Heart of Humanism

Some time ago, a good friend and mentor of mine gave me this piece of advice, a quote from George Burns: The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two of them as close together as possible!

I try to follow Burn's practice, especially the last part, but today will be hard because this is a huge and complicated topic.

How many of you identify as humanist? (hands)

Some of you might not be sure what a humanist is, so let me make it more plain. How many of you would say that ours is "a religious movement that emphasized human capabilities, especially the human capacity to reason; that adopted the scientific method to search for truth; and that promoted the right of all humans to develop to their full potential."[1]  Those are the words of Bill Schultz, a former UUA president and writer on humanism. Hands?

I'm not surprised.  In a survey of this church a few years ago, over 80% of respondents agreed that they  ‘feel that goodness and meaning in our lives are a result of our interactions with each other and the natural world’[2]. Sounds like humanism to me.

Humanism is about knowing, how we know and what we can know. The free and responsible search for truth and meaning is a central principle of our religious humanism.

Rev. Kenneth Patton, one of our great humanist ministers, wrote,
If there are any secrets in the world, they are not hidden.
They are everywhere.
If there is any reason why the universe is,
why it is the kind of universe it is,
why there is this strange eruption of life,
that reason can be found anywhere,
as soon in sand as in a galaxy,
as loud in a leaf-tip as in a forest.[3]

Religious humanism has long been a central part of Unitarian Universalism.  As Unitarians became more religiously diverse in the 19th century, many began to move the locus of religion from god in heaven to god all around us and then to us as humans. This led to controversy and nearly to schism, in the post-Civil War era, as the conservative east-coast Unitarians took on the more liberal Westerners. But things eventually settled down into just low level disagreement.  In the 1930’s new energy flowed into the religious humanist movement, and several Unitarian ministers and philosophers issued a document called “The Humanist Manifesto”, delineating key points of humanism. Here are some of statements in that manifesto (and I quote):

'man is a part of nature, and ... he has emerged as a part of a continuous process';

'Religious Humanism considers realization of human personality the end of man’s life'; and

'the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought".'[4]

I left the masculine language as it was -- we’ll return to that.

Humanism became ascendant in both the Unitarian and Universalist strands of our movement, to the point that today nearly half of UUs identify as humanist. The tension between humanists and others in the movement has heated up in the past few years in some of our churches. Ministers often groused about having to be careful about using the ‘g-word’ -- God -- lest they be accosted at coffee hour. On the other hand, some, including ministers I respect, respond with derision, lashing out at what they call ‘flat earth humanists’.

It seemed to me like a no-win kind of argument, one that could just go on and on as each side was assured of its own "rightness."  I began to wonder if there might be a third way.
As I was preparing this sermon, I had a chance to talk with Rev. Roger Brewin, who is editor of the magazine Religious Humanism. He steered me directly to the work of William Murry, who was president of Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. Murry is the author of the book Reason and Reverence. Murry extends religious humanism into what he calls humanistic religious naturalism, (which I know is a bit of a mouthful). Let’s explore a few of the concerns he has had with religious humanism and how he addresses these with humanistic religious naturalism.
In distinguishing a new form of humanism from its precedents, Murry points to the study of religion, where a distinction is made between mythos and logos. Logos is rational, factual religion, which Murry suggests is today based on a scientific-empirical worldview.  Mythos is religion based on myths, which, Murry tells us, ‘are stories with meanings.’[5] He continues,

I believe that myths were never meant to be taken literally but were probably understood even by a pre-scientific people as metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and mysterious to comprehend in any other way. It is only in a scientific age, with its emphasis on factual knowledge, that myths have come to be understood as facts. By taking myths literally, fundamentalist religion transforms mythos into logos.[6]

Murry notes that modern science has its own mythos, stories with meaning.  These stories are not wrong, but they may not tell the whole truth. For example, we understand the universe began some 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang. We visualize that creation event as best we can, perhaps as a flash, after which the universe immediately began to cool into the various fundamental forces and then matter and then leading to the formation of stars and galaxies. But of course that Big Bang understanding is complicated by ideas of cosmic inflation and the possibility that universe creation is ongoing. Such theoretical ideas fit some of our observations, but they haven't become part of our common story or mythos, for they are too new and difficult to grasp.

What I find lacking in our more traditional religious humanism is the lack of emphasis on mythos, on the importance of stories with meaning. Stories can have multiple interpretations; they are by nature unresolved. When we emphasize logos, we emphasize the truth, and have a tendency to claim prematurely that we have found the one truth.  We can become, in a word, fundamentalists.
So mythos, stories, are important. Our task is to update the stories to fit today’s reality. Ursula Goodenough, a biologist, reminds us:

Humans need stories -- grand, compelling stories -- that help to orient us in our lives and in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story -- what we are calling religious naturalism -- can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions.[7]

Murry makes the point that humanism is strongly rooted into the modern age, and it has yet to take the leap into the postmodern age. The worldview of modernity suggests that we can understand everything through scientific rationalism, that we can apply logic and reason to solve any problem. Post-modernity suggests that there are things that we cannot know, and that the knowledge we have is incomplete and provisional. Because we have incomplete knowledge, the knowledge we do have is filtered through lenses of our culture and ethnicity and other identity groupings. Humanism is modern, using logic, but not yet post modern enough to realize logic isn’t the whole answer.

Let me give you an example. All thirty-four persons who signed the Humanist Manifesto were male.[8] I bet they didn’t even notice the use of male-gendered language in that document.  As far as I know, all are white. A third were university professors, and half were Unitarians. Postmodern critique would suggest that these identities would lead to unconscious bias, if not in the language itself, then in what was included and what was left out.

So if humanism is to be fit for a post-modern age, it needs to be willing to listen to more voices. It needs to be more tolerant of uncertainty, of provisional views, and of the possibility that our very rational efforts, even our careful use of the scientific method, may not save us from unconscious bias.

As Sarah reminded us in the chalice lighting this morning, “we sure make a living hell for ourselves when we generate assumptions, harbor prejudice and play at ignorance.” In short, we need to be more humble about what we know and how we know it.

We Unitarian Universalists and religious humanists sometimes focus over-much on nature as a source of inspiration. Nature is not always inspirational, but it is often instructive. A recent New Scientist article described a ‘bloody ten-year [chimpanzee] dispute in the Ugandan jungle [that] ended in mid-2009 with the victors seizing territory held by the vanquished. The episode represents the first solid evidence that chimpanzees kill their rivals to acquire land’.[9] While some of the on-line commentators were unwilling to use the word ‘war’, it’s hard to see how this organized and murderous conflict should not be labeled ‘war’. And yet there is much emerging evidence that altruistic behavior is innate in many animals including humans, for it conveys evolutionary benefit. Even these primate wars may foster a sort of comradeship and altruism that benefits the group at a cost to the individual.[10]

On the other hand, ethologists in Guinea have observed the evolution of a new cultural grief practice among a group of chimpanzees. ‘In 1992, [one of the researchers] reported the death of a 2.5-year-old chimpanzee (Jokro) at Bossou from a respiratory illness. The infant's mother (Jire) carried the corpse, mummified in the weeks following death, for at least 27 days. She exhibited extensive care of the body, grooming it regularly, sharing her day- and night-nests with it, and showing distress whenever they became separated.’[11] ‘Corpse-carrying may have become something of a Bossou "tradition"’, according to the lead researcher.[12] In these examples, we are reminded that we are not all that special in the natural scheme of things.

Understanding the natural world also may offer some answers to other big questions that have normally been outside the realm of science. Just this week, an article by David Brooks in the New York Times noted recent research into the evolutionary origin of morality.[13] It seems that moral understanding is innate.  Babies just six months old understand, at a basic level, right and wrong as well as punishment. Perhaps we can build on this innate emotional response to morality with our intellectual understanding of morality and ethics; certainly we should not ignore the fact that we do have this innate emotional response.

