In the story Marcia read, Jackie's Gift: A True Story of Christmas, Hanukkah and Jackie Robinson by Sharon Robinson, the Robinson family noticed what their neighbors, the Satlows didn’t have, and sought to provide what was missing. To the Robinsons, it wouldn’t have been Christmas without a tree and ornaments. To the wise men who traveled from afar to pay homage to baby Jesus, nothing said Hosanna like frankincense, gold, and myrrh. If they had thought about it, or perhaps had been parents of a newborn themselves, they might have brought nappies or some sort of luxury swaddling—but they didn’t. They brought what they knew to be valuable, just as the Robinsons did.
The gifts of the Magi and the Robinson family expressed their affection. Jackie and Rachel Robinson hadn’t encountered many Jews and certainly had no exposure to Jewish practices or traditions. Thus they had no way of knowing Sarah Satlow’s orthodox parents would have plotzed at the sight of the tree. What they knew was the same commandment baby Jesus would learn and grow to teach all who followed him: From the 15th chapter, 7th verse of the book of Deuteronomy, “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community … do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be.”
That sensibility informed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and perhaps inspired Rachel and Jackie Robinson to go out on Christmas Eve and get another tree, to choose from among their ornaments ones they would lend. And it is that spirit of offering what is most precious to us, that willingness, yea, that desire, to share it with others, that defines Christmas. For our brothers and sisters worshipping deep in the heart of the Christian tradition, Christmas celebrates the birth of a savior. Here, we lift up the salvific gift inherent in the spirit of generosity made available to all who heed it. We can go a step further than the Magi or the Robinsons. Like Mary and Joseph and the Satlows we can receive the gifts of our neighbors in the spirit in which they were given, even if they don’t fit the occasion. Yes, we can re-gift, but more importantly, we can see through to the heart of their intention and by acknowledging that, we give them what they meant to give us: what we all value—- to be cared about, to be recognized, to be appreciated.
So this Christmas, no matter what Santa brings, no matter how quickly you stash something into next year’s Yankee Swap pile, take a moment to consider your neighbors’ longing. Consider not just what you would want but what they need, and if you have no other point of reference than yourself, give that: give of your good heart and your kind soul, and remember what The Little Prince taught: that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And perhaps less well known but no less true, “The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”
When Sarah and Archie Satlow see in a tree not a symbol of Christ but the love he learned from the God of their understanding, and when Mary and Joseph recognize an expression of adoration in otherwise impractical gifts, they remind us how to find meaning that can save us by restoring us to love. Amen.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Christmas Eve Enlightenment
Parishioner's Response by Patricia Caspers
I didn't grow up spending Christmas Eve in church. In fact, I didn't spend much time in church at all, so for me Christmas wasn't about the birth of Christ so much as it was about time with family, eggnog, the scent of gingerbread cookie ornaments mingling with the evergreen scent of the tree, and laughter.
When the family scattered because of death and divorce, Christmas changed too.
Because I didn't have faith in the Christmas miracle, for many years my sense of loss at Christmas was stronger than my joy-- and that's still true to some extent, especially since moving 3,000 miles away from the tiny family I have left. I often feel like shouting a la Charlie Brown, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?" But as much as I appreciate the beauty in Linus's heartfelt monologue, I just don't believe.
I'm learning, though, that all families change over time. Children grow and go their own holiday ways or bring families of their own to the gathering. Death and divorce happen all around, and there are enough melancholy holiday tunes to remind me I'm not alone with my loss.
This year we bundled up our children and attended the candlelight service at First Parish in Fitchburg where we have recently become members. It's a place where my atheist husband and I can enjoy the beauty of the season without feeling like frauds.
The choir carolled, Marcia read a story for all ages: Jackie's Gift: A True Story of Christmas, Hanukkah and Jackie Robinson ,
(with which I became so enthralled I forgot where I was or what I was doing until my little guy led me blinkingly back to my pew), and Leaf reminded us to accept all gifts with the spirit in which they are given.While Leaf spoke I thought about all of the Christmas celebrations I've attended with various families since the last happy eve I spent with the Caspers' clan, and I realized that those holidays were gifts, too, yet I accepted them begrudgingly or refused them altogether.
We spent a quiet Christmas morning at home with our children and, for the first time, the evening with my in-laws, whom I'm still coming to know. While I reminisced fondly about Christmases of Old, I kept Leaf's words in mind and was grateful for each gift of the day: a skype with my parents in California, the Santa sparkle in our children's eyes, a tamale assembly line and impromptu mini-feast with my brother-in-law, and of course, the pie.
It's a good and sometimes difficult lesson for every day, to be present to the gifts instead of the trials-- remembering the woman who let me and my over-tired, tantruming preschooler ahead of her in the grocery line, instead of the tantrum itself.
But that's the great thing about life; it offers ample opportunity for learning, and failing, and learning again. And that's a bit of miracle I'll carry into the New Year.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Of Solstice and Fullness
For ancient agrarian cultures, the growing darkness signaled infertility, the sun standing still, the encroachment of uncertainty in the world around: the fallow fields beneath indigo skies, sleeping bulbs beneath frozen ground—no way of knowing what would come to pass.
Tuesday’s solstice comes with a full moon and a lunar eclipse. Wholeness and obscurity. A reminder that we, like the moon, are always full. We may feel empty or partial, a sliver of our total selves as we wax and wane. But at any given moment like the moon our fullness is there even when not apparent.
The poet Denise Levertov describes it this way:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life… (The Great Unknowing)
Winter solstice with its womb of solar darkness birthing lunar light invites us re-imagine ourselves—to glimpse the forgotten truth of our wholeness as we daily unfold into our own re-making. The childhood that shapes us, accords us the tenderness and bruises we spend our adulthoods learning to recognize, and if we are lucky, heal, contains the seeds of fullness whether they fall on fertile soil or settle on arid land.
The novelist Darin Strauss, writes in his new memoir, Half A Life: “Things don’t go away. They become you. …We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
We see ourselves reflected in a moon that in turn reflects light from a source both distant and present. Thus we are beings able to achieve incandescence by reflecting and synthesizing light, be it solar or divine.
Perhaps that is why I love the line: We walk in all the light we have. For like the moon, we have moments of brightness that set snowy fields awash like the dawn, and moments of eclipse when darkness penetrates our core.
Yet eclipse like shadow exists only in the presence of light.
In Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, she writes: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we are formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
Several years ago, when I volunteered as a chaplain in a county jail I encountered a man I’ll call Tom who felt victimized by a system that was out to get him. I listened sympathetically for many weeks. After Tom got sentenced to the state prison, I went up to visit him, along with another fellow I’ll call Bob I also met in the county jail. Unlike Tom, Bob took responsibility for his actions and blamed no one else. I visited with Bob first, mentioning my intention to see Tom. That’s when Bob told me that Tom had worked for him in a community-based treatment program for sex offenders. According to Bob, Tom had shown no remorse then for the poor choices that had led to his dismissal, just as he showed no remorse for the sex offense he had been convicted of.
Bob’s information took me by surprise. I let my visit with him run so long so there was no time left to see Tom. I reconsidered whether to answer Tom’s letters. Apparently, he had misrepresented himself and the truth.
But in that way that grace appears, I remembered the other line that instructs me: it is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change.
This is, of course, a story of my stumbling in the darkness, not Tom.
It was not my role to judge him, but only to detect his light and reflect it back.
I decided to answer his letters and over the years I saw the shift from blaming others to expressions of remorse. Tom had enough light to take responsibility. He owned his offense. He recounted his therapy, named his addictions. Recognized his shadow and more remarkably, his light.
The darkness of eclipse is but a testimony to the hidden moon.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins writes:
The moon is full tonight…
It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
The long night with its full moon bright and then eclipsed, then re-emergent gives us a way to visualize the interior process of spiritual journey. The way we each travel a path or blaze a trail in order to return to our essence.
It’s easy to lose sight of the moon in the ambient sulfur glow of human-made light. So much of it we create to find our way out of the darkness when instead we are called to go in, to inhabit the darkness in all its fecundity. Yet how do we enter into the darkness if we walk in all the light we have and don’t wish to stumble or worse, crash headlong into something or someone?
If we take darkness as metaphor for the moments in our lives we lack awareness or necessary insight, if darkness represents the blind spots, the defenses that obscure our ability to see the needs or wants of others, or to recognize the deepest longing within ourselves, why seek to spend a minute longer in it?
Again a poet, this time Wendell Berry, provides an answer:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
When I was a child after I had cut my eye and been told it was a miracle I had not lost my sight, I used to practice walking with my eyes closed, feeling for walls and doorways, my fingers splayed across emptiness. I spent decades trying to find my way back to that original wholeness we come from, that oneness with creation, or as I like to imagine it, the great tree of life. And in that search for connection, that yearning for spiritual intimacy I stumbled a lot. Not unlike Tom when I first met him, I too blamed the furniture someone had carelessly left in my way. I cursed the darkness instead of getting to know it.
The dark wings and feet scared me.
But that is the beauty and gift of solstice, the long night, the bridge of darkness that delivers us, if we are willing to inhabit it long enough to know the moon is there when we do not see it, to feel the light of our fullness in that dark.
When we can view ourselves with compassion, when we can reach out to the parts of ourselves that feel horribly broken, whether shattered by dysfunction, ambition or grief, and run our fingers ever so gently around the sharp edges, when we can embrace the wisdom of an ancient poet’s line—“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I would not lose one”—we enter into union with the darkness and whatever we conceive of as the divine. When we can hold ourselves in gentleness not judgment, even the sharp parts, we glimpse the entire moon in a silver crescent.
I realize now, when Bob first told me what he knew of Tom, it’s as if he cracked open a vial of darkness and spilled it over Tom’s light. For a few minutes in a prison visiting room, I let Bob’s experience of Tom eclipse mine. The light I thought I’d seen in Tom became a mirage. But the grace that blooms in darkness, as Wendell Berry writes, sang to me again the truth that we walk in all the light we have. Just as Tom could not yet see his fullness, or understand how life bends us into shapes not entirely of our own making, neither could I. What I could detect however, was that in reaching out into the dark uncertainty that was Tom, I splayed my hand once again to comb my own darkness. To brush against my own edges and unfamiliar forms. To recognize compassion leads us back to our essential selves.
I imagine us coming into existence as an orb of glowing light, and then dispersing as experiences split us open and apart.
It’s so easy then to deny our missteps thinking they lead us away from God or whatever we name the sanctity of deep connection with all that is. It’s easy in these days of self-help and pop psychology to pathologize or rationalize, to slip into the chasm of sinner or saint, lout or victim. But that is not what allows us to come into our fullness. Compassion does because it lights the darkness, because it hold us in the same precious love Julian of Norwich promised six centuries ago.
Compassion for our true whole selves, scattered or reconstituted, and compassion for the thousand pieces of everyone else is what makes it possible to “gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself and carry him outdoors… steady[ing] his lolling head with the palm of your hand.”
As we enter the darkness solstice brings, and let it inhabit us for a while, we too will see in
“scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
… sky-moon complete, transcending
all violation
… talking to herself about
the shape of a life”
born into wholeness, rising full.
Amen.
Tuesday’s solstice comes with a full moon and a lunar eclipse. Wholeness and obscurity. A reminder that we, like the moon, are always full. We may feel empty or partial, a sliver of our total selves as we wax and wane. But at any given moment like the moon our fullness is there even when not apparent.
The poet Denise Levertov describes it this way:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life… (The Great Unknowing)
Winter solstice with its womb of solar darkness birthing lunar light invites us re-imagine ourselves—to glimpse the forgotten truth of our wholeness as we daily unfold into our own re-making. The childhood that shapes us, accords us the tenderness and bruises we spend our adulthoods learning to recognize, and if we are lucky, heal, contains the seeds of fullness whether they fall on fertile soil or settle on arid land.
The novelist Darin Strauss, writes in his new memoir, Half A Life: “Things don’t go away. They become you. …We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
We see ourselves reflected in a moon that in turn reflects light from a source both distant and present. Thus we are beings able to achieve incandescence by reflecting and synthesizing light, be it solar or divine.
Perhaps that is why I love the line: We walk in all the light we have. For like the moon, we have moments of brightness that set snowy fields awash like the dawn, and moments of eclipse when darkness penetrates our core.
Yet eclipse like shadow exists only in the presence of light.
In Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, she writes: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we are formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
Several years ago, when I volunteered as a chaplain in a county jail I encountered a man I’ll call Tom who felt victimized by a system that was out to get him. I listened sympathetically for many weeks. After Tom got sentenced to the state prison, I went up to visit him, along with another fellow I’ll call Bob I also met in the county jail. Unlike Tom, Bob took responsibility for his actions and blamed no one else. I visited with Bob first, mentioning my intention to see Tom. That’s when Bob told me that Tom had worked for him in a community-based treatment program for sex offenders. According to Bob, Tom had shown no remorse then for the poor choices that had led to his dismissal, just as he showed no remorse for the sex offense he had been convicted of.
Bob’s information took me by surprise. I let my visit with him run so long so there was no time left to see Tom. I reconsidered whether to answer Tom’s letters. Apparently, he had misrepresented himself and the truth.
But in that way that grace appears, I remembered the other line that instructs me: it is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change.
This is, of course, a story of my stumbling in the darkness, not Tom.
It was not my role to judge him, but only to detect his light and reflect it back.
I decided to answer his letters and over the years I saw the shift from blaming others to expressions of remorse. Tom had enough light to take responsibility. He owned his offense. He recounted his therapy, named his addictions. Recognized his shadow and more remarkably, his light.
The darkness of eclipse is but a testimony to the hidden moon.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins writes:
The moon is full tonight…
It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
The long night with its full moon bright and then eclipsed, then re-emergent gives us a way to visualize the interior process of spiritual journey. The way we each travel a path or blaze a trail in order to return to our essence.
It’s easy to lose sight of the moon in the ambient sulfur glow of human-made light. So much of it we create to find our way out of the darkness when instead we are called to go in, to inhabit the darkness in all its fecundity. Yet how do we enter into the darkness if we walk in all the light we have and don’t wish to stumble or worse, crash headlong into something or someone?
If we take darkness as metaphor for the moments in our lives we lack awareness or necessary insight, if darkness represents the blind spots, the defenses that obscure our ability to see the needs or wants of others, or to recognize the deepest longing within ourselves, why seek to spend a minute longer in it?
Again a poet, this time Wendell Berry, provides an answer:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
When I was a child after I had cut my eye and been told it was a miracle I had not lost my sight, I used to practice walking with my eyes closed, feeling for walls and doorways, my fingers splayed across emptiness. I spent decades trying to find my way back to that original wholeness we come from, that oneness with creation, or as I like to imagine it, the great tree of life. And in that search for connection, that yearning for spiritual intimacy I stumbled a lot. Not unlike Tom when I first met him, I too blamed the furniture someone had carelessly left in my way. I cursed the darkness instead of getting to know it.
The dark wings and feet scared me.
But that is the beauty and gift of solstice, the long night, the bridge of darkness that delivers us, if we are willing to inhabit it long enough to know the moon is there when we do not see it, to feel the light of our fullness in that dark.
When we can view ourselves with compassion, when we can reach out to the parts of ourselves that feel horribly broken, whether shattered by dysfunction, ambition or grief, and run our fingers ever so gently around the sharp edges, when we can embrace the wisdom of an ancient poet’s line—“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I would not lose one”—we enter into union with the darkness and whatever we conceive of as the divine. When we can hold ourselves in gentleness not judgment, even the sharp parts, we glimpse the entire moon in a silver crescent.
I realize now, when Bob first told me what he knew of Tom, it’s as if he cracked open a vial of darkness and spilled it over Tom’s light. For a few minutes in a prison visiting room, I let Bob’s experience of Tom eclipse mine. The light I thought I’d seen in Tom became a mirage. But the grace that blooms in darkness, as Wendell Berry writes, sang to me again the truth that we walk in all the light we have. Just as Tom could not yet see his fullness, or understand how life bends us into shapes not entirely of our own making, neither could I. What I could detect however, was that in reaching out into the dark uncertainty that was Tom, I splayed my hand once again to comb my own darkness. To brush against my own edges and unfamiliar forms. To recognize compassion leads us back to our essential selves.
I imagine us coming into existence as an orb of glowing light, and then dispersing as experiences split us open and apart.
It’s so easy then to deny our missteps thinking they lead us away from God or whatever we name the sanctity of deep connection with all that is. It’s easy in these days of self-help and pop psychology to pathologize or rationalize, to slip into the chasm of sinner or saint, lout or victim. But that is not what allows us to come into our fullness. Compassion does because it lights the darkness, because it hold us in the same precious love Julian of Norwich promised six centuries ago.
Compassion for our true whole selves, scattered or reconstituted, and compassion for the thousand pieces of everyone else is what makes it possible to “gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself and carry him outdoors… steady[ing] his lolling head with the palm of your hand.”
As we enter the darkness solstice brings, and let it inhabit us for a while, we too will see in
“scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
… sky-moon complete, transcending
all violation
… talking to herself about
the shape of a life”
born into wholeness, rising full.
