A New Paradigm

Recently I listened to an interview on my favorite public radio show, On Being.  Krista Tippett interviewed Christian Wiman, a poet, essayist, and editor of Poetry Magazine. Wiman grew up in West Texas in a Southern Baptist family. Like many young people, he left the church and religion when he left home, but several years later he returned to religion, to God. I was so engaged by the program, I listened to the unedited ninety-minute interview, then watched his interview with Bill Moyers. What captivated me most was this exchange with Krista Tippett who asks:

[If] you think about yourself in church all those years ago in west Texas, the church you grew up in, which was just given to you like the air you breathed and then when you're in church now, what's going on that's different? How is that experience different?

Mr Wiman: Well, it's utterly different. I think it's a weaker experience now. I mean, I'm just too conscious. I wish I were able to let myself go in ways that those people did in my childhood and still do. When I go to my mother's church now, it's one of those big mega-churches. You know, I don't agree with their theology and I don't like a lot of the ways that they commercialize their services, but it is an incredibly diverse church and the people are intensely involved. They're treating it as if their whole life were at stake. The churches I go to, liberal Protestant churches, it seems pretty casual. I wish there were some credible middle ground. I wish there was some way of harnessing that — the intensity that I felt in my childhood in more sophisticated ways.

You know how I talk about my inner-tent-revivalist? Well this is the tent I’ve been talking about and it’s going up now. Somebody left that barn door open and my inner-revivalist is coming out. Seriously, there is a deep and vast hunger to marry the intensity of a tent revival with a sophisticated understanding of spirit, and we, brothers and sisters, can officiate. But first we must recognize the power of treating church as if our whole life were at stake.

Now it’s easy to dismiss this part; we don’t labor under the threat of eternal damnation. But we live in a state of perpetual disconnection that causes this hunger. Our daily lives are filled with a thousand choices that either connect or disconnect us from the ground of our being—choices that don’t even feel like choices anymore. None of us wants to purchase products made by exploited workers but we figure what’s our choice? So we buy the smart phone or the cheap underwear, or anything else we can find at the big-box store, the discount chain or online, and it tears a little each time we do because even if we rationalize with our minds, the heart center, that core part of our being where knowing, not just thinking, resides, sighs. We know even if we ignore it that there’s no clean way to extract oil or natural gas. Fossil fuels are dirty even if the ads for them are sanitized. Literally everywhere we turn, we feel trapped by what feels like an inevitable, inescapable path paved with the bricks of individualism, competition, and fear. Our political discourse bounces between ridiculous and rancorous; we let the free market—not our core values—decide and then shrug our shoulders with a combination of resignation and powerlessness. We don’t know what to tell or teach our children about yet another fatal shooting in school; and we don’t know what to say to those same children for whom bullying is a fact of life and video war games are staple entertainment.

Daily we spiral deeper into disconnect and the evidence is ubiquitous. Addiction, asthma, autism, depression, PTSD, chronic fatigue, poverty, income disparity—all on the rise. We all experience the disconnect whether or not we name it, see it, or believe it. Our bodies, the heart-center in each of us knows it. Our lives are at stake.

And yet we see an Easter headline like this one from the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise: “Worshippers Waning: Local ministers say fewer of the faithful attend Easter Services.” And why are people not coming to church the way they did in the past? Because the old paradigm isn’t working.

Last month I read Thomas Bandy’s book, Kicking Habits: Welcome Relief for Addicted Churches. According to Bandy, twentieth-century folks went to church to belong to an institution, to secure status among the right social set, because neighbors and coworkers asked, “What church do you attend?” People joined to belong, and then the church set about to inform them of its structure, both implicit and explicit. Folks got nominated to committees and boards. They were groomed to maintain the church as an institution and train the next generation. Though they began as members, writes Bandy, they ended up as guardians: keepers of the institution. But in this millennium, he contends, people come to church, if they come at all, seeking something else. Not institutional belonging, not doctrine, not hierarchy, not committee meetings. People today seek deeper meaning, a greater sense of relevance and purpose. Bandy is not the only one reporting this. Every commentator or researcher I read says the same thing. People hunger to reconnect with the ground of being. For some that is God, for others, it is just that, the ground of all being, including theirs.

Bandy distinguishes between declining churches and thriving churches. Congregations, he asserts, must cross-examine themselves. Ask not what is important to many but truly essential to all?

In the newspaper article the minister of our sister congregation in Leominster says, “she tries to make religion and church life relevant for people in the post-modern age.” But even where there’s a parking lot, attendance is down on Easter. Why? Because it’s not enough to pepper our sermons with contemporary cultural references or sing folk songs. We have to act as if our lives are at stake. We have to address the deep disquieting discomforting disconnect that truncates our lives, that induces amnesia so that we forget and worse, deny our inter-being, the interdependency of the web. People come here seeking concrete ways to re-connect, to mend the torn fabric of creation, to engage in tikkun olam, not simply to do for others, but to relearn compassion for ourselves because we can’t give away what we don’t have.

