Rev. Lynn M. Acquafondata
November 29. 2009
For First Unitarian Universalist Church
Youngstown, Ohio
Cerberus [1] had an important job to do. The giant three headed dog with serpent’s tail, lion’s claws and a mane of snakes guarded the gates of the underworld. He fiercely challenged any ghosts who tried to leave or any live people who tried to enter. As we heard Orpheus managed to find a way past Cerberus, but Cerberus had back up. Hades would make sure that Orpheus paid a heavy price for his transgression.
Back in Pennsylvania earlier this fall a modern version of this story took place when a group of three visitors attended First UU Church of Indiana one Sunday morning carrying Bibles. After the sermon, one of the guests stood up and started to proselytize for Evangelical Christianity and attack UUs for devil worship. The minister asked him to sit down. He refused. Again she made it clear that his speech was inappropriate at this time and in this place. He continued speaking. She turned to the congregation and asked them to join in the closing hymn. The congregation stood to sing loudly and enthusiastically drowning out the words of the visitor. Afterwards the minister called the police for advice on handling the situation if that visitor should return. As a result of hate crimes that have taken place around the country including in a UU church in Tennessee a year ago, the police said do not let him enter, but call immediately if should return.
Gatekeeping plays a vital and necessary role whether it takes place in mythology, business or a UU church. The role and the methods of the gatekeeper need to fit the situation and serve the long term health and purposes of the region or organization it guards.
What do we UUs guard? Who are our gatekeepers? How do we know when we act wisely and enforce healthy boundaries or when we respond passively or reactively and prevent the growth of development of our congregations?
We can not recognize productive gatekeeping without first having a clear understanding of what we protect. Some people like to say that because Unitarian Universalists do not have a creed, we can believe anything we want. They are wrong.
In religious educations classes here this year the younger children are studying world religions by hearing the stories of children from around the world who follow a variety of faiths. They are learning how the teachings of other religions have inspired UU principles. Yet the classes make it clear that we do not believe all the same things or share all the same practices.
The older children are watching scenes from popular films and discussing the themes those films raise about life, belief and theology. Both curriculums show that UUs draw our wisdom from a wide variety of sources. We filter that wisdom through our own perspective and through the basic values of Unitarian Universalism. We believe that as long as we treat all people as valuable and worthwhile, there are multiple valid ways to live and practice religion. We believe in acting with respect for other people even those we do not agree with or understand. We do not accept religious perspectives in our communities which condemn others or assume that an individual or a group is bad or wrong because their views are different from our own.
When the visitor at the church in Indiana stood up and spoke, the Rev. Joan Sabatino did not criticize his views or try to convince him of UU beliefs, she just told him it was inappropriate for him to proselytize during a Sunday morning service. It would be equally inappropriate for a humanist UU to stand up in a worship service of born again Christians and present the merits of atheism. In fact doing that would go against our principles because it would show disrespect to other people and to their spiritual journey. We can treat people well and value our common humanity without agreeing with or accepting their religious views as our own.
That’s why basic UU principles are an ideal way to address some of the major problems in our world. As Scott Alexander wrote in our responsive reading today, Unitarian Universalism can make the world a better place through such actions as treating people with love in the face of hate, acting compassionately and seeking justice when we encounter brutality and fear, speaking from our conscience and modeling the use of the democratic process as a way to counteract tyranny and oppression. The gatekeepers of our religion guard a very precious treasure that has the power to change the world.
Despite our openness and acceptance, Unitarian Universalists do need to set boundaries and turn some people away. Although from time to time we are justified in acting as fierce guardians of the front door by asking people to leave, ideally setting boundaries takes place in a gentle, open and non-confrontational manner.
Congregations do this through sharing information about Unitarian Universalism and about our own congregation, handing out pamphlets, explaining what to expect in a typical Sunday service and letting visitors know our basic values and approach to religion. Unitarian Universalism is not a religion for everyone. We want people who think for themselves, who are actively engaged in theological interpretation and who wrestle with choices of how to live out this faith. Most of us came to this religion because we value this approach. Some people want a very different kind of religious experience. One woman who visited a UU church felt so overwhelmed by the pressures and struggles of daily life, that she wanted her religion to be the one place where things are clear. She wanted to come and sit quietly while the minister told her what to believe and how to live her life. Unitarian Universalism expected her to get involved in religion in ways she didn’t find nurturing, healing or comforting. There is nothing wrong with what this woman seeks, but she won’t find it in one of our congregations. We don’t need to send someone like this away. We can receive her warmly and explain what our religion is and what it asks of people. She will decide if this fits her needs or not.
We also let visitors know who we are through personal sharing. One of the congregations I belonged to held “This I Believe” Sundays on a regular basic in which two or three members share a personal story about why and how they became a UU and what it means for them to live life as a UU. When I lead introduction to Unitarian Universalism classes I always include a time for people to reflect on their own spiritual journey and then share a part of that journey. One typical class included a wide variety of people:
a recently divorced single father who had grown up Jewish, married a conservative Christian and later became agnostic;
a newly engaged couple who had come from Christian backgrounds, the woman helped lead her church youth group in high school, now she finds a spiritual connection in earth centered pagan practices;
a woman who had grown up Catholic, then spent a couple of decades sleeping in on Sundays and taking long hikes to nurture her spirit;
a man who had not grown up in any religious tradition, but is going through major changes in his life and seeks a community in which he can make friends and explore his philosophical ideas; and a woman who had rejected her conservative Protestant upbringing during a Christian Education class at the young age of 10, then raised her own children in a liberal Christian congregation, now she and her husband want a free and creedless religious community.
The people in this group, like all the classes I’ve led find intriguing commonalities as well as an interesting diversity of perspectives. The act of sharing and listening and acknowledging the value of each person’s life in progress says a lot about what it means to be a UU. Some people participate in this sharing feel at home in Unitarian Universalism. Others come and realize they seek a different kind of religion.
This sharing takes place in informal settings as well. When greeters and other members of the congregation smile and approach visitors, when they take the time to share a piece of their personal journey with a visitor, then the gate swings open and welcomes our guests to stay awhile and explore who we are. This doesn’t always happen naturally, so it helps to have a system in place to make the roles clear and easy to carry out. The church I served in Pittsburgh had a membership committee which organized a list for each Sunday including basic greeters and visitor greeters. Basic greeters say hello to everyone who arrives on Sunday morning and hand out bulletins. Visitor greeters focus on guests, showing them where to make a nametag, how to sign up to receive the newsletter, getting them information and a pamphlets about the church, making sure they find a comfortable seat, inviting them to coffee hour and introducing them to others. The gate swings wide when we leave seats available in especially inviting locations such as near the back and on the aisles and when we wear nametags so repeat visitors don’t have to struggle to remember the names of everyone they met last week. Nametags also serve as a convenient “cheat sheet” for those of us who struggle to remember names of people we know well.
There are so many ways to be welcoming while also giving a clear picture of who we are and are not. There are also many ways that we can and unfortunately do go wrong, sometimes without even realizing it.
I grew up Catholic, but as a teenager, I visited an Assembly of God church in my home town of Syracuse, NY. Everyone greeted me with the same question. It wasn’t, “What is your name?” or “How are you today?” or “What are you interested in?” Instead each person asked me, “Are you saved?” I returned two more times only because my brother gave me a ride and because the pastor’s son was cute. Obviously I wasn’t saved.