Part of finding the heart in humanism is broadening the emotional experiences that we enjoy in life. Humanism’s long suit has been the recognition of a sense of awe and wonder at the universe and the natural world. Who among us hasn't experienced some depth of feeling on looking up at a dark sky full of thousands of stars. As we learn more about the night sky, our wonder just increases, as we begin to identify the faint smudges as distant galaxies.

Can we extend that wonder into a place of humility, a sense of smallness and relative powerlessness before the universe? How about praise? We do not have to respond by offering praise, for many of us doubt that there is anyone or anything out there listening for our praise, but if praise makes us feel whole, then let us praise this wondrous creation.

When we walk in the woods or on a beach, do we feel like we truly belong in this world, that we are created from it and are a part of it? Do we love it? This love invites us into a caring relationship with the natural world, rather than dominance and separation.

I’m reading Bill McKibben’s recent book, Eaarth, spelled E-A-A-R-T-H. He suggests that with global climate change, we have already created a planet that is no longer the Earth, but something different. Although the global ecosystem will survive, it will be transformed into something far less hospitable for humanity. It will be less hospitable for other existing species, too, but that’s a different story.

Perhaps if we respect our deep interconnectedness with the natural world we inhabit, and learn to accept the limitations that this interconnectedness brings, perhaps then we can then find ways to tread more lightly on this world, for our sake as well as for the sake of the planet.

Finally, what emotions does humanism encourage in our relationship with one another? How do we respond to injustice? For many of us, a righteous anger drives us to act to protest injustice and to fight for social change. In the coming years, even more may be asked of us. We need to respond to those who suffer injustice not only with righteous anger but with compassion, so that we open up and share their pain as we attempt to understand their situation.

In the end, the presence or absence of god is not a critical question to humanistic religious naturalism. If there is a god, that god seems not to be the micromanaging kind, always messing with our lives and demanding constant ego-stroking.

Perhaps, as our Jesus Seminar translation of John 1 offers, there is a god that is wisdom. In it is life, that is the light of humanity. If we accept this as mythos, then perhaps wisdom, and creativity is our light.

If there is no god, may we rejoice in our improbable good fortune in living in a universe and on a planet like ours, so finely tuned to support sentient life. Earth teach me that we are blessed, and we do well to respond with care for each other and this planet. Earth teach me that we live in a holy place, and our heaven is what we create here on earth.

As in the Ute blessing, earth teach me suffering, earth teach me resignation, earth teach me limitation, but earth also teach me courage, and caring, and kindness. May a new humanism allow us to learn these things, may a new humanism allow us to know our hearts.

References

1 William Schultz, "Our humanist legacy", http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/27168.shtml
2 UUYO Survey Summary, undated, probably 2008.
3 Kenneth L. Patton, "All Blessedness", 1975, p. 20.
4 "Humanist Manifesto I" http://www.americanhumanist.org/Who_We_Are/About_Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I
5 William Murry, "Reason and reverence", http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/6558.shtml
6 ibid.
7 Ursula Goodenough, "The Sacred Depths of Nature", 1998, p. 174.
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_Manifesto_I
9 "Chimpanzees kill to win new territory", New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19064-chimpanzees-kill-to-win-new-territory.html
10 "Why altruism paid off for our ancestors", New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10750-why-altruism-paid-off-for-our-ancestors.html
11 Current Biology,"Chimpanzee mothers at Bossou, Guinea carry the mummified remains of their dead infants", http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(10)00218-6
12 Christian Sheppard, "Ape Pieta", http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2010/0513.shtml
13 David  Brooks, "The Moral Naturalists", http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/opinion/23brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

The God of Serendip

Reading: The Three Princes of Serendip

The story has become known in the English speaking world as the source of the word serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole because of his recollection of the part of the "silly fairy tale" where the three princes by "accidents and sagacity" discern the nature of a lost camel. The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip is based upon the life of Persian King Bahram V, who ruled the Sassanid Empire (420–440). Stories of his rule are told in epic poetry of the region (Firdausi's Shahnameh of 1010, Nizami's Haft Paykar of 1197, Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht of 1302), parts of which are based upon historical facts with embellishments derived from folklore going back hundreds of years to oral traditions in India and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. With the exception of the well-known camel story, English translations are very hard to come by.

Talmudic version

The fable of a camel blind in one eye is included in the Talmud, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan:
Rava relates the following in the name of Rabbi Yochanan:—“Two Jewish slaves were one day walking along, when their master, who was following, overheard the one saying to the other, ‘There is a camel ahead of us, as I judge—for I have not seen—that is blind of one eye and laden with two skin-bottles, one of which contains wine and the other oil, while two drivers attend it, one of them an Israelite, and the other a Gentile.’ ‘You perverse men,’ said their master, ‘how can you fabricate such a story as that?’ The slave answered, and gave this as his reason, ‘The grass is cropped only on one side of the track, the wine, that must have dripped, has soaked into the earth on the right, and the oil has trickled down, and may be seen on the left; while one of the drivers turned aside from the track to ease himself, but the other has not even left the road for the purpose.’ Upon this the master stepped on before them in order to verify the correctness of their inferences, and found the conclusion true in every particular. He then turned back, and…after complimenting the two slaves for their shrewdness, he at once gave them their liberty.”
Sanhedrin, fol. 104, col. 2.[6]

SERMONETTE

There is an old joke that “Unitarian believe in One God – at most.” Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way helped me to give my own personal God a name.
As I mentioned, Serendipity is part of the process that Julia Cameron sees happening with greater and greater opening of one’s self to one’s innate creativity – the way in which we become co-creators of our universe. As I thought about the elements necessary to turn my “sermonette” into a full-fledged service, the first words that popped into my head were from the musical dialogue between Noah and his sons from “Two By Two” –“ if God had wanted a rudder, God would have said, make a rudder.” These words were indelibly inscribed in my memory by virtue of the fact that, some thirty years ago, my father sang the role of Noah in an amateur theater production in Wayland, Massachusetts. The God of Serendipity clearly dictated that this should be my choice of music for a church service on Father’s Day, so I could honor my father across the miles.
In “Two By Two,”the author’s conceit was that Noah was a fundamentalist in his faith. When the storm hits, however, the almighty seemingly lacked the foresight that Noah’s sons, with their worldly experience, could provide. Noah’s faith is shaken. By the end of the play, however, Noah has had to accept the reality of human suffering and death, but nevertheless challenges the almighty to respect his offsprings’ foibles and the limitations of the human condition. God, therefore, moderates his wrath, and covenants to limit his destructive powers.
Since I was diagnosed with MS (in January 1994), I have become more and more conscious of how “I get by with a little help from my friends.” While I rejoice in the increased awareness of “the interconnected web of existence of which we are a part,” my ever-increasing level of dependence on others does not necessarily do much to feed my self-esteem. Members of UUYO have been ever obliging, and with the ironic sense of humor which has become more acute with study of Russian culture and my own existence over the passing years, I try to come up with various new takes on what I can offer in return. Our last interim minister, Martha Munson, dubbed me a “Wordsmith,” and indeed language tends to be the vehicle through which I try to make my contribution. But sometimes, the God of Serendipity is operating to connect our needs with the needs of family, friends, and even strangers. And when this happens, a deep sense of gratitude for the mysterious forces in the universe wells up in me.
This past spring, I participated in Matt Alspaugh in his workshop on “Crafting the Sermon Within You,” and challenged us to take a small incident, describe it in at much detail as possible, and then examine it anew for its potential to teach a more universal truth. I discovered, through successive attempts to find an appropriate incident, that the more seemingly insignificant the detail, the more poignant the process of dis-covery. It was not a narrow escape from a catastrophic auto accident that yielded the most successful results, but an un-covering of the wonders of everyday survival.
Indeed, just getting out of my house in time to teach a class at YSU has become a miracle in my world. The summer course I teach, “Foreign Film” meets for over three hours twice a week and involves a large amount of “show and tell” materials (DVDs, VHS tapes, books, handouts, and notes on multifarious internet links), preparation is nearly equivalent to packing for a short trip abroad. The first day of the summer term, I had made arrangements for a student who worked at the LLRC, Molly, to come by my house at 9:30 to help me get into my car to make sure I got to YSU in time for my 11 a.m. class. Molly had had an 11 a.m. class last fall that corresponded to my schedule, so when I had run into her in the LLRC two days before and said she had to be at YSU on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m., I asked her to stop by my house on her way to YSU at 9:30 during the summer term. Since I live less than two miles from campus, I felt comfortable making such a request, and was planning to propose that I compensate her for an hour of her time at $10 per hour.
At 9:30, when Molly had yet to appear, I managed to take care of a few of the tasks I would have handled at the office on my home computer. By 9:45, however, I sensed something was amiss and decided to face the tasks of putting on footwear, setting the house alarm, locking the door behind me, loading stuff in the car, and making sure I had my leg lifter to assist in hoisting my recalcitrant right leg into the driver’s seat on my own. Just as I had assumed my “bag lady” persona, laden with 2-3 canvas bags and two purses (one with cell phone from which I would call the YSU escort service to unload my mobility scooter once I got to campus) and was about to open the back door leading to the garage, the phone rang. It was NOT Molly, however, but UUYO member-neighbor-friend Eugenia Pierce, inquiring whether my offer of space in my basement for some of her collectibles inventory was still extant. I said of course and, ascertaining her immediate availability, I suggested that we continue our negotiations while she “spot” me during my home-evacuation exercise. Gina came over, and helped me load my stuff (and self) into the car. When Molly called from the office at 10:15 with abject apologies for having forgotten me, I could truthfully report that I was in capable hands.
So, I get by with A LOT of help from my friends. But many times, I find this a BLESSING rather than an imposition.
The time I have spent in Russia, where virtually NOTHING can be accomplished without a personal network of support, has moderated my native American individualism so that I can trade a modicum of my independence for the humbling experience of having to ask for help at nearly every (physical) turn. Indeed, I think that the plethora of resources we Americans have at our disposal leads to a loneliness that we can only assuage by gluing our cell-phones to our ears and “friending” people on Facebook. This virtual community, supported by our access to advanced technology, is no doubt a virtue of our American economic superiority in the world. But sometimes the warmth of a flesh-and-blood “helping hand” is what REALLY the highest expression of what makes us human.