People come to church not just to find relevance but to be relevant, which is to say related. Religion—from the Latin word for refasten. So how do we refasten ourselves? How do we re-member, re-attach that cleaved part that longs to be made whole?

We begin by re-connecting as Unitarian Universalists to a distinct tradition fraught with dissent that arose out of an insistence that we unite the intensity of religious fervor with our capacity for critical and compassionate thought. We recall the early martyrs of our movement who dared to speak against the religious hierarchies and edicts of their day, where their lives were literally at stake—being burned there. We teach our children and they more likely teach us what it means to take a stand—to stand with those who would otherwise go unprotected, unrepresented, whose dignity even the state would flagrantly defile.

In the nineteenth century, many Unitarian congregations split over slavery. Wealthy New England industrialists and mill owners defended it. Nothing is more profitable than slave labor. No doubt some of our churches have endowments built on those welted backs. The abolitionists who spoke up often got run out but they did not go silently because long before a gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh taught two generations of westerners the term “inter-are,” abolitionists knew about the interconnectedness of being. And that knowing propelled them to speak against the willful ignorance of those who cherry-picked the Bible in defense of an economy based on defilement.

A century later, when Jim Crow still wielded the lash, a Unitarian minister in Boston named James Reeb heeded Martin Luther King’s call to join marchers in Selma. Jim Reeb died at thirty-eight leaving behind his wife and four children when white men gusseted by fear beat him for the courage of his convictions, probably because to them, pardon the phrase, he looked like a nigger-lover. He died by the hand of segregationists and for that he is remembered in Unitarian Universalist circles, but it was not his death that embodied his sense of connection; it was his years of ministry working to integrate neighborhoods and churches, and most importantly, the human heart. Jim Reeb did not duck controversy or dodge danger by eschewing the divisive. He understood the fearfulness that grips us and how quickly it transmogrifies into rage.

A decade ago, before any states had passed marriage equality laws, the church where I had interned, a church that had welcomed and affirmed me, that loved the music director and his male partner of near twenty years, fractured around the full impact of what it meant to be a welcoming congregation. The suggestion to fly a large rainbow flag met with resistance. What if people in town think we only welcome gays and not other minorities? What if people reduce us to being “the gay church”? And with equal urgency others in the congregation countered, but we are the only church that welcomes gay and transgender people. Religious institutions have rejected, vilified queer folk for centuries. Consider what it means for people to be welcomed not shunned? We have the power to do that, they pled.

A while back, during social hour, I overheard Dick mention people picketing in front of Planned Parenthood so I made an appointment a couple of weeks ago to meet the outreach coordinator there. The director of the clinic let me in. I had to ring a buzzer so the director could check the live video feed to make sure she didn’t let in someone with a weapon. If I might speak to the women for just a moment, do you remember your first pelvic exam? I was terrified. The thought of it was creepy and invasive. I cannot imagine overlaying that late adolescent self-consciousness and fear with having to be buzzed into a building because someone might burst in and shoot the doctor. It doesn’t matter that no abortions are performed in Fitchburg. To the people who carry signs equating abortion with murder, they are content to willfully ignore the statistics: that nationally, 97% of the health services Planned Parenthood provides are not related to an abortion—or that abortion is still legal. It is not that the protesters are evil or even hateful though it probably feels that way to the young woman terrified because she has missed a period, or the young man afraid he has contracted or spread an STD, who have finally summoned the courage to get tested—as they walk through the gauntlet of stares, signs and disparaging remarks.

As I said before, we live in a world that perpetually disconnects us. Each day every one of us without wanting to, or meaning to, or even thinking that we are, engage in processes that diminish life. The World Health Organization estimates that somewhere between 30-40,000 children die every day of preventable conditions, namely the lack of clean water and adequate nutrition. Right this minute there are thousands of children languishing in foster homes. And thousands more abducted, sold into sexual slavery, splayed on pornographic websites. You don’t need me to list all the ways we defile the inherent worth and dignity of so many beings. It’s easier to fixate on abortion as the single most egregious form of defilement than to reckon with all the forms in which we are complicit.

And yes, I could tell you the story of my great aunt, or really my father telling me about her, the way she came to him late in her life, when he became president of the local Planned Parenthood, and revealed to him what it had been like in the 1920s for her to climb the stairs of the tenement abortionist when she could not face bringing a third child into an apartment ravaged by an abusive alcoholic. It was not something she could discuss with her rabbi or seek solace for from her congregation.

But if one’s religious community is not a safe place to seek counsel or support or even companionship what does that say about the nature of religious community—a community intended to bind us together?