Amen.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Roses of Guadalupe
Last Sunday before the service, Mark Peterson told me he didn’t have my sermon titles to post on the board outside, so for December twelfth he put up “Guadalupe” because he saw it on a calendar. I had been thinking of sermon topics, something related to the season, so when Mark mentioned Guadalupe, what came to mind was the week I spent in January 2001 in Cuernavava, Mexico with a side trip to Mexico City to see the BasÃlica of Guadalupe. Continuing in a theme of important dates in the Mexican calendar, today I bring you The Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, December twelfth, a day when thousands of Mexican pilgrims make their way to the Basilica, many traveling by bicycle and some arriving on their knees to pay homage to the Virgin.
The day I visited the basilica fell about a month after the feast day, but still hundreds of pilgrims filed by me on their knees. Thousands gathered to view the displayed piece of fabric bearing the image of Mary found by a peasant named Juan Diego this day in 1531.
The Benedictine nuns who took me and six other North American visitors to the shrine told us the miraculous origin of the cloth.
A peasant named Juan Diego was traveling from his home village to Mexico City when he came upon a young woman surrounded in light who instructed him in the local language of Nahuatl to build a church in her honor. Juan Diego recognized the woman as the Virgin Mother. He hurried to tell the Bishop who instructed him to return to site and ask the woman for a sign proving her identity. So off Juan went and when he found her, he asked for a sign and she told him to go up the rocky hill and gather flowers. And though it was winter he found roses everywhere. Guadalupe herself arranged the flowers in his cloak and bade him not to move them until he reached the Bishop. Juan Diego returned to the Bishop and when he opened his cloak, the flowers fell to the floor and in their place a glowing figure of her appeared on the cloth where the petals had been.
It is that image on Juan Diego’s cloak that hangs in the basilica.
The nuns explain Guadalupe’s name really means “the one who protects us from the ones who eat us,” undoubtedly a reference to the Spanish conquistadors Indians like Juan Diego faced. “She is mestizo,” says Sister Fatima. “She welcomes the children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers,” inviting the blended into her maternal embrace.
On my winter visit, roses bloomed in the gardens of the nuns just as they bloomed before Juan Diego.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the third Sunday of Advent, Any of you who grew up in or near the tradition may remember the colors that correspond with each of the four Sundays. Because Advent begins like Lent as a time of penitence and fasting, altars first feature purple, a color associated with both penitence and royalty, but by the third week they shift to bright blue to signify the night sky that will herald the rising star or the waters of life associated with creation, or they feature rose to reflect the joy inherent in the coming birth.
This year the third Sunday of Advent falls on December twelfth, the day Mexicans honor Guadalupe who chose as a sign of her authenticity roses abloom out of season on a rocky hillside.
There is a way the Spirit alights today no less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared before Juan Diego. No less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared to Mary herself when the angel Gabriel announced to her she would carry a son.
It is easy for folks like us who prefer a more rational approach to life than religious miracles portend, to dismiss the relevance of such stories, but the nine days I spent in Mexico a decade ago with the nuns taught me otherwise and summon me to heed the message of this time of year. So on this Mexican high holy day, it feels fitting to recount my experience, not with an apparition of Guadalupe, but an incarnation of her that appeared in the form of Benedictine sisters in their modest blue skirts and white blouses, cinnamon skin and dark eyes closer to the color of a Middle Eastern Mary than the paler versions we know.
Benedictines, whether monks or nuns, follow the Rule of Benedict, a set of directions for monastic life written in the 6th century by Benedict of Nursia whose wisdom shaped Western monasticism. Ten months a year, the good sisters at Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey welcome visitors from the United States for a program called "Faith/Hospitality Experience in Latin America." For nine days, people like me are given the chance to experience Benedictine hospitality. For Benedictines, each guest is a representative of Christ.
Upon our arrival at the retreat center, several nuns rush out to greet us. Each one offers a big hug and says in English, "Welcome Home." In our rooms, much more spacious than the ones the nuns live in, we each find a vase of flowers next to a hand-lettered card with our name and another "welcome." In each bathroom is a bottle of purified water. In our three daily chapel services, the nuns provide readings in English and play tapes of U.S. monks singing. In the dining room there are Oreos, and mashed potatoes. Hot dogs and grilled cheese. Evidence abounds of their effort to make us feel at home.
Year-round the nuns work with the poor of Cuernavaca. Part of their mission is to educate us about that reality. Eighty percent of Mexico’s people live in poverty. Illiteracy and malnutrition contribute to vast underemployment. We listen to guest speakers and watch a twenty-year-old video about the hidden Holocaust of Guatemala—a civil war where 135,000 people died. We meet survivors of that war who have settled in Mexico. Every day, we visit children and adults who labor to subsist. On a dirt walkway just over the hill from the retreat center, we chat with four women, shovels in hand, creating a road from a heap of gravel. Another day, we visit four families in The Station, a cramped, non-arable swath of government land where 30,000 squatters live in dwellings constructed from scraps. In the homes we enter, little light shines in. There are no windows amidst the corrugated metal and stone. Dust. Rats. Bare light bulbs. Outhouses. Strips of cloth functioning as doors. Conditions that mirror the encampments of poor blacks who lived a mile from my childhood home in Tennessee, reminiscent of lives lived in cardboard box villages and in subway tunnels. Each foray led by the nuns a billboard for the prophet Jeremiah who wrote: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; that makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.
The good sisters aim to churn our consciousness by exposing us to harsh realities. They want us to consider the ways we spend our disposable income and think twice before supporting NAFTA; but it is the nuns themselves, voices soft and laughter keen, who stir my soul beyond measure. It is their oft-repeated melodies sung on or off key, in praise of a god that restores their hope daily and calls them to serve by accompanying them as they do.
In Cuernavaca as I read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver each day as part of my morning meditation, sitting outside among lavish winter roses, apricot and ivory, I realize why the people I meet there need the Lady of Guadalupe, a mestizo incarnation of Mary who fuses indigenous religion with Christianity in a way that makes sense to conquered people. As I walk to 7a.m. chapel, marveling at the roses and hibiscus, the palette of sky as the sun transforms it, I experience the divine in Mary Oliver’s images and the scent of flora, in the colors and texture and infinite wisdom of the universe. And as soon as I sit down in the chapel, careful to select a seat that permits me to gaze out the picture window at the rising sun and the reflection of the candle in the foliage on the hill so that I peer into a burning bush, the nuns sing praises to El Senor, to a human incarnation of God who suffers with the poor. As the sound of the nuns singing psalms in Spanish fills my ear, I feel the presence of the God they invoke.
Up until that moment, I have experienced a sense of the divine through poetry. My realm of the sacred: magnificent trees, Not surprising for a person who lives in a wooded landscape where the trees have room to grow like spires. But there in the small room filled with the good sisters of Guadalupe, my horizon of the sacred expands.
The sisters faithfully bow to the consecrated host in a glass box that hangs from the chapel ceiling, wafers made holy they tell me by blessings of the priest. And at that moment, I see as clearly as Juan Diego did, the presence of holiness. Not in the host consecrated by the priest, but in the welcome consecrated by nuns who embody the risen spirit in their radical hospitality, their tireless pursuit of justice, their unsung labor—they emanate a god that before, I would have only seen present in the petals of rose light that bloom on the chapel wall at evening prayer.
It is the nuns who instruct me why it is that as lovely as their flowers are, what ultimately stirs Juan Diego, and centuries of his descendents is the image of a mestizo Mary welcoming them as graciously as the Virgin accepts the fullness of her womb, a pregnancy she does not choose. The message Mary imparts is that within each of us the divine gestates and comes to light when we, as courageously as she does, welcome the unbidden. When we heed the great Sufi poet Rumi, who writes: “Be grateful for whoever comes/ because each has been sent /as a guide from beyond.”
The morning of our departure, I am the only guest who shows up for 7 a.m. prayer. I peer in the doorway of the chapel where five nuns pray. No guitars or singing, just the quiet murmurs of Spanish. An amber hand beckons me in. The mother superior offers me an English Bible and indicates a passage to read. After I finish, she reads the same passage in Spanish. A moment later, the nuns rise and move toward center. We all join hands. They begin the Lord’s Prayer in English. I wave my hand to indicate no, no, please say it in Spanish. But daily they embroider the Rule of Benedict on their hearts. Of course they will pray in English for the sake of their lone North American guest.
The words catch in my throat, blocked by welling tears. I struggle to make them audible, to give voice to my gratitude for their kindness, for the gift of their prayer.
I keep replaying the words of sister Ramona telling me that after we depart, they will clean our rooms, launder the linens, re-make the beds. "This is our work," she says.
I think of Glenda telling me our job is to stay in our joy. And I think of Guadalupe telling a peasant to gather flowers where you least expect them. I recall gazing up at that cloth, centuries old, beholding the image of a woman radiating light, arms extended in welcome. I recall the sight of men and women walking on their knees across an acre of concrete in humility and praise, traveling like the legendary wise men to pay homage to “the one who protects them from the ones who will eat [them].”
We rarely believe it is the unknown that will protect us. We don’t associate the unbidden or unexpected with what saves us. Usually, we meet the unknown with apprehension or run the other way. But on the feast day of Guadalupe, the third Sunday of Advent, may the color of roses, the color of joy, remind us of flowers that bloom when and where we least expect. May we, like Juan Diego, see holiness on the hillside, and like Mary, feel it stirring within.
Amen.
Closing words: Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Adventure begins with Advent. Pregnant with risk and possibility, it invites us to participate in birth of what we cannot imagine but nevertheless can come to know.
The day I visited the basilica fell about a month after the feast day, but still hundreds of pilgrims filed by me on their knees. Thousands gathered to view the displayed piece of fabric bearing the image of Mary found by a peasant named Juan Diego this day in 1531.
The Benedictine nuns who took me and six other North American visitors to the shrine told us the miraculous origin of the cloth.
A peasant named Juan Diego was traveling from his home village to Mexico City when he came upon a young woman surrounded in light who instructed him in the local language of Nahuatl to build a church in her honor. Juan Diego recognized the woman as the Virgin Mother. He hurried to tell the Bishop who instructed him to return to site and ask the woman for a sign proving her identity. So off Juan went and when he found her, he asked for a sign and she told him to go up the rocky hill and gather flowers. And though it was winter he found roses everywhere. Guadalupe herself arranged the flowers in his cloak and bade him not to move them until he reached the Bishop. Juan Diego returned to the Bishop and when he opened his cloak, the flowers fell to the floor and in their place a glowing figure of her appeared on the cloth where the petals had been.
It is that image on Juan Diego’s cloak that hangs in the basilica.
The nuns explain Guadalupe’s name really means “the one who protects us from the ones who eat us,” undoubtedly a reference to the Spanish conquistadors Indians like Juan Diego faced. “She is mestizo,” says Sister Fatima. “She welcomes the children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers,” inviting the blended into her maternal embrace.
On my winter visit, roses bloomed in the gardens of the nuns just as they bloomed before Juan Diego.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the third Sunday of Advent, Any of you who grew up in or near the tradition may remember the colors that correspond with each of the four Sundays. Because Advent begins like Lent as a time of penitence and fasting, altars first feature purple, a color associated with both penitence and royalty, but by the third week they shift to bright blue to signify the night sky that will herald the rising star or the waters of life associated with creation, or they feature rose to reflect the joy inherent in the coming birth.
This year the third Sunday of Advent falls on December twelfth, the day Mexicans honor Guadalupe who chose as a sign of her authenticity roses abloom out of season on a rocky hillside.
There is a way the Spirit alights today no less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared before Juan Diego. No less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared to Mary herself when the angel Gabriel announced to her she would carry a son.
It is easy for folks like us who prefer a more rational approach to life than religious miracles portend, to dismiss the relevance of such stories, but the nine days I spent in Mexico a decade ago with the nuns taught me otherwise and summon me to heed the message of this time of year. So on this Mexican high holy day, it feels fitting to recount my experience, not with an apparition of Guadalupe, but an incarnation of her that appeared in the form of Benedictine sisters in their modest blue skirts and white blouses, cinnamon skin and dark eyes closer to the color of a Middle Eastern Mary than the paler versions we know.
Benedictines, whether monks or nuns, follow the Rule of Benedict, a set of directions for monastic life written in the 6th century by Benedict of Nursia whose wisdom shaped Western monasticism. Ten months a year, the good sisters at Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey welcome visitors from the United States for a program called "Faith/Hospitality Experience in Latin America." For nine days, people like me are given the chance to experience Benedictine hospitality. For Benedictines, each guest is a representative of Christ.
Upon our arrival at the retreat center, several nuns rush out to greet us. Each one offers a big hug and says in English, "Welcome Home." In our rooms, much more spacious than the ones the nuns live in, we each find a vase of flowers next to a hand-lettered card with our name and another "welcome." In each bathroom is a bottle of purified water. In our three daily chapel services, the nuns provide readings in English and play tapes of U.S. monks singing. In the dining room there are Oreos, and mashed potatoes. Hot dogs and grilled cheese. Evidence abounds of their effort to make us feel at home.
Year-round the nuns work with the poor of Cuernavaca. Part of their mission is to educate us about that reality. Eighty percent of Mexico’s people live in poverty. Illiteracy and malnutrition contribute to vast underemployment. We listen to guest speakers and watch a twenty-year-old video about the hidden Holocaust of Guatemala—a civil war where 135,000 people died. We meet survivors of that war who have settled in Mexico. Every day, we visit children and adults who labor to subsist. On a dirt walkway just over the hill from the retreat center, we chat with four women, shovels in hand, creating a road from a heap of gravel. Another day, we visit four families in The Station, a cramped, non-arable swath of government land where 30,000 squatters live in dwellings constructed from scraps. In the homes we enter, little light shines in. There are no windows amidst the corrugated metal and stone. Dust. Rats. Bare light bulbs. Outhouses. Strips of cloth functioning as doors. Conditions that mirror the encampments of poor blacks who lived a mile from my childhood home in Tennessee, reminiscent of lives lived in cardboard box villages and in subway tunnels. Each foray led by the nuns a billboard for the prophet Jeremiah who wrote: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; that makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.
The good sisters aim to churn our consciousness by exposing us to harsh realities. They want us to consider the ways we spend our disposable income and think twice before supporting NAFTA; but it is the nuns themselves, voices soft and laughter keen, who stir my soul beyond measure. It is their oft-repeated melodies sung on or off key, in praise of a god that restores their hope daily and calls them to serve by accompanying them as they do.
In Cuernavaca as I read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver each day as part of my morning meditation, sitting outside among lavish winter roses, apricot and ivory, I realize why the people I meet there need the Lady of Guadalupe, a mestizo incarnation of Mary who fuses indigenous religion with Christianity in a way that makes sense to conquered people. As I walk to 7a.m. chapel, marveling at the roses and hibiscus, the palette of sky as the sun transforms it, I experience the divine in Mary Oliver’s images and the scent of flora, in the colors and texture and infinite wisdom of the universe. And as soon as I sit down in the chapel, careful to select a seat that permits me to gaze out the picture window at the rising sun and the reflection of the candle in the foliage on the hill so that I peer into a burning bush, the nuns sing praises to El Senor, to a human incarnation of God who suffers with the poor. As the sound of the nuns singing psalms in Spanish fills my ear, I feel the presence of the God they invoke.
Up until that moment, I have experienced a sense of the divine through poetry. My realm of the sacred: magnificent trees, Not surprising for a person who lives in a wooded landscape where the trees have room to grow like spires. But there in the small room filled with the good sisters of Guadalupe, my horizon of the sacred expands.
The sisters faithfully bow to the consecrated host in a glass box that hangs from the chapel ceiling, wafers made holy they tell me by blessings of the priest. And at that moment, I see as clearly as Juan Diego did, the presence of holiness. Not in the host consecrated by the priest, but in the welcome consecrated by nuns who embody the risen spirit in their radical hospitality, their tireless pursuit of justice, their unsung labor—they emanate a god that before, I would have only seen present in the petals of rose light that bloom on the chapel wall at evening prayer.
It is the nuns who instruct me why it is that as lovely as their flowers are, what ultimately stirs Juan Diego, and centuries of his descendents is the image of a mestizo Mary welcoming them as graciously as the Virgin accepts the fullness of her womb, a pregnancy she does not choose. The message Mary imparts is that within each of us the divine gestates and comes to light when we, as courageously as she does, welcome the unbidden. When we heed the great Sufi poet Rumi, who writes: “Be grateful for whoever comes/ because each has been sent /as a guide from beyond.”
The morning of our departure, I am the only guest who shows up for 7 a.m. prayer. I peer in the doorway of the chapel where five nuns pray. No guitars or singing, just the quiet murmurs of Spanish. An amber hand beckons me in. The mother superior offers me an English Bible and indicates a passage to read. After I finish, she reads the same passage in Spanish. A moment later, the nuns rise and move toward center. We all join hands. They begin the Lord’s Prayer in English. I wave my hand to indicate no, no, please say it in Spanish. But daily they embroider the Rule of Benedict on their hearts. Of course they will pray in English for the sake of their lone North American guest.
The words catch in my throat, blocked by welling tears. I struggle to make them audible, to give voice to my gratitude for their kindness, for the gift of their prayer.
I keep replaying the words of sister Ramona telling me that after we depart, they will clean our rooms, launder the linens, re-make the beds. "This is our work," she says.
