Let It Be A Dance

I met him first on February 26, 1984. He could have been a painter. He studied at Pomona College in California with Millard Sheets, father of Rev. Carolyn Owen-Towle. Then he studied with the famous cubist painter Fernand Léger at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1949. Years later, someone recounted, he was walking though his house pointing to some of his paintings and muttering, “Van Gogh.” But in 1984, he simply said, “sunflowers/ time and time again/ I need to spend an hour/ with my sunflower friend/ sunflowers/ light the way/ put a touch of color/ in the long dark day.”

I met him again on November 6, 1993. Then, he read from a poem he had written called, With Birth To Look Forward To. He asked us to imagine that we came into the world old and got younger each year, thus puting death behind us at the very beginning. And so he briefly traced the rewinding of his life until, “suddenly/ my father comes back to life/ and once again/ I take him for granted/ I begin to shrink/ until sinking to my knees/ I roll over in my crib/ and wave good-bye to my feet/ stripped of all identity/ toothless and bald again/ I slip back inside my mother/ to dissolve in the absolute darkness/ of never having been.”

Of course that’s not the way it happened. In 1999, he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer. He pursued both traditional and non-traditional treatments. He used poetry to engage people living with cancer. In keeping with the arc of life, he once more illustrated his ability to, as he said, “do selfish things that benefit others.” That he was made the Poet Laureate of Prostate Cancer by the National Prostate Cancer Coalition in 2005, is evidence of his embodied, confessional poetry.

Its always been all about him, but the introspection of his poetry, which is both crass and sublime, mundane as well as transcendent, is bone jarring and heart rending.

Its always been about him, except when he shared his poetry with 60 men in Thousand Oaks California who were all members of a prostate cancer survivor group. Usually the speakers talked about the practical problems of coping with their disease, but not him. Instead, he read his poem Poor Devil, which reprises old western movies when the sentry is found dead with an arrow in his back. And whoever finds him always delivers the classic line, “Poor devil, he never knew what hit him.” Except all of these men knew what hit them, or did they? So he read, “‘Poor devil’/ never used an opening/ to tell loved ones he loved them/ never seized the opportunity/ to give praise for the sunrise/ or drink in a sunset/ moment after moment/ passing him by/ while he marched through his life/ staring straight ahead/ believing in tomorrow/ ‘Poor devil!’/ how much fuller/ richer and pleasing life becomes/ when you are lucky enough/ to see the arrow coming.”

Returning from Paris he worked as a carpenter and a printer, He wrote lyrics for musicals at Carmel’s Forest Theater, which is where he met Billie Barbara, his wife of 56 years. He wrote songs for the next ten years, of which some 78 were recorded including Turn the Key by pop artist Jerry Wallace and Teenage Preacher by Lord Luther, which cracked the top 100. But this didn’t satisfy. He began to find his true voice when he heard Bob Dylan, Pete Seger and Leonard Cohen. A career as a folk singer beckoned, although he couldn’t remember his own lyrics. Eventually he left the music behind, but the lyrics remained. He had found his true calling as a poet. Then he was ordained as a specialized Unitarian Universalist minister in 1972. His was a specialized case since he had flunked out of several colleges because of dyslexia and a hearing impairment, and had never attended a seminary. He became our “troubadour preacher,” and had the distinction of performing in more than 500 Unitarian Universalist churches, including First Universalist, as well as countless college campuses.

Its always been about him, except for the song that he wrote for Barbara Brussell, a friend of one of his daughters. Barbara was a high school dance student who was seriously injured in a car accident involving a drunk driver that killed her teacher and two of her classmates. Her knee was so badly damaged that it was doubtful that she would ever walk again, let alone dance. He visited her in the hospital and bet her that within a year she would come dancing up the road to his home in Big Sur to a song that he would write. The song he wrote within a few days was Let It Be A Dance. A year later, she came dancing, limping, but dancing up the road as he played his guitar and sang, “Let it be a dance we do./ May I have this dance with you?/ Through the good times/ And the bad times, too,/ Let it be a dance.”

It was included in our hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, which was published in 1993. Masten was pleased to have this song included, but he did not appreciate the poetic license that someone took in changing one of the words in the song. In the third verse he wrote, “share the laughter, bare the pain,” as in reveal the pain. This was changed to “bear the pain,” as in carry the pain. When Ric Masten performed in the church I served in Pittsburgh, he asked everyone to pencil in the correct word in our brand new hymnals, writing “b-a-r-e” in place of “b-e-a-r.”

In his last book of poetry entitled, Going Out Dancing, he wrote a poem called, A Word for Survival. The word for survival, coined by another cancer survivor, is “spiritude,” an engaging combination of attitude and spirit. UU minister Stephen Edington, who wrote a biography about our poet laureate, calls it “a trusting attitude towards life guided by the spirit.” But knowing a little bit about Ric Masten, who died on May 9, 2008 surrounded by his family, I think that the “spiritude” that he embodied was spirit with an attitude (of which we could all use a little).

Ric, thanks for the spiritude, for the poetry, and for the dance! (July 2008)

Learning to Whisper

Our daughter, LinsiAn, loves animals, especially horses. For the last four summers she spent a week or more at Girl Scout camps with horses. Slowly, she is becoming an accomplished rider.

Some time ago. I heard a story about Grant Golliher, a horse whisperer who uses the Bible to inform his work. While I was not persuaded by the theological basis for his work, I did appreciate his personal transformation. Before he met Ray Hunt, a horse whisperer, 27 years ago, Golliher “broke” horses in the worst sense of that word. Based on what he learned from Hunt, he became a horse whisperer and has shared that gift with others.

On a trip to the library, I suggested a book to LinsiAn about horses, Paint the Wind by Pam Munoz Ryan. It’s a coming-of-age story about an eleven year old girl named Maya, a horse named, Artemisia, and her foal, Klee. LinsiAn loved the book.

This collage of images reminded me of the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer directed by and starring Robert Redford, which is based on the book of the same name by George Evans. It is a story about a horse whisperer, Tom Booker, a man of immense patience, who helps heal a girl, Grace, her horse, Pilgrim, both of whom were terribly injured in a riding accident, and Grace’s mother, Annie, a high-powered magazine editor, whose life and marriage are not working.

Dan M. “Buck” Brannaman, also a student of Ray Hunt, is a horse whisperer. He was the primary inspiration for Evan’s novel and served as the technical advisor for the film. Brannaman has said that, “Abused horses are like abused children. They trust no one and expect the worst. But patience, leadership, compassion and firmness can help them overcome their pasts.” Brannaman knows what he’s talking about, having experienced abuse at the hands of his father after his mother died. He had the good fortune to end-up with foster parents Forrest and Betsy Shirley, who lived on a ranch near Bozeman, Montana. They had raised four children of their own and provided a home for some period of time for 17 other foster boys. They offered Brannaman positive discipline, leadership, and direction along with love, empathy, and support. In a sense, they, too, taught him how to be a horse whisperer. In his work, Brannaman helps people who have problems with their horses, and, more importantly, helps horses who have problems with their people.

The philosophy of horse whispering is to work with the horse's nature, using it to understand how horses think and communicate in order to work confidently and responsively with them, and create a bond so that the horse and rider can achieve a true union. It requires creating an environment in which the horse feels safe and secure. It requires a profound respect for the horse. It requires paying attention to countless non-verbal cues. It requires firmness, but also an abiding gentleness: whispering and all the compassion and intimacy that the word implies.

And all this brings me to the obvious conclusion: children are like horses. The point is never to break them, but to tame them in a way that preserves their essential, precious, and unique nature. This is the goal of good parenting and the goal of all who work with children in education, recreation, and other endeavors. Our children need to be companioned by people who are like horse whisperers. Shh! Please whisper.

First Principle

Let’s get radical, which means let’s go to the root, the tap root of our faith. Radical is also associated with revolutionary and we have been revolutionary from the beginning. When Francis David said in the mid-16th century, “We do not need to think alike, to love alike,” it was revolutionary. In those few words, he turned the approach to Christian faith on its head because he rejected right belief (orthodoxy) in place of right practice (orthopraxy). He felt that it was more important to be like-hearted than like-minded. David was attempting to follow the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus. Of course, he was imprisoned as a heretic and died in a cell at the fortress at Deva. He believed that the truth of his faith would prevail, and it has in us.