At the annual meeting I am asking that the congregation consider displaying a banner of support that reads: Love Responsibly. Support Planned Parenthood.

Why opt for something so divisive you might ask? Or seemingly political? For the same reason abolitionists objected to slavery when the biggest church donors profited from it. For the same reason Jim Reeb went down to Selma. For the same reason churches fly rainbow flags or banners supporting marriage equality.

To be relevant to the people of this congregation and community, that is to say related. To claim our connection with the heretical roots of our denomination, the branch that declared errors in the Trinity, and the branch that declared universal salvation, when both assertions sometimes resulted in death. Our denomination has been forged out of the courage to not only withstand the fires of condemnation and misunderstandding, but to champion conscience, reason, compassion and direct experience when no one else will.

We have the opportunity, as the church where I interned had years before, to publicly declare our support for people historically shunned by religious institutions: to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of the people a few blocks from here who seek medical services or work in a health clinic with surveillance cameras because our society hasn’t found a way to counter the deadliness of fear and ignorance yet.

And yes, if we hang a banner some people will say, “that’s the abortion church.”  But you know that just gives us the chance to say, “It’s not as simple as that.” Why not help shape a more thoughtful, compassionate and sophisticated dialogue? Why not re-connect with our own heretical roots? The etymological root of heresy, by the way, is choice.

Amid the overwhelming forces of disconnection, we hunger to reconnect. To restore wholeness cleaved a thousand times a day. Sisters and brothers, our lives are at stake. May we make of them a tent. Amen.

What's Larger Than Us?

Over twenty years ago, I ventured into the halls of AA. I didn’t have a drinking problem so much as a thinking problem. I thought about driving off the road. I didn’t want to die: I just wanted relief from the profound dis-ease I felt inside myself all the time despite outward accomplishment: grad school, college instructorship, friends, a nice apartment. It was during the era when I taught in prison and the woman who invited me to accompany her to an AA meeting said, “It’s no wonder you work in a prison; you live in one.” Ouch! But she was right and I knew it. I couldn’t have told you exactly what was imprisoning me but I felt the constraint so I went with her to a meeting in an upscale Catholic church thinking I was on an anthropological field trip to observe another species: alcoholics. As I said, I didn’t having drinking problem because I did not drink. I avoided alcohol and didn’t care for the effects, but curiously, I found myself identifying heavily with everyone who spoke. Not the details about DUIs, hangovers or hidden bottles: but the feelings I heard described were my own.
Because the hour spent in a meeting provided the only hour of relief from that feeling of dis-ease, I kept going, still thinking myself a visitor but a grateful one nonetheless. For those of you unfamiliar with AA or the other Twelve Step programs, spirituality is a big piece. That first meeting, a big blue felt banner hung on the podium that read “But for the Grace of God.” I recall thinking, well that’s just fine for these people but what are the rest of us to do?

People in meetings kept mentioning a higher power. Everyone needed one, no matter what it was: Nature, God, the Goddess or G.O.D —good orderly direction or group of drunks. Something beyond the self to turn to, or turn it over to and let go. For me, the phrase conjured some sort of elevated sovereign being which just wasn’t a resonant metaphor so I would sit in meetings held in church basements and peer out a window usually at the street level, thinking there’s a world going on out there that gives no thought to those of us inside this room at ten on a Monday morning or eight on a Wednesday night; but here we are, all searching for something larger. And that’s when it hit me: the idea of a larger power, not a higher one. I realized each morning we wake unto a world already in action. We re-enter consciousness from the sleepy world of our dreams and there it is in all its glory: the universe humming along. As odd as it sounds, it might have been the first time I recognized, or more accurately, felt, for it was more sensation than cognition—that I belong, that we all belong to something larger than ourselves.

When I was a kid I used to terrify myself worrying that I had dreamed up the entire world: that it was just a figment of my imagination and when I woke up I would be all alone in the blackness of space. Finally, I told my best friend who said she had thought the same thing—which somehow instantly reassured me I was not in fact alone, unless of course I had dreamed her up, too. I suspect whether or not we have a childish moment of solipicism where we fear we might have thought up everything from string theory to the entire canon of Mozart, deep down many of us have experienced at least a flash of feeling terribly alone: not solitary in a contented way: but truly unstrung like the moment the obstetrician severs the umbilical cord. Suddenly the world is awash in unfamiliar sounds and smells, lights, temperatures, textures. Gone is the familiar slosh of amniotic fluid, the safe confines of a womb inside a larger being that notices and hopefully cares.

My students often presume humans created religion solely as a way to explain otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena. The new field of neurotheology examines where in our brains the religious impulse comes from and how the brain apprehends religious experience. But it occurs to me on some pre-conscious level, or perhaps simply a pre-natal one, we literally enter the world as we come to know it, with the initial experience of being part of something larger; and once we slip through the birth canal into the delivery room: be it home or hospital or the back of a cab, we sense the sudden shift and seek to recreate the experience of belonging we’ve already had.