I think of Glenda telling me our job is to stay in our joy. And I think of Guadalupe telling a peasant to gather flowers where you least expect them. I recall gazing up at that cloth, centuries old, beholding the image of a woman radiating light, arms extended in welcome. I recall the sight of men and women walking on their knees across an acre of concrete in humility and praise, traveling like the legendary wise men to pay homage to “the one who protects them from the ones who will eat [them].”
We rarely believe it is the unknown that will protect us. We don’t associate the unbidden or unexpected with what saves us. Usually, we meet the unknown with apprehension or run the other way. But on the feast day of Guadalupe, the third Sunday of Advent, may the color of roses, the color of joy, remind us of flowers that bloom when and where we least expect. May we, like Juan Diego, see holiness on the hillside, and like Mary, feel it stirring within.
Amen.
Closing words: Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Adventure begins with Advent. Pregnant with risk and possibility, it invites us to participate in birth of what we cannot imagine but nevertheless can come to know.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Seligman Sermons in the Wider World
Recently, we received a response to Leaf's sermon, "The Cost of Indifference" from UUSC:
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
UU Hammers
Hanukah, sometimes known as the Festival of Lights, began Wednesday at sundown. Later in the service when the children join us, we will light the menorah together. Although light is a central metaphor for winter holidays, Hanukah’s first metaphor is a hammer. Hence this morning’s rousing rendition of the Pete Seeger classic, “If I Had a Hammer.”
As our last hymn will tell us, the main characters of the Hanukah story are a band of brothers known as the Maccabees. This isn’t their surname; it is an honorific designation. Maccabee means hammer and according to Michael Lerner, of Tikkun magazine that’s just what the brothers and their father did.
When Alexander the Great introduced Jews to Hellenistic culture some city-dwelling Jews assimilated, but many rural Jews who were farmers, held fast to their ways; they resented foreign rule and the Jewish elite who courted favor with their Greek conquerors. Burdened by taxation and repulsed by the Hellenists’ love of power, a small band of rebels under the leadership of a country priest and his five sons, who came to be known as “the Maccabees,” decided to fight back against imperialism. There were unwilling to accept the desecration of the Temple. For them it was an unbearable assault that they were forbidden to study the Torah or observe the Sabbath. They refused to worship the Greek Gods set on the altar. They believed the human spirit was more powerful than technology and in 165 B.C.E. they retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple, (Hanukah means “dedication”) and rekindled the eternal light. Thus, the miracle of Hanukah has less to do with mysteriously long-burning oil, and more to do with the tenacity, bravery, and faith evident in a small group of people who refused to give up the communal practice of their faith or give in to oppression.
And since some of you have asked about the origins of Unitarian Universalism and what exactly is a Unitarian as distinctive from a Trinitarian, this morning I will take you on a brief tour of the hammers of Unitarian Universalism. I realize taken out of context that could sound like Builder Bob on a rampage, but think of it in the Pete Singer and Lonnie Hayes way of hammering out justice, freedom and love.
First stop on the tour, Egypt in third century of the Common Era. A Christian theologian and scholar named Origen, whose name is reputed to mean “unbreakable” took issue with the way the early church leaders sculpted theology. Though he believed in a trinity, he saw it hierarchically with God the Father as more powerful than Jesus, his Son. He subscribed to a doctrine of universal reconciliation, which refuted the idea that only certain souls would be reconciled with God in the afterlife. This is the doctrine that lends its name to Universalism.
As one scholar, Edward Moore, put it:
Origen was an innovator in an era when innovation, for Christians, was a luxury ill-afforded. He drew upon pagan philosophy in an effort to elucidate the Christian faith in a manner acceptable to intellectuals, and he succeeded in converting many gifted pagan students of philosophy to his faith. He was also a great humanist, who believed that all creatures will eventually achieve salvation, including the devil himself.
So in 1770, when the father of American Universalism, a Brit named John Murray arrived on the New Jersey coast spreading his message of Universalism, he drew on the theology of Origen and many others through the centuries who refused to accept the position so fiercely articulated by John Calvin that only certain souls, predetermined before birth, would reunite with God after death.
Though it may seem passé to us in 2010, the covenant we recite every week contains this very theology: “To help one another in fellowship, to the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with each other and with the Holy.”
Origen is not only known for his understanding of universal salvation; he also laid the theological groundwork for our Unitarian forebears. Though Origen acknowledged the Trinity, he did not recognize Jesus or the Holy Spirit as equivalent to God. He applied a hierarchy wherein God the Father had the most power, with Jesus the Son took a secondary position and the Holy Spirit, third.
For almost as long as Christianity has existed in a systematically organized form, theologians have debated the nature of the Trinity, he concept of a triune or three-part deity. Early in the 4th century of the Common Era, Arius provoked controversy when he declared not unlike Origen, that Jesus, though the Son of God was not made of the same substance as the Father. In 325, at the Council of Nicea, Arius’s proposition was defeated. Hence, the Nicene Creed recited in most Christian churches, affirms “the belief in one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, the essence of the Father and being of the same substance.” And that is a Trinitarian.
When Michael Servetus, a sixteenth century Spaniard, penned his tome, On the Errors of the Trinity, he was burned at the stake.
Peter Hughes, editor of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, writes,[Servetus] inspired unitarians and other groups on the radical left-wing of the Reformation to develop and institutionalize their own heretical views.… [he] rejected the doctrine of original sin and the entire theory of salvation based upon it,… [and] held that God was present in and constitutive of all creation. This feature of Servetus' theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin.
Let me repeat that: “God was present in and constitutive of all creation” That is what we would call a panentheist: one for whom God is present in and comprised of all being. That Michael Servetus would so pithily describe the theology of so many contemporary Unitarian Universalists, including mine, is remarkable. That he died for doing it, hammers a new meaning of religious conviction.
Prior to Unitarianism, theologians destructed and reconstructed Trinitarianism, the doctrine of a triune God. The Transylvanian Unitarianism that crystallized in 1568 was suffused with the universalism that had been percolating through the centuries. On March 8, 1568 the only Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund, convened ministers of both Hungary and Transylvania to listen to eleven debaters, five Unitarians and six Calvinists. They began with solemn prayers then proceeded to debate in Latin. The bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary appealed to the authority of the Bible, the creeds, the Fathers, and the orthodox theologians. Ferenc Dávid, the preacher of the King’s court appealed to the Bible alone. Note the absence of any reference to creeds or the Church Fathers from Dávid. By the ninth day the Calvinists asked to be excused from listening further. The king suggested that might signal defeat so the Calvinists stayed, and mercifully, the king ended the debate on day ten, “recommending that the ministers give themselves to prayer, seek harmony, and refrain from mutual abuse as [it is] unbecoming in them” (Earl Morse Wilbur).
The debate, generally regarded as a complete victory for the Unitarians, made a hero of Ferenc Dávid, met by crowds “who insisted he mount a large boulder at a street corner (still preserved as a sacred relic) and speak to them of his victorious new doctrine.” (Perhaps that is why there is a boulder right outside our church.) And while the hometown exploded with excitement, others were not so pleased. According to Earl Wilbur’s historical account, “the Calvinists began to rally their forces in Transylvania; while in Hungary, all through the year 1568, they kept holding synods in different districts, confirming the orthodox doctrine and condemning [Unitarians]. Disregarding the king’s decree of tolerance, they persecuted and drove out ministers holding Unitarian views, if they would not deny their faith, and forbade them to speak in their own defense, lest they thus make more converts to their views.”
The debates continued with great fervor, for in the sixteenth century, these weren’t good-natured jousts of intellect designed to affirm the superiority of reason. The king and his court attended along with generals. When the bishop of the Reformed Church spoke viciously to Dávid, the king himself interjected, “We wish that in our dominions there be freedom of conscience; for we know that faith is the gift of God, and that one’s conscience can not be forced.” A mere six days later, “the king saw that nothing further could be gained, and having charged the orthodox with evading the real issue he closed the debate.”
By 1571, Unitarianism, or “the religion of Ferenc Dávid” as it was known then, reached the height of its prominence, recognized as one of the four “received” religions protected by law, with almost five hundred congregations. Dávid published no less than eight of his own texts on Unitarianism in both Latin and Hungarian so that scholars and commonfolk alike could have access to his thoughts. King Sigismund required all rulers in Transylvania to respect and preserve the religious rights and freedoms of the four received religions: Unitarian, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, but once the king died prematurely, Unitarians were no longer assured protection or respect.
The ensuing decades brought great challenges to the early Unitarians whose theological innovations continued to cause controversy and place spokesmen such as Dávid at risk. Though he was not alone in putting forth the idea that there was no biblical support for the belief that Jesus equaled God, or that Christ should be worshiped, Dávid suffered the blows of orthodox Christians who considered him blasphemous.
And not unlike the Maccabees, he refused to be silenced. Despite warnings he spoke his truth to power and paid the price. Ill and sentenced to prison, Dávid died there November 15, 1579.
In his last sermon, he preached. "Whatever the world may say, it must some time become clear that God is but one." That is the theological root of Unitarianism. What we think of as our core values: religious freedom, the responsibility to bring reason and conscience to bear, and to interpret sacred texts ourselves come from Servetus, David, the Polish theologian Faustus Socinus and King Sigismund.
Their legacy flourishes today in Transylvania, now known as Romania, and parts of Hungary where about seventy thousand Unitarians dwell. They are members of the only religion indigenous to that region. Ninety-five percent of their congregations are rural. While certainly the most liberal religion there, it is quite different than our version of Unitarian Universalism. A bishop still presides though he can only be elected to two six-year terms and cannot be over seventy-five. A catechism remains in use that declares belief in one God comprehended as spirit and love; belief in the spiritual leadership of Jesus through the example he set; and a belief in the mission of the Unitarian church. Communion, known as The Lord’s Supper, is offered four times a year, not as a sacrament but as part of the liturgy. Ministers preach from the Bible and junior-high aged children are confirmed.
What binds us to this expression of Unitarianism is not ritual, liturgy or even congregational polity. A cursory glance reveals few similarities and our respective ways of speaking about our beliefs would hold few if any words in common. What binds us is a shared heritage and living history that instructs us in courage and the meaning of conviction.
And that’s what the candles we light at Hanukah represent. Not the miracle of long-lasting oil, but the miracle of human beings, who against all odds, hammer out justice, refusing to forsake irrefutable values, rescuing religious freedom from the flames of intolerance and restoring what is holy to the altar of everyday life. Amen.
Closing words:
Each of here has the opportunity to seek our inner Maccabee, to find and refine a faith worth defending, a spiritual community worth preserving. Let us hammer out justice and freedom as carry our light into the world.
As our last hymn will tell us, the main characters of the Hanukah story are a band of brothers known as the Maccabees. This isn’t their surname; it is an honorific designation. Maccabee means hammer and according to Michael Lerner, of Tikkun magazine that’s just what the brothers and their father did.
When Alexander the Great introduced Jews to Hellenistic culture some city-dwelling Jews assimilated, but many rural Jews who were farmers, held fast to their ways; they resented foreign rule and the Jewish elite who courted favor with their Greek conquerors. Burdened by taxation and repulsed by the Hellenists’ love of power, a small band of rebels under the leadership of a country priest and his five sons, who came to be known as “the Maccabees,” decided to fight back against imperialism. There were unwilling to accept the desecration of the Temple. For them it was an unbearable assault that they were forbidden to study the Torah or observe the Sabbath. They refused to worship the Greek Gods set on the altar. They believed the human spirit was more powerful than technology and in 165 B.C.E. they retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple, (Hanukah means “dedication”) and rekindled the eternal light. Thus, the miracle of Hanukah has less to do with mysteriously long-burning oil, and more to do with the tenacity, bravery, and faith evident in a small group of people who refused to give up the communal practice of their faith or give in to oppression.
And since some of you have asked about the origins of Unitarian Universalism and what exactly is a Unitarian as distinctive from a Trinitarian, this morning I will take you on a brief tour of the hammers of Unitarian Universalism. I realize taken out of context that could sound like Builder Bob on a rampage, but think of it in the Pete Singer and Lonnie Hayes way of hammering out justice, freedom and love.
First stop on the tour, Egypt in third century of the Common Era. A Christian theologian and scholar named Origen, whose name is reputed to mean “unbreakable” took issue with the way the early church leaders sculpted theology. Though he believed in a trinity, he saw it hierarchically with God the Father as more powerful than Jesus, his Son. He subscribed to a doctrine of universal reconciliation, which refuted the idea that only certain souls would be reconciled with God in the afterlife. This is the doctrine that lends its name to Universalism.
As one scholar, Edward Moore, put it:
Origen was an innovator in an era when innovation, for Christians, was a luxury ill-afforded. He drew upon pagan philosophy in an effort to elucidate the Christian faith in a manner acceptable to intellectuals, and he succeeded in converting many gifted pagan students of philosophy to his faith. He was also a great humanist, who believed that all creatures will eventually achieve salvation, including the devil himself.
So in 1770, when the father of American Universalism, a Brit named John Murray arrived on the New Jersey coast spreading his message of Universalism, he drew on the theology of Origen and many others through the centuries who refused to accept the position so fiercely articulated by John Calvin that only certain souls, predetermined before birth, would reunite with God after death.
Though it may seem passé to us in 2010, the covenant we recite every week contains this very theology: “To help one another in fellowship, to the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with each other and with the Holy.”
Origen is not only known for his understanding of universal salvation; he also laid the theological groundwork for our Unitarian forebears. Though Origen acknowledged the Trinity, he did not recognize Jesus or the Holy Spirit as equivalent to God. He applied a hierarchy wherein God the Father had the most power, with Jesus the Son took a secondary position and the Holy Spirit, third.
For almost as long as Christianity has existed in a systematically organized form, theologians have debated the nature of the Trinity, he concept of a triune or three-part deity. Early in the 4th century of the Common Era, Arius provoked controversy when he declared not unlike Origen, that Jesus, though the Son of God was not made of the same substance as the Father. In 325, at the Council of Nicea, Arius’s proposition was defeated. Hence, the Nicene Creed recited in most Christian churches, affirms “the belief in one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, the essence of the Father and being of the same substance.” And that is a Trinitarian.
When Michael Servetus, a sixteenth century Spaniard, penned his tome, On the Errors of the Trinity, he was burned at the stake.
Peter Hughes, editor of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, writes,[Servetus] inspired unitarians and other groups on the radical left-wing of the Reformation to develop and institutionalize their own heretical views.… [he] rejected the doctrine of original sin and the entire theory of salvation based upon it,… [and] held that God was present in and constitutive of all creation. This feature of Servetus' theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin.
Let me repeat that: “God was present in and constitutive of all creation” That is what we would call a panentheist: one for whom God is present in and comprised of all being. That Michael Servetus would so pithily describe the theology of so many contemporary Unitarian Universalists, including mine, is remarkable. That he died for doing it, hammers a new meaning of religious conviction.
Prior to Unitarianism, theologians destructed and reconstructed Trinitarianism, the doctrine of a triune God. The Transylvanian Unitarianism that crystallized in 1568 was suffused with the universalism that had been percolating through the centuries. On March 8, 1568 the only Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund, convened ministers of both Hungary and Transylvania to listen to eleven debaters, five Unitarians and six Calvinists. They began with solemn prayers then proceeded to debate in Latin. The bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary appealed to the authority of the Bible, the creeds, the Fathers, and the orthodox theologians. Ferenc Dávid, the preacher of the King’s court appealed to the Bible alone. Note the absence of any reference to creeds or the Church Fathers from Dávid. By the ninth day the Calvinists asked to be excused from listening further. The king suggested that might signal defeat so the Calvinists stayed, and mercifully, the king ended the debate on day ten, “recommending that the ministers give themselves to prayer, seek harmony, and refrain from mutual abuse as [it is] unbecoming in them” (Earl Morse Wilbur).
The debate, generally regarded as a complete victory for the Unitarians, made a hero of Ferenc Dávid, met by crowds “who insisted he mount a large boulder at a street corner (still preserved as a sacred relic) and speak to them of his victorious new doctrine.” (Perhaps that is why there is a boulder right outside our church.) And while the hometown exploded with excitement, others were not so pleased. According to Earl Wilbur’s historical account, “the Calvinists began to rally their forces in Transylvania; while in Hungary, all through the year 1568, they kept holding synods in different districts, confirming the orthodox doctrine and condemning [Unitarians]. Disregarding the king’s decree of tolerance, they persecuted and drove out ministers holding Unitarian views, if they would not deny their faith, and forbade them to speak in their own defense, lest they thus make more converts to their views.”
The debates continued with great fervor, for in the sixteenth century, these weren’t good-natured jousts of intellect designed to affirm the superiority of reason. The king and his court attended along with generals. When the bishop of the Reformed Church spoke viciously to Dávid, the king himself interjected, “We wish that in our dominions there be freedom of conscience; for we know that faith is the gift of God, and that one’s conscience can not be forced.” A mere six days later, “the king saw that nothing further could be gained, and having charged the orthodox with evading the real issue he closed the debate.”
By 1571, Unitarianism, or “the religion of Ferenc Dávid” as it was known then, reached the height of its prominence, recognized as one of the four “received” religions protected by law, with almost five hundred congregations. Dávid published no less than eight of his own texts on Unitarianism in both Latin and Hungarian so that scholars and commonfolk alike could have access to his thoughts. King Sigismund required all rulers in Transylvania to respect and preserve the religious rights and freedoms of the four received religions: Unitarian, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, but once the king died prematurely, Unitarians were no longer assured protection or respect.