The first Unitarian Universalist principle, “respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” is also a radical statement, one with which many would disagree. Consequently, it is not practiced by those who restrict the idea of inherent worth and dignity to a chosen group whether circumscribed by family, tribe, ethnicity, religion, or nation. It is not hard to imagine how the world would be transformed if everyone lived this principle. It is, in a sense, the Namaste principle: The god in me greets the god in you. (For the world god feel free to substitute holy, sacred, love, etc.) In a sense this even transforms the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you because the others are you.

Gandhi said, “Be the change in the world you wish to see.” To affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person is to be in profound opposition to the concepts of original sin and human depravity. To affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person is to understand that our essential value as human beings is not earned. It is also that part of our humanity, which cannot be forfeited, except in the extreme. In fact, this worth and dignity are what makes us human.

Kurt Vonnegut suggested that dignity is something that we give each other. He believed that if we don’t give it to one another, there is no way we can obtain it. Carl Jung added, “It is impossible to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of another if you have not done that for yourself.” They are both correct. Our worth and dignity must be affirmed by others. At the same time, our recognition of the inherent worth and dignity in another requires an awareness of our own inherent worth and dignity. Obviously, we can do things that destroy the worth and dignity that inheres in an individual. This is what evil represents, the loss of a basic humanity. The purpose of religion, the purpose of society is to nurture the inherent worth and dignity of each person.

An Election Day Sermon

It began in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 and continued until 1884. The tradition spread to Connecticut in 1674, to Vermont in 1778, and to New Hampshire in 1784. It was called Election Day, although there were no elections on that day. Instead, public officials were installed in their offices in a manner similar to our contemporary Inauguration Day. It was one of the few public holidays in pre-revolutionary America. Stores and schools closed and the day was marked with parades, picnics, and an Election Day sermon delivered to the officials by a distinguished minister. In Massachusetts, the Election Day sermon was initially delivered in May in Boston’s First Church and after 1658, in the Boston Town House. According to Harry Stout in The New England Soul, the audience consisted of the “magistrates who represented the oligarchy, the deputies who represented the democracy, and the ministers who represented the theocracy.” Once Massachusetts became a commonwealth, the sermon was delivered to the governor and members of the legislature.

You may remember the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who admitted that he was the father of Hester Prynne’s daughter, Pearl. This admission came after Dimmesdale delivered the Election Day sermon in Boston, which was regarded as the most eloquent sermon that he ever preached. (Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody, a Unitarian, were married in 1842 by Unitarian Minister James Freeman Clarke. Her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, called Unitarianism “terra firma.”)

Typically, “New England election sermons,” writes David Hall, “observed the customary Calvinistic tenets: government is initiated by God; the fallen nature of man requires constraints; rulers must be limited and should meet moral qualifications; and law takes precedence over arbitrary opinion.”

Over the years, a few Unitarian and Universalist ministers were invited to deliver the Election Day sermon in Boston. Jonathan Mayhew, minister of the West Church of Boston from 1746 to 1766, delivered the Election Day sermon in 1754. Considered a precursor to the Unitarians, Mayhew said to the newly installed officials, “By wise and good laws, and by proper conduct in other respects, the rulers of a people lay a foundation... not only for the welfare of the present generation, but for the prosperity of those who are to come after.” The concern was not only the immediate welfare of people, but the long term consequences of actions. A century after Mayhew, Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke said that the difference between “a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks of the next election, and a statesman thinks of the next generation.” Our current state of affairs makes it clear that we desperately need statesmen.

Samuel West was another liberal minister considered a precursor to the Unitarians. An ardent patriot, West gave the election day sermon in Boston in 1776. In that sermon, he proclaimed that the colonies were already independent and constituted a new nation. “Any people, when cruelly oppressed,” West argued, “has the right to throw the yoke, and be free.” New England clergy, through the Election Day sermon, played an influential role in the run-up to the American Revolution by providing a theological justification for declaring independence from England.

Universalist ministers chosen to give the Election Day sermon in Massachusetts included Paul Dean in 1831 and Alonzo Ames Miner in 1884. Miner, a leader in the temperance movement, used the sermon to attack the use of alcoholic beverages and the traffic in liquor.

Perhaps most notable was the Election Day sermon delivered by Unitarian minster William Ellery Channing in 1830, entitled Spiritual Freedom. He argued that “civil and political liberty” were of little value if individuals did not possess an inner freedom of the spirit. Channing was concerned that Americans tended to put an “idolatrous trust” in free institutions, believing that they can, by a kind of magic, “secure our rights; however we enslave ourselves to evil passions.” In moving rhetoric, Channing declared, “I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, … which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come.... I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect… I call that mind free, which is not passively framed by outward circumstance, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles…. I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules…. I call that mind free, which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged with others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.”

My Election Day sermon is simple. Vote!

Everything is Holy Now

Peter Mayer, a Minnesota singer and songwriter, performed at General Assembly. He is a Unitarian Universalist and is perhaps best known for his wonderful song, Blue Boat Home, but I have been totally enraptured by his song, Everything is Holy Now” (click for a You Tube video), which he performed in worship at GA. My wife, Carol, purchased a CD with that song on it and we listened to it driving from Minnesota to Pittsburgh and then back to Denver.

The song is biographical in the sense that Mayer grew up in the Catholic Church. He studied theology and music in college and attended two years at a seminary before he decided that the priesthood wasn’t for him. The song begins with the following lyrics:
“When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow”

And then for Mayer everything changed. Those changes likely brought him to Unitarian Universalism, but they also reflect a spiritual maturity that informs how he sees and relates to the world. The lyrics continue
“Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now.”

He goes back to the past again:
“When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still."

And back to now:
“But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle.”

He clearly would have been at home among our Transcendentalist forbearers who turned to nature to look for divinity. And so he continues:
“Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all.”

And this presents all of us with a challenge daily.
"So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one.”

Of course, he is not talking about miracles that defy the laws of the universe. He is talking about the miraculous nature of the universe flowing out of the Big Bang and continuing on this planet through the equally amazing and miraculous process of evolution. For him as for Emerson (and me), everything is a miracle.
“When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it.”

Mayer pulls a Platonic influence into the song, acknowledging the philosopher’s belief that the material world was somehow a poor copy of the non-material world of forms, which possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. And so Mayer sings,
“It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now.”

In the end, Mayer reforms religious language just like Emerson, Thoreau, and those other Transcendentalists.
“Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done.”

It is interesting to read the impact of his music in parts of the Christian community. Some are repelled and others are enamored. Of course as Mayer says himself, “As a songwriter I enjoy leaving room for people to find their own kind of faith reflected in my songs. I often do try to focus on what people have in common—religious beliefs, shared citizenry of the world. [I want my songs to] bridge those barriers, so [my songs don’t] favor one theology.”

“This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now.”

Indeed!

Change is Good! You Go First!

I cannot make pie crust. My mother has told me and shown me how countless times and I still can’t do it. The simple ingredients simply do not coalesce as required to actually assume a coherent, pie-like shape under the rolling pin. None-the-less, I did learn how to make bread. It wasn’t easy and, in the end the recipes failed me, but I learned how. The problem for me was always how much flour to use, which depended on the flour and humidity and other things over which I had no control. Measuring the amount of flour that I was supposed to use was a necessary place to begin. In the end, however, it became for me both a matter of feel as I kneaded the dough and what the surface of the dough looked like after some serious kneading.

I use the image of making bread, because it is, for me, an image of transformation. It involves second order change, which is qualitatively different than first order change.

Much of what we do in life involves either no change; we really do like our routines and habits, or first order change, which involves a logical extension between past and current practices. It is doing more or less of what we are already doing. First order change is reversible, which means it’s relatively easy to change our mind and abandon the project. New learning is not required and the story of what we are doing remains essentially unchanged.