RESPONSIVE READING: THE ARTIST’S WAY – BASIC PRINCIPLES BY (JULIA CAMERON)

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.
2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves.
3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.
4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.
7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: Good, Orderly Direction.
8. As we open our creativity channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.
9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.
10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

Julia Cameron

Being in Nature

I’m glad we’re off to Mill Creek Park for our picnic today! That park is one of the things that I really love about Youngstown. It has become part of my spiritual practice, to go over there two or three times a week, if possible, and walk the paths.

Being outdoors, in nature, has been shown to be helpful for one’s mental health. A study in the UK showed that taking walks in woodlands reduced depression in nearly three quarters of participants. In the control group, which walked in indoor shopping malls, fewer participants had reduced depression, and some found their level of depression increased.[1] As a man who hates shopping malls, this is not one bit surprising.

Even a window on nature is helpful. Studies in hospitals have found that patients who are in rooms with windows looking out on natural scenes need less pain medication, are more cooperative with staff, and are discharged more quickly than those who see something unnatural like a brick wall.[2] In the hospital where I worked as a chaplain, we even considered putting photographs of nature scenes in patient rooms, which we learned has a similar effect. We were warned that paintings or watercolors (as opposed to photos) apparently don’t work.

Our Unitarian ancestors did not have access to this kind of science but they did have religion! Unitarian Universalism is made up of numerous intertwined theological strands, including Unitarian Christianity, Humanism, Paganism, Process Theology, among others. Of these, one I find most attractive is the Transcendentalist movement, that radical offshoot of Unitarian Christianity. The Transcendentalist movement got its start with Emerson’s publication of his essay Nature, from which we quoted earlier. Much of what we hold dear in our UU movement we owe to Transcendentalists: our attention to social justice, our belief in the primacy of each individual’s own search for meaning, and particularly the respect for nature as a source of spiritual inspiration. As religious movement, we have inherited the Transcendentalists’ high reverence for the natural world. We tend to respect the world more than many other faiths, which see the world is merely the stage on which humans and god or the gods play out their various roles. God, for UUs who seek god, is found in nature, among the rocks and trees, and in the ecological interrelationships among the organic beings within an ecosystem. For the Transcendentalists, that god is one, that god is everywhere, and that god is within everyone.


It’s been hard to watch the unfolding of the oil spill that continues in the Gulf, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, as pictures roll in of birds covered thick in oil, beaches ruined with slick, and satellite images of the blackened gyre that continues to form and spin, difficult to stop after repeated attempts. Carol Howard Merritt, a friend who once served a church in Louisiana, says that when she saw those pictures, she “felt that the soul of our nation was drowning in the muck, along with our precious wildlife. … Looking at those white graceful egrets covered in slick, black oil reminds me of what we have done. There is something majestic hidden in that marshland, something that we have destroyed. In many ways, our soul lives there, and it is irreparably damaged.”

I feel a strong sense of personal remorse about this incident, since many in my family work in the ‘oil bidness’ as they say in Texas. I did too, briefly, in college, where on a co-op job, I helped design oil refineries for one of the big Houston firms. I don’t think any of my family truly believes in the ‘drill baby drill’ craziness of Palin and the Tea Party crowd, but there is a confidence among many in that business that oil extraction can be done safely, responsibly, and in an environmentally sound manner -- until this.

But even now, at a distance from the oil business, it would be easy to be contrite; as I drive my second-hand Prius and buy locally grown produce through the CSA. But I know better. We are all deeply intertwined in this, we all contribute to these problems by virtue of being alive in this country, with its addiction to oil. Even though most of us work for a better world, we are complicit.

Thich Nhat Hahn tells us:

"I am the forest that is being cut down.
I am the rivers and the air that are being polluted,
and I am also the person who cuts down the forest
and pollutes the rivers and the air.
I see myself in all species,
and I see all species in me. [4]

Last Sunday we had a little musical revue here, “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long”, based on some of Ogden Nash’s writing from the early nineteen sixties. Some of his poetry almost makes me nostalgic. Bacteriological warfare. Conquering space. Intercontinental ballistic missiles blasting the air with roars and whistles. Nuclear fallout. Bacteria issuing forth to prowl.

A half century ago, and our problems seemed so easy then!

Our world is more complicated now. It seems that as we solve one of those old problems, two new more intractable problems take its place. Bacteriological warfare may be banned by treaty, but genetic modification of living organisms can be done in a well equipped high-school.[5] The threat of full scale nuclear war between superpowers may be decreased, but the new danger is a small-scale nuclear exchange launched between small nations with deep grudges. Even a relatively small war involving primitive nukes has the potential to create a nuclear winter that would starve much of the human race and perhaps end civilization as we know it.[6] And I haven’t even started to consider the problem of global climate change.

Underneath all of these problems is the problem of greed. We want too much, more than the earth can deliver. According to a research organization called the Global Footprint Network, we’ve been running a deficit with the earth since 1986. As they put it, “Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.4 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and five months to regenerate what we use in a year.”[7]

Population is a big part of this problem, certainly. We’ve grown from about 3 billion people in the good old days of Ogden Nash’s poem, to nearly 7 billion now. Projections suggest we’ll reach over 9 billion by 2050.

Bad enough, but things used to look more dour. The amazing thing that has happened is that birthrates have dropped from almost five children per woman in the middle of the last century to about two and a half children per woman, with trends continuing down. Often this is the result of women simply having more control of their lives, and being allowed to make their own choices. Programs such as microloans so they can start small businesses and achieve some financial independence help. Better access to contraceptives helps, too. Slowing population growth is great news, but it has national economists in many countries apoplectic because how can you have GDP growth without population growth? Some are even pushing policies to increase birthrates.