I used to tell that story with a smug attitude. “See what those Pentecostal Christians do! They don’t care about people. I’d never be one of them.” Then I started reflecting on things I’ve seen UUs do to visitors on Sunday mornings. To reassure any guests this morning, I’m just a visiting preacher myself, so none of these stories took place here.
During coffee hour at an unnamed UU congregation in the mid-West, a visitor started to share a story with a congregation member about the way God is moving in her life. The member shifted uncomfortably and interrupted. “We like to joke here,” she said, “that the last time anyone mentioned God at this congregation was when the janitor fell off the ladder.” The visitor never finished her story and didn’t return. What made the member say that? What did she protect? This UU may have thought that if too many of these spiritual and God focused people join, atheists may feel like a marginalized minority. But UUs do hold a variety of theological views including many UUs who are theist and affirm the influence of God in our lives, as well as many are pagan and many who are who are atheist or agnostic and those who don’t think in traditional spiritual terms at all. In addition we value a free search for truth and meaning. Unitarian Universalism thrives on a diversity of perspectives and ideas and an acceptance that there is not one true way even my way.
Some UU congregations portray this value by holding a congregational reflection time during the Sunday service after the sermon, in which anyone present can share their own perspective on the subject the minister just spoke about. It can lead to a profound exchange of ideas. Unfortunately this open sharing time degenerates in some congregations. In one UU fellowship, a woman stood up “talk back” time and berated people for drinking out of her well marked coffee mug the week before. No one stopped her, so she proceeded her tirade for a full 10 minutes of the Sunday service. Who lulled Cerberus to sleep at that congregation? The members willingness to tolerate this speech communicates that the impulses of one individual far outweigh the needs of the group.
At another church, the gatekeepers in this case, every member of the congregation used another technique. I’m sure they didn’t consciously think about it, but at coffee hour they gathered in small circles of three or four. One group tried to figure out whether they should continue holding the annual meeting on Saturday night or move it to Sunday morning. Another group started discussing the latest decision by the board to hire another staff member. A circle of close friends talked excitedly about last week’s service auction and shared a concern they had about a friend who didn’t make it to church that morning. No one noticed the visitors standing awkwardly and reading pamphlets.
In this case, members liked a small gathering. When visitors arrived they feared the congregation would grow too large and they wouldn’t know everyone anymore. They didn’t say directly to the guests, “This congregation is big enough already, please don’t come back,” but their actions achieved the same goal. The visitors didn’t feel a welcome place for them at this UU congregation.
We sometimes have gatekeepers in our midst who communicate barriers which do not accurately reflect the essence of Unitarian Universalism. Those guests do not know the truth, they just leave.
If we only let people into Unitarian Universalism who make us feel safe and secure, we lose the essence our religious tradition. To live out the values of Unitarian Universalism involves embracing people who will challenge our ideals in productive and growth inducing ways, even if we think of them as enemies and they make us uncomfortable.
This has happened in various ways throughout UU history. John Murray grew up a strict Calvinist in the 1700s. As an adult he became a committed Methodist. One day he was sent out to convert a young woman away from her heretical Universalist faith. They engaged in a conversation in which, though Murray did not admit it at the time her arguments convinced him instead of him converting her. He left feeling mortified and avoided Universalists for a period of time, but finally he sought out the Universalist church. John Murray went on to become a minister of that heretical faith tradition and ending up coming to America and starting Universalist churches here.
Moving forward to the late 1900s, Margot Adler, a Wiccan priestess and author became involved in Unitarian Universalism. You might know her as a National Public Radio correspondent. She wrote many books including Drawing Down the Moon, a history of paganism in America. I’m sure a few UUs felt nervous when she first walked into their congregation. Did she fit in our movement? What would she do to us? In an article from World Magazine in 1996, Margot Adler wrote, “ I guess I chose Unitarian Universalism because I need to live in balance. I love the fact that Unitarian Universalists have a good many atheists and humanists among them. After all, it's important to have a reality check, to have people who will bring us down to earth and say, "Stop all this intuitive garbage and look at the reality: this is a ceiling, this is a table, this is a floor. And by the way, get out of that trance: look at that homeless guy lying in the street. I can do all those wonderful, earth-centered spiritual things: sing under the stars, drum for hours, create moving ceremonies for the changes of seasons or the passage of time in the lives of men and women. But I also need to be a worldly, down-to-earth person in a complicated world--someone who believes oppression is real, that tragedies happen, that chaos happens, that not everything is for a purpose….And I think, in turn, the Pagan community has brought to Unitarian Universalism the joy of ceremony, and a lot of creative and artistic ability that will leave the denomination with a richer liturgy and a bit more juice and mystery.”
That describes the ideal reciprocal sharing and development that comes when we welcome people to our faith who aren’t exactly like us, who fit our tradition in their own way. Ideally our visitors will learn from us, but also give us new perspectives which challenge us to grow and become more than we already are.
Each one of us got involved in Unitarian Universalism because we have found something very special and important, something worth preserving. In fact I’ve heard many newcomers say with longing, “I wish I had known about this religion many years ago.” Even more sad are those who spent their life looking for what we offer, but when they finally visit a UU church they are ignored or treated defensively or simply can’t find a seat without walking to the front of the church. These people leave empty and we remain unaware of the loss of a valuable companion on the journey. It’s our responsibility to stand at the gates as new people walk through our doors and protect our core identity as UUs, sharing who who we are, teaching them what this tradition has to offer. When we do this with hearts and minds open, we are ready to receive the precious and unexpected gifts our guests might offer us and our faith tradition.
1. “Orpheus” from The Beautiful Stories of Life: Six Greek Myths, Retold by Cynthia Rylant
November 29, 2009
November 22, 2009
Choose to Give Thanks
Matt Alspaugh
Please join me in singing just the first stanza of Hymn #128, "For All That Is Our Life"[1]. We've been using this hymn in most of our services over the last month, so many of you will find it to be familiar.
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.
I was in Ottawa last week for a ministers meeting they hold every seven years. There were nearly five hundred ministers present. Jason Sheldon, a premier choir director, had organized a choir which was going to sing at the closing service. I did not sign up, thinking most every minister has a far better voice than I do.
On the second day, the choir director put out a request for basses and tenors, so I felt obliged to help out. My contribution was small, my range is limited, but I felt great joy being part of this one hundred person choir. I had forgotten how much fun such singing can be. There's something empowering about finding your musical voice.
So first a pitch. Marcellene is organizing a choir for our Christmas Eve service. Our group, the Sometimes Sunday Singers, will meet for the first time on Sunday December 6, at 10:15. I encourage you to join us, even if you think you're not a strong singer.
So let us sing our thanks and praise! It sounds so much more joyful than when we merely speak our thanks and praise.
Many of us are ambivalent about the hymns we sing. The old joke goes "why do Unitarian Universalists sing so poorly? Because they are busy reading ahead to see if they agree with the words."
Many of us, including me, have thought that our hymns are just revisions of old Lutheran hymns, many of those which were just old German drinking songs. This may be true for some of our hymns, but not all. This particular hymn, "For All That Is Our Life" was written just a couple decades ago by a British Unitarian minister, Bruce Findlow, near the end of his own life.[2]
Findlow served as head of Oxford University's Manchester College, which has historically been a hot-bed of British Unitarian nonconformist thought. Among Findlow's books are Religion in People and I Question Easter.
The tune was written by Patrick Rickey, a composer and organist in Oakland California. The tune is named for Sherman Island, which is one of Rickey's favorite places for windsurfing.
So let's continue in our journey through this hymn. Along the way we'll give voice to those things for which you are thankful, and I'll offer a few thoughts and stories. On to sing the next stanza.