Second order change is deciding or being forced to do something in a radically different way than you have done it before. It typically involves a new way of seeing things. It might begin informally, but it does require new learning and the creation of a new story to explain and to make sense of things. And it involves transformation, which is to say profound, qualitative changes in who you are and what you do, changes that make a discernible difference. Real second order change is irreversible because the avenues to returning to the old way are no longer viable options. This is to say that we won’t go back even if we could because the old story no longer works for us.

To speak of bread as a symbol of transformation is to speak literally and metaphorically. Master Baker Peter Reinhart talked about the series transformations that occur that result in bread. Wheat is grown, harvested and converted into flour. Flour is combined with water, salt and yeast and becomes alive as the bread rises. The bread is baked and becomes for us the staff of life, a necessary food staple to sustain human life, to sustain our life as we partake of the bread.

Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said that “the purpose of life is to grow a soul.” To say this is to suggest that at birth there are many ways in which we can express our humanity as we grow and some of these involve the essence of who we are.

It seems to me that we come to religious community with a deep yearning for more: more meaning, more purpose, and more connection. We come with a holy discontent and the desire for transformation. Using the journey metaphor, we come in search of a path and fellow-pilgrims to accompany us on the journey. Unitarian Universalist minister Michael Schuler writes that people come to our churches because, “They have become frustrated with a life that feels shallower, more tedious, and less intrinsically meaningful than it should.” They want “a fresh perspective, a renewed sense of purpose, and the possibility of greater daily gladness.”

The container for this work is at hand. It is this religious community. The invitation is simple: take up the soul work that calls to you. Proceed with diligence, commitment, and compassion and you will be amazed at the growth that will eventually occur. As Richard Holloway said, the trick is “to change elegantly rather than awkwardly when the time is ripe.”

Alive in the Mystery

Our religious tradition draws on six religious sources. The first is, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which move us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” Religion begins with experience, not with words. Annie Dillard writes, “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.” Dillard knew what our forebears, the Transcendentalists, knew: nature itself is a scripture to be read, studied, and understood. The cathedral that provided them with the most profound inspiration was the world of nature. In his essay, Nature, Emerson wrote, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” This last phrase, “glad to the brink of fear,” is a way of describing the powerful impact of awe when we are seized by an experience. It can be awe-full or awful, the intersection of excitement and dread. His focus is on that experience, which is all that he needs.

The word miracle comes from a Latin root that means “to wonder at.” Or, as a Pennsylvania Dutch idiom explains, “It wonders me.” Look at the beauty, complexity, grandeur, and mystery of the world. Does it wonder you? Does it evoke a sense of “transcending mystery?” Thinking back to my childhood, I remember what wondered some of my friends. For Billy Heme, the youngest child on our street, it was, as he so aptly and raptly called them, wiggle worms. When I came home from the hospital when I was eight because of a bike accident in which I broke my collar bone, he gave me a small container of earth worms as a welcome home gift. Priceless! For Eddie Wagner, who we called Little Eddie because he had the same first name as his father, it was the crayfish in the spring driven creek beside his house. We would spend hours on a Saturday wading through the water, overturning rocks, and trying to catch these marvelous creatures. For my sister, it may have been ladybugs or the dandelion bouquets that she picked for our mother. For me, many wonders: buckeyes, osage oranges, cicadas, butterflies, lightning bugs, Japanese beetles, full moons, thunderstorms, rainbows, and much more. Alive in the mystery.

Rachel Carson wrote, “If a child is to keep alive his [or her] inborn sense of wonder... [the child]…needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with [the child]…the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” As a child, I was fortunate to have adults who companioned in me a sense of mystery through gardening, fishing, and reverence for nature. I have worked to do the same with my daughters. When we lived in Pittsburgh, I would take LinsiAn for walks around our neighborhood to take in the beauty of flowers and trees and the slow procession of the seasons. This past year, LinsiAn, MerriLyn, and I began taking walks along a trail near our home that runs alongside a creek that is lined with cottonwood trees. We were all mesmerized by the clouds of cottony, silky white fibers strewn along the path as the trees sent forth the tiny brown seeds that bore the promise of more trees. Alive in the mystery.

Someone said, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” This is an invitation to life, each day, an invitation to explore mystery, consider possibility, and create meaning and purpose. The truth is that each of us is a puzzle, each a mystery to our self and to others, as they are to us. This means that our opportunities for growth are lifelong and profound. We swing on the pendulum of life as Don Vaughn-Foerster suggests, alternating between seeking to penetrate the ultimate mystery of life and simply trying to live this day well. Our religious tradition invites us to experience the mystery of life, to ask questions. Some of our best questions are those that will never yield to answers, but they keep the quest for life alive in us. This is why Einstein said, “Never lose a holy curiosity,” for with a holy curiosity you will always find yourself alive in the mystery.

Come, Yet Again, Come

So why get out of the bed and come to church?

Come because life is a puzzle that often eludes our desperate search for a solution or at least some understanding. And we are a puzzle to our self and others. As Norman Maclean observed in the book, A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” This is a place to sort out the pieces, to make some sense of the emerging pattern, making it possible to fill in the spaces with missing pieces.

Come because there is still within you, regardless of your age or life experience, an acorn that yearns to become an oak tree, or a drop of water that could become a river, then a waterfall, then an ocean of possibility, or a flower that is about to bloom. There is always the challenge of becoming more nearly yourself, of completing your life before death ends it. There is a Hasidic tale intended to remind us of what is at stake here. “Before his death Rabbi Zusya said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

Come simply out of need, realizing that you are not self-sufficient, self-sustaining, or self-derived. George Odell wrote, “We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs. We need one another in the hour defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again. We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey. All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.” You need to know that here you will find gentle hands and hearts. You need to know that your gentle hands and heart are needed to create and sustain the beloved community.

Albert Schweitzer said, “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.” Come because the flame of your being needs to be rekindled through music and silence and poetry. Or you might come willing to be the one to rekindle the light of another person.

Come out of despair in. We will offer you comfort, hope, and a song: “Come, come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving/ Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again come.”

Come out of a sense of profound reverence. This is the practice of Namaste: “the God in me greets the God in you.” This is an awareness of the need to cultivate desire, desire for Life, for the holy, for God or for the Goddess, for whatever you consider most precious and profound. Coming here on a Sunday morning could be and perhaps should be a spiritual practice that you do for the good of your soul. Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies said that, “The purpose of life is to grow a soul.” The Quakers would ask, “How is it with thy soul?” Let us risk asking that question. Let us risk finding answers worthy of our desire.

Come because you are trying to make sense of those things that make it impossible for you to sleep through the night. I am reminded of Paul Simon’s song, The Obvious Child. “Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself/ How it's strange that some rooms are like cages/ Sonny's yearbook from high school/ Is down from the shelf/ And he idly thumbs through the pages/ Some have died/ Some have fled from themselves/ Or struggled from here to get there/ Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls/ Runs his hand through his thinning brown hair.” Now we become real. Now we admit to sorrow and regret, the profound need for forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness; the need for healing, even the need for salvation by which I mean wholeness. Now we accept our mistakes and failures, willing to have them teach us as we choose authenticity over artifice, depth over convenience.

Come because you finally accept the premise, as I have, that life is a hire wire act without a net. There is no way forward but forward and you must risk who you are, which means risking everything, in the service of who you might become. Mary Oliver wrote, “When it's over, I want to say: all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement./ I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms./ When it's over, I don't want to wonder/ if I have made of my life something particular, and real./ I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,/ or full of argument./ I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

Come without expectation, but willing to place yourself in a sanctuary of possibility. You might come because you are intent on creating the Beloved Community, one worthy of your commitment, knowing that your presence is essential to that undertaking. You might come out of a sense of holy discontent demanding that together we fulfill the incredible promise of our faith. You might even come with a sense of urgency knowing that it is the only way to make a difference in whatever time you have remaining.

What if it all means Hallelujah?