The other half of the problem is increasing desire for material wealth worldwide. One interesting comparison is made by Oregon State University statistician Paul Murtaugh, who studied the carbon footprint of having babies in different parts of the world. He concludes that today, one American baby with its descendants will have the same carbon footprint as fifty-five babies with their progeny in India.[8] Fifty five! That’s a huge difference!

But the more pernicious problem is that these consumption patterns are changing. As the head of one non-governmental organization put it, in a Mother Jones article: "The irony is that just as some Americans are starting to learn to live more like traditional Indians—becoming vegetarian, buying locally, eating organic—aspiring middle-class Indians are trying to live more like over-consuming Americans. The question really is, which kind of people do we want less of?"[9]

And the related question is, can we decrease our overconsumption faster than our population growth, so that we are able to reach a sustainable state? Because if we don’t do it, the earth will do it for us, and it will not be pretty. As Tony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley put it, "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people."

Environmental sustainability is a difficult problem that will require great creativity and courage of thought as well as concerted action if we are to resolve it. When we face difficult problems we are wise to turn to the wisdom of those who preceded us and the lessons of past experience for guidance. In particular, we might look to our own Unitarian history.

The Transcendentalists were able to take on some difficult problems in their time. They opposed slavery in a time when slavery was almost universally accepted. They opposed American wars of expansion, in particular the war which acquired Texas from Mexico. They worked for women’s rights, at a time when women had no vote or property rights.

I have no doubt that the Transcendentalists would be at the forefront of modern eco-justice work. They understood innately the interconnection of all life, and would see that our actions here could cause harm to others elsewhere.

We are part of life and it is part of us. This is, I think, the essence of the spiritual intuition of many of the Transcendentalists. This sense of loss of ego or of false separateness, of being connected with the all, is a strong strand that runs through Unitarianism and reaches down to us today and has become a core theology for many of us.


So today is the last worship service of our regular church year.

I ask you to do two things this summer, that are really two forms of the same thing. The first is to come to Sunday worship here at UUYO this summer. We are changing what we do in our summer services, and holding worship, rather than talks. Worship is attending to things of worth, and we hope to have Sunday morning experiences that are worthy of your presence. This is experimental, and I know we will have successes and make mistakes. Help us as we explore this new way of doing things, help us to make it better, to make it more worthy.

The second thing is to take yourself out into nature, when you can. Even on some Sunday mornings, if you must (I can’t believe I’m suggesting this) take yourself out, and attend to things of worth, by being in nature.

The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore speaks from joyful experience, “The stream of life that runs through my veins … is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks in tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.”[10]

It is not just that we are interconnected, as our seventh principle suggests, we are embedded in life. Being in nature reminds us of this deep connection, this unity of life, that the Eastern mystics knew and the Transcendentalists came to understand.

Seek your own interior spiritual understanding, follow your own intuition about the nature of things. Follow Thoreau’s lead, and “Make time for intelligence with the earth”. Perhaps from the earth you will learn what you are called to do, to preserve all of us, to save our unified soul, and to create a sustainable world. May it be so.

Notes:

1 “Ecotherapy – the green agenda for mental health” http://www.mind.org.uk/assets/0000/2138/ecotherapy_report.pdf
2 Research on the importance of nature to well-being and functioning
http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/flourishing-lives.php?p=cGlkPTE3MiZpZD02Njk=
3 http://tribalchurch.org/?p=1618
4 Thich Nhat Hahn, Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book, 2000, p. 33
5 “Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering” NY Times, Feb. 10, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14Biology-t.html
6 “South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering?” Scientific American Jan. 2010,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-nuclear-war
7 Global Footprint Network http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
8 “Population: The Last Taboo” Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
9 http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
10 Rabindranith Tagore, "Stream of Life", Gitangali, verse 69.

State of the Church

I’m teaching a class now, “Crafting the Sermon Within You” on Tuesday nights -- you’re welcome to join us. Last Tuesday, we were learning about types of sermons. There’s the ‘no no no yes’ form where you reject a number of alternatives, the ‘oops ugh aha whee yeah’ form [1] where you lead the listener on a journey down into a problem and then out again, the ‘plot and moves’ form [2] where ideas just line up as stories and points leading hopefully to a conclusion. I use that form a lot. Then there’s the traditional deductive form where you announce your thesis, make some supporting points, then summarize in a conclusion. Matt Latimer, one of George W. Bush’s speechwriters, tells us in his book Speech-less, that the former president insisted his speeches use this introduction, three points, and conclusion form, which is why his speeches were usually boring.[3]

So allow me to be boring today -- and give you my conclusion, about the state of the church, first. I think the state of the church is pretty darn good. I think this church is doing better than a great many other Unitarian Universalist churches. For one thing, we’ve grown in numbers, from about 105 members last year, to 122 now, which bucks a declining trend in the Unitarian Universalist denomination at large. Our finances are in good shape, primarily because our gas bill has declined significantly this year. Yes, it’s true that some of that savings is because we’ve had the heat shut off for the remodel, but most of that decline is actually due to competitive gas pricing in this region.

On the qualitative side, I think the church is doing splendidly, too. Now I need to admit I’m a little weak at qualitative evaluation and judgment. I tend to see things through rose-colored glasses, maybe a bit too optimistically. But I’d like to support this conclusion by appealing to our mission statement.

I think the mission statement is the guide-star for this church, or any church, for that matter. UUYO’s mission statement is a good one. Let’s read it together, it’s on the back of your order of service:

"Our Mission is to build a diverse and transformative spiritual community, help people live lives of wholeness, and promote justice, peace, and religious freedom."
Let’s take these three phrases as our three talking points, and see how we are doing and where we need to go on each of them.

The first phrase is “to build a diverse and transformative religious community.” Certainly we are becoming more diverse, and that is exciting. It is also challenging for we are not all alike: we come from different backgrounds, jobs, ethnicities, classes, and faith traditions. But we transform ourselves by living with and loving that diversity.

I think of our reading from Ibn Arabi, a medieval Spanish Sufi mystic and philosopher. His words talk of a kind of spiritual transformation:

"There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith...
But now my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
My religion is love.

And he tells us, “whichever path love takes, is the path of my faith".

I see this here! I see people changing in a way that moves from skepticism and rejection, to listening, to finding and following the path of optimism and love. We realize that this is a journey that love’s caravan takes, and we are on that journey. It is a transformative journey that brings us into greater understanding and compassion for one another.

So how is this manifesting? I’m really impressed at the energy level in the congregation. People love to be here. You know it when you come in: people are talking, connecting, reconnecting. There is hope in the air, new possibility, opportunity. We’re being more intentional in how we welcome and include visitors and newcomers, which ranges from things like Marcia Malmer’s new nametag board to improved contact with newcomers by Betsy Johnquest and others. All of us are -- or can be-- part of this transformation.

The second part of our mission statement is “help people live lives of wholeness”.
I struggled when I chose the opening hymn this morning, or rather, when it chose us. It is a favorite hymn of mine, and brings back fond memories of my early days, just joining a UU church. But it suggests something that I’m not sure I completely agree with today. ‘May nothing evil cross this door’ implies that evil, ill fortune, hatred and raucous shout are always out there, outside us. That all we need to do is create a place that is free of all these things, and every casual corner will become a shrine.
If we don’t acknowledge the possibility that these negative things, these shadows are also within us, then we fail to do the work to integrate them, to convert them into something useful, to create wholeness. We need to confront the possibility that we all slip, that we all are unskillful at times, and we address this by providing ways that we can recover gracefully when we do slip. We need to be ready to counter thoughtless but unkind remarks, and to support those who need help responding or reframing what they mean. We need to practice ways of directly addressing people who upset us, rather than complaining about them to others.

The good news is I see this happening all the time. I see people with vastly different working styles coming together on projects, taking the time to smooth out the difficult parts in their work. I see people standing up for others, often for new people, when thoughtless or categorizing comments are made. I see covenants, agreements on how we want to interact and be with each other, being used in groups and meetings.  I see people making room for others, realizing that while the contributions of some may appear to be the Squirrel’s pebbles, and not the Monkeys’ stones, those contributions are still needed and valued.[4]
I’m very gratified that so many people have explored their own growth and wholeness through some of the adult education programs we’ve been able to offer. The eight-week Building Your Own Theology class was fully subscribed, and attendance was typically twelve people -- which is phenomenal. Our Adult Forums have been a solid part of our life together here this year, organized primarily by Lowell Satre. I’m hoping that in the future other classes and ongoing programs will be created by energetic and passionate participants here at UUYO.