For needs which others serve, for services we give, for work and its rewards, for hours of rest and love; we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.
When Liz and I lived in Denver, we had a small vegetable garden at our house. It was small because our house was blessed with four ancient and huge elm trees, and so most of the lot was too shady for a garden. But there was one bright spot beside the garage, so we grew peas, and squash, and herbs, and raspberries, and lots of flowers.
I tried to grow tomatoes. I remember the joy of tomatoes from my dad's garden when I was growing up, so having tomatoes from the garden was important to me. And I learned that in Denver tomatoes are an exercise in misplaced hope, a study in chance, a lottery with nature with long, long odds.
The first year, we planted after the last frost, and this was too late. A cool summer meant the tomatoes were still green when the fall cold came. And these are those green tomatoes that you can't get to ripen indoors - they just stare at you from the window sill in bright light green defiance.
So we learned to put them in early, and take a chance on the last frost, sometimes losing that bet. Then we tried the 'Wall of Water', a contrivance used in the mountains to try to prevent plants from freezing. No success here.
Then there was a wet, rainy summer, where few tomatoes set. Then there were those giant nasty green tomato worms that did the plants in.
Finally one year, all was coming together just right. Lots of tomatoes on the vines, big, beautiful, unblemished. Enough summer heat and sun that they were nearly perfectly ripe. The early ones tasted great. Then the hail came. Golf-ball sized chunks of ice. Ok they were small golf-balls, not quite regulation size, but they were enough. There was nothing left, but a few bare, broken stems.
We give our thanks and praise for services we give, for work and its rewards. Too often, we get focused on the rewards of work or of service; the outcomes. We expect our labors in the garden to literally bear fruit. We expect our hard work, our nights at the office to lead to a promotion or a bonus. We expect our efforts helping the homeless or teaching in an after-school program to yield housed, educated, and grateful recipients of our service.
Sometimes, none of this works out like we hoped. The people we help never get their lives together. The career languishes. The garden whispers to us, 'maybe next year'.
Like David Budbill, in the poem "Sometimes" [3] we still feel a sense of gratitude. He tells us, "I've got to say, right now, how beautiful and sweet this world can be."
Our gratitude can emerge from what we have accomplished, our achievements, but it can be so much larger than that. We can give thanks for that which is possible, even if it does not play out exactly the way we hoped. Our gratitude can emerge, when we realize how beautiful and sweet this world can be. Even with agony, and dying, and torture, this world still can be beautiful and sweet. Can be -- that's the operative phrase here. We find gratitude in what can be. We give thanks and rejoice in our efforts, our work and service, as we strive to make a world that can be. Let us continue:
For sorrow we must bear, for failures, pain, and loss, each new thing we learn, for fearful hours that pass: we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.
People move quickly through the hospital these days, from unit to unit and then to rehab or home care. As a hospital chaplain I saw many people just once. But a few people I saw many times over the course of weeks or even months. You see, one of the units I served was Psych, and I cared for people both in the locked units and those who participated in our outpatient group therapy. In this 'day treatment program' I'd both lead groups and meet with people for individual pastoral care.
One woman I met first in the locked unit, and I saw her for several months. I've of course changed some of the details of her story to respect her anonymity here. I learned of all of the troubles she was having, a marriage on the rocks; a job that was once creative and satisfying was now dry, dull and repetitive; serious problems with teenage kids. On top of all this, she was a deeply religious woman, involved in her church, and the church was blowing up, coming apart at the seams. It seemed that she had run up against the shadow side of synchronicity, that life seemed to have dealt her a lot of bad cards at once.
She progressed in our treatment program, which was most satisfying for me to watch. It was almost as if the color came back in her life. We had many conversations, often about God. Why was God distant, wrecking her life, and on top of that, wrecking her church? Now, you need to know that as a professional chaplain, I do not try to evangelize, but I tried to stay with her as she worked through this.
In the end, her understanding of God deepened. It moved from the big Daddy guy in the sky kind of God to something much deeper, a mystical companion who accompanied her and suffered with her. In this new understanding, she found a deep sense of thankfulness. She told me that while she would not wish this experience of depression on anyone, that she was able to look back on it with a sense of gratitude for the growth that emerged from it.
If we choose to live full lives, we will bear many sorrows. It is how we deal with them that frames our lives. I don't want to suggest that we can simply "look on the bright side" whenever something bad happens.
But we can begin to reframe the stories we tell ourselves about bad things that happen. Are they always someone else's fault? Do we always get the bad deal? Or do we make the attempt to see if there is another way to tell the story, that makes bearing the suffering easier.
Maybe fault and blame are not helpful ideas. My patient stopped blaming God. Maybe some bad deals are just bad, but some are opportunities for a new thing. My patient concluded she needed to leave her church and find a new religious home. That was sad, but necessary.
I never saw this patient again after she left the hospital, which is good, as it means she did not return to the psych ward, as many do. I don't know what happened to her, but I like to think she's doing well and finding a life of balance. It's part of how I remain thankful that I could be of service to this patient in this hospital.
Let's sing the he final stanza:
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.
There is a relatively new field within psychology called positive psychology. It's only a couple decades old, and developed when some researchers noted that all they focused on was disease and disfunction, and that no one was studying the psychology of healthy, flourishing people.
Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill, recently published a book called Positivity [4], which explores the benefits of positive emotions; emotions like awe, compassion, joy, amusement, contentment, and gratitude. There is plenty of evidence, based on controlled scientific studies that increasing these positive emotions does improve overall physical health, for example.
Fredrickson then suggests what we might do to have more of these emotional experiences. Again, studies point to the effectiveness of things like walking in nature, meditation, losing oneself in an activity all can contribute to positive emotional states. As an aside, I'd note that these sound like spiritual practices to me!
What doesn't work is trying to think our way to an emotion. We can't say, "I am now going to be joyful" or "I am now in awe". But it does turn out that the easiest emotion to access consciously is gratitude. We can intentionally think of things for which we give thanks, and gradually the feeling of gratitude comes to us. Just the act of thinking about people you love, the good in the life you live, the small gifts and graces in your life, can bring on this feeling of gratitude. It's no wonder many religious traditions include gratitude practice as part of their overall spiritual practices - it is not difficult, and it is effective in raising our spirits.
So as part of my spiritual practice, I found myself walking the trails of Mill Creek Park earlier this week, enjoying the now bare trees over me, noticing the bits of green that remained: ferns, with their jade green, willows with their faded leaves. It was early evening, and crows were beginning to settle down in trees above me, calling to each other, caw, caw caw.
I thought about how this earth has a thin veneer of life overlaying its surface. The bulk of life extends not much farther down than the roots of the trees around me, nor much higher than the crows above me. A thin layer, on a small planet. The only place we know in the universe that life exists. I felt connected to those crows, not crow by crow, but to all of them together as a combined presence. A field of crow energy that enveloped me and held me. An embrace of crow, with all of that black fluttering, calling, cawing, crying vitality.
I have been told that birds are the most direct descendants of dinosaurs, so I imagine the crying of crows to be a primeval sound. I hear dinosaur words in their voices, as they fluttered around warning or gossiping about my presence. I felt connected in crow song, these powerful throaty voices, deep into the history of life here on earth. I felt completely contained and held, fully part of of life, woven into life's past, and into the vitality of the present. I walked in gratitude. I gave thanks.
All life is a gift, I am supremely grateful, I give thanks, and I am glad.