Our religious tradition was powerfully transformed by the work of the 19th century German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher who placed experience at the center of the religious life. The fruit of experience is meaning, which is more a felt response to life than something that we can explain in words or defend with reason. T.S. Eliot cautioned that people too often, "...had the experience but missed the meaning." We miss the meaning if we fail to reflect on our experience, to let it speak to us. Parker Palmer writes, "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

What does it mean? Nothing! Everything! Many things! Only this one thing! What does it mean? This song. That poem. The canvass hanging in the museum. The piece of art on the refrigerator door created by a five-year old. The first kiss. The death of a loved one. The wild flowers in the field beside the road. The architect's dream captured in a building. The bouquet of flowers on the table and the meal that we share made with many ingredients including love. That snow-capped mountain in the distance or the aspen grove through which we have been driving.

What does it mean that increasingly, when I have the occasion to say the pledge of allegiance, I am moved to tears? I could try to explain why that happens, but such an explanation would trivialize the experience and its meaning.

What does it mean? What do you mean? What does our life together mean? These questions yield answers in reflection, in conversation, in listening to the stories that others tell, stories in which you see reflected some of the meanings of your own life. These questions yield answers in the silence, in sanctuary, in worship, and in the dark of night.

Here in the search for truth, we find that we are with others who are like-minded. Here in the search for meaning, we find that we are with others who are like-hearted. Here, in the search, the beloved community is born: a resource for meaning-making, a companion on life's journey.

To bring this reflection to a close, I find myself returning to popular culture generally, and the movie, Shrek (2001), specifically. In that movie the song, Hallelujah, written by Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen in 1984 is a tribute to the love affair between Shrek and Princess Fiona. It was performed by Welsh musician John Cale.

Cale's version begins with this verse: "Now I've heard there was a secret chord/ That David played, and it pleased the Lord/ But you don't really care for music, do you?/ It goes like this/ The fourth, the fifth/ The minor fall, the major lift/ The baffled king composing Hallelujah/ Hallelujah/ Hallelujah/ Hallelujah/ Hallelujah." (This link is to a YouTube version that I partiularly like: Hallejuah).

What does my marriage mean? Hallelujah!
What do my daughters mean? Hallelujah!
What does this church mean? Hallelujah!
What does my life mean? Hallelujah!
What does being alive mean? Hallelujah!
What about finding and traveling a pathway to meaning? Hallelujah!

But the song is not simply one of joy and praise. Cohen also writes, "And even though/ It all went wrong/ I'll stand before the Lord of Song/ With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah" If I understand this verse correctly then I must also ask, "What do the times that my heart has broken mean?" Hallelujah!

Spiritual Memoir

Poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The world is made up of stories, not atoms.” Catherine Ann Jones added, “Without story, we do not exist. The power of story is how we discover who we are.” Finally, James Carroll observed, “The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative is holy…. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.”

What is the story of your life? It is an important question because, to paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard, we live our lives forward, but can only understand them backward. There are two spiritual practices that allow us to write about, reflect on, and ultimately own our own life in a profound way. One involves journal writing, the other is spiritual memoir.

Henry David Thoreau began journaling on October 22, 1837 at the suggestion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau’s first entry recounted the conversation with Emerson: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry today.” Thoreau’s journaling continued for 25-years comprising more than 7,000 manuscript pages and two million words. It started as a record of experiences, observations, and ideas, became a writer’s notebook involving introspection and composition, and evolved into the foundational work of his life. His journal was the source of much of his published writing. Thoreau wrote faithfully, often 15 pages a day, and thus owned his life in a way that few people do. We need not be as prolific as Thoreau to reflect profoundly on our life. While a diary is a description of one’s experiences, a journal is also a reflection on those experiences in an attempt to make meaning of experience.

Philip Zaleski defines spiritual writing as “poetry or prose that deals with the bedrock of human existence—why we are here, where we are going and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way.” Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew outlines three characteristics of spiritual memoir. 1.) “the writer of spiritual memoir works to uncover, probe, and honor what is sacred within his or her own life story; …2.) writing itself becomes a means for spiritual growth. … and 3.) The writer works to tell his or her story in such a way that the experience of the sacred is made available….”

Our spiritual memoir can begin with the creation of a timeline that attempts to uncover the depth of our life and the formative experiences that have shaped us. These include the homes we lived in, the people who influenced us, the places we went that were filled with meaning, peak experiences that continue to resonate, as well as the crises encountered and the losses that remain healed or unhealed. It also includes the “ah-hahs”—those precious glimpses of wisdom. As these dimensions of the timeline of our life are fleshed out, themes that characterize different phases of our lives begin to emerge. And for each theme there is at least one story, a signature if you will, that illustrates the theme. Recollecting these stories and sharing them deepens our understanding of our own life. And with each retelling, there can be small shifts in understanding simply because our perspective is enlarged.

It is impossible to begin our spiritual memoir at the beginning of our own life because, in truth, we were born into the middle of a story that was already in progress, one greatly influenced by our parents to be sure, but also by previous generations and historical circumstance.

What is your story? If you don't tell it, who can?

John's Garden

The annual ritual of transforming pumpkins into jack 'o lanterns is upon us. For our congregation, this ritual has become more precious. We are part of an interfaith group of 12 congregations (i.e., Jewish, Episcopal, United Methodist, Roman Catholic, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalist) that work with Habitat for Humanity of Denver. Known as the Habitat Interfaith Alliance, their mission "is to utilize the energy and commitment of their faith communities to build homes for families in need, while building a foundation for interfaith trust, communication and understanding." We just completed our eighth home, and now begin raising the $85,000 necessary to build the next one. It all begins with our annual pumpkin patch fundraiser where pumpkins eventually become nails, shingles, windows, plywood, wallboard and all of the other materials necessary to build a home.

Knowing how much my daughters will enjoy the creative process of transforming a pumpkin into a jack 'o lantern, as so many children do, I wanted to share Peter Mayer's delightful song, John's Garden. The You Tube link to John's Garden

Farmer John wandered back
And when he reached the pumpkin patch, began to speak.
He said, "The weather's getting colder,
Summer's over and it's almost Halloween.
That's the day, the reason you were raised
When everything about your life will change.

You will have eyes to see, and for that night, you'll be
A bright lamp burning in the darkness.
But remember that candle shines for only the briefest time
In a jack-o-lantern's heart."

The pumpkins held a meeting then;
Some were very apprehensive and afraid.
"Could this really happen to us?
What could be the meaning?" is what they were saying.
"This is home, it's all we've ever known."
Then one bold, outspoken pumpkin spoke.

He said,
"I don't need eyes to see, it sounds like a lie to me,
I like it just fine here in John's garden.
And remember that candle shines for only the briefest time
In a jack-o-lantern's heart."

There is much to ask and to ponder in the pumpkin patch
When imposing old October shows up at last.

Then a pumpkin from the farther end
Who had been silent up till then
Over the commotion, said
"What would you rather have my friends,
A chance to shine, or die here on the vine?
The better way seems very plain to me.

You will have eyes to see, and for that night, you'll be
A bright lamp burning in the darkness.
And maybe that candle shines for only the briefest time
In a jack-o-lantern's heart,
Oh, but one goblin's smile should make it all well worth while,
You know you might even see the starlight.
And knowing that time is brief, makes it that much more sweet
When you have a jack-o-lantern's heart."

What is True for You?

In his meditation manual, Noisy Stones, Unitarian Universalist minister Robbie Walsh writes, “A friend asked me to try my hand at rewriting the Ten Commandments. She wanted something to tape to the door of the fridge. I only came up with nine. But then I spent much less time on this than it took Moses to climb the mountain.” Following are his proposed commandments:

1. You shall not worship the finite and conditional as if it were the ultimate.
2. You shall keep to a rhythm of work and rest in the spirit of the Sabbath.
3. You shall keep your promises.
4. You shall tell the truth.
5. You shall try to make amends for the things you break.
6. You shall honor the people who give and sustain life.
7. You shall honor the earth.
8. You shall grant to others the same rights to life, liberty, and property that you claim for yourself.
9. You shall be kind.