At the same time, I hope we can devote more energy to helping our young people live lives of wholeness through our Religious Education program. First a shout-out to Laura Goist, who has provided needed stability and leadership to our RE program for nearly a decade as its director. She is stepping down at the end of this church year and we are searching for a new Director for our RE program in the next few weeks. We will need to be very mindful in supporting and growing our RE program and supporting its new leadership, since we will have both a new Director and a new RE committee. Let’s remember that children and youth are an important part of our diversity. They provide a sense of continuity to our movement that those of us who come out of other faiths may not bring, and they will carry that into our future.

Finally, our mission statement calls us to “promote justice, peace and religious freedom”. I’m sure many of us would consider this third area as our greatest strength, for this is where we are out in the world.

Our Board of Trustees has been reading Mike Durall’s book The Almost Church Revisited. I have some extra copies for those who’d like to read it. One of the points that has energized the board is the idea of a ‘public’ versus a ‘private’ church [5]. A public church is out in the world, doing things. It has a reputation for serving the community and seeking change. It spends a significant part of its resources including money outside of itself.

I hope that our All Church Social Justice Project will be the start of a more organized and clearer public face for UUYO. Special thanks to Susie Beiersdorfer and Steve Oravecz for beginning the process of creating this project. We are at the place in the process where you can suggest project ideas and areas. If you are interested, talk to me or to Steve.

But whatever project we choose to do, and that choice will be made next year, remember that there is a place for you. Remember these words from Howard Thurman: “Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

What the world needs-- what we in this church need -- is for you to come alive. Whether coming alive means working on an All Church project, or working in a social justice area around your own passion… Whether coming alive is ushering or planting hostas or leading a group…   Whether coming alive just being part of the church community by taking classes, coming to worship, or forum… We need you to come alive, by being with us.

So here’s the conclusion. I think we’re doing great. But I also am aware that our work continues, and that we will continue to work on some of our current goals and create new goals as we begin our next church year in September.

I remember visiting a small church in Houston many years ago. They had just bought a building and were very proud. It was strip-mall space that had formerly been a gym and aerobics studio. The sanctuary still had mirrors on one wall, which they covered with paper and cloth on Sunday mornings. I was impressed with this high-energy bunch and struck up a conversation with the finance person at coffee hour. We compared notes, for I was the finance chair at a much larger church. She said, “Do you still have to run stewardship campaigns, even at your size?” I said, “Yes, and it requires quite a bit of organization with all the people involved.” She said, “So it doesn’t get easier, then?” She seemed crestfallen, that growth wouldn’t automatically solve their financial problems.

We don’t grow to make things easier. We grow because we are responding to a need in our community for liberal religion. We grow because people need us, and they come, and they find a spiritual home with us. Our growth is a byproduct of doing good work, of responding to our mission, and serving people that we know and people that we don’t know yet -- people who may not have even heard of us, but who yearn for what we have to offer.

Marge Piercy [6] reminds us that connections sometimes grow underground, that more than half a tree is in the soil, that we too, make connections slowly. The work is done in the dark, or in the background, it is not obvious. What looks like a thicket and bramble is interconnected with our equivalent of runs and burrows and lairs. Of course part of transformation is coming to know, and helping others know that the wilderness of this world is full of what we need, that we need only keep reaching out and keep bringing in. 

She reminds us that after all the work, digging, planting, tending and growth, the harvest does come. And of course, after the harvest, there will be another season, and another year, and more work and more harvest. Many of you know this, you who’ve been here two or three or four decades, you know this cycle well. You, we, all of us show up for the planting, and the tending, and the harvest. We acknowledge the fruits of our work here, we are grateful for its transformative power, and in its season we look forward to a fruitful harvest.

1 Eugene Pier, The Homiletical Plot, 2001.
2 Ronald Allen, Patterns of Preaching, 1998, p. 87-89.
3 Latimer, Speech-less: Tales of a White-house Survivor, 2009, p. 182.
4 “How Squirrel Got It’s Stripes” (used as Story for All Ages) http://www.healingstory.org/crisis/squirrel/how_squirrel_got_stripes.html
5 Michael Durall, The Almost Church Revisited, 2009, p. 3.
6 Marge Piercy, “Connections Are Made Slowly”, SLT #568

Mother’s Day for Peace

My mother was not a sentimental woman, so Mother’s Day was not a big deal in our house.  As a family, we probably celebrated Mother’s Day more after she passed away, as a day to visit the place where her ashes were scattered and to remember her, than we ever did when she was alive.

I think my mother objected to the Mother’s Day focus on motherhood as the primary identity for a woman. She  she found that identity limiting and life-denying. She was one of those closet feminists of the 60s and 70s, active in many related organizations like League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, reluctantly active in the Methodist Church, and then only to run the food pantry and occasionally to stir up trouble in their version of Adult Forum. Toward the end of her life, she admitted to me that if she had her druthers, she would have joined the Unitarian Church.

So Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday in my house, growing up. I think my mother would have been far happier with Mother’s Day if she’d known a bit about the real history of the day. If she had been aware of that history, she would have known a kindred spirit, another strong woman, an icon, a predecessor in women’s rights and justice work. This woman was Julia Ward Howe, the founder of the original Mother’s Day holiday, then called Mother’s Day for Peace.

Julia Ward Howe was born in New York in 1819, to a wealthy banker. She had family in Boston, and through them encountered Unitarianism, reading and hearing and meeting William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. She married Samuel Howe, who worked as an educator of children with multiple handicaps. She switched from the Episcopal religion of her youth to Unitarianism, attending Theodore Parker’s church, which was the nexus of the radical anti-slavery movement.

She began a career as a writer, and published anonymously, for her work was opposed by her husband. Marriage troubles continued. They disagreed about attending Theodore Parker’s church, which Samuel considered too informal -- he complained that people read newspapers during the service, and some got up and left during the sermon[1] -- so the family instead began to attend Rev. James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples. Clarke, a Unitarian minister, became a close friend of the Howes.

As our closing hymn, we’ll sing Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ward Howe. This hymn was included in the 30’s era Unitarian hymnal “Hymns of the Spirit.” 

This hymn was published in the Atlantic Magazine in 1862, and increased Julia Ward Howe’s prominence as a writer and speaker, so it’s important to this story. She tells about writing this hymn in her autobiography.

We were invited, one day, to attend a review of troops at some distance from the town. My dear minister was in the carriage with me, as were several other friends. To beguile the rather tedious drive, we sang from time to time snatches of the army songs so popular at that time, concluding, I think, with
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground;
His soul is marching on."
The soldiers seemed to like this, and answered back, "Good for you!" Mr. Clarke said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune ?" ...

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, " I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed my writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, "I like this better than most things that I have written."[2]

Her story is just another reminder that the middle of the night is good for more than merely sleeping!

We also heard earlier Julia Ward Howe’s own reflection on her work creating the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Howe, with her husband and many other Unitarians, was involved in the Sanitary Commission, the predecessor to the Red Cross, so they were well acquainted with the horrors of the Civil War. So for Howe to see another war developing in Europe, in countries she had visited and loved, pushed her to agitate in opposition to that war, and to all war. She went to work, writing to prominent women around the world, even traveling to Europe, to promote her peace crusade. She initiated a Mother’s Peace Day observance the second Sunday in June, which was held for a number of years.