When we study religion: eastern, western, animist, monotheist, polytheist, earth-based or otherwise, we encounter story. Great and often overlapping narratives that at the core offer us belonging. Creation stories may attempt to explain how we got here or how life first formed; but more essentially, they contextualize our individual beginning within a meta-origin that continues to hold us. We think of story as a human invention or impulse indicative of how our brain works: how memory, imagination and consciousness coalesce: all of which may be true.  But a bit like my child-self thinking I had dreamed up the world, we believe we have conjured story when in actuality we don’t create story so much as inhabit it.

As one of my students wrote in his research essay on what comprises reality, except for astronauts who have viewed the earth from space, humans don’t typically perceive the ground we live on as spherical. We know cognitively that the planet is round but our senses don’t relay that information; we encounter it as an idea. We experience our lives unfolding on a horizontal plane when in reality gravity affixes us to a point on an arc. In the same way, we appear to fabricate stories from memory and imagination, the gravitational pull of narrative connects us to the greater story of life unfolding.

We speak of our legacy, how we live on in the memory of others through the stories they tell that attest to our influence; but even after the last person who knows us dies, our story still exists. Whether or not it resides in human consciousness, our story remains in the narrative fabric of earth where we have trod and in the molecules of air we exhaled, in the long forgotten cells sloughed off our bodies and the heat that once emanated from us. Our very being belongs to a world that contains us regardless of corporeal form.

Such a perspective is what I call mosaic: enough distance to see the complete picture. Views from the Hubble telescope can depict Earth from multiple angles though not all at once; but even a telescope so powerful cannot capture the entirety of our galaxy, much less all the other solar systems out there. It’s not a readily available perspective so we create stories to stitch us into place, to mark the dot in the swirling galaxy that indicates: we are here. The distinctly tribal narratives of Genesis and Exodus reflect the need to know our place in the scheme of things. To identify with a particular clan or collective recreates a sense of prenatal belonging. Once again we know we are part of something larger.

We rely on stories, biblical or literary, scientific, even musical to instruct and assure us we belong.

That’s the power of AA and other Twelve-Step programs: creating a safe space for individual stories others identify with so that no one feels unique or more importantly isolated, unreachable, alone. As much as an insistence on having a higher or larger power may appear dictatorial, it isn’t. It’s just wise. The isolation of addiction is not unique. It is an intense and potentially deadly form, but as prosaic that the isolation of anyone else. Most if not all of us know the feeling of floating like a dust mote disconnected. The concept of a larger power is but a metaphor for the source of our being; be it a long-dead star, an accumulation of atoms, or the breath of the universe mysteriously and miraculously coalesced into human form.

Dust motes don’t exist in a vacuum. Well, they may end up in one, but dust though it seems disconnected gives evidence of what exists and has existed. Dust may be the original storyteller.

Macro- and microscopic worlds include us even when we don’t consciously perceive our inclusion. Many years ago on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland I noticed

the untamed grasses tickling

the clear belly of sky…

the ground plump with stories,

mist unfurling secrets

to the intricate workings

of villages blossoming

in the scrub brush

a world chattering around our ankles.

On woods walks with my dog, Zuki I often get lost in my thoughts but then she sniffs and upends a tuft of fur and I realize the woods teem with stories of life and death. The voles and mice, fox and deer, coyotes and porcupines, owls and woodpeckers, the hawks and wild turkeys inhabit an intricate expansive world far greater than my ability to imagine—and with each step that jostles a twig or rustles leaves, Zuki and I enter the narrative, leaving our scents and our dust, our spent oxygen, and she, her scat for other creatures to decipher just as intently as she reads theirs.

What’s larger than us? Everything. The trees more plentiful; the underground fungi more prolific; oceans, mountains, sky, galaxies. And stories. Something as vast as the Himalayas or as complex as the mathematical underpinnings of a multiverse lacks the intimacy we long to return to, the containment of belonging we seek, so we go in search of that and find it in AA drunkalogues and tall tales, in ballads and frescoes, poems and plays, quilts and recipes handed down for generations. We find it in archetypes and myths and pictographs etched into cave walls.

We craft stories to express ourselves: to exhale what we ingest; to make tangible what we imagine; to enrich the ongoing conversation; to demonstrate how our particular experience nuances the cosmic narrative. We engage with the stories of others to find the ways we fit and where we don’t because even when we feel we don’t fit in to this particular story or that particular crowd, we define ourselves within the meta-narrative.