Walsh’s commandments are a gentle reminder that we must seek our own sources of authority as we struggle both to know what is true and how to live our lives. These sources of authority include reason, intuition, personal experience, the natural world, science, our religious heritage, and revelation. We use them individually or in combination to discover truth (with a small “t”), for we are understandably cautious of capital “T” Truth that insists that we end our quest(ioning). As theologian Paul Tillich correctly observed, all too often “the passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.” Sometimes it is necessary to take the position that undisputed authority has no weight and that the dispute is the scale by which authority is weighed.

The integrity of our search for truth is critical. Paul Tillich advised, “Don't give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Don't be seduced into a truth which is not your own....” This can require the willingness to live with a certain amount of uncertainty and ambiguity until we arrive at our own truths. We need, however, to persist in our truth seeking, to find what is true for ourselves, and to live our lives out of that truth. The process is ongoing.

Some of our truths will last a lifetime, while others will be left behind as markers of our own evolution. This winnowing process occurs as we balance commitment to our truths with a willingness to revise our thoughts and actions based on new information and experience. Such a balance helps us from becoming dogmatic about our truth. One method of truth-testing is to seriously consider the truth statements of others that we do not believe to be true. Niels Bohr suggested that such serious consideration may result in paradox. He writes, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

What is true for you? What are the insights out of which you live your life? What commandments would you create to transform your truth into ethical action? And does all of this result in life lived with conviction rather than consistency? In his essay, Self-Reliance, Emerson reminded us, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. …Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Emerson also believed that the truth that is unchanging might not be the truth.

Let Us Remember the Mothers

Let us remember the mothers of small children. May they get some sleep.

Let us remember the mothers who carpool. May they know when to tune in and tune out.

Let us remember the mothers of teenagers. May they have the patience, wisdom, forbearance, and humor that each day requires.

Let us remember the mothers of grown children. May they take pleasure in the work they have done, and if they are blessed with grandchildren, may they delight a lot and spoil a little.

Let us remember those who are about to have children. May this journey bring them great joy.

Let us remember the mothers who have adopted a child. May each be a blessing to the other.

Let us remember the women who have no children, for how could mothers do without their friendship?

Let us remember the mothers who have lost a child and the children that have lost a mother. May we offer them our deepest sympathy for this forever grief.

Let us remember the mothers whose children are not as other children. May they remember that “what is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one sees rightly.”

Let us remember the grandmothers and great-grandmothers. May their gift of love traverse the generations.

Hope - Sketch #2

Hope has long been a central virtue of Unitarian Universalism. While at times we have tended, as Unitarian Universalist minister Earl Holt observed, “toward a sometimes unrealistic optimism,” hope is part of our enduring good news. The Universalist minister John Murray said, “Go out into the highways and by-ways of America…. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism, something of your new vision…. Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage.” If he had been talking about an easy optimism, he would not have linked hope with courage. This linkage is essential because we must contend with the tragedy, suffering, and inhumanity woven through life.

Some people worry about false hope, concerned that what we hope for cannot be realized. Hope, however, is more resilient and durable than that. It is continually tempered, not by the impossible, but as William Sloane Coffin said, “by a passion for the possible.” Vaclav Havel reminds us that hope is “a dimension of the Spirit. It is not outside us but within us.” Do you recall what Emily Dickinson wrote? “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers-- / That perches in the soul-- / And sings the tune without the words-- / And never stops--at all.”

To better appreciate the importance of hope, consider the debilitating effects of hopelessness. When things appear hopeless, despair triumphs as we feel powerless, immobilized by events seemingly beyond our control. Often hopelessness is a consequence of loss, the loss of someone we love through death or the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, the loss of health, even the loss of a dream. It is as if things will never be all right again. At other times, hopelessness overtakes us without any identifiable cause. We experience desolation, a disquiet of the soul, a spiritual dis ease.

In moments like these, hopelessness can color every aspect of our lives and become overwhelming. William F. Lynch offers this good advice: “One of the best safeguards of our hopes...is to be able to mark off areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them, to face them directly, not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility.” Still, it is not enough simply to isolate hopelessness; we must also seek to heal our hopelessness.

Healing hopelessness begins with a process of naming. Robert Browning wrote, “Entertaining hope, means recognizing fear.” We might also say, “healing hopelessness, means naming fear.” Naming our fears allows us to confront them in their limited concreteness instead of being paralyzed by them in their unlimited diffuseness. Healing hopelessness thus requires courage. Part of this work is individual. Another part of this work can occur in community. In this, our church is a community of hope, a community of hopers.

Hopelessness is darkness, a kind of Hell. The caring and encouragement of others can help with its healing. Tom Owen Towle writes, “To en courage, literally denotes the act of ‘putting heart’ into a companion. When our days are dreary and crises bedevil us, spiritual kin are there to encourage us, to lift us up and push us forth, reminding us that there is still more affection and comfort for us to experience.”

The novelist Barbara Kingsolver suggests that, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.” Wishing you hope.

Hope - Sketch #1

I don’t know about you, but I find myself, like essayist Scott Russell Sanders, hunting for hope. He began his search following a distressing exchange with his son who said, “Your view of things is totally dark. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t.”

Now Sanders was not without hope, but obviously the breadth and depth of that hope was not evident to his son, and, quite frankly, it apparently wasn’t sufficient for Sanders. He went hunting for hope; he went on a journey “to gather his own reasons for facing the future with hope.” And he wasn’t willing to settle for platitudes or cheap grace. As he said, “No understanding of hope can be honest unless it reckons with the absence of hope, the dark night of the soul when nothing comforts and nothing reassures. . . If hope is a bright, indomitable bird, despair is the dark ocean over which it flies, against which it sings.” Sanders embraces Emily Dickenson’s image of hope as a bird, (i.e, “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul,/ And sings the tune without the words,/ And never stops at all.”), but he rightly acknowledges the challenge that hope can face, a challenge as foreboding and immense as a dark ocean. The image of hope as a bird hovering over an immense ocean is fitting. The ocean is the abyss of despair or fear or illness or any other of the countless challenges that we encounter in life. The bird could fall into the ocean at any time, but it also has the ability to soar to incredible heights.

Scott Russell Sanders found hope in the wildness of the natural world and in his desire to restore the wilderness. He found hope in families that provide protection, guidance, affection, and companionship. Sanders writes, “In the struggle between a destructive, reckless, shallow culture and these ancient human needs, I place my faith in the family.” He found hope in beauty and community, in faith and fidelity. Sanders writes, “If we are determined to live in hope . . . we join with others who are making a kindred effort, and thus our work will be multiplied a thousand-fold across the country, a million-fold around the earth…. In order to live in hope, we needn’t believe that everything will turn out well. We need only believe that we are on the right path.”

Hope is a possibility that difficulties can be overcome or at least transformed. It is a decision that empowers and energizes us to grow. Hope is a connection that binds us with the hopeful of the world. It is a desire and a discipline to “be the change that we want to see.” Hope is an internal attitude, a state of mind and heart and soul that more is possible in life. It is a response, a strategy that encourages us to meet the challenges that beset us and the world with creativity. Hope is not passive, but active, demanding that we do what is necessary to deal with whatever gives rise to hopelessness.

Leave A Message

Peter Russell has corrected a philosophical misconception related to telephone “answering” machines. His telephone message states, “This is not an answering machine. This is a questioning machine. You already know the questions. Who are you? and What do you want?” The message continues, “Before you answer, please remember that these are not trivial questions. Many people live a lifetime without ever finding an answer to these two questions.”

A defining difference between conservative and liberal religion involves the way questions and answers are valued. One conserves answers while the other liberates questions. As Elie Wiesel rightly observed, “We tend to lose our humanity when we forget that there are no ultimate answers, only ultimate questions.” The liberal path (guided by a belief in revelation as a continuous process) is strewn with answers that are provisional, tentative, and evolving. There is an essential ongoing dialectic between questions and answers. Each transforms the other. Questions are the means of wresting answers and meaning out of the mystery of life. In religious terms this requires being comfortable with a theology of the unknown. The invitation, as phrased by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, is to both love and live the questions so that we may eventually live into the answers.