This Mother’s Day for Peace died out, but the idea of a Mother’s Day was resurrected by Anna Jarvis in West Virginia in 1907 as a memorial day for women. This gradually spread and became a national holiday in 1914.[3]

After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe became increasingly involved in the work for women’s suffrage and larger issues of women’s rights. She noted in her autobiography, “During the first two thirds of my life I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one. ... In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me a world of thought and of character quite beyond the limits within which I had hitherto been content to abide. The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood, -- woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances.”[4] Howe cofounded the New England Woman’s Club, and was founder or president of several suffrage organizations, and founded a suffrage newspaper, the “Woman’s Journal.”[5] 

As Howe gained greater prominence as a writer, she began to speak publicly, and even preached on occasion, in churches of various denominations when she traveled. She received much encouragement in this work from her minister, James Freeman Clarke.

At a Unitarian denominational meeting in 1875, she organized a gathering of women ministers, which she held at her home church, the Church of the Disciples. This became an ongoing organization, the Women’s Ministerial Conference.[6] Realize that women in the pulpit were a relatively new phenomenon in this era, so these conventions were an innovation.

Howe’s minister, James Freeman Clarke coined a phrase that, good or bad, became a kind of slogan for Unitarianism. This phrase, “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever”, was the last of Clarke’s “Five Points of a New Theology”[7], and it became an epithet for the kind of rosy optimism that our tradition sometimes still struggles with. I don’t want to suggest that progress toward a better world is not possible, but I think most of us would agree that it is not steady and certain,  and that the cost of progress is occasional regress.

Howe did not live to see the fruits of her work for suffrage and women’s rights -- she died a full decade before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed and ratified. In her autobiography, she laments the loss of energy and vitality in the women’s movement as younger women failed to take up the cause, and as she put it, “Death had done his usual work on our number.”[8]

The Mother’s Day for Peace project also faltered, in part because so many potential women supporters became focused on the suffrage movement.

Howe’s relationship with her husband had always been strained, because of his lack of respect for her talents. Toward the end of his life, he softened his attitude toward her work and apologized for his transgressions, and the marriage became more harmonious.

Unfortunately, Howe’s finances, never fully in her control, were mismanaged by her husband until his death and then by a cousin, to the point that she had to go on the lecture circuit to make ends meet.

Howe died in 1910. Her eulogy was given by Samuel Atkins Eliot II, then the president of the American Unitarian Association.[9]  There is a sad irony here. Eliot is now seen as a misogynist, and one consequence of his leadership was that women were driven out of the Unitarian ministry. As one UUA description put it: “Eliot's ... gender discrimination effectively weeded out Unitarian women ministers for the next 50 years.”[10]

I feel a great personal sympathy for Howe’s story, for there are a few parallels in my own mother’s far more ordinary life. My mother was trained as a nurse, but after she married she was discouraged from working outside of the home, in an era when many women found careers and life choices narrowed. She found some outlets in church work and school, but even these were limited. Finances were a source of friction.

I’m sure her story was repeated by many women in her era.  I think my mother could easily have quoted the poet and said,

“ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard”[11]

I think Julia Ward Howe could have said that too.

I think all of us as woman or as man or claiming both or neither identities, come to realize that progress in our lives is not onward and upward forever. Rather, as Zamora tells us,

Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.[12]

Can we find solace in this crossing, even as we suffer to be driven from our charted course again and again? Perhaps we can, whether with our own children or with the children of those we love:

go forward, holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.[13]

And so may it be --
May each of us abide,
in brief living instantiation,
part of that long line of creation,
mother to child, and father too,
that carries us all,
in fits and starts,
through storms and torments,
gradually, generation by generation,
onward and upward, in hopeful progress, 
toward that long future destination,
that lives only in our dreams.

Notes:
1 Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1899, p. 244.
2 ibid., p. 273-275.
3 http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejuliaward/a/julia_ward_howe_4_mothers_day.htm
4 Reminiscences, p. 372-373.
5 http://www.juliawardhowe.org/timeline.htm
6 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/marybillings.html
7 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/jamesfreemanclarke.html
8 Reminiscences, p. 393.
9 http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Julia_Ward_Howe
10 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/samuelatkinseliotii.html
11 Daisy Zamora, “Mother's Day”
12 ibid.
13 ibid.

Everyday Meditation

So there’s an old joke that goes:

Two men meet on the street.
One asks the other: "Hi, how are you?"
The other one replies: "I'm fine, thanks."
"And how's your son? Is he still unemployed?"
"Yes, he is. But he is meditating now."
"Meditating? What's that?"
"I don't know. But it's better than sitting around and doing nothing!"

I’m pretty good at sitting around doing nothing, but meditation is something else entirely. I've attempted to practice meditation since college. My early attempts were  unsuccessful -- they were a lot like what Philip Simmons described. Go find a beautiful or meaningful spot and then expect something miraculous to happen. I was always disappointed.  I don’t believe I am the only one who has had this experience with meditation.

But about ten years ago, I found myself in a stressful, stagnant job situation, with a long and painful commute. At a church retreat, I encountered meditation again.  I learned a technique, and began a practice, and have meditated most every morning since then. I'll talk about this technique, called passage meditation, later on.

My key learning is not that Passage Meditation is the right technique for everyone.  A few years ago, that is what I might have told you. My key learning is that I now accept the ordinariness of meditation.  If I am in an ordinary spot, like my chair at home, I close my eyes and meditate for my half hour in the morning, and it is ordinary. If I'm in a beautiful spot -- like last week on the balcony of my brother's home in Puerto Rico, looking off over the hills, and the city, toward the sea, listening to the birds and enjoying the warmth of the sunrise, for example -- I close my eyes, and meditate, and it is ordinary.

What I've learned in my practice is to not seek perfection. I meditate not to seek some kind of blissful experience or nirvana, but for a better day, everyday.  I try to seek my own version of what the Buddha called the 'middle way'. To the Buddha, the middle way was the path between living a life devoted to sensory pleasures, and the life of ascetic denial. According to the tradition, Buddha had left his position of privilege and luxury as a prince to seek spiritual understanding as an ascetic. He nearly starved to death, and came to realize that the ascetic life is no solution either. Buddha's awakening is in part a path of moderation between self-indulgence and denial.

So, in my own practice, the middle way means that I remain faithful to the practice. I try to maintain my half hour of meditation every morning, even when I don't feel motivated to do it. I do slip, and sometimes I have an immediate deadline and meditation time is impossible. But I also do not practice at extreme levels. I do not get up at 3:30 in the morning to sit for 4 hours as one friend described doing for many years. I sit comfortably upright in a chair, knowing full well my body is not able to contort into the full lotus position illustrated on the cover of the Order of Service.  Most importantly: I do not beat myself up when things don't go quite right and my mind does wander. Which it does. Together now, let’s take a closer look at the wandering monkey-mind.

If you’re willing, I'd like to try a little experiment with you. Let’s start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close your eyes.  For the next minute, all you have to do is silently repeat your own name. Just that. Very simple! Just repeat your name over and over again.  I’ll sound this bowl to tell you when the minute is up.

ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL
So tell us, how many of you were able to repeat your name without interruption for the entire minute?  Show of hands. How many had a few other stray thoughts wandering into your consciousness? How many of you had nothing BUT stray thoughts playing through your mind? You're with me!
Does this show you something of the nature of the mind? The mind wanders here, wanders there, aimlessly and without much logic. It’s like an untrained puppy that’s chasing a butterfly here, a ball over there, and oh look there’s a cat with a tail like mine, I think I’ll just check that out too.   But often these thoughts are stressful – they are about old wounds, embarrassments, things we should have done, or things we need to do, worries about the days to come.

We know that using meditation and related spiritual practices can bring on physiological changes, such as lowering blood pressure and heart rate. More recent studies have shown that it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol.[1]

A few years ago, Richard Davidson at the University of Madison found that the left prefrontal lobes of Buddhist meditators are more active than those who don’t practice.[2] Now the left prefrontal lobe is associated with positive emotions, such as hope and love for one another. What’s fascinating to me is that the research showed that this heightened activity in the left prefrontal lobe went on all the time, not just when these people were meditating.

One study showed that meditation actually increased the size of the prefrontal cortex and related areas. The researcher, Sara Lazar, at Massachusetts General Hospital, points out "The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections."[3] It is further evidence that meditators, in Lazar’s words, “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.”