The ensuing decades brought great challenges to the early Unitarians whose theological innovations continued to cause controversy and place spokesmen such as Dávid at risk. Though he was not alone in putting forth the idea that there was no biblical support for the belief that Jesus equaled God, or that Christ should be worshiped, Dávid suffered the blows of orthodox Christians who considered him blasphemous.
And not unlike the Maccabees, he refused to be silenced. Despite warnings he spoke his truth to power and paid the price. Ill and sentenced to prison, Dávid died there November 15, 1579.
In his last sermon, he preached. "Whatever the world may say, it must some time become clear that God is but one." That is the theological root of Unitarianism. What we think of as our core values: religious freedom, the responsibility to bring reason and conscience to bear, and to interpret sacred texts ourselves come from Servetus, David, the Polish theologian Faustus Socinus and King Sigismund.
Their legacy flourishes today in Transylvania, now known as Romania, and parts of Hungary where about seventy thousand Unitarians dwell. They are members of the only religion indigenous to that region. Ninety-five percent of their congregations are rural. While certainly the most liberal religion there, it is quite different than our version of Unitarian Universalism. A bishop still presides though he can only be elected to two six-year terms and cannot be over seventy-five. A catechism remains in use that declares belief in one God comprehended as spirit and love; belief in the spiritual leadership of Jesus through the example he set; and a belief in the mission of the Unitarian church. Communion, known as The Lord’s Supper, is offered four times a year, not as a sacrament but as part of the liturgy. Ministers preach from the Bible and junior-high aged children are confirmed.
What binds us to this expression of Unitarianism is not ritual, liturgy or even congregational polity. A cursory glance reveals few similarities and our respective ways of speaking about our beliefs would hold few if any words in common. What binds us is a shared heritage and living history that instructs us in courage and the meaning of conviction.
And that’s what the candles we light at Hanukah represent. Not the miracle of long-lasting oil, but the miracle of human beings, who against all odds, hammer out justice, refusing to forsake irrefutable values, rescuing religious freedom from the flames of intolerance and restoring what is holy to the altar of everyday life. Amen.
Closing words:
Each of here has the opportunity to seek our inner Maccabee, to find and refine a faith worth defending, a spiritual community worth preserving. Let us hammer out justice and freedom as carry our light into the world.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
The High Cost of Indifference
What is the opposite of Love? I don't believe it's hate. Hate is passion. Hate is obsession with the object of hate. Hate is thinking about the object of hate.
The opposite of love is indifference. Indifference is the lack of passion, obsession and thought. Indifference can cause severe destruction. Recently, indifference severely impacted my life.
I live at 41 Arlington St., in Fitchburg. Recently, the property was foreclosed upon and bought by the bank at auction. Last March the bank auctioned and bought the property itself.
At the time I had three roommates including Stevie Germano. Stevie was severally disabled and on S.S.I. Because of the extreme pressure of the foreclosure and eviction, Stevie suffered a break down. Shortly after that Stevie was seriously injured in a fall down the back stairs where the bank had shut off the lights and left the hall dark. Stevie injured his head where he'd already had a metal plate. He injured his spine and broke his arm. He was unconscious and in intensive care at a hospital in Worcester for several weeks and then in a regular hospital for several more weeks. On October 13, 2010 at about 6 p.m., Stevie died from the injuries sustained in his fall down the unlighted hallway.
During this entire process I kept the offices of the Governor, the Attorney General, our loca Senator, our local Representative, the Mayor and the Fitchburg Health Department informed about these events. The Mayor and the Senator spoke with the Health Department to no avail. None of the other public representatives responded.
Out of shear desperation I wrote to the Governor and reminded him that he was running for re-election in six weeks, and then I got a call from his office. The public relations representative told me about a recent law signed by the Governor protecting landlords in foreclosures. This law does little to help tenants.
During the foreclosure, eviction, the violation of human rights, and the law, the attitude of the bank was, "This is how we do things." Agents for the bank come and go and don't communicate with us.
If we think of church as a place we go to for only one hour on Sunday, the parish will die. Every week, we say love is the doctrine of this church. Does that mean we commit to dismantling indifference?
-----
This testimonial was written by Fred Hutchings, a member of First Parish, Fitchburg.
The opposite of love is indifference. Indifference is the lack of passion, obsession and thought. Indifference can cause severe destruction. Recently, indifference severely impacted my life.
I live at 41 Arlington St., in Fitchburg. Recently, the property was foreclosed upon and bought by the bank at auction. Last March the bank auctioned and bought the property itself.
At the time I had three roommates including Stevie Germano. Stevie was severally disabled and on S.S.I. Because of the extreme pressure of the foreclosure and eviction, Stevie suffered a break down. Shortly after that Stevie was seriously injured in a fall down the back stairs where the bank had shut off the lights and left the hall dark. Stevie injured his head where he'd already had a metal plate. He injured his spine and broke his arm. He was unconscious and in intensive care at a hospital in Worcester for several weeks and then in a regular hospital for several more weeks. On October 13, 2010 at about 6 p.m., Stevie died from the injuries sustained in his fall down the unlighted hallway.
During this entire process I kept the offices of the Governor, the Attorney General, our loca Senator, our local Representative, the Mayor and the Fitchburg Health Department informed about these events. The Mayor and the Senator spoke with the Health Department to no avail. None of the other public representatives responded.
Out of shear desperation I wrote to the Governor and reminded him that he was running for re-election in six weeks, and then I got a call from his office. The public relations representative told me about a recent law signed by the Governor protecting landlords in foreclosures. This law does little to help tenants.
During the foreclosure, eviction, the violation of human rights, and the law, the attitude of the bank was, "This is how we do things." Agents for the bank come and go and don't communicate with us.
If we think of church as a place we go to for only one hour on Sunday, the parish will die. Every week, we say love is the doctrine of this church. Does that mean we commit to dismantling indifference?
-----
This testimonial was written by Fred Hutchings, a member of First Parish, Fitchburg.
Monday, November 22, 2010
The Cost of Indifference
Some of you may have read this recently in the New York Times:
Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper, a donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret “until the very end.”
What captivates me about this story is that in the midst of the Depression, an economic plague of such enormity it has become the definitive event against which to measure all other economic crises, one man responded in a profound and personal way. He did not gaze into that roiling sea of need, shake his head despairing over the fact he could not rescue everyone. He placed one ad in one paper in the place where history had set him—and he asked people to tell him their story, to name their specific need. Now this may sound a bit patronizing: a bit like Santa asking children to line up, but I read it differently. I see a man who took the time to listen to individual stories, who took on the responsibility to witness and hear firsthand the effects of the Depression on strangers. Stories he could have easily overlooked.
He could have simply mailed a check to a charity, but instead he engaged. He remained anonymous through a pseudonym and though he promised the letter writers he would not disclose their identities, he didn’t consign them to the kind of anonymity that leaves people to suffer unnoticed. “At a time when accepting charity was seen as a moral failure, [his] promise of anonymity shielded the letter writers from shame.” But before he ever mailed a check, he lifted them out of the silence of their despair. The people who penned letters were no longer the faceless masses flattened by the Great Depression. “J. L. White, father of seven children, wrote in his thank-you note … he was considering suicide just before he received the gift.…In many cases these were individuals with their backs against the wall, watching their children go hungry every night.”
B. Virdot turned out to be Samuel Stone, a Romanian Jewish immigrant who prospered in United States by opening a chain of clothing stores. The children and grandchildren of his beneficiaries laud not just the financial value of his gift, but his attention: the fact that he cared. [note: I refer below to a congregant’s testimonial about the bank foreclosing on the house he lives in and his housemate’s fall down the stairs in an unlit hallway.]
When the bank foreclosed on the house at 41 Arlington Street in Fitchburg, people didn’t lose their home: Fred and Stevie did. All across this country banks have foreclosed on houses. A few weeks ago, Sarah shared a testimonial about the foreclosure on her brother’s house. Maybe we hear or read so many accounts the details begin to blur; the numbers are enough to make our eyes glaze over.
But as Fred so eloquently asked, if love is the doctrine of this church, and indifference is the opposite of love, how can we as a congregation dismantle the indifference that enervates love? What is required of us to “stand on the side of love,” as Unitarian Universalists now have a campaign to do? Admittedly, the campaign with that name, “Standing on the Side of Love” began as a vocal movement to support marriage equality. But this morning I invite us to re-conceive it in broader terms. To stand on the side of love as opposed to lining up with indifference. Does standing on the side of love mean we find out whose house is being foreclosed upon and show up in solidarity to bear witness, to offer condolence and support? Does it mean we take these Guest At Our Table Boxes and put quarters or dollar bills in and return them in a few weeks? Or does it entail a bit more? Does dismantling indifference mean more than writing a check? Does it ask of us something else?
If you go to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee website, you will find a list that enumerates what a donation in varying amounts will buy. For instance:
$40 buys materials for a woman in Northern Uganda to make her own groundnut sheller[which] helps to reduce … workload and generate needed income for families, as residents return home after more than 20 years of war.
$65 pays for a small business loan for a displaced woman in Kenya. Which woman, I wonder? What does it feel like to be the anonymous woman who receives help from anonymous strangers? Perhaps there is still a stigma attached to receiving aid, though it strikes me as odd the recipients would feel ashamed instead of the ones responsible for such stark inequity. As much as the woman appreciates the nut sheller or the loan, would it mean more to be known, to have one’s specific reality witnessed. Would it make a difference for a congregation donating money to buy a sheller or underwrite a micro-loan, to learn together about the civil war in Uganda and the post-election violence in Kenya, to understand more fully the impact on individual lives?
What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?
I am compelled by the story of Samuel Stone precisely because he acted in a relatively small way in the face of almost inconceivable need. He sent a hundred and fifty checks, most no more than five dollars. A nanospeck in the barrel, and yet, according to The Times, “at a reunion for families of recipients [a]bout 400 people attended. For the older people, it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that was beginning to lose hope.”
Small gifts that meant more than money—envelopes that contained the powerful message that someone cared about their plight. A person unmet but not unknown. What a powerful way to combat indifference.
Fred spoke of contacting politicians, officials elected to represent constituents, mostly unresponsive to his pleas. We can all make excuses for how busy people are, for the vast responsibilities, personal and professional, that fill their schedules, but I think back to George W. Bush’s unwillingness in 2005 to meet with Cindy Sheehan who wanted to understand the reasoning behind the Iraq war that claimed her son. Sure, the President was busy man and some might argue, entitled to vacations at his Crawford, Texas ranch without interruption from a grieving mother. I haven’t listened much to the former President’s current book tour interviews but I did hear the clip where he identified “one of the most disgusting moments” of his presidency as Kanye West’s accusation that he didn’t care about black people. Mr. Bush resented being called a racist. When Matt Lauer asked Mr. Bush if he accepted Kanye West’s recent apology, the former Present replied, “Yes. I’m not a hater.”
The question is not whether the forty-third President, or any of us here are “haters,” but are we lovers? Do we stand on the side of love or cross the road and duck inside?
None of us here can respond to the enormity of need. We can’t attend every foreclosure or contribute to every good cause. We simply can’t afford it. But neither can we afford to turn our backs, to not notice the cries of those we cannot help. I’m not suggesting we bum ourselves out to the point of immobilization by inundating ourselves with endless stories of suffering three times a day; but I am asking what it means to stand on the side of love. When can we be present? Where? How?
Last year I noticed a man in my home town standing on the side of the road holding a cardboard sign with too much lettering to read as I drove by. I passed him three or four times before I finally stopped, hearing a voice in my head that said you don’t have to care for the stranger but you do need to care about him.
He wasn’t asking for money. He was asking to be heard.
On Thursday, I attended a performance of a new play called “Turning the Tide.” Imagine “An Inconvenient Truth” crossed with modern dance and fable. The message: we can’t afford indifference to the stark realities of climate change, specifically our human complicity. The play did its job. I left thinking I am far too indifferent to the impact of my choices. Sure,I have a moment in the grocery when I buy anything packaged in plastic especially the kind I can’t recycle, but usually I buy it anyway. I shop from the perspective of the boy in the story Marcia read, pretending the ants don’t feel the squish, the oceans don’t choke on the plastic, and ecosystems don’t die from the oil spill. But they do.
When Fred emailed me his story about Stevie’s death and the darkened hallway, the city and state officials who did not respond, I thought about a newsclip I watched a few months ago filmed in Miami where a neighborhood full of people intervened when the sheriff came to evict a family. Where are they going to sleep when you throw them out? The crowd wanted to know? What good will it do the city or the bank to have another homeless family? The neighbors, like the residents, were African American. The sheriff and bank guy, white. With the television news camera rolling the sheriff huffed and puffed. He was not in the mood for resistance but neither was he up for a showdown and miraculously, he backed off. He shrugged and muttered and got back in his car. The family stayed.
How would it change any of our stories if we were to stand on the side of love? If we were to ask ourselves, what will we do today to dismantle indifference?
A light in a darkened stairwell might keep another eulogy from being written.
This holiday season we can fill not only our own bellies, but a little cardboard box that sits on the table in hopes the change we reach for isn’t just coinage, but care. Who are the people pictured on the little cardboard box? What are their names? What do they long for? And how does the fulfillment of our wants intersect with their need?
Like Samuel Stone, we too, live in dire times. We may not notice the leak if we’re standing on the top deck, but everyone down below in steerage knows there’s a problem. The unnamed woman in Kenya shelling groundnuts by hand. The good folks lining the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The people stricken with cholera in Haiti and the other 1.3 million still displaced know there’s a problem.
In 1933, in Canton, Ohio, one man with a chain of clothing stores knew he couldn’t restore economic solvency. But he could put an ad in the paper and stand on the side of love.
So can we.
Amen.
Let us change the world with our love; let our love affirm each other’s meaning; let it not only guide us to the place we stand; may it be the direction in which we move.
Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper, a donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret “until the very end.”
What captivates me about this story is that in the midst of the Depression, an economic plague of such enormity it has become the definitive event against which to measure all other economic crises, one man responded in a profound and personal way. He did not gaze into that roiling sea of need, shake his head despairing over the fact he could not rescue everyone. He placed one ad in one paper in the place where history had set him—and he asked people to tell him their story, to name their specific need. Now this may sound a bit patronizing: a bit like Santa asking children to line up, but I read it differently. I see a man who took the time to listen to individual stories, who took on the responsibility to witness and hear firsthand the effects of the Depression on strangers. Stories he could have easily overlooked.
He could have simply mailed a check to a charity, but instead he engaged. He remained anonymous through a pseudonym and though he promised the letter writers he would not disclose their identities, he didn’t consign them to the kind of anonymity that leaves people to suffer unnoticed. “At a time when accepting charity was seen as a moral failure, [his] promise of anonymity shielded the letter writers from shame.” But before he ever mailed a check, he lifted them out of the silence of their despair. The people who penned letters were no longer the faceless masses flattened by the Great Depression. “J. L. White, father of seven children, wrote in his thank-you note … he was considering suicide just before he received the gift.…In many cases these were individuals with their backs against the wall, watching their children go hungry every night.”
B. Virdot turned out to be Samuel Stone, a Romanian Jewish immigrant who prospered in United States by opening a chain of clothing stores. The children and grandchildren of his beneficiaries laud not just the financial value of his gift, but his attention: the fact that he cared. [note: I refer below to a congregant’s testimonial about the bank foreclosing on the house he lives in and his housemate’s fall down the stairs in an unlit hallway.]
When the bank foreclosed on the house at 41 Arlington Street in Fitchburg, people didn’t lose their home: Fred and Stevie did. All across this country banks have foreclosed on houses. A few weeks ago, Sarah shared a testimonial about the foreclosure on her brother’s house. Maybe we hear or read so many accounts the details begin to blur; the numbers are enough to make our eyes glaze over.
But as Fred so eloquently asked, if love is the doctrine of this church, and indifference is the opposite of love, how can we as a congregation dismantle the indifference that enervates love? What is required of us to “stand on the side of love,” as Unitarian Universalists now have a campaign to do? Admittedly, the campaign with that name, “Standing on the Side of Love” began as a vocal movement to support marriage equality. But this morning I invite us to re-conceive it in broader terms. To stand on the side of love as opposed to lining up with indifference. Does standing on the side of love mean we find out whose house is being foreclosed upon and show up in solidarity to bear witness, to offer condolence and support? Does it mean we take these Guest At Our Table Boxes and put quarters or dollar bills in and return them in a few weeks? Or does it entail a bit more? Does dismantling indifference mean more than writing a check? Does it ask of us something else?
If you go to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee website, you will find a list that enumerates what a donation in varying amounts will buy. For instance:
$40 buys materials for a woman in Northern Uganda to make her own groundnut sheller[which] helps to reduce … workload and generate needed income for families, as residents return home after more than 20 years of war.
$65 pays for a small business loan for a displaced woman in Kenya. Which woman, I wonder? What does it feel like to be the anonymous woman who receives help from anonymous strangers? Perhaps there is still a stigma attached to receiving aid, though it strikes me as odd the recipients would feel ashamed instead of the ones responsible for such stark inequity. As much as the woman appreciates the nut sheller or the loan, would it mean more to be known, to have one’s specific reality witnessed. Would it make a difference for a congregation donating money to buy a sheller or underwrite a micro-loan, to learn together about the civil war in Uganda and the post-election violence in Kenya, to understand more fully the impact on individual lives?