Our questions of life grow out of our search for meaning. As Victor Frankl has said, "The human search for meaning is a primary force in life. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by each individual alone...." Within a religious community there is also a collective search for meaning. This takes us back to Peter Russell's two questions, the answers to which will shape our collective life: "Who are we?" (or even more provocatively, "Whose are we?")and "What do we want?"

Sabbath Prayer

Occasionally we reach the end of a week, of a season, or a year and find ourselves overwhelmingly exhausted.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

This is not simply the exhaustion of the body, which sleep might restore, but the exhaustion of the soul.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

How hard to praise life's gifts when we are haunted by such incredible burden. How difficult to recognize joy or possibility, to experience contentment or purpose, to consider self-care a necessity rather than a luxury.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

At times like these sleep becomes an escape from such weariness, but not its cure. At times like these we continue to sleep while we are awake. We call this sleep depression, the physical, emotional and spiritual numbing that masks our pain and suffering at such great cost.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

To reach this state, whether by overwork, stress, fear, doubt or loss, is to also realize that an essential balance in our life has been lost. There is no quick fix to such spiritual dis-ease.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

In times such as these, let us pray for salvation, not for a superficial religiosity, but for the healing and wholeness that is our birthright and our destiny.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

Let us not surrender to despair, but to Life itself.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

Let us enter Sabbath time, that respite of prayer, meditation, and play that can restore our soul.
Be Still...Rest...Shalom.

Be still, that you might become mindful of your sorrow and your joy. Be still, that you might come to know the deepest longings of your heart. Be still that you might become open to the healing possibilities in you and around you.

Rest. Set your burdens aside that this Sabbath time might bring you deep refreshment.

Shalom. In stillness and rest may you come to know a peace that passes understanding.

A Walk

In his poem, The Blessing, poet James Wright wrote, “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom.” Has life ever seized you in that way? Have you ever had an experience that filled you to overflowing? A good friend of mine tells of driving to Banff, a town near Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. What she saw so overwhelmed her that she parked on the side of the road and wept for the beauty of it. I suspect that if she had stepped out of her body in that moment she would have broken into blossom.

Unfortunately as the world loses its enchantment, we lose our capacity to experience the mysterious. This is the point of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem entitled, A Walk. He writes, “My eyes already touch the sunny hill,/ going far ahead of the road I have begun./ So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;/ it has its inner light, even from a distance—/and changes us, even if we do not reach it,/ into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;/ a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave.../but what we feel is the wind in our faces.”

It is a very simple poem. It's just about a walk up a hill in sunlight. Except, he says, we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. Something grasps us that has an inner light, a reality that is elusive but commanding. Something grasps us and we stop by the side of the road to weep at the breathtaking beauty of the Canadian Rockies. Something grasps us and we know if we step out of our selves, if we move just beyond the boundary of the body, we will break into blossom. I have in mind breaking into a common dandelion, now bright and yellow, now snowy white, a bouquet of seeds about to be dispersed by the wind. These epiphanies, these peak experiences, these moments of grace, change us, Rilke says, into something we already are. Isn't all life change in which each change brings us closer to our true nature? Yet most of the time we miss what is happening. Life or God, you choose the name to call what is most precious and most profound, waves to us, beckoning, but what we feel is the wind on our faces.

We are grasped by what we cannot grasp: by mystery, by love, by the spirit of life itself. Such is the nature of spirituality, but what we feel is the wind in our faces. The Hebrew word for spirit was wind or breath. We can explain the wind, measure its direction and velocity, and relate its intensity to changing weather systems and various atmospheric conditions. We can experience the wind, but we can't control it. We can feel the wind in our faces, but it is much harder for many of us to embrace with our arms or our minds the wonder and mystery of life.

The capacity to value mystery is enhanced by awareness; by a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude at the reality of being alive and being a witness to existence; by an appreciation of the mystery that extends beyond the boundary of human knowledge (a boundary that is always changing as human knowledge evolves); and by the meaning and purpose that we create or discover, including the way we live in response to that meaning and purpose.

Our lives are not merely a series of questions to be answered or problems to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. The question, then, is “What puts us in contact with mystery?” The answer is Life. Eduardo Galeano writes about a gift given to a child by his parents when he was born: “they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight [and said]: ‘Don’t ever, ever open it. So you’ll learn to love mystery.’”

We can, and often do, take this mystery for granted. Nevertheless, at times something breaks through and we are, for a moment, transfixed, if not transformed. James Hillman reminds us that, “Moments come when we feel outside time, seized by a longing, moved by an image, in touch with invisible voices.” “We realize,” he continues, “that we do not live in one world only.” Or perhaps we realize what it really means to live in this world, to make contact with the mystery of existence, the mystery of being. It may happen when all we intended to do was go for a walk.

Born of Earth's Desiring

There is no question that “desire” has a questionable reputation, one that goes back to Antiquity. In place of desire, Plato argued that we should focus on higher ideals. Spinoza saw natural desires as a form of bondage that we do not freely choose. The archetype for this is the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. His single life focus and desire, “Me want cookie!” must be followed by its satisfaction, “Me eat cookie!” creating a rather narrow existence.

According to Buddhism, desire or craving is based in the belief that if our desires are fulfilled we will achieve lasting happiness or well-being. Given the reality of impermanence, happiness and well-being are always fleeting, which makes our desire or craving even stronger. Frustrated in our pursuit of permanent happiness, we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of desire-happiness-suffering in which suffering comes to predominate. Still, desire is important. William Irvine writes, “Banish desire from the world, and you get a world of frozen beings who have no reason to live and no reason to die.”

A brief discourse on Buddhism on Easter Sunday may seem unconventional, but we will arrive safely at our destination. According to Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein, author of Open to Desire, “Clinging - not desire - is where we get stuck, and it’s possible to embrace desire without clinging by infusing it with awareness.” The geometry of desire includes the individual, the object of desire, and the gap that separates the two. While the size of the gap may vary over time, there will always be a gap between us and what we desire. That is the nature of desire. Rather than clinging to try to close the gap, Epstein suggests that we learn to dwell in the gap so that desire can become a teacher in its own right. This requires desire without expectation. It also requires, as Epstein explains, that we learn how to use desire, rather than being used by it.

Epstein suggests that as we embrace desire as a valuable and precious resource, rather than as the cause of suffering, we face a sizable challenge. Desire is seductive and can end up mastering us if we do not master it, so caution is required. Still, says Epstein, desire, “if harnessed correctly, can awaken and liberate the mind.” He calls desire “the energy that strives for transcendence,” that it is “the foundation for all spiritual pursuits.” As desire becomes an object of meditation, we must ask of each desire that arises in us, “What is its source?” Does this specific desire arise out of life’s longing for itself, or does it arise out of some wound or perceived lack of wholeness within us? The latter is clearly problematic. If desire becomes the master, it can corrode our ability to know truth, see beauty, and feel love.

We find ourselves once again at the intersection of three significant observances in the turning of the year. These three, Passover, Easter, and spring represent a trinity of desire. Passover is a desire for freedom. Easter, mindful of the central teachings of Jesus, is a desire for love, and springtime is a desire for life. We live by desire and we are born of earth’s desiring. At the conjunction of Passover, Easter, and spring the only appropriate prayer of gratitude that we can utter is “Yes!”

Daughters

What arises in you, my daughters,
on this summer day?
If I could still this moment
of joy and hold you
forever in its embrace, I might.
Do you feel stirring in you the need
to hold life against your breast?
Do you feel stirring in you that
which through me
gave birth to you both?
My kittens, purring in my lap,
content with the perfect fullness of this moment,
I know the sound of you
and the smell of you
and the shape of you
in my lap purring.
So you reach out to life's purring,
holding the kitten (as I held you) in the morning light.

The distance between us grows as you grow:
the room between us,
the window between us,
the yard between us.
In time's turning
the fence will come between us
and then
we will be separated by the road and more.