Let us, everyone, choose to give thanks. Let our words and our songs flow, "let us sing with thanks unto the end." Let us all be grateful for these gifts of life.
Notes:
1."For All That Is Our Life", Singing the Living Tradition, UUA, 1993, #128.
2. Jacqui James, Between The Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition, 1998. p. 36.
3. David Budbill, "Sometimes", http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/11/17
4. Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive, 2009.
see also, "Gratitude, Like Other Positive Emotions, Broadens and Builds", Barbara Fredrickson, in The Psychology of Gratitude, Chapter 8, ed. by Robert A. Emmons & Michael E. McCullough, 2004, p. 145.
Please join me in singing just the first stanza of Hymn #128, "For All That Is Our Life"[1]. We've been using this hymn in most of our services over the last month, so many of you will find it to be familiar.
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.
I was in Ottawa last week for a ministers meeting they hold every seven years. There were nearly five hundred ministers present. Jason Sheldon, a premier choir director, had organized a choir which was going to sing at the closing service. I did not sign up, thinking most every minister has a far better voice than I do.
On the second day, the choir director put out a request for basses and tenors, so I felt obliged to help out. My contribution was small, my range is limited, but I felt great joy being part of this one hundred person choir. I had forgotten how much fun such singing can be. There's something empowering about finding your musical voice.
So first a pitch. Marcellene is organizing a choir for our Christmas Eve service. Our group, the Sometimes Sunday Singers, will meet for the first time on Sunday December 6, at 10:15. I encourage you to join us, even if you think you're not a strong singer.
So let us sing our thanks and praise! It sounds so much more joyful than when we merely speak our thanks and praise.
Many of us are ambivalent about the hymns we sing. The old joke goes "why do Unitarian Universalists sing so poorly? Because they are busy reading ahead to see if they agree with the words."
Many of us, including me, have thought that our hymns are just revisions of old Lutheran hymns, many of those which were just old German drinking songs. This may be true for some of our hymns, but not all. This particular hymn, "For All That Is Our Life" was written just a couple decades ago by a British Unitarian minister, Bruce Findlow, near the end of his own life.[2]
Findlow served as head of Oxford University's Manchester College, which has historically been a hot-bed of British Unitarian nonconformist thought. Among Findlow's books are Religion in People and I Question Easter.
The tune was written by Patrick Rickey, a composer and organist in Oakland California. The tune is named for Sherman Island, which is one of Rickey's favorite places for windsurfing.
So let's continue in our journey through this hymn. Along the way we'll give voice to those things for which you are thankful, and I'll offer a few thoughts and stories. On to sing the next stanza.
For needs which others serve, for services we give, for work and its rewards, for hours of rest and love; we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.
When Liz and I lived in Denver, we had a small vegetable garden at our house. It was small because our house was blessed with four ancient and huge elm trees, and so most of the lot was too shady for a garden. But there was one bright spot beside the garage, so we grew peas, and squash, and herbs, and raspberries, and lots of flowers.
I tried to grow tomatoes. I remember the joy of tomatoes from my dad's garden when I was growing up, so having tomatoes from the garden was important to me. And I learned that in Denver tomatoes are an exercise in misplaced hope, a study in chance, a lottery with nature with long, long odds.
The first year, we planted after the last frost, and this was too late. A cool summer meant the tomatoes were still green when the fall cold came. And these are those green tomatoes that you can't get to ripen indoors - they just stare at you from the window sill in bright light green defiance.
So we learned to put them in early, and take a chance on the last frost, sometimes losing that bet. Then we tried the 'Wall of Water', a contrivance used in the mountains to try to prevent plants from freezing. No success here.
Then there was a wet, rainy summer, where few tomatoes set. Then there were those giant nasty green tomato worms that did the plants in.
Finally one year, all was coming together just right. Lots of tomatoes on the vines, big, beautiful, unblemished. Enough summer heat and sun that they were nearly perfectly ripe. The early ones tasted great. Then the hail came. Golf-ball sized chunks of ice. Ok they were small golf-balls, not quite regulation size, but they were enough. There was nothing left, but a few bare, broken stems.
We give our thanks and praise for services we give, for work and its rewards. Too often, we get focused on the rewards of work or of service; the outcomes. We expect our labors in the garden to literally bear fruit. We expect our hard work, our nights at the office to lead to a promotion or a bonus. We expect our efforts helping the homeless or teaching in an after-school program to yield housed, educated, and grateful recipients of our service.
Sometimes, none of this works out like we hoped. The people we help never get their lives together. The career languishes. The garden whispers to us, 'maybe next year'.
Like David Budbill, in the poem "Sometimes" [3] we still feel a sense of gratitude. He tells us, "I've got to say, right now, how beautiful and sweet this world can be."
Our gratitude can emerge from what we have accomplished, our achievements, but it can be so much larger than that. We can give thanks for that which is possible, even if it does not play out exactly the way we hoped. Our gratitude can emerge, when we realize how beautiful and sweet this world can be. Even with agony, and dying, and torture, this world still can be beautiful and sweet. Can be -- that's the operative phrase here. We find gratitude in what can be. We give thanks and rejoice in our efforts, our work and service, as we strive to make a world that can be. Let us continue:
For sorrow we must bear, for failures, pain, and loss, each new thing we learn, for fearful hours that pass: we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.
People move quickly through the hospital these days, from unit to unit and then to rehab or home care. As a hospital chaplain I saw many people just once. But a few people I saw many times over the course of weeks or even months. You see, one of the units I served was Psych, and I cared for people both in the locked units and those who participated in our outpatient group therapy. In this 'day treatment program' I'd both lead groups and meet with people for individual pastoral care.
One woman I met first in the locked unit, and I saw her for several months. I've of course changed some of the details of her story to respect her anonymity here. I learned of all of the troubles she was having, a marriage on the rocks; a job that was once creative and satisfying was now dry, dull and repetitive; serious problems with teenage kids. On top of all this, she was a deeply religious woman, involved in her church, and the church was blowing up, coming apart at the seams. It seemed that she had run up against the shadow side of synchronicity, that life seemed to have dealt her a lot of bad cards at once.
She progressed in our treatment program, which was most satisfying for me to watch. It was almost as if the color came back in her life. We had many conversations, often about God. Why was God distant, wrecking her life, and on top of that, wrecking her church? Now, you need to know that as a professional chaplain, I do not try to evangelize, but I tried to stay with her as she worked through this.
In the end, her understanding of God deepened. It moved from the big Daddy guy in the sky kind of God to something much deeper, a mystical companion who accompanied her and suffered with her. In this new understanding, she found a deep sense of thankfulness. She told me that while she would not wish this experience of depression on anyone, that she was able to look back on it with a sense of gratitude for the growth that emerged from it.
If we choose to live full lives, we will bear many sorrows. It is how we deal with them that frames our lives. I don't want to suggest that we can simply "look on the bright side" whenever something bad happens.
But we can begin to reframe the stories we tell ourselves about bad things that happen. Are they always someone else's fault? Do we always get the bad deal? Or do we make the attempt to see if there is another way to tell the story, that makes bearing the suffering easier.
Maybe fault and blame are not helpful ideas. My patient stopped blaming God. Maybe some bad deals are just bad, but some are opportunities for a new thing. My patient concluded she needed to leave her church and find a new religious home. That was sad, but necessary.
I never saw this patient again after she left the hospital, which is good, as it means she did not return to the psych ward, as many do. I don't know what happened to her, but I like to think she's doing well and finding a life of balance. It's part of how I remain thankful that I could be of service to this patient in this hospital.