What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?
I am compelled by the story of Samuel Stone precisely because he acted in a relatively small way in the face of almost inconceivable need. He sent a hundred and fifty checks, most no more than five dollars. A nanospeck in the barrel, and yet, according to The Times, “at a reunion for families of recipients [a]bout 400 people attended. For the older people, it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that was beginning to lose hope.”
Small gifts that meant more than money—envelopes that contained the powerful message that someone cared about their plight. A person unmet but not unknown. What a powerful way to combat indifference.
Fred spoke of contacting politicians, officials elected to represent constituents, mostly unresponsive to his pleas. We can all make excuses for how busy people are, for the vast responsibilities, personal and professional, that fill their schedules, but I think back to George W. Bush’s unwillingness in 2005 to meet with Cindy Sheehan who wanted to understand the reasoning behind the Iraq war that claimed her son. Sure, the President was busy man and some might argue, entitled to vacations at his Crawford, Texas ranch without interruption from a grieving mother. I haven’t listened much to the former President’s current book tour interviews but I did hear the clip where he identified “one of the most disgusting moments” of his presidency as Kanye West’s accusation that he didn’t care about black people. Mr. Bush resented being called a racist. When Matt Lauer asked Mr. Bush if he accepted Kanye West’s recent apology, the former Present replied, “Yes. I’m not a hater.”
The question is not whether the forty-third President, or any of us here are “haters,” but are we lovers? Do we stand on the side of love or cross the road and duck inside?
None of us here can respond to the enormity of need. We can’t attend every foreclosure or contribute to every good cause. We simply can’t afford it. But neither can we afford to turn our backs, to not notice the cries of those we cannot help. I’m not suggesting we bum ourselves out to the point of immobilization by inundating ourselves with endless stories of suffering three times a day; but I am asking what it means to stand on the side of love. When can we be present? Where? How?
Last year I noticed a man in my home town standing on the side of the road holding a cardboard sign with too much lettering to read as I drove by. I passed him three or four times before I finally stopped, hearing a voice in my head that said you don’t have to care for the stranger but you do need to care about him.
He wasn’t asking for money. He was asking to be heard.
On Thursday, I attended a performance of a new play called “Turning the Tide.” Imagine “An Inconvenient Truth” crossed with modern dance and fable. The message: we can’t afford indifference to the stark realities of climate change, specifically our human complicity. The play did its job. I left thinking I am far too indifferent to the impact of my choices. Sure,I have a moment in the grocery when I buy anything packaged in plastic especially the kind I can’t recycle, but usually I buy it anyway. I shop from the perspective of the boy in the story Marcia read, pretending the ants don’t feel the squish, the oceans don’t choke on the plastic, and ecosystems don’t die from the oil spill. But they do.
When Fred emailed me his story about Stevie’s death and the darkened hallway, the city and state officials who did not respond, I thought about a newsclip I watched a few months ago filmed in Miami where a neighborhood full of people intervened when the sheriff came to evict a family. Where are they going to sleep when you throw them out? The crowd wanted to know? What good will it do the city or the bank to have another homeless family? The neighbors, like the residents, were African American. The sheriff and bank guy, white. With the television news camera rolling the sheriff huffed and puffed. He was not in the mood for resistance but neither was he up for a showdown and miraculously, he backed off. He shrugged and muttered and got back in his car. The family stayed.
How would it change any of our stories if we were to stand on the side of love? If we were to ask ourselves, what will we do today to dismantle indifference?
A light in a darkened stairwell might keep another eulogy from being written.
This holiday season we can fill not only our own bellies, but a little cardboard box that sits on the table in hopes the change we reach for isn’t just coinage, but care. Who are the people pictured on the little cardboard box? What are their names? What do they long for? And how does the fulfillment of our wants intersect with their need?
Like Samuel Stone, we too, live in dire times. We may not notice the leak if we’re standing on the top deck, but everyone down below in steerage knows there’s a problem. The unnamed woman in Kenya shelling groundnuts by hand. The good folks lining the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The people stricken with cholera in Haiti and the other 1.3 million still displaced know there’s a problem.
In 1933, in Canton, Ohio, one man with a chain of clothing stores knew he couldn’t restore economic solvency. But he could put an ad in the paper and stand on the side of love.
So can we.
Amen.
Let us change the world with our love; let our love affirm each other’s meaning; let it not only guide us to the place we stand; may it be the direction in which we move.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Ginger Snap Sunday
This morning, as we welcome our newest members, Tricia, Rick, Oli, Seamus and Ann, we taste the sweetness of community. We celebrate the spice each one brings, distinctive and flavorful. As we know from the world around us, the world that holds us, there is so much that is unsavory, and thus, it is such a blessing to come together, to form beloved community, to make a space within the busyness and complexity of our lives, to enjoy simple gifts. A place where we ought to be, a valley of love and delight, where we can come down right. As Rumi so eloquently puts it:
I don’t need
a companion who is
nasty sad and sour
the one who is
like a grave
dark depressing and bitter
a sweetheart is a mirror
a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else
a companion who is
in love only with the self
has five distinct characters
stone hearted
unsure of every step
lazy and disinterested
keeping a poisonous face
the more this companion waits around
the more bitter everything will get
just like a vinegar
getting more sour with time
enough is said about
sour and bitter faces
a heart filled with desire for
sweetness and tender souls
must not waste itself with unsavory matters (translated by Nader Khalili )
It’s not that we turn our backs on the unsavory, on the suffering of so many, on the challenges of our time; it’s that we enjoy the sweetness, take in the spice. We, for whom joy beckons, owe it to ourselves and each other, not only to taste the sweetness but to savor it. Religious community is one of the ways we do that. Here, we have the perfect blend of spice and sweet. Each of us offers our own distinctive flavor. Variety is the spice of life. Especially in a Unitarian Universalist context. Here, we mix it up: cinnamon and clove, ginger and allspice. Coriander and cumin, star anise and fennel. Each with our own theology or perspective, freshly ground, or well-aged. If we were to ingest any one spice undiluted, it would overpower our taste buds and send our sensibilities reeling. So we blend. We take a pinch of God as all being and mix it with a dash of the earth as divinity itself. We stir in a bit of Jesus as spiritual exemplar and Buddha as guide. We sprinkle in some Christmas carols and Yom Kippur, the Passover story and Unitarian Easter themes; we stir in Universalist themes of hope and redemption with reason and transcendentalist mysticism to balance the simple gifts of care and good cheer. We rattle our bones on Halloween and occasionally indulge in communions of gingersnaps because ritual allows us to embody what we espouse.
If we borrow the idea that something we eat can serve as a metaphor for what comprises us and our ministries, gingersnaps seem an appropriate choice. The spiciness is complemented by the sweetness of molasses and brown sugar, by the creaminess of butter and the binding quality of eggs. The flour gives the gingersnap its gravity; it keeps it from being spicy sweet goo and turns it into wafery goodness.
We bring our individual spice to mix it with the sweetness of religious community, “the delicious cake” of togetherness that combines our unique flavor with the common “desire for sweetness.” Something happens here in our interactions akin to the heat an oven provides that turns batter into cake.
In the writings classes I teach, I use this metaphor to illustrate the difference between raw ingredients heaped in a bowl and a perfectly baked cake. If all we do is place our thoughts, memories, opinions, and beliefs on the counter, we have a bunch of ingredients. If we add passion and take the time to carefully blend the ingredients of our experience and perspective with others, considering proportion, then heat it in the oven of reason, wonder, compassion and critical thought, the ingredients transform from batter to a sumptuous source of nourishment much easier to digest and enjoy.
While chemists can explain the physical chain of events happening in the oven, I prefer the poetic approach: a creative synergy of materials and heat: an alchemy of delight. It is easier to identify than to explain. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, a student asked me about Unitarian Universalism. I had mentioned in passing that I write sermons, so after class he asked what for. I told him and he inquired about our denomination. “It’s a philosophy not a religion, right?”
“No,” I countered. It’s a religion.” And then the poor lad had to suffer through my abbreviated though probably way too long for his taste version of Unitarian Universalism and how the two merged. When I finished the historical summary of two liberal Protestant strands combined into one pluralistic, non-creedal, God-optional faith, he said, “Why would I as an agnostic want to go to church? Why would I be interested in religion? Isn’t it just a philosophy?”
I launched into Part B of what became a lesson in what not to ask a writing teacher cum UU minister. I told the young man I could not speak to why he might want to go to church, but I shared why I do. I recounted the loneliness I felt in a university English department inhabiting the big questions: the meaning of life, the consciousness of mortality, the ubiquity of suffering and undeniable evidence of joy, and in my life, grace. I explained that I found much needed spiritual community within a congregation that I couldn’t find anywhere else. In church, we have the opportunity to worship, to lift up what is worthy, to apprehend awe long enough to savor it not just taste it; to stretch into new postures of compassion and generosity that require a safe loving space in which to do so. In church our voices mingle literally and figuratively. When we sing together and meet together, envision ministries and sort out practicalities, we learn to harmonize. Church invites us to blend our spiciness so that we find the right balance—not pungent, not bitter, not cloying. Forming religious community allows each flavor to maintain its distinctiveness yet form something greater.
This morning I invite you to partake in the communion of gingersnaps not just by taking one and savoring its spicy sweetness, but by offering one to someone seated nearby, and as you pass the gingersnaps, take a moment to share a bit of your spice: your theology or worldview, in a snippet (save the unabridged version for coffee hour so we have time left to have one). Take a moment to identify the sweetness you find here. What is it about First Parish that bakes your cake? That turns the ingredients of your presence, spice, and time into something wonderfully nourishing?
I’ll come around with plates and as you pass them, share the sweet and the spice.
(after the gingersnaps have gone around and people have shared)
a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else…
As we welcome our newest members and celebrate each person here, let us savor the sweetness of our communal cake. Life produces vinegar right and left: “enough is said/ about sour and bitter faces.”
Let us offer the world our spicy sweetness, the perfect blend of First Parish.
Be ours a religion which, like
sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space:
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living. (Theodore Parker)
Amen.
I don’t need
a companion who is
nasty sad and sour
the one who is
like a grave
dark depressing and bitter
a sweetheart is a mirror
a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else
a companion who is
in love only with the self
has five distinct characters
stone hearted
unsure of every step
lazy and disinterested
keeping a poisonous face
the more this companion waits around
the more bitter everything will get
just like a vinegar
getting more sour with time
enough is said about
sour and bitter faces
a heart filled with desire for
sweetness and tender souls
must not waste itself with unsavory matters (translated by Nader Khalili )
It’s not that we turn our backs on the unsavory, on the suffering of so many, on the challenges of our time; it’s that we enjoy the sweetness, take in the spice. We, for whom joy beckons, owe it to ourselves and each other, not only to taste the sweetness but to savor it. Religious community is one of the ways we do that. Here, we have the perfect blend of spice and sweet. Each of us offers our own distinctive flavor. Variety is the spice of life. Especially in a Unitarian Universalist context. Here, we mix it up: cinnamon and clove, ginger and allspice. Coriander and cumin, star anise and fennel. Each with our own theology or perspective, freshly ground, or well-aged. If we were to ingest any one spice undiluted, it would overpower our taste buds and send our sensibilities reeling. So we blend. We take a pinch of God as all being and mix it with a dash of the earth as divinity itself. We stir in a bit of Jesus as spiritual exemplar and Buddha as guide. We sprinkle in some Christmas carols and Yom Kippur, the Passover story and Unitarian Easter themes; we stir in Universalist themes of hope and redemption with reason and transcendentalist mysticism to balance the simple gifts of care and good cheer. We rattle our bones on Halloween and occasionally indulge in communions of gingersnaps because ritual allows us to embody what we espouse.
If we borrow the idea that something we eat can serve as a metaphor for what comprises us and our ministries, gingersnaps seem an appropriate choice. The spiciness is complemented by the sweetness of molasses and brown sugar, by the creaminess of butter and the binding quality of eggs. The flour gives the gingersnap its gravity; it keeps it from being spicy sweet goo and turns it into wafery goodness.
We bring our individual spice to mix it with the sweetness of religious community, “the delicious cake” of togetherness that combines our unique flavor with the common “desire for sweetness.” Something happens here in our interactions akin to the heat an oven provides that turns batter into cake.
In the writings classes I teach, I use this metaphor to illustrate the difference between raw ingredients heaped in a bowl and a perfectly baked cake. If all we do is place our thoughts, memories, opinions, and beliefs on the counter, we have a bunch of ingredients. If we add passion and take the time to carefully blend the ingredients of our experience and perspective with others, considering proportion, then heat it in the oven of reason, wonder, compassion and critical thought, the ingredients transform from batter to a sumptuous source of nourishment much easier to digest and enjoy.
While chemists can explain the physical chain of events happening in the oven, I prefer the poetic approach: a creative synergy of materials and heat: an alchemy of delight. It is easier to identify than to explain. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, a student asked me about Unitarian Universalism. I had mentioned in passing that I write sermons, so after class he asked what for. I told him and he inquired about our denomination. “It’s a philosophy not a religion, right?”
“No,” I countered. It’s a religion.” And then the poor lad had to suffer through my abbreviated though probably way too long for his taste version of Unitarian Universalism and how the two merged. When I finished the historical summary of two liberal Protestant strands combined into one pluralistic, non-creedal, God-optional faith, he said, “Why would I as an agnostic want to go to church? Why would I be interested in religion? Isn’t it just a philosophy?”
I launched into Part B of what became a lesson in what not to ask a writing teacher cum UU minister. I told the young man I could not speak to why he might want to go to church, but I shared why I do. I recounted the loneliness I felt in a university English department inhabiting the big questions: the meaning of life, the consciousness of mortality, the ubiquity of suffering and undeniable evidence of joy, and in my life, grace. I explained that I found much needed spiritual community within a congregation that I couldn’t find anywhere else. In church, we have the opportunity to worship, to lift up what is worthy, to apprehend awe long enough to savor it not just taste it; to stretch into new postures of compassion and generosity that require a safe loving space in which to do so. In church our voices mingle literally and figuratively. When we sing together and meet together, envision ministries and sort out practicalities, we learn to harmonize. Church invites us to blend our spiciness so that we find the right balance—not pungent, not bitter, not cloying. Forming religious community allows each flavor to maintain its distinctiveness yet form something greater.
This morning I invite you to partake in the communion of gingersnaps not just by taking one and savoring its spicy sweetness, but by offering one to someone seated nearby, and as you pass the gingersnaps, take a moment to share a bit of your spice: your theology or worldview, in a snippet (save the unabridged version for coffee hour so we have time left to have one). Take a moment to identify the sweetness you find here. What is it about First Parish that bakes your cake? That turns the ingredients of your presence, spice, and time into something wonderfully nourishing?
I’ll come around with plates and as you pass them, share the sweet and the spice.
(after the gingersnaps have gone around and people have shared)
a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else…
As we welcome our newest members and celebrate each person here, let us savor the sweetness of our communal cake. Life produces vinegar right and left: “enough is said/ about sour and bitter faces.”
Let us offer the world our spicy sweetness, the perfect blend of First Parish.
Be ours a religion which, like
sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space:
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living. (Theodore Parker)
Amen.
Friday, November 12, 2010
What's Next?
After Tuesday’s midterm elections, you may be wondering along with me, “What’s next?” How does a deeply divided electorate proceed? Will Democrats and Republicans, Tea Partiers and Independents find common ground or retreat to separate trenches? Already, we have heard a battle cry to fight, but I wonder, in a rived nation is fighting the next step? I understand the impulse to stand firm in one’s convictions. Our Unitarian forebears Michael Servetus and Francis David were martyred for the certainty with which they clung to their belief in the errors of the trinity. But even they did not seek battle; they sought freedom of choice. They refused to subscribe to beliefs incongruent with their reading of scripture, and they spoke out, but they did not assail others for disagreeing with them.
This is challenging territory: the not assailing part. It has been dogging me this week, even before the outcome of Tuesday’s election. My sister called me Monday night. She is perhaps my greatest teacher; her lessons often come in the guise of my utter frustration. My sister moves through the world emotionally bare; and I am uncomfortable in the presence of her nakedness. Often, she calls to tell me someone angered her. She laces her narration with judgment I react to, most ungraciously I might add. My sister is autistic and part of her challenge is that she lacks the skills or the superego, in Freud-speak, to rein in her uncensored id, her rash responses. She sees the world in gradations of threat so there is little room to consider things. An assault on her senses or sensibilities is just that: an assault. Anger mobilizes her energy; as she steps deeper into it, she steps further away from the fear that dogs her.
That my sister is unable to engage in mindfulness because her mind truly doesn’t allow her to imagine what another mind might be experiencing, sets me boiling faster than water in an electric kettle.
I get screechy and preachy in the worst sort of way with my sister though I never mean to. I try to corral myself and find an approach she will understand, but in my attempt to get her to understand me I totally overlook the fact that she can’t: that her world is so riddled with anxiety and a lack of emotional strategies many adults have. When fear is the only traveling companion, life quickly turns into an arsenal.