When I was so sure I did not belong with the ones who talked about a higher power and kept saying “But for the grace of God,” I unwittingly returned to the story by Dr. Seuss where some of the sneetches had stars on their bellies while others did not. I spent my childhood and adolescence on the margins, and occasionally I wore that feeling of outsiderhood as a badge; but by early adulthood I remember wanting to be just another bozo on the bus. In my late twenties I spent several months sitting in AA meetings thinking I didn’t belong and wishing I did—because I felt better there, recognized and inside, no longer out. I’d been writing stories since childhood to understand the incomprehensible; and then years later, when and where I least expected, rooms full of strangers named and demystified the incomprehensible by telling their stories and nodding when I shared mine.

Thursday it snowed where I live so Zuki and I went trotting into the woods where the lattice of snow-laden branches sculpted a womb of trees and suddenly I knew why I have always sought to live at the forest’s edge.  As much as I love the beach and the expanse of ocean stretching toward the horizon, it is in the woods that I feel held. It is there I experience most vividly the sensation of belonging: where I meet what is larger and climb inside.

All of art, music, invention and discovery are larger than us. Grief and joy are larger. Hope and the indomitability of spirit are larger. The drive to survive, the replication of cells, the path of light traveling from red giants to our retinas here on earth, God, the ground of our being, the breath of the universe, mysteries and the ineffable: all larger than we are —and inseparable.  It is not just with our brains but with our sensory organs we can once again know how it feels to inhabit belonging. The more we notice, the more we listen to the stories that surround us in scrub-brush and anthills, in church basements and sanctuaries, in fallen logs and deer scat, supernovas and bacteria, the easier it is to feel again the pulsing umbilical cord that fastens us to the world wherever and whoever we are.

Opening the Window

If you're a fan of the sermons posted here, you might also like to check out Reverend Seligman's new book:

Opening the Window: Sabbath Meditations
(Bauhan Publishing)

by Leaf Seligman

Why do we do what we do? What happens as a result? How do we make sense of, and find meaning in, our lives and in the world that contains us? How do we render wholeness out of brokenness, creating mosaics of beauty and functionality from the rent pieces of our lives? This collection of Sabbath meditations invites readers to inhabit the questions with intention and joy. With a pastor’s sensibility, a writer’s lyricism, and a generous heart, Leaf Seligman invokes poetry, thinking from diverse spiritual traditions, and stories from her own walk through life to grapple with enduring religious themes and contemporary challenges. It is the preacher’s responsibility to be of use, to choose words with great care, and open the window so spirit can move in and out, she writes in her afterword. Indeed, these meditations the words themselves and their call to a more fully understood, more deeply felt life resonate long after the bookmark is tucked into place and the covers closed. Read them slowly and deliberately. Let them be your company as you journey through the Sabbath and into the week.

The Given Life

Much has been written and reported the last couple of weeks on the legacy of Steve Jobs as an innovator and entrepreneur. He’s been compared to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and no doubt will take his place in history as one of the great creative minds in business. But there is more to Steve Jobs than Apple and Pixar, iPods and iTunes, iPhones and iPads. In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs offered three stories from his life: a distillation of lessons he presented with the simple elegant beauty of a Mac.[1]

Because we are Unitarian Universalists who draw inspiration from many sources, today I turn to the spiritual message embedded in a secular address. “Sometimes,” Jobs said, “Life hits you with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

Like Job, Steve Jobs experienced the unexpected in acutely painful ways. Being fired at thirty from the company he co-founded at twenty, was in Jobs’ words, “Awful-tasting medicine.” Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the cusp of fifty was a profoundly sobering fate. Yet Jobs told his audience at Stanford in 2005, “it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

I imagine some us here know the heft of success. I grew up hearing my mother tell me “the higher you climb, the farther you fall.” Though I experienced nothing like Steve Jobs’ incredible journey from a Reed College drop-out who started Apple in his parents’ garage to the head of a two billion dollar company in ten years, I know about being shiny, full of promise and burdened by a responsibility to fulfill it. Unlike Steve Jobs, I did not quit college; in fact I raced through Harvard Divinity School completing my coursework a semester early so that I could serve as the sabbatical member in my home congregation. Toward the end of the five-month stint as student minister covering for two full-time ministers on leave, somewhere deep within me, below the level of consciousness, a voice whispered, “I’m not ready.” Up in the sphere of consciousness, a louder voice rattled off my accomplishments. I had completed my coursework and satisfied the requirements for my thesis in a single draft. I had gotten glowing reviews on my two-year parish internship. I had successfully navigated the search process and been selected as a candidate at a desirable congregation. And I had managed to minister to my home congregation reasonably well in the stead of two seasoned professionals. It felt incumbent on me to proceed as expected: to collect my diploma, accept the call and get ordained.