So there is increasing scientific evidence that meditation is good for you and good for your brain. But when I started, I didn't have this evidence to motivate me. I was motivated by the simple awareness that it was good for my mind. I noticed that after a few weeks of practice, I was becoming less stressed out, more relaxed. More importantly, other people close to me began to notice this too. People began to comment that I seemed to have a calm presence, and a steady, joyful nature.

So, getting back to our experiments with meditation earlier-- if the mind wanders all over the place, how do we use meditation to cause it to stop? I think the reality is that most of us can't really get the mind to stop, for more than a few seconds at a time. We want to simply slow it down, to reduce the torrent of thoughts to a reasonable flow, then maybe to a trickle.

What we have to be careful about  though, is  getting annoyed with ourselves when thoughts come up. Then we'll constantly be annoyed and we'll get frustrated with meditation and we’ll give it up. Believe me, I've been there, and gave it up many times in my younger years.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche offers a more joyful and relaxed approach to meditation, which I offer you today. He calls this objectless attention meditation, and we'll try a bit of it here. He suggests we simply rest our minds. That's his term, we rest our minds. So let's try a short, simple meditation, resting our minds. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.
Now just rest your mind: "as though you've just finished a long day of productive work. Just let go and relax. You don't have to block whatever thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise, but neither do you have to follow them. Just rest in the open present, simply allowing whatever happens to occur. If thoughts or emotions come up, just allow yourself to be aware of them…. This doesn't mean letting your mind wander aimlessly among fantasies, memories or daydreams. There's still some presence of mind that may be loosely described as a center of awareness. You may not be fixating on anything in particular, but you're still aware, still present to what's happening in the here and now."4 We'll continue for another minute, just resting the mind, noticing but not following thoughts and emotions.
ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL

So how was that? Did you seem to have fewer thoughts arise than with the previous exercise? Good! More? Also good!
Sometimes objectless meditation is too much of nothing, and we need to offer our minds something simple to hold on to. This is why many meditation techniques have us focus on breathing, or counting, or resting our eyes on an object. Let's try a meditation on something that's always around us: lets meditate for a couple of minutes on the sounds in the room. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.

SOUND BOWL
Now just allow yourself to focus on sounds that are around you. Your breath. Your heartbeat. The street sounds. You don't need to identify, or analyze, these sounds. Just be aware. As your mind wanders, just come back to the sounds. If you mind rests in objectless attention for a few seconds, that's OK too. We'll continue with the sounds for a couple more minutes.
TWO MINUTES - SOUND BOWL

I've come to realize that having both objectless and a variety of object attention meditations in our spiritual practices toolkit is good: we can choose different meditations as our situation demands.  I've recently been adding these techniques to my meditation practice for a deeper experience.

My primary meditation technique is called Passage Meditation[5]. It was taught by Eknath Easwaran, a Fulbright Scholar in literature at Berkeley. In this meditation technique, we focus on reciting, slowly and silently, a passage of sacred text, such as Scripture or mystical poetry.

Now it is a little hard to teach this in our limited time, since we do not all have memorized texts in our minds. So lets do a variation. What I’d like to do is invite you into an attitude of meditation, and I will recite, at a slow meditative speed, a text by Lao Tzu, "The Best" So let’s again find our center, spine straight, and eyes softened or closed. Now, just listen as I recite these words. Don’t try to analyze them, just notice them going by.

The best, like water
Benefit all and do not compete.
They dwell in lowly spots,
that everyone else scorns.

Putting others before themselves
they find themselves in the foremost place
And come very near to the Tao.

In their dwelling, they love the earth;
In their heart, they love what is deep;
In their personal relationships, they love kindness;
In their words, they love truth;
In their world, they love peace.
in their personal affairs, they love what is right.
In action, they love choosing the right time.

It is because they do not compete with others
That they are beyond the reproach of the world.[6]

How was that? For some, it might be the perfect form of meditation, for others, it may not feel quite right. We each have our preferred tools in our kit.

There's an old analogy that I think is helpful in understanding what we try to accomplish in meditation. Our minds are like a cloudy sky. Most of the time we focus on the clouds, trying to pick out patterns, wondering if they are bringing rain, and so on. Meditation asks us to focus on the sky beyond the clouds.

Let me extend this analogy. My experience is that meditation lets us move beyond these low cumulonimbus clouds to find, not blue sky, but higher cirrus clouds. Maybe at times there is blue sky, and stars too, but the new clouds are with us too. They are different but they are still clouds. We move to a higher level of mindfulness, but we do not, at least most of us, reach that true awakening or nirvana that the mystics talk about. And that is OK. It should not be a near goal, that is, one we measure success or failure with. It is fine as a far goal, an aspiration, but if we want to make progress in meditation or in any spiritual practice, we need to accept the ordinary everydayness of our own abilities.

In his book Learning to Fall, Philip Simmons wrote about his mountain-top meditation experience, which was abruptly ended by an ant crawling on his back: "I had come for a miracle. What I got was an ant."[7]

He goes on: "Only now, years later, have I come to understand that the ant was the miracle." He says, "It was the ant that returned me to the world, that called me to another way of worship, the way of all things ordinary and small, the way of all that is imperfect, the way of stubbornness and error, the way of all that is transitory and comes to grief. The ant was my messenger, calling me back to a world that in truth I had never left."[8]

So my hope is that in all of our spiritual practices, we begin to find those ants, those annoyances and distractions, and like Simmons, begin to see them for what they are, messengers, calling us back to our place in the world.





Notes:
1 Meditation really does reduce stress, New Scientist Magazine, 13 October 2007
2  The Colour of Happiness, New Scientist Magazine  24 May 2003
3 Meditation builds up the brain, New Scientist Magazine, 15 November 2005
4 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living, p. 139.
5 see http://www.easwaran.org/page/96
6 Eknath Easwaran, God Makes the Rivers to Flow, 2003, p. 141.  
7 Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall, 2000, p. 35.
8 ibid. p. 35-36.

Heads, Hearts, Hands - Our Service to the Community

Last May, I was actively -- maybe even frantically -- looking for a ministry position, and a friend mentioned to me that I ought to consider First UU of Youngstown. I was intrigued. As I began to learn about this congregation, I was drawn to your focus on social justice work.

There is a standard online form that congregations use to advertise for ministers, and on that form there is this question: Does the congregation have a mission -- not a mission statement, but a glowing coal at its center -- and if so, what is it? This 'glowing coal' question is probably the most important question ministers examine, when they consider a congregation.

How did UUYo answer? Your answer was two parts. The first part was "we are determined to maintain a liberal religious presence in the Mahoning Valley and will do all within our power to keep it here." That makes sense, check, and I know that many UU churches have the same aspiration.

The second part was what caught my eye. It read: "Second, we are committed to social justice and are working with other groups in our town to bring about change as quickly as possible."

As I looked over the materials, and began to understand the congregation, I came to see that this is true. Most significantly, you have chosen to remain in this location on the north side, in what many would call the 'inner city'. That has meant tradeoffs: worries about maintaining this building, concerns that some potential members may stay away out of fear of this part of town.

Also, I've come to see that the congregation is involved in many social justice activities currently, plus it has a long history of other causes. Let me list a few.

• The congregation was instrumental in forming the 'Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing Our Neighborhoods' better known as ACTION, which was involved in early anti-corruption work, and continues working on crime, health, and economic issues.
• The congregation was also instrumental in founding the local Montessori school, and before that, we housed a Head Start program here.
• Members of the congregation founded a food coop, the Good Karma Food Coop, which operated for many years. More recently, the congregation founded the Northside Farmers Market.
• We've been involved in supporting GLBTQ rights, and housed the PRIDE center here for many years. We continue to serve gay and lesbian youth and their allies with our Cocha Mocha group that meets here monthly.
• We have put our environmental consciousness into action through the Grey to Green Festival and Trees Pleeze and the Mahoning River Consortium.
• Universal Café and In Praise of the Arts are two other areas where we've explored art and education for the community.

