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.