I ignored the mumbling and pressed ahead. As Mr. Jobs so eloquently noted in his speech, when we ignore the internal rumbles of the psyche: the patterns that won’t go away, that nagging sense of something just beyond view that doesn’t disappear—the rumbles will dislodge a brick and send it hurtling down. Furiously trying to drown out the doubts and deep-seated exhaustion, I acted rashly and didn’t ask for help. Embarrassed by my lapse in judgment I ignored it. By the time the ministers returned and I revealed my mistakes, I had lost the opportunity to fit the brick back into the wall. Like Steve Jobs, I found myself suddenly unemployed, which felt like a colossal failure. I withdrew from my first call to a settled ministry, finally conscious something in me wasn’t ready though I did not yet know what or why. I hunkered down in a house next to a mountain, returned to therapy and volunteered as a chaplain at the county jail.

In the five years after Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, he founded NeXT then Pixar, which made “Toy Story,” the first computer-animated film—not only top grossing at the box-office but the movie that changed film animation forever. Then Apple acquired NeXT and Steve got his job back—and he met and married his wife.

 “You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the Stanford grads; “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Though nothing quite so successful happened for me that next year, I gradually began to discern the mumbling inside. I believed the dots would connect someday because trusting that was the only way to get there. Like Steve Jobs, I swallowed some pretty bitter medicine but I did not lose faith. I felt sad and empty and confused—and in the midst of it realized the universe held me. It sent a herd of deer that winter to feed at woods’ edge. It gave me the chance to sit with people whose medicine was far more acrid than mine. The universe gave me the hush I needed to hear the whisper; and the mountain stood as a testament to the beauty of what rises out of tumultuous change.

I didn’t start any companies that transformed multiple industries but I did get called to another congregation. I held onto the wisdom Jobs offered the graduates: “You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

But as we all know, it is never quite that simple. I departed for Canada to engage in the work I knew I loved and encountered a congregation full of great teachers: many lovely compassionate people and a few sharp-edged folks who taught me a great deal, including how to recognize a shoe that doesn’t fit properly especially when it’s a drag to go barefoot.

Jobs told the audience at Stanford,

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I recall my mother’s response when I suddenly announced my desire to change plans upon graduating from college. She took me out on the front stoop and instructed me to look at the clouds moving swiftly overhead. “How often does the wind change direction?” She asked. “All the time,” I answered. To which she said, “Does it ever change the beauty of the night sky?”

When I knew it was time to go, I re-entered the search process only to find it did not yield the right match. I followed my heart back to New Hampshire anyway. I wanted to be near my mother and sister and return to a landscape more treed than peopled. I bought a house and trusted the work would follow. And it did. Steve Jobs is right: the dots do connect if we are patient enough to acquire the long view. Or as Emerson said in his famous essay, “Self-Reliance”: The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.”

Had I not faltered in that sabbatical ministry enough to dislodge myself from a pedestal I did not wish to be on, and from my own expectations foolishly wrought; had I not experienced the clarity of too many days that would not have sufficed as my last one, I would not be here. As Jobs says, “As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.”

He reminds us in his premature death as much as his words:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The wise Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister writes,

The sense of competence that comes with being in a position we want and work we can do is the fuel of energy. It gives a person a reason to strive, to achieve, to become co-creators of a better life for everyone. It gives both purpose and meaning to life. Then, no matter who applauds us, we are satisfied with ourselves. We’re giving everything we’ve got and doing everything we can to make this world a better place than it was when we got here. Then we know that we are on the verge of becoming everything we were ever meant to be. Then we know what it is to be happy.[2]

We all know something of life’s ups and downs, its falling bricks and bitter medicine. We know something of our own frailty and hopefully, our own inner-knowing. The pace and pressures of life rarely occasion the quietude we need to hear the psyche’s whisper or the soul’s calling. We hear the allure of success and its accolades. We hear the din of expectation. We taste disappointment and reach for something sweeter to swallow. But inside each of us is a voice making its way to the peak of our consciousness telling us every step that the dots will connect if we keep going, if we remain true to who and what we love, if we honor what we yearn for and keep the faith—especially when we falter.

The year I lived beside the mountain and marked the days by counting deer and sitting with prisoners, I learned about the freedom that comes in constraint. Without the distraction of the employment I had labored so hard to get, without the buzz of activity or even the hum of certainty or its illusion, I had time and stillness. Without that, the only dots I could have connected would have been bricks falling in a row.

The poet David Whyte writes, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.” Wendell Berry puts it this way: “We live the given life, not the planned.”

Accepting that is the only route to serenity I’ve found.

In the thick of my troubles, one of the ministers who returned from sabbatical said, “Five years from now all this might be the best thing that could happen.” I remember thinking that was the single most unpastoral, unhelpful comment I had ever heard. The timing was astoundingly insensitive. Five years later, I wasn’t ready to proclaim as Steve Jobs did, that the best thing that could have happened had; but I recognized the gifts that emerged as a result. Looking back the dots have led me here. And I am  grateful.

The day Steve Jobs delivered his Stanford address, he hoped to live for decades. Sadly, he did not. But he left behind more than several transformed industries. He left us with the sage advice to live each day in such a way—be it somewhere in the middle or the last—that we can say thank you, dayenu, amen.