Let's sing the he final stanza:
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.
There is a relatively new field within psychology called positive psychology. It's only a couple decades old, and developed when some researchers noted that all they focused on was disease and disfunction, and that no one was studying the psychology of healthy, flourishing people.
Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill, recently published a book called Positivity [4], which explores the benefits of positive emotions; emotions like awe, compassion, joy, amusement, contentment, and gratitude. There is plenty of evidence, based on controlled scientific studies that increasing these positive emotions does improve overall physical health, for example.
Fredrickson then suggests what we might do to have more of these emotional experiences. Again, studies point to the effectiveness of things like walking in nature, meditation, losing oneself in an activity all can contribute to positive emotional states. As an aside, I'd note that these sound like spiritual practices to me!
What doesn't work is trying to think our way to an emotion. We can't say, "I am now going to be joyful" or "I am now in awe". But it does turn out that the easiest emotion to access consciously is gratitude. We can intentionally think of things for which we give thanks, and gradually the feeling of gratitude comes to us. Just the act of thinking about people you love, the good in the life you live, the small gifts and graces in your life, can bring on this feeling of gratitude. It's no wonder many religious traditions include gratitude practice as part of their overall spiritual practices - it is not difficult, and it is effective in raising our spirits.
So as part of my spiritual practice, I found myself walking the trails of Mill Creek Park earlier this week, enjoying the now bare trees over me, noticing the bits of green that remained: ferns, with their jade green, willows with their faded leaves. It was early evening, and crows were beginning to settle down in trees above me, calling to each other, caw, caw caw.
I thought about how this earth has a thin veneer of life overlaying its surface. The bulk of life extends not much farther down than the roots of the trees around me, nor much higher than the crows above me. A thin layer, on a small planet. The only place we know in the universe that life exists. I felt connected to those crows, not crow by crow, but to all of them together as a combined presence. A field of crow energy that enveloped me and held me. An embrace of crow, with all of that black fluttering, calling, cawing, crying vitality.
I have been told that birds are the most direct descendants of dinosaurs, so I imagine the crying of crows to be a primeval sound. I hear dinosaur words in their voices, as they fluttered around warning or gossiping about my presence. I felt connected in crow song, these powerful throaty voices, deep into the history of life here on earth. I felt completely contained and held, fully part of of life, woven into life's past, and into the vitality of the present. I walked in gratitude. I gave thanks.
All life is a gift, I am supremely grateful, I give thanks, and I am glad.
Let us, everyone, choose to give thanks. Let our words and our songs flow, "let us sing with thanks unto the end." Let us all be grateful for these gifts of life.
Notes:
1."For All That Is Our Life", Singing the Living Tradition, UUA, 1993, #128.
2. Jacqui James, Between The Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition, 1998. p. 36.
3. David Budbill, "Sometimes", http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/11/17
4. Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive, 2009.
see also, "Gratitude, Like Other Positive Emotions, Broadens and Builds", Barbara Fredrickson, in The Psychology of Gratitude, Chapter 8, ed. by Robert A. Emmons & Michael E. McCullough, 2004, p. 145.
November 8, 2009
The Call to Create
Matt Alspaugh
"How many of you are artists? There must be some here, with all this beautiful art around here?" That's how Gordon MacKenzie, a steel sculptor, would begin his talks with schoolchildren. He describes his experience in his book, "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" [1], and I quote:
In Praise of the Arts returns here at First UU after several years' absence and I'm grateful for the energy and efforts of many who organized the art show, hung these banners, put together the wonderful reception last night, and did all the other tasks involved in this two week event. In praising the arts, we praise the possibility that all of us are artists, that we all know what those first graders know. We praise creativity, We praise that gift which we all are born with, that ability to make the world more satisfying and beautiful.
So if we've come to see ourselves as not artistic, or uncreative, how do we summon our creative selves back? How might we recover our innate call to create?
One of our readings today [2] described how, as a child, poet Ruth Stone wrote, or rather didn't write, poetry. The poems just showed up, and they were not meek. These were powerful, thunderous, almost terrifying experiences that barreled through her, and if she was fast enough she could grab the poem and get it down on paper before it rumbled past. The creative force seemed to be outside Ruth, and it came in, or she grabbed it and pulled it in.
Are there any of you who have had those experiences? Maybe not so physical, but still, many of us have experienced a flash of insight, the appearance of a complete creative idea suddenly popping into our consciousness.
I've had only a few occasions in which I've had such an inspiration, where a text, or a creative solution appears nearly whole in my mind's eye. It's as if your muse, or your genius, some entity outside yourself just hands you the work, fully formed or nearly so. In ministry, we might say that 'the Spirit moved though you'. Whatever we call it, when this happens, about all we can do is just say 'thank you', because we are in awe and we are grateful.
The second form of inspiration comes from deep within, and it is born of waiting, and listening. This form is far more familiar to me. As in the May Sarton poem [3], we wait as the phoebe does, nurturing the egg of the life of the idea that emerged from us. We sit with it, we incubate it, we give it silence and time to break out.
Except it is not quite that simple. The waiting time does not mean we sit around doing nothing. We are working. We are often hard at work, in this kind of creativity. But the work has a certain silent quality, in that the better part of this creativity we must do alone. There may be many drafts of the poem, many sketches in the sketchbook, many preliminary renditions, before the final layer is placed on the canvas. This is work! and it emerges slowly, from within. We start with that divine spark, and we blow on it, carefully, we give it our breath, by offering it our stillness and steadfast efforts.
Melissa mentioned Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way [4], as a tool to recovering your creative self. This book has been around a while, and remains a popular resource. There was at one time a study group here at First UU that used The Artist's Way through the twelve-week program.
In the book, Cameron talks of two critical activities for opening up one's creative self -- these are Morning Pages and Artist Dates. The idea of Morning Pages is simply that you commit to write three pages every morning in a journal. The writing can be on anything, you can even write "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over. But you do three pages, and you do it every single day.
The idea of the Artists Dates is that once a week, you set aside two hours or so that is time for just you and your creative self to have fun. Time in solitude, maybe walking, taking in a show or a museum or going to an amusement park, this is recreation in the original meaning of the word: re - creation.
I see these two activities as spiritual practices, things you do regularly in order to move toward fullness and wholeness in your life. What Cameron observes, and what others who have used the Artist's Way have told me, is that people tend to love one of these two practices and hate the other. Some love the routine of the Morning Pages, as they feel productive and grounded by them, but they see the Artist's date as frivolous, a waste of time. Others love the fun of the Artist Date, and see the Morning Pages as a boring, daily grind.
Perhaps these two activities line up with the two ways in which creativity can manifest itself to us. If creativity usually comes from outside ourselves, we may enjoy the stimulation of the Artist's Dates. If our source is within us, the rigor of writing pages may nurture that source of creativity.
Now I suspect that the duality I'm describing here -- that creativity either emerges from an outside source or from within us -- is a false one. It's a helpful fiction as we try to understand our patterns of creating. If we are wise, we understand that our creativity depends on both the interior and exterior sources of creative energy.
And as creatives, we get stuck. There are many ways in which our call to create goes unanswered or gets blocked. We already considered the question of identity with the schoolchildren that MacKenzie talked with. When you identify as an artist, of course you are creative. But it is pretty easy to let other life choices drive us to lose that innate sense of creativity. As I look back on my business career, I realize the times when I was most unhappy were when I found myself in situations where 'creativity' didn't seem to be part of the job description. Money, recognition; these did not fill that gaping hole.