So I set my gaze upon you both
that I might hold in my heart forever
the delight of this day,
as you look toward me
daughters of my being,
as you look away from me,
daughters of my being,
as I place the photograph of this day
in the album that grows in my memory
as your unfolding becomes remembered in still life;

As you are called from me
still will I remember
life purring in you
(gift of me)
seeking
life
still.

Born Again and Again

Ideally, membership in a congregation should affirm us while inviting us into the process of spiritual growth that lies at the heart of conversion. To be affirmed for who we are is to have our own inherent worth acknowledged. It is to experience the reliability of the horizontal dimension of the covenant. To seek a change in the direction of our lives is to open ourselves to the essential, creative, transforming power present in the spiritual community. When conversion becomes implicit rather than explicit, we become less adept at facilitating spiritual change (or spiritual direction) than we need to be. This may be why many people come to Unitarian Universalism with great expectations only to eventually leave wondering, “Is that all there is?”

In contemporary Unitarian Universalism conversion becomes implicit when the emphasis of covenant shifts from the vertical to the horizontal dimension. Our 1985 Principles and Purposes deal mostly with horizontal relationships and obligations because this is the dimension in which we have been able to forge a consensus. Since we cannot agree on the terminus of the vertical dimension, this dimension, through our silence, has been flattened. As this has happened, we have moved in the direction of what Adams called a “kept” religion, one that has taken the transcendent into its possession as a means of domesticating (or annihilating) ultimate commitment. The function of the “kept” God was to do our bidding rather than to command our lives.

Without the vertical dimension, the transforming power necessary for conversion is gone, as is the motivation to convert. In spiritual terms, this motivation involves “the desire for more,” a felt connection with the transcendent, or a hunger for a unitive experience. Regardless of one’s theological persuasion, recovering conversion as a process of spiritual development requires a reconstruction of the vertical dimension. We do not live by bread alone, and whether we are atheist, theist, humanist, Christian, neo-pagan or agnostic, we cannot achieve authentic religious community based on a covenant reduced to only a horizontal dimension. When aspiring to the lowest common denominator effectively eliminates the vertical dimension, we must realize that we have gone too far. The pain that we avoid by ignoring our theological differences is much less than the joy we have foregone or the energy that we have misused. The six sources of our faith associated with the principles eloquently articulate the vertical dimensions that inform our faith, sources that are worthy of our loyalty. Which one or more of these sources command your loyalty?

In “resurrecting” conversion as a valid and valuable process of religious growth in our congregations, we will need to find effective ways of creating, nurturing, and honoring diverse vertical commitments. We will also need to make the process of conversion more explicit in our worship, religious education, and social action. The growing emphasis of Unitarian Universalist identity in our religious education curricula is a significant step in making the implicit explicit. A lot more work is necessary to respond effectively to the needs of those who seek a deeper and broader religious commitment.

As we work on making conversion explicit, we will find that the number of people interested and willing to “convert” will represent a minority. The New England distinction between parish and church is instructive in this regard. The membership (or constituency of members and friends) of a congregation forms its “parish” (not as a geographical designation but as an associational one). The “church” comprises those members who seek to go deeper in their faith, to enter into a gradual and continuous process of conversion. The reason for using this model is not to create two classes of membership within a congregation. It is to remind us that the religious needs of the “parish” are different than those of the “church” and that we need to be intentional about ministering to both sets of needs.

To Be Born Again

The course Remember Universalism into Life by Raymond Nasemann and Elizabeth Strong raises an essential, enduring question: “Can you be a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation and not be a Unitarian Universalist, and not know it?” Most of the people participating in the discussion when I led this course responded, “No.” For me, the answer was and is, “Yes.” Is signing the membership book and entering into a covenant with the congregation sufficient to become a Unitarian Universalist? Is something more required? This raises the issue of conversion.

A “religious problem” that led to the Great Awakening of 1740-43 was an inadequate number of religious conversions. During that period the revival meeting became a means of re-creating a sense of the power and immediacy of the Holy Spirit: An emotional, ecstatic experience produced a conversion and testified to the presence of divine power. Our forbear, Charles Chauncey, thought that the revivalists corrupted religion. He, like the Unitarians to follow, believed in a gradual process of conversion which involved understanding and judgment and will, as well as an emotional and spiritual component.

Ironically, a contemporary religious problem for Unitarian Universalism is the absence of conversion, gradual or otherwise. This is not a new problem as various essays by James Luther Adams attest. In his Berry Street Lecture in 1941, he spoke of the necessity of conversion because religious liberals were “largely an uncommitted and therefore a self-frustrating people.” To solve this lack of an ultimate commitment, he believed, “We need conversion within ourselves. Only by some such revolution can we be seized by a prophetic power.... Only by some such conversion can we be possessed by a love that will not let us go. And when that has taken place, we will know that it is not our wills alone that have acted....”

Conversion in our tradition (correctly understood as a gradual and continuing process) historically involved entering into a covenant. The vertical dimension of this covenant connected the individual to a transcending, ultimate reality, commitment or value. Given our theological diversity, the terminus of the vertical dimension has included God, Goddess, nature, the good, ultimate concern, reverence for life, life force, philosophic truth, and humanity. The horizontal dimension of covenant encompassed the gathered congregation (and defined a relationship with the larger society). These two axes play different roles in the transformation that occurs when a person moves in a new direction spiritually. The vertical terminus may change, or a previously absent (or latent) vertical dimension may emerge. This dimension involves “turning to” that which is transcendent, while the horizontal dimension involves “turning with” the members of the congregation. Conversion may require moving further in a specific direction or a change in a new direction, a change in heart, mind, and soul. Conversion is the process by which one’s identity, will, and action become increasingly informed by the obligations of covenantal relationships and religious depth.

The process of conversion weakens when it becomes more implicit than explicit, or as Tillich would say, more latent than manifest. The absence of an explicit process of conversion in Unitarian Universalism is particularly problematic because we are comprised largely of “come-outers,” people in search of religious commitments more authentic and reliable than the ones with which they were raised. Our initial appeal to the come-outer is our commitment to freedom of belief. This is often translated into an invitation to “come as you are,” with more emphasis on “freedom-from” than on “freedom-for.” But seldom do people join a congregation because they are fully content with “who they are” or with the direction in which they have been traveling. To be a seeker is to be discontent. Conversion is the path of continuing deepening. It is not a result of coercion, but of generous invitation. It is not the imposition of belief, but the challenge and support to build one’s own theology.

Transformation

We end up living on the surface of life pursuing this trinket and that bauble. We forget to go deeper and may end up eventually saying—with so many needs unfulfilled—“Is this all there is?”

Our religious communities exist to meet deep needs involving meaning and significance, care and connection, compassion and justice, forgiveness and courage, and love and longing.

This brings me to two questions: First, what need(s) brought you to church? This is not an easy question to answer, especially if we wonder whether or not the needs in the deepest part of our selves can ever be met. Second, what do you need of your church? To be sure, you want certain things in a church if you are to participate in it and support it. But articulating our needs of the church is to encourage us to collectively look, not so much at the breadth of our programming, but at its depth. It is important to remember what brought us to church so that we stay focused on meeting those needs. As May Sarton wrote in her poem Gestalt at Sixty, “Lovers and friends,/I come to you starved/For all you have to give,/Nourished by the food of solitude,/A good instrument for all you have to tell me,/For all I have to tell you./We talk of first and last things,/Listen to music together,/Climb the long hill to the cemetery/In autumn,/Take another road in spring/Toward new lambs./No one comes to this house/Who is not changed./I meet no one here who does not change me.”

Our congregations have as their work transforming lives. They need to become centers of transformation. To be sure, this involves personal growth, but the religious community also has the task of transforming the world.

Robert Grudin has written, “What we understand best, we understand by renewal—by looking at the same thing again and again in different ways, looking at it internally and externally, walking around it, turning it in our hands, participating in it until some strange abstract spirit of its being rises from the complexity of effort and detail. And what we have best, we have by renewal—by chronic challenges never refused, by danger of loss, by repeated cherishings, and by love remembered.” His words remind me of what it means to participate in religious community over time. The community becomes more meaningful as experience after experience become part of a treasure of connection and memory. And, in the end, we are transformed.