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[1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html?view=print

[2] from Happiness by Joan Chittister, published by Eerdmans

Memorial Day 2011

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day we commemorate fallen soldiers, but approaching it more broadly, it’s a day that invites us to remember the people whose imprint lingers. As we recall the people whose lives have touched ours in memorable ways, we conjure moments recent and long past, even fleeting, when a spark of kindness or decency charged us, when the gift of patience or compassion changed us, even now.


Often, we remember the people who had such an effect on our lives without knowing that we have done the same for someone else. At every memorial service I officiate I remind listeners the fullness of a life is not measured by longevity, but by the impressions made.

Last year, as I considered the perennial question of what happens when we die, I settled on the idea that all the light once contained in our animate body disperses back into the world, carried in all the beings and places we touched. In the memory of people and animals we knew, the ground we walked, the oceans we swam, in the air we exhaled—our essential being remains.

If Memorial Day is a time to commemorate the dead it is also a time to consider the ways death doesn’t end us. In her fanciful novel A Gracious Plenty, Sheri Reynolds writes:

The dead coax the natural world along.…[They] control the seasons.…In June, the dead tunnel earthworms, crack the shells of bird eggs, poke the croaks from frogs. The ones who died children make play of their work, blowing bugs from weed to weed, aerating fields with their cartwheels.…The ones who died old cue the roosters to crow and dismiss the dawn each morning…The ones who died strong push the rivers downstream…the ones who died shy string spiderwebs, almost invisible. There’s a job for everybody on any given day. The Dead are generous with their gifts to the living.

Not everyone perceives the dead this way, but as the protagonist of the novel notes, she can only see those who have died by remembering the shape they held in the past, “but that’s about my eyes—not [their] presence.”

Memorial Day creates an opening through which to return our attention to the presence of those we carry with us, whether they are dead or not. And it invites us to consider the ways we inhabit not just the memory, but the sensibility of others.

If you were to ask me to name all the folks who have made a positive impression on me it would take hours. Chances are good that I did not end up in all of their memory banks, but I have learned I am stored in some.

A couple of months ago, Tricia forwarded an email that came to the church office from a woman now forty, I knew for about six weeks when she was twelve. I stayed briefly at her house having befriended her mother, roosting the way young adults do when they have not quite landed. To be honest, I had not thought of Joni since I left Houston in 1982. I heard from her mother once by email about eight years ago, out of the blue. It was a short email updating me on the family. I responded in kind and that was the end of it. When I read the email Tricia forwarded it took a moment to figure out just who Joni was. She mentioned she had come across a letter in her mother’s attic I had sent to her and her younger siblings and that triggered her getting in touch. She didn’t tell me what was in the letter and I had no recollection of writing it, but she asked if she could visit so I invited her up to my house for lunch and she came. We had a delightful time and though I still don’t know what possessed her to reconnect, I agreed to visit her this summer in Greenfield where she and her children and partner live.

Though I still wonder why Joni remembered and reached out almost 30 years later, I certainly understand the impulse because of the people I carry inside. Some I haven’t seen for thirty years and if my Internet searches had proved fruitful I would have contacted folks out of the blue, too. People who might have thought, gee, what is she getting in touch for?

So often we don’t realize the effect we have on others, or they, on us. For eleven years I have carried a little boy named John Gustin with me. I met John on the pediatric floor of Maine Medical Center where I did Clinical Pastoral Education, the hospital chaplaincy program required for ministers in training. John was seven the summer of 2000. From the notes in his chart I knew he was nonverbal without any medical explanation noted; that his alcoholic mother was out of the picture; that his father and two older brothers lived four hours away. Every day I would visit John, grateful for the chance to hang out without having to worry about words. There was no small talk to make. Just quiet playing and the occasional words I offered him. He was quiet even beyond his wordlessness, in his manner. He moved slowly, deliberately, gently. He had been hospitalized because of an infection around the insulin pump in his abdomen, but most days, he appeared not to be in pain. John liked to play at the computer in the patient lounge and I will always remember the day I found him entranced by the figures on the screen. I asked if he would be willing to color with me for a while, being the low-tech person I am. I can still see him registering my request, considering his options to pass the time. In a moment, he lifted his index finger with its dirty little fingernail and pressed the off button. I have never felt so loved in all my life.

And because the universe is benevolent, one of my last days there, I happened on John in his room while a lovely pet therapy volunteer brought out an enormous white bunny. I sat down on John’s bed and stroked the rabbit’s soft fur with him when the volunteer offered to take our picture. I knew there would have been no way to photograph John myself as that would have been a violation of confidentiality and a breach of my role, but when the volunteer handed us each a Polaroid print I smiled and silently thanked the universe.