What scares me about the recent election isn’t the results as much as the fear that fueled campaigns so often ugly in their tenor. When fake pundit Stephen Colbert rallied to keep fear alive alongside Jon Stewart’s efforts to restore sanity, the pair contrived an easy ending where reasonableness triumphs. Sure, Jon Stewart acknowledged, there will always be the jerk speeding in the breakdown lane trying pass everyone else, but mostly we drive in an orderly fashion, yielding as necessary so we can all get home.
I want to function within that vision and most days I do. But then, not so unlike my sister, something assails my sensibilities, more often than my senses, and suddenly, the image of my sister as a nakedly fearful person turns from portrait into mirror.
Take for instance the murder trial going on this week in New Hampshire with its grisly testimony of four youths charged with slaughtering a woman in her own bed and maiming her eleven-year-old daughter. I, the staunchest opponent of capital punishment, the one who volunteers in prisons to spend quality time with men doing fifteen to life, am so overcome by horror and disgust that I find myself thinking, there is no death painful enough for the perpetrators. The naked truth is, a decade and a half before a couple of young men wielded a machete in Mount Vernon, New Hampshire, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans died by the blade of them. It’s when the blade glints in a sleepy town not so far from my own, that my fear roils; my inclinations toward nonviolence and my faith in the possibility of transformation evaporate.
For any of us, feeling threatened activates fear that unleashes anger—and for a moment the anger distracts us from the fear. Righteous anger distracts best of all, but like the vinegar-activated volcanoes of elementary school, once the fuming fizzles, what’s left but a clump of wet baking soda?
What’s next for a nation rife with internecine distrust and contempt? What’s next for a divided Congress and a chastened President? For an electorate split between the disengaged and the enraged? What’s next for a nation that often appears to forsake tools for weapons? A country truly targeted by extremists who find themselves thinking for longer than a minute, there is no death painful enough for the perpetrators of what threatens them?
That’s the sticky part: daring to even look for the us in them. I am the first to admit how much I resist that exercise. I don’t even like doing it with my sister. I prefer to sizzle and snap every time she recounts what a pain someone at her church is, or how the pastor should kick out the homeless guy who sat next to her and suggested they ought to kill President Obama. I prefer to take deep breaths and explain how she belongs to a Christian church so it is incumbent upon the pastor to follow the teachings of Jesus: to do for the least among them: the homeless, the deranged, the disregarded. Reluctantly, I might get around to admitting, not so unlike Juan Williams, that I would get nervous around an unkempt, possibly paranoid man advocating murder. I might give my sister that nanosecond of identification: I too, can relate to being afraid, though I know nothing of the depth of her fear, the relentless all-consuming anxiety: the only partner she has.
And then, I inevitably hang up the phone and despise myself for doing what I can’t tolerate in her: I want so desperately for her to have more skill at clothing her responses. I want a world where all of us engage mindfully, where each of us pauses to consider how the other might be feeling, how another’s experience shapes not only a world view but a way of being.
We may not agree with or condone the actions of another; we might not even be capable of imagining the means, but we do ourselves no favor if we don’t try at least to understand the ends. Yes, psychopathology exists and it may elude all but the forensic psychiatrists, but teenagers who take up machetes, and strap on suicide vests and assemble IEDs roam among us and come from wombs not so unlike the ones from which we and our children emerge. Anger cloaked as violence may be the only mask for otherwise naked fear.
When the adults start screaming epithets, when the politicians accuse each other with more gusto than gunslingers in the wild west, when fear mobilizes anger to the point that ordinary citizens conflate a Nobel peace laureate with Adolf Hitler, confuse a constitutional law scholar with a monkey, decry a secret Muslim in the White House; when we who value religious freedom sit back and let the media skewer a female candidate for being a witch, what’s next?
Some of the threats we face are real and my sister teaches me that all of the threats we feel feel real. If feeling threatened can make a peacenik like me reach—even for a moment— toward a violent answer, if reasonable fear can cause reasonable people to assail others who seem unreasonable to us, what can God or the earth or the thrum of existence count on us to do?
To be responsive, to read the news and try to comprehend the despair that descends yet again this week upon Haiti. To notice the ones in our neighborhood whose longing threatens to disrupt our own and recognize them as neighbors even if we don’t invite them to the block party. To understand that being responsive to others means we have a responsibility to ourselves not to get overwhelmed, and if we do, not to stay there.
We can acknowledge the relationships that bless us, the good fortune that underpins our existence and know when to shut off the news and stand in the presence of beauty. Lie down at the roots of a great white pine or copper beech. Rest for a while under broad canopies that outlive recessions and even wars, gerrymandering and pandering, twenty-four hour news cycles chattering and blatting. We can unplug ourselves long enough to stroll in the wake of kindness, plunk ourselves down in the vast fields of compassion that blanket the earth as much as the schisms and horrors that defile it.
Because we are all human any strong emotion will evoke our own. The nakedness of my sister’s responses threatens to undress me. When I hear rhetoric devoid of reason and chocked full of fear, my frustration ignites far quicker than my compassion. And in the shortness of my wick, I catch a glimmer of my sister who smiles at me in the mirror and says, “But Leaf, you have a choice. You have the capacity for what neurologists call theory of mind: ‘the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.’”
For all the uncertainty that plagues us and gives our life meaning, there can be constancy in what’s next if we exercise the freedom of choice our forebears died for—if we speak up and cry out without assailing others. We can predict but not know, fret or fume, turn away in haste or slow ourselves with mindfulness.
My sister tells me she will keep her judgments to herself. In her nakedness that is her fig-leaf of compassion.
We dwell in the garden: afraid of its serpents, in praise of its fruits—together.
The sight of her fig-leaf makes me reach for my own.
Amen.
Closing words: This from Nietzsche: I am still living, I am still thinking: I have to go on living because I have to go on thinking . . . I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as the beautiful in them – thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: (love of fate)may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. … And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer!
If our lives are a song, let it be a serenade to compassion. Even in our keening let our song be an ode not a dirge. Let the notes rise till they fall graceful as leaves onto common ground.
This is challenging territory: the not assailing part. It has been dogging me this week, even before the outcome of Tuesday’s election. My sister called me Monday night. She is perhaps my greatest teacher; her lessons often come in the guise of my utter frustration. My sister moves through the world emotionally bare; and I am uncomfortable in the presence of her nakedness. Often, she calls to tell me someone angered her. She laces her narration with judgment I react to, most ungraciously I might add. My sister is autistic and part of her challenge is that she lacks the skills or the superego, in Freud-speak, to rein in her uncensored id, her rash responses. She sees the world in gradations of threat so there is little room to consider things. An assault on her senses or sensibilities is just that: an assault. Anger mobilizes her energy; as she steps deeper into it, she steps further away from the fear that dogs her.
That my sister is unable to engage in mindfulness because her mind truly doesn’t allow her to imagine what another mind might be experiencing, sets me boiling faster than water in an electric kettle.
I get screechy and preachy in the worst sort of way with my sister though I never mean to. I try to corral myself and find an approach she will understand, but in my attempt to get her to understand me I totally overlook the fact that she can’t: that her world is so riddled with anxiety and a lack of emotional strategies many adults have. When fear is the only traveling companion, life quickly turns into an arsenal.
What scares me about the recent election isn’t the results as much as the fear that fueled campaigns so often ugly in their tenor. When fake pundit Stephen Colbert rallied to keep fear alive alongside Jon Stewart’s efforts to restore sanity, the pair contrived an easy ending where reasonableness triumphs. Sure, Jon Stewart acknowledged, there will always be the jerk speeding in the breakdown lane trying pass everyone else, but mostly we drive in an orderly fashion, yielding as necessary so we can all get home.
I want to function within that vision and most days I do. But then, not so unlike my sister, something assails my sensibilities, more often than my senses, and suddenly, the image of my sister as a nakedly fearful person turns from portrait into mirror.
Take for instance the murder trial going on this week in New Hampshire with its grisly testimony of four youths charged with slaughtering a woman in her own bed and maiming her eleven-year-old daughter. I, the staunchest opponent of capital punishment, the one who volunteers in prisons to spend quality time with men doing fifteen to life, am so overcome by horror and disgust that I find myself thinking, there is no death painful enough for the perpetrators. The naked truth is, a decade and a half before a couple of young men wielded a machete in Mount Vernon, New Hampshire, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans died by the blade of them. It’s when the blade glints in a sleepy town not so far from my own, that my fear roils; my inclinations toward nonviolence and my faith in the possibility of transformation evaporate.
For any of us, feeling threatened activates fear that unleashes anger—and for a moment the anger distracts us from the fear. Righteous anger distracts best of all, but like the vinegar-activated volcanoes of elementary school, once the fuming fizzles, what’s left but a clump of wet baking soda?
What’s next for a nation rife with internecine distrust and contempt? What’s next for a divided Congress and a chastened President? For an electorate split between the disengaged and the enraged? What’s next for a nation that often appears to forsake tools for weapons? A country truly targeted by extremists who find themselves thinking for longer than a minute, there is no death painful enough for the perpetrators of what threatens them?
That’s the sticky part: daring to even look for the us in them. I am the first to admit how much I resist that exercise. I don’t even like doing it with my sister. I prefer to sizzle and snap every time she recounts what a pain someone at her church is, or how the pastor should kick out the homeless guy who sat next to her and suggested they ought to kill President Obama. I prefer to take deep breaths and explain how she belongs to a Christian church so it is incumbent upon the pastor to follow the teachings of Jesus: to do for the least among them: the homeless, the deranged, the disregarded. Reluctantly, I might get around to admitting, not so unlike Juan Williams, that I would get nervous around an unkempt, possibly paranoid man advocating murder. I might give my sister that nanosecond of identification: I too, can relate to being afraid, though I know nothing of the depth of her fear, the relentless all-consuming anxiety: the only partner she has.
And then, I inevitably hang up the phone and despise myself for doing what I can’t tolerate in her: I want so desperately for her to have more skill at clothing her responses. I want a world where all of us engage mindfully, where each of us pauses to consider how the other might be feeling, how another’s experience shapes not only a world view but a way of being.
We may not agree with or condone the actions of another; we might not even be capable of imagining the means, but we do ourselves no favor if we don’t try at least to understand the ends. Yes, psychopathology exists and it may elude all but the forensic psychiatrists, but teenagers who take up machetes, and strap on suicide vests and assemble IEDs roam among us and come from wombs not so unlike the ones from which we and our children emerge. Anger cloaked as violence may be the only mask for otherwise naked fear.
When the adults start screaming epithets, when the politicians accuse each other with more gusto than gunslingers in the wild west, when fear mobilizes anger to the point that ordinary citizens conflate a Nobel peace laureate with Adolf Hitler, confuse a constitutional law scholar with a monkey, decry a secret Muslim in the White House; when we who value religious freedom sit back and let the media skewer a female candidate for being a witch, what’s next?
Some of the threats we face are real and my sister teaches me that all of the threats we feel feel real. If feeling threatened can make a peacenik like me reach—even for a moment— toward a violent answer, if reasonable fear can cause reasonable people to assail others who seem unreasonable to us, what can God or the earth or the thrum of existence count on us to do?
To be responsive, to read the news and try to comprehend the despair that descends yet again this week upon Haiti. To notice the ones in our neighborhood whose longing threatens to disrupt our own and recognize them as neighbors even if we don’t invite them to the block party. To understand that being responsive to others means we have a responsibility to ourselves not to get overwhelmed, and if we do, not to stay there.
We can acknowledge the relationships that bless us, the good fortune that underpins our existence and know when to shut off the news and stand in the presence of beauty. Lie down at the roots of a great white pine or copper beech. Rest for a while under broad canopies that outlive recessions and even wars, gerrymandering and pandering, twenty-four hour news cycles chattering and blatting. We can unplug ourselves long enough to stroll in the wake of kindness, plunk ourselves down in the vast fields of compassion that blanket the earth as much as the schisms and horrors that defile it.
Because we are all human any strong emotion will evoke our own. The nakedness of my sister’s responses threatens to undress me. When I hear rhetoric devoid of reason and chocked full of fear, my frustration ignites far quicker than my compassion. And in the shortness of my wick, I catch a glimmer of my sister who smiles at me in the mirror and says, “But Leaf, you have a choice. You have the capacity for what neurologists call theory of mind: ‘the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.’”
For all the uncertainty that plagues us and gives our life meaning, there can be constancy in what’s next if we exercise the freedom of choice our forebears died for—if we speak up and cry out without assailing others. We can predict but not know, fret or fume, turn away in haste or slow ourselves with mindfulness.
My sister tells me she will keep her judgments to herself. In her nakedness that is her fig-leaf of compassion.
We dwell in the garden: afraid of its serpents, in praise of its fruits—together.
The sight of her fig-leaf makes me reach for my own.
Amen.
Closing words: This from Nietzsche: I am still living, I am still thinking: I have to go on living because I have to go on thinking . . . I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as the beautiful in them – thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: (love of fate)may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. … And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer!
If our lives are a song, let it be a serenade to compassion. Even in our keening let our song be an ode not a dirge. Let the notes rise till they fall graceful as leaves onto common ground.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Dia de los Muertos
As we know from our splendid dance last night, today is Halloween, followed tomorrow by Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead. I have long been intrigued with the way some cultures, more readily than our own, embody the idea that “death ends a life, not a relationship.” Dia de los Muertos commemorates a “reunion of the dead and the living.” As the Senegalese writer Birago Diop put it:
Those who have died
Have never, never left
The dead are not under the earth
They are in the rustling trees
They are in the groaning woods
They are in the crying grass
They are in the moaning rocks
The dead are not under the earth
The New York Times recently reported from Ambohimirary, Madagascar :
With fanfare befitting a parade, the shrouded remains of 17 bodies were removed from the family crypt, some sprayed with expensive perfume, others splashed with sparkling wine. Five brass bands took turns belting out cheerful melodies, and each emerging corpse was lifted onto the shoulders of its own set of revelers. The celebrators then joyously trotted about, dancing with the bones of the dead.
… Every society has its own customs regarding the deceased, an interplay between those who are and those who were.… Here in the central highlands of Madagascar, [a]ncestors are periodically taken from their tombs… The ritual is called a famadihana (pronounced fa-ma-dee-an)…Many [here] believe the boundary between life and death is not altogether impermeable, that the spirits of their ancestors can somehow pass back and forth. To them, the famadihana is a time to convey the latest family news to the deceased and ask them for blessings and sagely guidance.
This service welcomes the ancestors back. Inviting the spirit of those we love who have died to commune with us once again.
I suspect most if not all of us have felt the presence of loved ones who have died: in a turn of phrase that comes out of our own mouths. In a gesture, a thought even, a way of approaching the world. We carry those who have died in our memory, but also in our actions, our posture, our patterns of speech, in a laugh or even what it is we laugh at. Some we may carry as a bruise, a tenderness unhealed or simply left to be.
As the Birago Diop poem suggests, I seek my father in the rustling leaves, my brother in the seagull who alights for a moment by himself. This summer I had occasion to revisit what I understand about death: how it cleaves the living. How the verb cleave means both to separate and to join. And that is what death appears to do: to simultaneously separate one from another, the living from the dead, and yet, it fastens the two together in irrevocable ways.
In a recent email exchange, Fred Hutchings articulated one of those ways. He wrote of people who commit evil deeds, “they must be held accountable by we the living. We must find them and hold them responsible. This is a duty. Indeed it is one of our relationships with the departed.”
If I read Fred correctly, we have a responsibility to uphold justice, to pursue right relations and death dos not terminate that duty; if anything, it intensifies it, so this morning as we consider together the relationships we have with those who have died, I share a story from the Jewish mystical tradition, a story of creation that goes something like this: When the divine energy needs to make room for the world it has to recede. A rabbi explained it to me this way: visualize an inflated balloon deflating. Then somehow it bursts into infinite pieces. Sparks of divine light fall everywhere. The task of creation for humans is to recognize the divine light in each being, to gather it up, to reassemble its constituent parts. Perhaps each of us, not just the collective divine energy eventually reassembles as a complete being.
I imagine Eeyore with his busted balloon gathering the pieces into a honey pot. If the purpose of life is to let ourselves be re-assembled, or reunited with our own divine fragments as we lift up and return the divine fragments of others, then perhaps what happens in death is that once again, the divine light within us scatters. It doesn’t dissipate so much as disperse. Instead of residing in the body we once had, our light travels with any and every being we touched. The ones who love us. The ones who learn something about themselves by encountering us, even disliking us. The ones we inspire, mentor, raise. The ones we challenge in ways that evoke their growth, cultivate their flexibility, or patience or understanding. The ones we extended our compassion to, and the ones who gained the capacity to be compassionate by knowing us.
Consider all the beings, not just people, who have touched, shaped, even defined your life, and consider as well your effect on others. Usually we don’t have an accurate idea the scope or depth of our influence. Perhaps that’s why at calling hours and memorial services we recount the ways the deceased affected our lives. Imagine if you will, all the fragments of our essential being: whether it be our sense of humor or our tenacity, our wisdom or our charm, our foibles, our resilience, our suffering, our joy, even our need—each carried in vessel of someone else. It is not just a matter of being recalled. It’s a matter of becoming part of what imprints another. We tread across sand and the grains shift all the way out to the ocean floor.
Perhaps in death our light disperses like shafts of light entering a prism refracting into multiple rainbows. Light, light everywhere. Which leads me to believe the light we leave reflects the light we find, the light in others we lift up during our lives, however brief or long they may be.