Even if we hold on to that identity as artists and 'creatives', we may still find many things, mostly internal, may block our creativity. Perhaps the biggest block is the fear of being inadequate, of being not good enough, even of being laughed at. It takes courage to create, and it gets even harder when we realize that there is always someone who will find our efforts wanting.
I practice Interplay [5], a kind of group expression in movement, dance, song and story. I introduced some of you to Interplay during our Adult Forum time this morning. Our focus is on the play, being in our bodies, creating, having fun, and not on right or wrong or 'improvement'. In Interplay, we experiment with these various activities we call 'forms'. One form is 'run-walk-stop', which is just that: people running, walking or stopping as they wish. Another form is babbling, where we tell very brief stories to one another about mundane things. We may do dance forms, like 'three-play' where we try to have three people moving and the rest observing, but any observer can jump in at any time. So you get the idea: the forms are very loose, it's play, shaped by the people, and it's just a lot of fun.
At the same time, Interplay can provide a space for people to explore the difficult stories in their lives: a dying father, a lump in a breast, a shooting in a church, a suicidal patient at work. Without the sense of performance, or judgment, people can go to amazingly deep places with movement and story and song. And the results can be profoundly beautiful.
Another block to artistic creativity is our sense of isolation. Not only do we feel we do it alone, we may even feel overly competitive with others artists. Yet much of our creation builds quite directly and honestly on the prior work of others, and that is as it should be. This morning Marcelline explored a variation on the tune used in the hymn we sung earlier, and Mi Sook Yun our guest musician, offered a piece based on the 23rd Psalm. Not long ago I attended a traveling exhibition of the art of Picasso [5] and his American contemporaries. I was surprised at the amount of what to me seemed to be outright copying of image elements among artists like Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. I immediately thought, "this is plagiarism", but no, the copying furthered these artist's exploration of Abstract Expressionism and what followed it. We can actually be more creative when we work in collaborative community with other artists.
These are just a few of the blocks to creativity: loss of identity, fear, isolation, competition. There are many others, as you well know. We can work to overcome our blocks, realizing that overcoming is hard work, the work of a lifetime.
Where does our creative energy actually come from? For many of us, this is a deeply spiritual question. Strong emotions arise when we create. I have on many occasions found myself weeping as I write out a sermon or even practice the beginning piano pieces I can play. There is sweet joy in this! There does seem to be something larger than me that these emotions are connected to; they well up from something deep and divine.
In my own belief system, I see the creative force as the center of everything. Creativity works by evolving the universe through the process of natural selection, and this particular process abides in much more than just the evolution of life. Even our universe may have been selected out of many universes as one compatible with life.
As humans, we evolved and are aware. Research suggests that many of our moral behaviors result from our evolution as a species. So things like altruism and fairness are part of our nature; they help us survive in groups. It may also be that creativity is a selected evolutionary response. So when I create, and offer the fruits of my efforts up into the world, I work in alignment with this larger creative force; and I feel this.
Now that is just my own window into the understanding of what goes on; it too continues to evolve. In any event, it helps me comprehend what drives me to create, and helps to sustain me during the dry spells.
We who create, create because we must. The poet Wendell Berry tells us, in his poem, 1994 [6]:
So. We are artists; we create, because we love this world. And perhaps the end of our creation will be life beyond words, life beyond our art.
Notes:
1. Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, 1998, p. 19.
2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on nurturing creativity, TED Talks, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html; text transcribed at http://lateralaction.com/articles/elizabeth-gilbert-creativity-divine-inspiration/
3. Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, 1992.
4. www.interplay.org
5. Whitney Museum, "Picasso and American Art", see http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/past.jsp
6. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p. 182: "1994, VII", excerpted.
"How many of you are artists? There must be some here, with all this beautiful art around here?" That's how Gordon MacKenzie, a steel sculptor, would begin his talks with schoolchildren. He describes his experience in his book, "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" [1], and I quote:
The pattern of responses never varied.And this story was from well before the passage of 'No Child Left Behind'! But today is not about schools or kids, but about all of us.
First Grade: En masse the children leapt from their chairs, arms waving wildly, eager hands trying to reach the ceiling. Every child was an artist.
Second Grade: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. The raised hands were still.
Third Grade: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand. Tentatively. Self-consciously.
... By time I reached sixth grade, no more than one or two did so and then only ever-so-slightly — guardedly — their eyes glancing from side to side uneasily, betraying a fear of being identified by the group as a “closet artist.”
In Praise of the Arts returns here at First UU after several years' absence and I'm grateful for the energy and efforts of many who organized the art show, hung these banners, put together the wonderful reception last night, and did all the other tasks involved in this two week event. In praising the arts, we praise the possibility that all of us are artists, that we all know what those first graders know. We praise creativity, We praise that gift which we all are born with, that ability to make the world more satisfying and beautiful.
So if we've come to see ourselves as not artistic, or uncreative, how do we summon our creative selves back? How might we recover our innate call to create?
One of our readings today [2] described how, as a child, poet Ruth Stone wrote, or rather didn't write, poetry. The poems just showed up, and they were not meek. These were powerful, thunderous, almost terrifying experiences that barreled through her, and if she was fast enough she could grab the poem and get it down on paper before it rumbled past. The creative force seemed to be outside Ruth, and it came in, or she grabbed it and pulled it in.
Are there any of you who have had those experiences? Maybe not so physical, but still, many of us have experienced a flash of insight, the appearance of a complete creative idea suddenly popping into our consciousness.
I've had only a few occasions in which I've had such an inspiration, where a text, or a creative solution appears nearly whole in my mind's eye. It's as if your muse, or your genius, some entity outside yourself just hands you the work, fully formed or nearly so. In ministry, we might say that 'the Spirit moved though you'. Whatever we call it, when this happens, about all we can do is just say 'thank you', because we are in awe and we are grateful.
The second form of inspiration comes from deep within, and it is born of waiting, and listening. This form is far more familiar to me. As in the May Sarton poem [3], we wait as the phoebe does, nurturing the egg of the life of the idea that emerged from us. We sit with it, we incubate it, we give it silence and time to break out.
Except it is not quite that simple. The waiting time does not mean we sit around doing nothing. We are working. We are often hard at work, in this kind of creativity. But the work has a certain silent quality, in that the better part of this creativity we must do alone. There may be many drafts of the poem, many sketches in the sketchbook, many preliminary renditions, before the final layer is placed on the canvas. This is work! and it emerges slowly, from within. We start with that divine spark, and we blow on it, carefully, we give it our breath, by offering it our stillness and steadfast efforts.
Melissa mentioned Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way [4], as a tool to recovering your creative self. This book has been around a while, and remains a popular resource. There was at one time a study group here at First UU that used The Artist's Way through the twelve-week program.
In the book, Cameron talks of two critical activities for opening up one's creative self -- these are Morning Pages and Artist Dates. The idea of Morning Pages is simply that you commit to write three pages every morning in a journal. The writing can be on anything, you can even write "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over. But you do three pages, and you do it every single day.
The idea of the Artists Dates is that once a week, you set aside two hours or so that is time for just you and your creative self to have fun. Time in solitude, maybe walking, taking in a show or a museum or going to an amusement park, this is recreation in the original meaning of the word: re - creation.
I see these two activities as spiritual practices, things you do regularly in order to move toward fullness and wholeness in your life. What Cameron observes, and what others who have used the Artist's Way have told me, is that people tend to love one of these two practices and hate the other. Some love the routine of the Morning Pages, as they feel productive and grounded by them, but they see the Artist's date as frivolous, a waste of time. Others love the fun of the Artist Date, and see the Morning Pages as a boring, daily grind.