I treasured that photo because it allowed me to more readily revisit the time I spent with John, the way he instructed me in how to be present and attentive. He provided an easy way for a nervous novice to pass the days without having to knock on doors or enter rooms of other patients less eager to see a chaplain.

Over the years I have wondered what became of him. A few years ago I went onto Facebook thinking I might find him there but I found only other folks with the same name. And for some inexplicable reason about a week and a half ago, I decided to try again. I went onto Facebook, typed in his name, and got a link to his obituary. John died six months after I last saw him. In the hospital at age eight.

I have been carrying his light, thoroughly illumined by the vision of that small finger pressing the computer button. I have held fast to the feeling of John one of the last times I encountered him, curled in my lap, his arms wound tightly around me, his head burrowed in my neck. I heard him crying and followed the sound into his room where a young nurse’s aide brusquely combed his freshly shampooed hair. Suddenly, John began to wretch and the newly made bed was instantly soiled. Exasperated, the young aide yanked the sheets beneath him so I carried John to the couch and cradled him. The trust he bestowed charged and changed me that August day, in a way that enlivens us both still.

When I speak of the universe holding us, this is what I mean. We are held in body, but also in memory. Whether we recognize it or not, we are held by those who carry us, and those we carry. We are held by the places we have trod, the trees trunks we leaned against. We are held in the stories others tell.

In the novel I quoted from earlier, Sheri Reynolds writes of the realm the dead inhabit, “In this place you’ve moved beyond experience. Now it’s your stories that keep you down. You can’t leave until you’ve told them.”

I sense it is our stories that tether us. The ones we have yet to tell, the secrets as yet unreleased carried into death may need telling in order to free the spirit. And perhaps imaginations freed of body trade secrets and swap stories beyond our capacity to hear.

The stories we tell testify to the presence of the beings that remain part of our lives—they may not all be human—by virtue of leaving an impression, imparting a lesson, instilling a value, encouraging a path.

I invite you to take a few moments now to share a story you carry with someone seated nearby so that on this Memorial Day, we not only remember, but we become the a chalice poised to hold another’s light. (Give folks time to share stories)

Sheri Reynolds writes in A Gracious Plenty, “I know the Dead haven’t disappeared because the sun does rise. The roosters do crow. The clouds move across the sky like always.”

After my father died in 1999, a year or two after I read Sheri’s book, which by the way, I bought seventeen copies of and gave out to friends, I began to think of my father pushing the tomato plants up each summer because of the way he devoured the box of Tennessee tomatoes his sister shipped him every year. He would sit down with a box of Saltines, a handful of red tomatoes and a serrated knife and eat slices on crackers as if every one were his last and happiest meal.

Before my father left this life to ripen tomatoes, he married three times, first my mother, then his second and third wives. The last two left their marriage to him and got involved with a woman. During my father’s cancer when there was time to ruminate, we wondered aloud what were the odds. At the time my father met his second and third wives, they had been drifting in rough seas—and in him they found a safe harbor. My father was a gentle, supportive man. In his later marriages he had come to understand more of himself. From the pier where I stand looking back, I see how each woman gathered her strength and re-charted her course. And if someone were to say to me, “Gosh, your dad was married and divorced three times; too bad none of his marriages worked out,” I would tell the story of his memorial service where all three ex-wives gathered to hold him. I would speak also of the Russian émigré who told the people gathered, all strangers to her, how my father had saved her life by helping her come to America. I would express how proud I am to be the daughter of a man who ushered women to safer shores.

Relationships serve a purpose beyond our line of sight. They don’t have to last to work. What we think of as not working may in fact not be a failure of anything other than our ability to see. In 1982 when I left Houston, a twelve-year-old girl named Joni stored me in her memory; and though I left Maine Medical Center eleven summers ago, I never set John B. Gustin II down.

This Memorial Day as we remember the lives that imprint our own, may we feel the embrace of those we hold and those who hold us, in memory, in story, in being. Amen.

Phoetry (Photo + Poetry) Project #1

This is the first poem in an ongoing project by Patricia Caspers, a member of the UU congregation at First Parish, Fitchburg.

The idea is to write poem responses to photos surrounding the current events to which Rev. Leaf Seligman refers in her sermons.

Unfortunately, we were not able to gain permission to post the photo for this poem, but you can view the image by clicking here.

La Fruta del Diablo

coyote makes no promises
anchor of sun
howl of rape trees
buitre, black as death’s lashes
scorch blistered
mama’s worry between my teeth
as a man might carry his knife
wind callused
mija, my light, tres meses,
buried beneath desert stones
no identificado
sleep soured
cross myself before the shadow river
la migra, la migra, la migra
Virgen de Guadalupe, to you I pray
before la serpiente de la frontera
swallows me, spits me
sin papeles
into fields of bloody fruit.

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 Basílica 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.

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.