Mary Oliver writes, “when death comes I don’t want to end up having visited this world.” Life calls us to be its denizens, not tourists. It calls us to fully engage knowing unlike barnacles, we can’t fully attach, because like Eeyore’s balloon and the cosmos itself, we expand and contract and expand again.
We exist in who and what we love, in the tangible embodiments of our essence: that which gives shape to who we are.
A talented young poet, Emma Clarkson, captures it this way:
I was eight when I first learned death
and how it meant Galileo thermometers, and
adjustable rate mortgages, and asparagus.
As we sat in the church, my mind wandered from
the John 14:something to what I remembered, and it was
a Galileo thermometer
sitting on a side table, in the Cape May house;
the globes, all with their ounce of colorful fluid, bobbing
up and down, their metal tags clinking, 76 degrees, 80 falling;
and then Dad talked, and it was called a eulogy, but that
was a new word to me.
He talked about lots of things, but I remember
he said that his then father-in-law-to-be had
given them money advice, and been scandalized, when they got an
adjustable rate mortgage.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I
meant to google it later.
I forgot.
And then we drove to the graveyard where there was
a family plot; lots of Brooks’ who I hadn’t known.
We gathered round the hole, black clad
and the box was lowered, a small thing, with
ashes in it.
And people laid flowers across it. Roses, and something yellow.
And then asparagus. Because he had loved asparagus, and
mom had grown up with an asparagus patch.
People laughed and cried at the same time; then
Chris pulled a reading from his jacket, and
read it.
It was a ship, sailing away from us, going somewhere, and
it ended with the line,
and that is dying.
It was lovely, but it wasn’t right. Because dying wasn’t
the ship that sailed away. And
it wasn’t the box that they lowered into the ground.
And it wasn’t the never-see-him-again, because
that hadn’t even started to happen yet. At that
moment, then,
dying was asparagus.
And Galileo thermometers.
And adjustable rate mortgages.
Few of us know when we will die, but if Emma is right, dying holds us as we have lived. The light of our life may scatter, mirroring the birth of the world.
Mary Oliver writes in an essay called “Bird” of her encounter with an injured black-backed gull she finds on the beach: “it made no protest when I picked it up, the eyes were half-shut, the body so starved it seemed to hold nothing but air.” Over the next few weeks though, the gull gains strength, enough so to become playful. In the end though, despite the poet and her partner’s loving ministrations, the gull dies. Oliver notes, “He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it not filled with darkness but with light.”
This from the poet who writes, “If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life.” To live well implies connection, feeling akin to beings whose transience is assured. Our awareness of the inevitability of transition heightens the intensity of connection. We owe the shape of our lives to fondness with its inherent peril. Fondness for other beings, for activities and sensations, a fondness for service, for feeling purposeful. Some of our fondnesses may wane; and the leavetaking will be ours. And sometimes we will be left to reckon with the absence of the very creature, sensation or interaction of which we have become fond.
Each of us, time and time again, enters that perilous place. It is the place that gives our lives and our death dimension. May we be graced with “the other part of knowing” that allows us to lift the jar of emptiness, of absence, of missing, and open the lid to find not darkness but light. The scattered and luminous light that can shine out of a life even when it belongs to the sky.
This morning you will notice that some of the lower panes of our windows have cellophane on them and bits of colored tissue paper nearby. This is to allow you to commemorate the light of someone you carry. It’s a way of reuniting their light in death with this day in our lives. If you care to move to a window now or during the postlude to affix a bit of color I invite you to do so.
Tomorrow, across Mexico, millions will welcome the spirits of those who have never really left, those whose breath now stirs in “rustling leaves and groaning woods,” the ones whose spirits dwell in seagulls or flowers, in the vistas that arrest our own breathing with the splendor of the view. As our neighbors to the south celebrate, may the sounds of their laughter and the aroma of their freshly baked skull-shaped breads remind us that death cleaves without end; on the other side of separation is reunion: and it is ours.
Closing words: As Kahlil Gibran writes, “Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering.” May you go fully and fondly into this good day.
Those who have died
Have never, never left
The dead are not under the earth
They are in the rustling trees
They are in the groaning woods
They are in the crying grass
They are in the moaning rocks
The dead are not under the earth
The New York Times recently reported from Ambohimirary, Madagascar :
With fanfare befitting a parade, the shrouded remains of 17 bodies were removed from the family crypt, some sprayed with expensive perfume, others splashed with sparkling wine. Five brass bands took turns belting out cheerful melodies, and each emerging corpse was lifted onto the shoulders of its own set of revelers. The celebrators then joyously trotted about, dancing with the bones of the dead.
… Every society has its own customs regarding the deceased, an interplay between those who are and those who were.… Here in the central highlands of Madagascar, [a]ncestors are periodically taken from their tombs… The ritual is called a famadihana (pronounced fa-ma-dee-an)…Many [here] believe the boundary between life and death is not altogether impermeable, that the spirits of their ancestors can somehow pass back and forth. To them, the famadihana is a time to convey the latest family news to the deceased and ask them for blessings and sagely guidance.
This service welcomes the ancestors back. Inviting the spirit of those we love who have died to commune with us once again.
I suspect most if not all of us have felt the presence of loved ones who have died: in a turn of phrase that comes out of our own mouths. In a gesture, a thought even, a way of approaching the world. We carry those who have died in our memory, but also in our actions, our posture, our patterns of speech, in a laugh or even what it is we laugh at. Some we may carry as a bruise, a tenderness unhealed or simply left to be.
As the Birago Diop poem suggests, I seek my father in the rustling leaves, my brother in the seagull who alights for a moment by himself. This summer I had occasion to revisit what I understand about death: how it cleaves the living. How the verb cleave means both to separate and to join. And that is what death appears to do: to simultaneously separate one from another, the living from the dead, and yet, it fastens the two together in irrevocable ways.
In a recent email exchange, Fred Hutchings articulated one of those ways. He wrote of people who commit evil deeds, “they must be held accountable by we the living. We must find them and hold them responsible. This is a duty. Indeed it is one of our relationships with the departed.”
If I read Fred correctly, we have a responsibility to uphold justice, to pursue right relations and death dos not terminate that duty; if anything, it intensifies it, so this morning as we consider together the relationships we have with those who have died, I share a story from the Jewish mystical tradition, a story of creation that goes something like this: When the divine energy needs to make room for the world it has to recede. A rabbi explained it to me this way: visualize an inflated balloon deflating. Then somehow it bursts into infinite pieces. Sparks of divine light fall everywhere. The task of creation for humans is to recognize the divine light in each being, to gather it up, to reassemble its constituent parts. Perhaps each of us, not just the collective divine energy eventually reassembles as a complete being.
I imagine Eeyore with his busted balloon gathering the pieces into a honey pot. If the purpose of life is to let ourselves be re-assembled, or reunited with our own divine fragments as we lift up and return the divine fragments of others, then perhaps what happens in death is that once again, the divine light within us scatters. It doesn’t dissipate so much as disperse. Instead of residing in the body we once had, our light travels with any and every being we touched. The ones who love us. The ones who learn something about themselves by encountering us, even disliking us. The ones we inspire, mentor, raise. The ones we challenge in ways that evoke their growth, cultivate their flexibility, or patience or understanding. The ones we extended our compassion to, and the ones who gained the capacity to be compassionate by knowing us.
Consider all the beings, not just people, who have touched, shaped, even defined your life, and consider as well your effect on others. Usually we don’t have an accurate idea the scope or depth of our influence. Perhaps that’s why at calling hours and memorial services we recount the ways the deceased affected our lives. Imagine if you will, all the fragments of our essential being: whether it be our sense of humor or our tenacity, our wisdom or our charm, our foibles, our resilience, our suffering, our joy, even our need—each carried in vessel of someone else. It is not just a matter of being recalled. It’s a matter of becoming part of what imprints another. We tread across sand and the grains shift all the way out to the ocean floor.
Perhaps in death our light disperses like shafts of light entering a prism refracting into multiple rainbows. Light, light everywhere. Which leads me to believe the light we leave reflects the light we find, the light in others we lift up during our lives, however brief or long they may be.
Mary Oliver writes, “when death comes I don’t want to end up having visited this world.” Life calls us to be its denizens, not tourists. It calls us to fully engage knowing unlike barnacles, we can’t fully attach, because like Eeyore’s balloon and the cosmos itself, we expand and contract and expand again.
We exist in who and what we love, in the tangible embodiments of our essence: that which gives shape to who we are.
A talented young poet, Emma Clarkson, captures it this way:
I was eight when I first learned death
and how it meant Galileo thermometers, and
adjustable rate mortgages, and asparagus.
As we sat in the church, my mind wandered from
the John 14:something to what I remembered, and it was
a Galileo thermometer
sitting on a side table, in the Cape May house;
the globes, all with their ounce of colorful fluid, bobbing
up and down, their metal tags clinking, 76 degrees, 80 falling;
and then Dad talked, and it was called a eulogy, but that
was a new word to me.
He talked about lots of things, but I remember
he said that his then father-in-law-to-be had
given them money advice, and been scandalized, when they got an
adjustable rate mortgage.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I
meant to google it later.
I forgot.
And then we drove to the graveyard where there was
a family plot; lots of Brooks’ who I hadn’t known.
We gathered round the hole, black clad
and the box was lowered, a small thing, with
ashes in it.
And people laid flowers across it. Roses, and something yellow.
And then asparagus. Because he had loved asparagus, and
mom had grown up with an asparagus patch.
People laughed and cried at the same time; then
Chris pulled a reading from his jacket, and
read it.
It was a ship, sailing away from us, going somewhere, and
it ended with the line,
and that is dying.
It was lovely, but it wasn’t right. Because dying wasn’t
the ship that sailed away. And
it wasn’t the box that they lowered into the ground.
And it wasn’t the never-see-him-again, because
that hadn’t even started to happen yet. At that
moment, then,
dying was asparagus.
And Galileo thermometers.
And adjustable rate mortgages.
Few of us know when we will die, but if Emma is right, dying holds us as we have lived. The light of our life may scatter, mirroring the birth of the world.
Mary Oliver writes in an essay called “Bird” of her encounter with an injured black-backed gull she finds on the beach: “it made no protest when I picked it up, the eyes were half-shut, the body so starved it seemed to hold nothing but air.” Over the next few weeks though, the gull gains strength, enough so to become playful. In the end though, despite the poet and her partner’s loving ministrations, the gull dies. Oliver notes, “He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it not filled with darkness but with light.”
This from the poet who writes, “If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life.” To live well implies connection, feeling akin to beings whose transience is assured. Our awareness of the inevitability of transition heightens the intensity of connection. We owe the shape of our lives to fondness with its inherent peril. Fondness for other beings, for activities and sensations, a fondness for service, for feeling purposeful. Some of our fondnesses may wane; and the leavetaking will be ours. And sometimes we will be left to reckon with the absence of the very creature, sensation or interaction of which we have become fond.
Each of us, time and time again, enters that perilous place. It is the place that gives our lives and our death dimension. May we be graced with “the other part of knowing” that allows us to lift the jar of emptiness, of absence, of missing, and open the lid to find not darkness but light. The scattered and luminous light that can shine out of a life even when it belongs to the sky.
This morning you will notice that some of the lower panes of our windows have cellophane on them and bits of colored tissue paper nearby. This is to allow you to commemorate the light of someone you carry. It’s a way of reuniting their light in death with this day in our lives. If you care to move to a window now or during the postlude to affix a bit of color I invite you to do so.
Tomorrow, across Mexico, millions will welcome the spirits of those who have never really left, those whose breath now stirs in “rustling leaves and groaning woods,” the ones whose spirits dwell in seagulls or flowers, in the vistas that arrest our own breathing with the splendor of the view. As our neighbors to the south celebrate, may the sounds of their laughter and the aroma of their freshly baked skull-shaped breads remind us that death cleaves without end; on the other side of separation is reunion: and it is ours.
Closing words: As Kahlil Gibran writes, “Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering.” May you go fully and fondly into this good day.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Come Dancing!
You're all invited to a Halloween dance at the Unitarian church in Fitchburg, 7-10 p.m., Sat. Oct. 30. It's a free, family-friendly, non-alcoholic, event. Costumes optional.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Ache to be Worthy
I didn’t grow up going to church, but I did pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep. . .” every night. Other than that, I didn’t think much about God until I was eleven, an awkward girl with oversized teeth and ratty hair whose best friend was a red Dachshund named Dune. Dune walked me to the bus stop every morning and slept in my bed at night.
One evening Dune was hit by a car and died, and I was devastated, as you can imagine. My great Aunt Sue, whom I’d always found a bit frightening, tried to comfort me by saying that Dune was such a good dog that God wanted him up in heaven, and it crossed my mind that God might be a little bit selfish.
But the pain I felt about the loss of my dog was a pin prick compared to what I felt the following year when my Nana Pat died of cancer. Nana was not only my namesake but also a mother to me during my parents’ divorce. Nana Pat was the center of the Caspers’ family, and without her we fell apart. I didn’t see my grandfather again for fifteen years, and by then he was in the early stages of dementia.
I’ll never really know, but I believe now that my dad’s grief and regrets about the loss of his mother fueled the fire of his alcoholism and a drug addiction. He never recovered.
My dad’s wife, who’d been like a favorite aunt, left him and took my three-year-old brother and baby sister with her. It was years before I saw them again, and then our visits were rare.
When my nana died, I was angry with God, but when the hits kept coming I chose instead, not to believe that I was being punished, but rather that God didn’t exist. There was no one looking after me, I thought, so I had to look after myself. I thought I was alone in this belief -- or lack of belief-- and kept it a secret; I hadn’t yet learned the word atheist.
But as I stumbled into adulthood I realized that because I’d grown up without faith in God, it was difficult to have faith in anything: friendship, family, love, myself.
Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of hearing Mary Oliver read from her new book, Swan, at Wellesley College. When asked, “Why is there beauty in the world?” Oliver responded, “There is beauty in the world so that we may feel the ache of wanting to be worthy.” How that struck me.
I was 25 when my daughter Olivia was born. She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen, and for the first time I felt that ache, wanted to be worthy of that beauty. All that spring I felt as if I were waking from a long slumber, seeing brilliance in the world for the first time. Suddenly every tulip, camellia, flowering dogwood, was a small, every day miracle, a mirror of the miracle snuggled in a pouch on my chest. Nature was a continual reminder of my new aspiration to be a better person.
And that’s where I found God-- in striving to be a better human being, without the expectation of anything in return: no promise of heaven, no guarantee of love, not even a guarantee that I wouldn’t fail.
The poet and playwright Ntozake Shange writes, “I found God in myself, and I loved her . . . fiercely.”
When I found God in myself, I found faith in myself, and I was able to have faith in others, too—- to see that everyone around me is inherently good even when, just like me, they sometimes fail. Believing in the goodness of others makes forgiveness that much easier-- or if forgiveness isn't possible in this moment, at least acceptance.
While writing this, I started thinking about how envious I am of people who believe that when they pass beyond this life they’ll go on to reunite with all of their loved ones who passed before them.
While I love the idea of seeing Nana Pat again, I know that if there’s a heaven, by many Christian standards, my dad— a heroin addict who died in a car wreck, who took another man’s life— won’t be in it. What kind of heaven would that be for me if my dad’s not there?
So I don’t know what I believe about the afterlife, but I’m hopeful that if God is in our continual struggle to be better people, that when we pass beyond this life we all finally get to be our best selves.
This testimonial of faith was offered by Patricia Caspers.
One evening Dune was hit by a car and died, and I was devastated, as you can imagine. My great Aunt Sue, whom I’d always found a bit frightening, tried to comfort me by saying that Dune was such a good dog that God wanted him up in heaven, and it crossed my mind that God might be a little bit selfish.
But the pain I felt about the loss of my dog was a pin prick compared to what I felt the following year when my Nana Pat died of cancer. Nana was not only my namesake but also a mother to me during my parents’ divorce. Nana Pat was the center of the Caspers’ family, and without her we fell apart. I didn’t see my grandfather again for fifteen years, and by then he was in the early stages of dementia.
I’ll never really know, but I believe now that my dad’s grief and regrets about the loss of his mother fueled the fire of his alcoholism and a drug addiction. He never recovered.
My dad’s wife, who’d been like a favorite aunt, left him and took my three-year-old brother and baby sister with her. It was years before I saw them again, and then our visits were rare.
When my nana died, I was angry with God, but when the hits kept coming I chose instead, not to believe that I was being punished, but rather that God didn’t exist. There was no one looking after me, I thought, so I had to look after myself. I thought I was alone in this belief -- or lack of belief-- and kept it a secret; I hadn’t yet learned the word atheist.
But as I stumbled into adulthood I realized that because I’d grown up without faith in God, it was difficult to have faith in anything: friendship, family, love, myself.
Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of hearing Mary Oliver read from her new book, Swan, at Wellesley College. When asked, “Why is there beauty in the world?” Oliver responded, “There is beauty in the world so that we may feel the ache of wanting to be worthy.” How that struck me.