Perhaps these two activities line up with the two ways in which creativity can manifest itself to us. If creativity usually comes from outside ourselves, we may enjoy the stimulation of the Artist's Dates. If our source is within us, the rigor of writing pages may nurture that source of creativity.
Now I suspect that the duality I'm describing here -- that creativity either emerges from an outside source or from within us -- is a false one. It's a helpful fiction as we try to understand our patterns of creating. If we are wise, we understand that our creativity depends on both the interior and exterior sources of creative energy.
And as creatives, we get stuck. There are many ways in which our call to create goes unanswered or gets blocked. We already considered the question of identity with the schoolchildren that MacKenzie talked with. When you identify as an artist, of course you are creative. But it is pretty easy to let other life choices drive us to lose that innate sense of creativity. As I look back on my business career, I realize the times when I was most unhappy were when I found myself in situations where 'creativity' didn't seem to be part of the job description. Money, recognition; these did not fill that gaping hole.
Even if we hold on to that identity as artists and 'creatives', we may still find many things, mostly internal, may block our creativity. Perhaps the biggest block is the fear of being inadequate, of being not good enough, even of being laughed at. It takes courage to create, and it gets even harder when we realize that there is always someone who will find our efforts wanting.
I practice Interplay [5], a kind of group expression in movement, dance, song and story. I introduced some of you to Interplay during our Adult Forum time this morning. Our focus is on the play, being in our bodies, creating, having fun, and not on right or wrong or 'improvement'. In Interplay, we experiment with these various activities we call 'forms'. One form is 'run-walk-stop', which is just that: people running, walking or stopping as they wish. Another form is babbling, where we tell very brief stories to one another about mundane things. We may do dance forms, like 'three-play' where we try to have three people moving and the rest observing, but any observer can jump in at any time. So you get the idea: the forms are very loose, it's play, shaped by the people, and it's just a lot of fun.
At the same time, Interplay can provide a space for people to explore the difficult stories in their lives: a dying father, a lump in a breast, a shooting in a church, a suicidal patient at work. Without the sense of performance, or judgment, people can go to amazingly deep places with movement and story and song. And the results can be profoundly beautiful.
Another block to artistic creativity is our sense of isolation. Not only do we feel we do it alone, we may even feel overly competitive with others artists. Yet much of our creation builds quite directly and honestly on the prior work of others, and that is as it should be. This morning Marcelline explored a variation on the tune used in the hymn we sung earlier, and Mi Sook Yun our guest musician, offered a piece based on the 23rd Psalm. Not long ago I attended a traveling exhibition of the art of Picasso [5] and his American contemporaries. I was surprised at the amount of what to me seemed to be outright copying of image elements among artists like Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. I immediately thought, "this is plagiarism", but no, the copying furthered these artist's exploration of Abstract Expressionism and what followed it. We can actually be more creative when we work in collaborative community with other artists.
These are just a few of the blocks to creativity: loss of identity, fear, isolation, competition. There are many others, as you well know. We can work to overcome our blocks, realizing that overcoming is hard work, the work of a lifetime.
Where does our creative energy actually come from? For many of us, this is a deeply spiritual question. Strong emotions arise when we create. I have on many occasions found myself weeping as I write out a sermon or even practice the beginning piano pieces I can play. There is sweet joy in this! There does seem to be something larger than me that these emotions are connected to; they well up from something deep and divine.
In my own belief system, I see the creative force as the center of everything. Creativity works by evolving the universe through the process of natural selection, and this particular process abides in much more than just the evolution of life. Even our universe may have been selected out of many universes as one compatible with life.
As humans, we evolved and are aware. Research suggests that many of our moral behaviors result from our evolution as a species. So things like altruism and fairness are part of our nature; they help us survive in groups. It may also be that creativity is a selected evolutionary response. So when I create, and offer the fruits of my efforts up into the world, I work in alignment with this larger creative force; and I feel this.
Now that is just my own window into the understanding of what goes on; it too continues to evolve. In any event, it helps me comprehend what drives me to create, and helps to sustain me during the dry spells.
We who create, create because we must. The poet Wendell Berry tells us, in his poem, 1994 [6]:
I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
....
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
So. We are artists; we create, because we love this world. And perhaps the end of our creation will be life beyond words, life beyond our art.
Notes:
1. Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, 1998, p. 19.
2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on nurturing creativity, TED Talks, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html; text transcribed at http://lateralaction.com/articles/elizabeth-gilbert-creativity-divine-inspiration/
3. Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, 1992.
4. www.interplay.org
5. Whitney Museum, "Picasso and American Art", see http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/past.jsp
6. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p. 182: "1994, VII", excerpted.
November 1, 2009
Sharing our Bread
Matt Alspaugh
This is a sermon about bread. Not about dough or baking, or wheat or gluten, but about the colloquial term. Bread. Money. This is a sermon about money, and sharing money, about generosity of money and life.
Now, money brings up a lot of anxiety for most of us. Even in preparing this sermon, I noticed my own anxiety talking about this topic. Joseph Campbell said, "Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life's possibilities."[1] Money is, in a way, a distillation of what we value. So how we use money really points to the larger values and concerns we face, and our anxiety about money is a reflection of angst or tension about these larger issues.
There are three particular areas of tension that get reflected in money that I want to speak about today: these three areas are trust, sharing, and purpose. These connect up with money not only in our individual lives, but also in the economics of our society. After all, the word economics comes from the Greek oikonomia, 'the management of a household'. So these areas of tension -- trust, sharing, and purpose -- overlap to touch how we live our personal lives, how this country and the global society functions, and -- as one would expect in a sermon on Stewardship Sunday -- how we relate to this church community.
Let's start with trust. The act of breaking bread together -- with a friend or a companion-- is a classic image of trust. The derivation of companion, from the French, is com - pan - ion 'with bread, being'. To be with bread, to take a meal together implies a certain degree of closeness with the other person, a time where we can relax and let down our guard. Who do you choose to sit with when you take lunch at work? Who do your children sit with when they take lunch at school? Theologian John Dominic Crossan in his book "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography" suggests that one of the most radical things Jesus did was not his teaching or miracles, but that he simply had meals with people outside his social class. That was unheard of in Hebrew times.[2]
Today, for many of us, it is less about trusting who we break bread with as it is trusting the source of bread, and the overall food supply. Our trust in the production and delivery of food has been shaken with outbreaks of food poisoning from food we once thought was safe and healthy. We've come to realize that terms like 'organic' and 'free-range' and 'fresh-squeezed' have no real meaning, that perhaps they cannot be trusted. We want to trust our sources of food, and one way to do that is to buy locally. I think that trust is the primary factor driving the local food movement, maybe more than the ecological cost of transporting food from afar. You can come to our local farmers market, and actually talk to the farmer about how the food was produced. You can visit their farm if you want. That builds trust.
In our larger society, many voices have suggested that the economic meltdown of the last year or so is due to misplaced trust. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine last month, asking "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"[3] He suggests that most economists put too much trust in their theories -- theories that assumed we were all rational economic beings working the free market to maximize our 'utils', our desires. This misplaced trust led to systemic changes in our markets that led to the meltdown of the last year or so.