It's amazing! For a small congregation, there is huge energy around social change. It is gratifying to be part of this, and to see lives changed by such efforts.

It's especially good to see so much energy going in so many different areas. I tell my minister friends that the opportunity for ministry in Youngstown is enormous. As social activist Dorothy Day said, "No one has the right to sit down and feel helpless, there's too much work to do."


But I want to point out a danger. All too often, the social justice work moves to the periphery of the congregation. It can become individual activities by individual people, and it can gradually become more and more disconnected from the church.

I remember attending the social action committee meetings of a large and successful church, and dreading these meetings. The meetings were essentially a 'go around' where everyone there talked about their own personal projects. Each one spoke more stridently than the next, trying to get others to admit that the speaker's project deserved more attention and time, and possibly more of the committee's miniscule budget. Nobody outside of the social justice crew wanted to be involved with this committee's activities! It was too painful to be loaded up with so much guilt.

Reverend Dick Gilbert is known in our movement for his work in social justice. His book, The Prophetic Imperative, is almost a Unitarian Universalist textbook on social justice; I know some in our social justice committee have studied it. Gilbert suggests that four pillars support the liberal church.
The first pillar is worship.[1] Gilbert reminds us that the word worship derives from the Anglo-Saxon word weorthscipe, which means "pointing to and celebrating that which is of worth."[2]  He reminds us that worship is much more than simply what happens here in the sanctuary, it can also "include informal experiences by which transcendent values break through the ordinary and move us to reconstruct our experiences, raising up symbols of our loftiest goals."[3]  Here at UUYo, we work, as part of our shared ministry, with Worship Associates and the Worship Team to craft and create good worship.

The second pillar is education. Here we include both education of our children and our adults, unifying these to create a lifelong learning experience. Religious education doesn't just happen in classrooms, but it happens throughout the entire church, all the time. I'm excited about our emerging Religious Education Team that will guide how we educate our children and youth.

The third pillar is a caring community. Gilbert sees this going beyond just pastoral care for the suffering, to the ordinary everyday relationship between us all. Gilbert tells us, "the caring community … is based on person-to-person, face-to-face, I-thou relationships."[4]  Our one-on-one conversations that we started last week help us to develop this caring community. Are you still committed to practicing the one-on-ones?

Gilbert relates a story how creating such a caring community is important in social justice work. He describes a situation where his church voted 156 to 1 to support a particular social justice resolution. He wrote this in his newsletter column:

Note to a minority of one: congregational democracy can be a difficult process. … It takes courage to vote one's convictions when it is clear one is going to be a small minority. Yet it is crucial to the process that this voice be heard. The minority, even of one, reminds the majority that conscience counts for something in liberal religion…The voice keeps the majority from becoming arrogant and self-righteous. We needed that vote for the good of us all.[5]

Gilbert cared for the one, even when he didn't agree with the position.

The fourth pillar is the community of moral discourse and action. This is the pillar of social action. While Gilbert reminds us that moral discourse happens everywhere in the church, he warns us: "Social action is not the central function of the church. It is a vital function, but it must emerge out of a religious community that serves well the functions of worship, caring and education. Social action is a necessary but not sufficient dimension for a Unitarian Universalist church."[6]


So, when a church has many members who are avidly focused on social justice concerns, how can it be that this pillar of social justice withers away and the work of social justice becomes so peripheral to the church? It's a paradox.

When I think back on those large church Social Action Committee meetings, I wonder if an answer to that paradox was that the members were so committed to their causes that they were unable to engage in the other pillars of the church. They focused on their own projects and passions, pushing them onto the church, rather then inviting a project to emerge out of the church.

I will say that my story has a happy ending. That large church did some serious work around changing the nature of its social justice program. There were false starts and conflict. But the church has made social justice work much more central to its lived mission than it was before.


Way back in September, during our Startup Workshop, the idea of an All-Church Social Justice Project emerged. I do not recall who suggested that, but I do know that I was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea, and it became one of the five broad goals that we planned to work on this year. We've had numerous discussions over the course of months in our Social Action Committee (thanks Susie!) and in the Adult Forum about this idea. We're moving forward toward a plan to communally choose and launch such a project, probably in the fall.

It is time to begin to think about what specifically might make a good all church project. What communities might we serve? What needs might we meet? What injustice might we seek to change?
I want to note that I have great passion around the idea of the all church project, and it's promise to make the pillar of social justice more central to the life of the church. At the same time, I don't have strong preference for what we do. Whether we work with food security, or schools, or economic justice, or housing, concerns me less than whether we are able to bring social justice work more to the core of our life here.


How do we choose a good project then? How do we choose one that will strengthen our social justice action? Let me offer a few thoughts.

First, the project should be big enough: something that we do for several years and which anyone in our community may participate. Let me illustrate with a counterexample. A few years ago I participated in a church service trip to post-Katrina New Orleans. It was a wonderful trip, but it would not be a good all-church project. Cost and time commitment limited it a few people. In New Orleans, locals asked us, 'why aren't you devoting your energy to the homeless living close to our own church'? That was a good question that we did not adequately answer.

Ideally the project should allow lots of people to be involved, whatever their level of commitment, whatever their skill level, whatever their age.

Secondly, the project should balance aspects of service, education, and social change. Service can bring us in direct contact with those we are trying to help, and help us understand them in their humanity. I recall well a time when I made coffee and had conversations with people who were homeless in Denver. The experience opened my eyes to the complexity of their lives and to the uniqueness of each person's situation.

Education is essential if we are to make sense of the underlying causes of injustice and oppression so that we might correct them. An example is a Unitarian Universalist Service Committee trip to Guatemala where we learned about US-funded violence and genocide in the 1980's. We were surprised to meet many Christian missionaries traveling on service trips in Guatemala who had no clue that these atrocities had happened.

Third, social change includes bearing witness to injustice, advocating legislative changes, and organizing communities of the oppressed. Social change is essential if we are to actually correct the causes of injustice rather than simply address the symptoms. I'm told that when this church was involved in the early days of ACTION, that group was quite successful in using organizing techniques to address government corruption in the valley.

My sense is that a good project will balance all these aspects of social change. That way, it can energize the talents and passions of a wide variety of people in the congregation.

Finally, a good project should transform us spiritually. I recall the New Orleans trip that I mentioned earlier. We all confronted the reality that while our group was doing good work repairing just one family's house, we could see thousands of other houses abandoned or needing repair. We knew that each house represented a family uprooted and suffering. Our efforts were so miniscule and the magnitude of the need so enormous. We had to find ways to hold that tension, to not be overwhelmed, and to cherish the good we were doing.


So how do we proceed with creating, implementing, executing and evaluating an all-church social justice project? I know that Steve is hard at work on process details. When we start let's keep the poem by Margaret Wheatley[7] in mind:

There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
Ask “What’s possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking.
Notice what you care about.
Assume that many others share your dreams.
Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.
Talk to people you know.
Talk to people you don’t know.
Talk to people you never talk to.
Be intrigued by the differences you hear.
Expect to be surprised.
Treasure curiosity more than certainty.

And as we settle on a project and launch it, let's remember the second part of her poem,

Invite in everybody who cares to work on what’s possible.
Acknowledge that everyone is an expert about something.
Know that creative solutions come from new connections.
Remember, you don’t fear people whose story you know.
Real listening always brings people closer together.
Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world.
Rely on human goodness. Stay together.

Social justice work is at its core, spiritual work. It is work best done in community. Let us remember, as Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed tells us, "It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength is too limited to do all that must be done. Together our vision widens and our strength is renewed.[8]"

Notes:
1. Richard Gilbert, The Prophetic Imperative, Social Gospel in Theory and Practice, 2000, p. 121.
2. ibid. p. 122.
3. ibid.
4. ibid. p. 123.
5. ibid. p. 124.
6. ibid. p. 126.
7. Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, 2009, p. 166
8. Unitarian Universalist Association, Singing the Living Tradition, 1993, #580.