Caterpillar Dreams

Eric Carle tells his story of The Hungry Caterpillar like a magician. We are so captivated by all the hungry little caterpillar is eating, that we think that this is what the story is about. It is not until the last page, that we realize that it is a story about transformation. We attend to the outward action, unable to imagine, just like the caterpillar, that our destiny, if we pay sufficient attention, may be the winged life. And this is the larger reality; it is not a story just about caterpillar transformation, but about the possibility of our own transformation.

Like the hungry little caterpillar, Eve ate the apple and nothing has ever been the same since. She gave birth to human possibility. So, what is it that you hunger for? How will you feed that hunger? And by feeding it, how will you be transformed? Be careful. These are provocative and essential questions, and we get the answers wrong most of the time. We feed the wrong thing in the wrong way, and become addicted to things that betray our humanity. We spend too much time feeding the body and not enough time feeding the soul, forgetting that if we truly feed our souls, how we treat our bodies would profoundly change, as would the way that we live our lives.

It is just a simple children’s story, yet we would be wise to ponder its deeper meanings and higher aspirations. The caterpillar, from the moment it hatches, is on an incredible journey that it cannot imagine and the same can be true for us, or not. The journey is simply this: from no-life to caterpillar-life to cocoon-death to butterfly-transformation.

Once we read The Hungry Caterpillar for the first time, every other reading has us transfixed by butterfly transformation. It is, after all, quite a miracle: incredible beauty and the ability to fly. But ask yourself this, “Which is more miraculous, leaving the cocoon to fly or leaving the egg to enter the world as a caterpillar?” Choose life, and then choose transformation.

As you think about your own life, ask yourself again and again: “In this moment, am I a caterpillar or a butterfly?” And expect that the answer will keep changing. If we compare our life span to that of a caterpillar, we literally have hundreds of lifetimes, with the possibility of being transformed again and again. Transformed into what, you may ask? And there is the mystery. No one knows. A caterpillar looking at a butterfly is oblivious to the fact that the butterfly is the caterpillar’s mirror. Ask yourself in any cycle of time, perhaps a month or a year, is this caterpillar time, cocoon time, or butterfly time?

Now, I have already made the case for the miracle of emerging from a cocoon to become a butterfly, the transformation from being earthbound to flying, as well as the birth from an egg to become a caterpillar, the transformation from no-life to life. Neither of these, per se, requires much of us. They are outcomes of processes that we cannot control. The leap of faith, the act of courage, is to accept the fact that our caterpillar life is ultimately not adequate to our dreams, and to begin spinning the silk thread, building the cocoon, and undertaking the hard work of transformation, which is usually hidden from everyone else’s eyes. Most of the time, we refuse the cocoon life, unwilling to die to our present self in order to be born again, unwilling to rely on faith and patience as tools of transformation.

In addition to the fear that prevents us from creating and entering the cocoon, there is the fear of leaving the cocoon. There is what I would call the existential caterpillar decision: Will we choose to “soar immortal, outlasting the sun and moon, or lie forever unwakened in our blind cocoon?” I hope that we do not remain captive to our fear, afraid of change, but choose to become, as one of our hymns has it, “architects of our faith.” As we learn to negotiate the caterpillar transitions of our lives, we will learn to soar higher and higher in our butterfly aspirations.

The Necessity of Covenant

Covenant is essential to Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is created by the promises that we make with each other, with the world, and the divine. Alice Blair Wesley says we are “promising creatures.” I love that phrase and its double meaning. We are people of great promise and people who make promises. Jewish theologian Martin Buber reminds us that humans are “promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing.” Without promises it is hard to conceive that we could even imagine a future, let alone bring it into being. Through promises, we create a future, and by the keeping of those promises, we bring the future into the present. If we lived in a utopia with all needs satisfied, all social ills redeemed, and all injustices made right, there would be no need for promises. We do not. There are chasms that separate us from the world we would create. Promises are one of the tools that we use to build bridges to that world. But not all promises are kept, or can be kept. A French writer, Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld, said that, “We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.” Better to perform according to our loves.

Individualism in Unitarian Universalism is either our original sin or our idol, a false God. Without covenant, the needs of the individual will always trump the needs of the religious community. We have mastered individualism, but not individualism in community. Covenant teaches us, as we practice it week-in and week-out, how to be an individual in community. It invites us to surrender some of our individual needs to the greater good of the congregation. Covenant calls us to be in right relationship with each other, and when those relationships become frayed, as they inevitably will, to repair the relationship.

Living in covenant is not easy for we must ask, “What does love require?” Our doctrine of love requires intention and skill, discipline and risk, trust and forgiveness, connection and care, listening and more listening, humility and the presumption of goodwill, compassion and sympathy, valuing diversity and practicing radical hospitality, honesty while speaking the truth in love, as well as the work of justice and spiritual maturity. It requires that we share our stories so we can enter into the depth of each other’s lives and see each other, not with the hard eyes of judgment, but with the soft eyes of respect.

Living in covenant is not easy, but it has the power to transform. We must be willing to practice seventy times seven, to fail seventy times seven, to forgive seventy times seven. Eventually, we will learn how to do it and as more and more of us live in covenant, we will be transformed and transforming.

A covenant is dynamic, inviting those who share in it to new possibilities by taking risks that seek to expand and deepen the beloved community. Preston Moore, a Unitarian Universalist minister, concludes that, “The measure of this openheartedness is the magnitude of the risks accepted, the surprises welcomed,” the successes achieved, and the failures endured. No one intends to fail or let another person down, but sometimes, despite our best efforts, that is precisely what happens. If the covenant cannot endure failure, then we must question its power as well as our commitment to it. Covenant rightly understood and rightly lived takes into account human imperfection and failing, as well as generosity of spirit and our capacity for goodness.

We are a covenantal religion, not creedal. Covenant is the center-point of our congregations, but for too long we ignored this reality. After the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, we seemed to lose our way. Again and again there were programs designed to articulate a Unitarian Universalist identity. We grappled with the challenge of what we held in common since we were not gathered around shared belief. We forgot that the glue was covenant. We found ourselves gathering because we were like-minded. Our churches felt like a liberal oasis in an illiberal desert, a desert that we found antithetical to our deepest sensibilities. While we would have rebelled at being told what to believe, we found respite in this like-mindedness.

An aspect of this like-mindedness was a fierce individuality, which we struggled, often unsuccessfully, to balance with the idea and ideal of community. The weak force of community could not achieve equilibrium with the strong force of individuality, and many of our congregations failed to thrive.

Looking back it becomes clear that like-mindedness was never adequate to bind us together. Too often disagreements would emerge, polarities that could not be managed or resolved: theist versus humanist, rational versus spiritual, collective social action as a congregation versus social action by individuals outside of the church. Our congregations cannot thrive if we are only like-minded, for we will always find sources of disagreement. More is needed. Since love is the doctrine of our church, we must become like-hearted in order to flourish.

For Unitarian Universalism, covenant is the alpha and the omega.

Within Native American traditions, the drum is used in ceremonies because the rhythmic beat of the drum symbolizes the heartbeat of the tribe. Covenant is our drum.

The Torah within Judaism is sacred and portions of it are read each week in the Sabbath service. It illuminates the ancient covenant between the people of Israel and Yahweh. Covenant is our Torah.

Islam is built on five pillars which include surrender to Allah, daily prayers, charity, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Covenant is our pillar.

Buddhists pursue enlightenment by committing to the eightfold path, which includes right intent, right action, and right mindfulness. Covenant is our path.

In Taoism, the Tao is the experience of harmony and is often called the “way.” Covenant is our “way.”

Hinduism understands “atman” as being the divine spark within each individual, which is related to Brahman, the godhead. Covenant is atman.

Finally, Unitarian Minister A. Powell Davies said, “The purpose of life is to grow a soul.” The purpose of covenant is to grow the soul of a congregation.

Covenant is a promise to love, to care, to walk together, to work together, to do justice together, to pray together, to learn together, to grow together, to laugh and grieve together, to build the beloved community together.