I was 25 when my daughter Olivia was born. She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen, and for the first time I felt that ache, wanted to be worthy of that beauty. All that spring I felt as if I were waking from a long slumber, seeing brilliance in the world for the first time. Suddenly every tulip, camellia, flowering dogwood, was a small, every day miracle, a mirror of the miracle snuggled in a pouch on my chest. Nature was a continual reminder of my new aspiration to be a better person.
And that’s where I found God-- in striving to be a better human being, without the expectation of anything in return: no promise of heaven, no guarantee of love, not even a guarantee that I wouldn’t fail.
The poet and playwright Ntozake Shange writes, “I found God in myself, and I loved her . . . fiercely.”
When I found God in myself, I found faith in myself, and I was able to have faith in others, too—- to see that everyone around me is inherently good even when, just like me, they sometimes fail. Believing in the goodness of others makes forgiveness that much easier-- or if forgiveness isn't possible in this moment, at least acceptance.
While writing this, I started thinking about how envious I am of people who believe that when they pass beyond this life they’ll go on to reunite with all of their loved ones who passed before them.
While I love the idea of seeing Nana Pat again, I know that if there’s a heaven, by many Christian standards, my dad— a heroin addict who died in a car wreck, who took another man’s life— won’t be in it. What kind of heaven would that be for me if my dad’s not there?
So I don’t know what I believe about the afterlife, but I’m hopeful that if God is in our continual struggle to be better people, that when we pass beyond this life we all finally get to be our best selves.
This testimonial of faith was offered by Patricia Caspers.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
A Glimpse of UUs
Our Chalice
Order of Service
Hymnal
Light in the Sanctuary
Stained Glass in the Sanctuary
A Stone for Your Thoughts
Sally Bakes Muffins
Fred Bakes Pies
Anne Bakes Muffins
Slicing Apples for Muffins
Mary Ann Bakes Muffins
Finally Finished-- Apple Muffins for Fitchburg's Forge In
Friday, October 15, 2010
On Thin Ice
Some of you may have read in this month’s Open Door newsletter that today, 10-10-10, is a day of global action to celebrate climate change solutions, sponsored by 350.org cofounded by environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben. The name of the organization refers to the number of parts per million of CO2 scientists have identified as the upper safety limit for humanity. Currently, the number hovers at 390 ppm. Quite literally, we — and the polar bears — are on thin ice.
As Richard Ellis writes in his book entitled, On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear,Adult polar bears—in captivity or the wild—now stand (or swim) for global warming, considered the major threat to the planet today.…The bears’ habitat is disappearing, and human beings are responsible. We have filled the sky with poisonous fumes and chemical aerosols that effectively trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the surface of the planet.
Ellis draws on the work of geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee to point out, it is not just the bears whose lives are precarious. A warming world will bring about rising sea levels, changing plant communities, and the migration of tropical diseases into more temperate regions. There may be an increase in the violence of storms, more droughts and floods, and disruption of agriculture. As the earth heats up, wars over food, water and habitable land may increase. 1
The devastating floods of Pakistan and to a lesser extent, some we’ve seen recently in the U.S.—such as the flood that overtook Nashville, Tennessee less than three weeks after I visited last spring—suggest changes are already underway.
The purpose of bringing this up on a lovely crisp Sunday morning is not to bum you out, but to pause on this day of global action, long enough to ponder, as Mary Oliver does in her poem entitled: “Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive in the Melting Ice Floes,” That God had a plan, I do not doubt. But what if His plan was, that we would do better?2
In the spirit of confession I must tell you, each day I sit in my prayer space, in a lovely bentwood rocker, facing three extraordinarily beautiful polar bears rendered in blown glass. Above them hangs a photo of a polar bear rolling deliciously on its back. The prayer I utter goes like this; Thank you God that I live in a world with polar bears, that I have seen them with my very own eye, and thank you for these beautiful glass bears upon which to gaze, and I say a prayer of contrition for the ways my life imperils the bears. Please help me to change.
Then I gaze at the bears for a few moments in silence. It is my version of meditating. I just try to quiet my mind long enough to hear, for lack of a better phrase, God’s plan. What on earth does the universe want from me and how do I give it?
Glory for and to the polar bear no doubt. But when I really let the weight of those glorious bears—that can grow to well over a thousand pounds—be surpassed by the weight of their peril, the likely possibility that they will become extinct at the edge of my life, or your children’s, it is hard to move. It is, no pun intended, hard to bear.
The great irony is that when I traveled to Churchill, Manitoba in 2004 to see polar bears in the wild, I got on a plane and flew from southwestern Ontario, and rode around for three days in a tundra buggy, that for all the assurances from the tour company otherwise, probably left more of an imprint than its giant tire tracks in the snow. I knew there was no carbon-neutral way to see the bears so I prayed hard that somehow my gratitude would magically erase my eco-footprint or at least balance it out.
To this day, having seen those bears up close remains one of the great moments in my life. And it makes the ache of their potential demise one of the heart, not the mind. I think of a congregant in a previous congregation, a retired biochemist who said, rather glibly, species are made to go extinct. But doesn’t it sadden you to hasten their extinction? I pressed. He gave a shrug of inevitability.
Psychologists have documented that humans respond most compassionately to a single being in need, beings with faces as expressive as our own. Perhaps that is why, having looked into the eyes of a polar bear through a telephoto lens, and then without need of a lens as a bear poked its head into the wheel well of the tundra buggy in search of food, I feel their plight in a way that haunts me much as the hungry child begging in the streets I encountered in Mexico.
So while everyone here knows about global warming and has probably experienced changing weather patterns first-hand, as New England has had its share of wacky weather of late, it’s a bit like a precarious church budget: easier to ignore while there’s still an endowment, but the finitude of resources will eventually hit home.
So the intent this morning is to ponder the poet’s question, and to widen it to those who may not truck with a divine plan, who may instead consider whether the cosmos, the course of evolution contains a blueprint less willing than my previous congregant in Canada to shrug at accelerated extinctions—extinctions that foreshadow our own demise.
An article in this week’s New York Times notes: With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply …the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.… In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.
“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.
He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.3
And consider this staggering fact: “Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan… While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.”4
Thus our dependence on fossil fuels carries far more than an enormous financial toll. To the soldiers, sailors and marines who lose their lives guarding oil, it is hard not to ask, can we do better than this? Clearly, the U.S. military thinks so. Ironically, it is the military that leads the way innovating and implementing alternative forms of energy. I wonder though as I imagine those polar bears swimming between ice caps, must we be prodded by the machinations of war? Could we be moved by anything less?
When I read “in 2006, Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life [and] that request catalyzed new research,” and that “while setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy,” 5
I wonder, if we jammed rocks in the gates of war, would arctic ice melt all the
faster? Would temperatures rise and crops fail, droughts and flooding wreak even greater havoc? Is it possible peace and genuine security would lull us into greater environmental complacency? Must we have disruption and death to respond decisively to human-induced climate change?
And if so, what does that reveal about the condition of our psyches, our souls, our longing for connection? In an interestingly provocative book entitled The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton writes: The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological.…The ecological thought doesn’t just occur “in the mind.” It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be — can we even imagine it?6 What would we say to the polar bears about why our quality of life is intrinsically more valuable or pressing than theirs? Really, what does assert in any ultimate way, our right to impinge on another species? According to Ron Paul and other libertarians, I would guess one answer is personal liberty. I was struck by his comment that freedom is all about personal liberty, which for me begs the questions, but what happens when your liberty to blare your music trounces my liberty to enjoy some quiet? Or my liberty to hop on a plane and view polar bears impinges on their liberty to forage for seals on frozen—not melting—ice.
Is this the cosmic plan: the evolution of a subset of humanity for whom personal liberty triumphs everything else? Of course there are other subsets, societies, even nations built on the premise of the common good as central, not individual liberties, but to Americans rallying for the right to do whatever they damn well please without regulation, intervention, or apparent regard for others—animal, vegetable or mineral—such a premise makes little sense.
Somewhere is the earth longing for a collective sensibility, a democracy of species, or even a benevolent dictatorship? What is the plan creation rolls out to insure its own existence? Are the nihilists right that nothingness enfolds us? That species evolve only to become extinct by whim or will of another?
Or as Timothy Morton asks in his book:
Is there such a thing as the environment? Is it everything “around” us? At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and nonenvironment: The atmosphere? Earth’s gravitational field? Earth’s magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn’t be alive at all? The Galaxy? Does the environment include or exclude us? Is it natural or artificial, or both? Can we put it in a conceptual box? Might the word environment be the wrong word? Environment, the upgrade of Nature, is fraught with difficulty. This is ironic, since what we often call the environment is being changed, degraded, and eroded(and destroyed) by global forces of industry and capitalism. Just when we need to know what it is, it’s disappearing.
On this Sunday morning like most others, I offer questions not answers: any
inducement to action comes in the form of words. The crisis we face is not environmental; it is existential. For some it may be spiritual, or deeply religious, reckoning with what it means to stray from a plan that “we would do better.” When I gaze at the polar bears on a prayer table, or more potently, recall their look as they gazed at me, I hear the question Timothy Morton poses: “What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?”
In this mid-term election year as talk of democracy extirpated and restored fills the airwaves and most of cyberspace, it is the great white (or more accurately, off-white) bears of the north, greater in size and stature than us yet unequal in power, who are asking plaintively across the melting ice, how can you be so sure?
Amen.
I close this morning with the African concept of ubuntu (oo-BOON-to). As one translation goes: “I am what I am because of who we all are." Or to paraphrase Nelson Mandela: Are we going to enrich ourselves in order to enable the community to improve? Will the democracy we seek, the solutions we reach thin the ice or thicken it? When the waters rise with whom will we swim?
------------------------
1 Quoted in On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear, Richard Ellis, p.282
2 Mary Oliver, Redbird, Beacon Press
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html?_r=2&th&emc=th
4 ibid
5 ibid
6 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 7
© Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU, Fitchburg 10 Oct. 2010
As Richard Ellis writes in his book entitled, On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear,Adult polar bears—in captivity or the wild—now stand (or swim) for global warming, considered the major threat to the planet today.…The bears’ habitat is disappearing, and human beings are responsible. We have filled the sky with poisonous fumes and chemical aerosols that effectively trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the surface of the planet.
Ellis draws on the work of geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee to point out, it is not just the bears whose lives are precarious. A warming world will bring about rising sea levels, changing plant communities, and the migration of tropical diseases into more temperate regions. There may be an increase in the violence of storms, more droughts and floods, and disruption of agriculture. As the earth heats up, wars over food, water and habitable land may increase. 1
The devastating floods of Pakistan and to a lesser extent, some we’ve seen recently in the U.S.—such as the flood that overtook Nashville, Tennessee less than three weeks after I visited last spring—suggest changes are already underway.
The purpose of bringing this up on a lovely crisp Sunday morning is not to bum you out, but to pause on this day of global action, long enough to ponder, as Mary Oliver does in her poem entitled: “Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive in the Melting Ice Floes,” That God had a plan, I do not doubt. But what if His plan was, that we would do better?2
In the spirit of confession I must tell you, each day I sit in my prayer space, in a lovely bentwood rocker, facing three extraordinarily beautiful polar bears rendered in blown glass. Above them hangs a photo of a polar bear rolling deliciously on its back. The prayer I utter goes like this; Thank you God that I live in a world with polar bears, that I have seen them with my very own eye, and thank you for these beautiful glass bears upon which to gaze, and I say a prayer of contrition for the ways my life imperils the bears. Please help me to change.
Then I gaze at the bears for a few moments in silence. It is my version of meditating. I just try to quiet my mind long enough to hear, for lack of a better phrase, God’s plan. What on earth does the universe want from me and how do I give it?
Glory for and to the polar bear no doubt. But when I really let the weight of those glorious bears—that can grow to well over a thousand pounds—be surpassed by the weight of their peril, the likely possibility that they will become extinct at the edge of my life, or your children’s, it is hard to move. It is, no pun intended, hard to bear.
The great irony is that when I traveled to Churchill, Manitoba in 2004 to see polar bears in the wild, I got on a plane and flew from southwestern Ontario, and rode around for three days in a tundra buggy, that for all the assurances from the tour company otherwise, probably left more of an imprint than its giant tire tracks in the snow. I knew there was no carbon-neutral way to see the bears so I prayed hard that somehow my gratitude would magically erase my eco-footprint or at least balance it out.
To this day, having seen those bears up close remains one of the great moments in my life. And it makes the ache of their potential demise one of the heart, not the mind. I think of a congregant in a previous congregation, a retired biochemist who said, rather glibly, species are made to go extinct. But doesn’t it sadden you to hasten their extinction? I pressed. He gave a shrug of inevitability.
Psychologists have documented that humans respond most compassionately to a single being in need, beings with faces as expressive as our own. Perhaps that is why, having looked into the eyes of a polar bear through a telephoto lens, and then without need of a lens as a bear poked its head into the wheel well of the tundra buggy in search of food, I feel their plight in a way that haunts me much as the hungry child begging in the streets I encountered in Mexico.
So while everyone here knows about global warming and has probably experienced changing weather patterns first-hand, as New England has had its share of wacky weather of late, it’s a bit like a precarious church budget: easier to ignore while there’s still an endowment, but the finitude of resources will eventually hit home.
So the intent this morning is to ponder the poet’s question, and to widen it to those who may not truck with a divine plan, who may instead consider whether the cosmos, the course of evolution contains a blueprint less willing than my previous congregant in Canada to shrug at accelerated extinctions—extinctions that foreshadow our own demise.
An article in this week’s New York Times notes: With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply …the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.… In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.
“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.
He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.3
And consider this staggering fact: “Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan… While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.”4
Thus our dependence on fossil fuels carries far more than an enormous financial toll. To the soldiers, sailors and marines who lose their lives guarding oil, it is hard not to ask, can we do better than this? Clearly, the U.S. military thinks so. Ironically, it is the military that leads the way innovating and implementing alternative forms of energy. I wonder though as I imagine those polar bears swimming between ice caps, must we be prodded by the machinations of war? Could we be moved by anything less?
When I read “in 2006, Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life [and] that request catalyzed new research,” and that “while setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy,” 5
I wonder, if we jammed rocks in the gates of war, would arctic ice melt all the
faster? Would temperatures rise and crops fail, droughts and flooding wreak even greater havoc? Is it possible peace and genuine security would lull us into greater environmental complacency? Must we have disruption and death to respond decisively to human-induced climate change?
And if so, what does that reveal about the condition of our psyches, our souls, our longing for connection? In an interestingly provocative book entitled The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton writes: The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological.…The ecological thought doesn’t just occur “in the mind.” It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be — can we even imagine it?6 What would we say to the polar bears about why our quality of life is intrinsically more valuable or pressing than theirs? Really, what does assert in any ultimate way, our right to impinge on another species? According to Ron Paul and other libertarians, I would guess one answer is personal liberty. I was struck by his comment that freedom is all about personal liberty, which for me begs the questions, but what happens when your liberty to blare your music trounces my liberty to enjoy some quiet? Or my liberty to hop on a plane and view polar bears impinges on their liberty to forage for seals on frozen—not melting—ice.
Is this the cosmic plan: the evolution of a subset of humanity for whom personal liberty triumphs everything else? Of course there are other subsets, societies, even nations built on the premise of the common good as central, not individual liberties, but to Americans rallying for the right to do whatever they damn well please without regulation, intervention, or apparent regard for others—animal, vegetable or mineral—such a premise makes little sense.
Somewhere is the earth longing for a collective sensibility, a democracy of species, or even a benevolent dictatorship? What is the plan creation rolls out to insure its own existence? Are the nihilists right that nothingness enfolds us? That species evolve only to become extinct by whim or will of another?
Or as Timothy Morton asks in his book:
Is there such a thing as the environment? Is it everything “around” us? At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and nonenvironment: The atmosphere? Earth’s gravitational field? Earth’s magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn’t be alive at all? The Galaxy? Does the environment include or exclude us? Is it natural or artificial, or both? Can we put it in a conceptual box? Might the word environment be the wrong word? Environment, the upgrade of Nature, is fraught with difficulty. This is ironic, since what we often call the environment is being changed, degraded, and eroded(and destroyed) by global forces of industry and capitalism. Just when we need to know what it is, it’s disappearing.
On this Sunday morning like most others, I offer questions not answers: any
inducement to action comes in the form of words. The crisis we face is not environmental; it is existential. For some it may be spiritual, or deeply religious, reckoning with what it means to stray from a plan that “we would do better.” When I gaze at the polar bears on a prayer table, or more potently, recall their look as they gazed at me, I hear the question Timothy Morton poses: “What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?”
In this mid-term election year as talk of democracy extirpated and restored fills the airwaves and most of cyberspace, it is the great white (or more accurately, off-white) bears of the north, greater in size and stature than us yet unequal in power, who are asking plaintively across the melting ice, how can you be so sure?
Amen.
I close this morning with the African concept of ubuntu (oo-BOON-to). As one translation goes: “I am what I am because of who we all are." Or to paraphrase Nelson Mandela: Are we going to enrich ourselves in order to enable the community to improve? Will the democracy we seek, the solutions we reach thin the ice or thicken it? When the waters rise with whom will we swim?
------------------------
1 Quoted in On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear, Richard Ellis, p.282
2 Mary Oliver, Redbird, Beacon Press
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html?_r=2&th&emc=th
4 ibid
5 ibid
6 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 7
© Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU, Fitchburg 10 Oct. 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)