In religious communities like this one, trust is always in tension. We have to decide which decisions need to be made by everyone, and which ones can be delegated safely to the board of trustees (there's that word again) or others. When does this tension really stretch and strain us? It is when we are talking about money. I've seen some congregations suffer through long congregational meetings, arguing over the smallest details of the budget. Not pretty. Better to find ways to build the trust in committees to make those decisions. Better to work to develop a history of good decisions around money, so we trust that the money is raised and spent wisely.
Trust, in a way, is a spiritual practice. It requires balance. If you are too trusting, you put yourself and those around you at risk. Not trusting enough, and we close off opportunities that life presents us, and we miss the chance to interact with new people or try new things.
The second tension that money places in bold relief is sharing. How do we create a system in which we contribute according to our ability and receive according to our need, and do this efficiently? I remember as a kid, trying to convince my folks to raise my allowance. When that failed, my brother and I tried to talk them into a kind of 'fee for service' arrangement where we'd get paid by the chore. Nope. My mother was pretty adamant that our allowance was paid just for being part of the family, not on the basis of what we did.
In churches, this same sort of dynamic sometimes pops up. I've visited churches, both in our denomination and outside, where it seems everything has a price. There's a jar set out -- $2 for a cup of coffee. There are fees for children's and adult religious education classes.
Some of our old historic Unitarian churches even rented pews. If you visit some of the old Boston churches, you'll find pews sectioned off by low walls -- creating pew boxes, that wealthy families would rent by the year. In a few churches of our Puritan forebears, these pew-boxes even had separate outside entrances, so you didn't have to interact with the hoi-polloi.[4]
I rather prefer the idea that we all share together in the various expenses of this church, that there are few items that require extra fees. Certainly there is the possibility that some will take more than they choose to give, but this process ebbs and flows with the changes that life brings. Part of our challenge as a community is the discernment that helps us know when people should be supported by us because they are in need.
In the larger society the tension emerges between the idea of common-wealth, and individual ownership and rights. I am convinced that a large part of what made this country great was a sense of shared responsibility in creating public schools, public libraries, freeways and open roads, national parks, among other resources of our common wealth. Many of our early Unitarian leaders were instrumental in founding some of these institutions. While it is true that private ownership and the free market also contributed to our greatness, I worry that we are out of balance now, and we've lost this sense of common-wealth. That loss makes all of our lives smaller, more separate, and less full.
The third item of money tension, and perhaps the most important, is purpose. Does how we earn our living fit into our sense of life purpose? Does it track our values? Often there are tradeoffs here, tensions, as people try to balance supporting their families with doing work that is worth doing.
Similarly, how do our values align with how we spend our money, save it, and give it away? I do not need to delineate the details of this conflict, as most of us face this daily, for we are bombarded with advertisements urging us to spend, save, or give in specific ways.
These tensions arise even in making our pledges or estimate of planned monthly giving to this church. I hope we all will think carefully about how much we can give based on how our values align with the sense of purpose of this community, our mission, what we are doing in the world. The generosity of each pledge should be deliberate, it should be well thought out. Each pledge represents a personal linkage of your life purpose to the larger purpose of this institution.
Lynne Twist worked for many years as a fundraiser for The Hunger Project. In her book, the Soul of Money, she describes learning the importance of purpose early in her career. She had two back-to-back fundraising visits. The first was to the CEO of a major agribusiness concern that had been receiving some bad press. Lynn described how this executive half-listened to her pitch, then slid a preprinted check across his desk to her for $50,000, a huge sum for her. But, as Lynn said,
Lynn made a decision. When she got back to her office she returned the check with a note suggesting that the company put the money behind something it could believe in.
Now the story doesn't end there. Lynn heard from that same CEO years later. He told her he had retired, and as he reviewed his career, the returned check stuck out as a pivotal memory. He realized that he now wanted to do something with his money, he wanted to make a difference, he needed a new sense of purpose. He ended up supporting The Hunger Project and donating many times the amount of the original check out of his own funds.
Lynn concludes,
What are the possibilities, the dreams of this church community? Can we trust others in the community to share in the efforts that carry us toward our common purpose? How will this community sustain us in the future? What miracles will emerge from our involvement, our touch, our support? What can we offer toward this higher purpose.
Following this service when we sit together and share a meal of soup and bread, we will explore some of these questions. Our visitors today are welcome to join us, and as you are our guests, we will not ask you for a financial pledge.
If as Joseph Campbell suggests, money is congealed energy, then perhaps our pledges are distilled gratitude for this community. Let us release the energy behind money, releasing our gratitude, and release life's possibilities which this church represents. When you direct the flow of your money in alignment with your life, you find deep joy.
Notes:
1. Jerrod Mundis, Making Peace with Money, 1999, p. 168.
2. John Dominic Crossan, "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography", 1999. Chapter 3.
3. Paul Krugman, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", New York Times Magazine, Sept. 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html
4. Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England, 1891, p. 33.
5. Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money, 2003, p. 99.
6. ibid., p. 101.
7. ibid. p. 119.
8. Blessing the Bread: Meditations, Lynn Ungar, 1996, p. 1.
This is a sermon about bread. Not about dough or baking, or wheat or gluten, but about the colloquial term. Bread. Money. This is a sermon about money, and sharing money, about generosity of money and life.
Now, money brings up a lot of anxiety for most of us. Even in preparing this sermon, I noticed my own anxiety talking about this topic. Joseph Campbell said, "Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life's possibilities."[1] Money is, in a way, a distillation of what we value. So how we use money really points to the larger values and concerns we face, and our anxiety about money is a reflection of angst or tension about these larger issues.
There are three particular areas of tension that get reflected in money that I want to speak about today: these three areas are trust, sharing, and purpose. These connect up with money not only in our individual lives, but also in the economics of our society. After all, the word economics comes from the Greek oikonomia, 'the management of a household'. So these areas of tension -- trust, sharing, and purpose -- overlap to touch how we live our personal lives, how this country and the global society functions, and -- as one would expect in a sermon on Stewardship Sunday -- how we relate to this church community.
Let's start with trust. The act of breaking bread together -- with a friend or a companion-- is a classic image of trust. The derivation of companion, from the French, is com - pan - ion 'with bread, being'. To be with bread, to take a meal together implies a certain degree of closeness with the other person, a time where we can relax and let down our guard. Who do you choose to sit with when you take lunch at work? Who do your children sit with when they take lunch at school? Theologian John Dominic Crossan in his book "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography" suggests that one of the most radical things Jesus did was not his teaching or miracles, but that he simply had meals with people outside his social class. That was unheard of in Hebrew times.[2]
Today, for many of us, it is less about trusting who we break bread with as it is trusting the source of bread, and the overall food supply. Our trust in the production and delivery of food has been shaken with outbreaks of food poisoning from food we once thought was safe and healthy. We've come to realize that terms like 'organic' and 'free-range' and 'fresh-squeezed' have no real meaning, that perhaps they cannot be trusted. We want to trust our sources of food, and one way to do that is to buy locally. I think that trust is the primary factor driving the local food movement, maybe more than the ecological cost of transporting food from afar. You can come to our local farmers market, and actually talk to the farmer about how the food was produced. You can visit their farm if you want. That builds trust.
In our larger society, many voices have suggested that the economic meltdown of the last year or so is due to misplaced trust. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine last month, asking "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"[3] He suggests that most economists put too much trust in their theories -- theories that assumed we were all rational economic beings working the free market to maximize our 'utils', our desires. This misplaced trust led to systemic changes in our markets that led to the meltdown of the last year or so.
In religious communities like this one, trust is always in tension. We have to decide which decisions need to be made by everyone, and which ones can be delegated safely to the board of trustees (there's that word again) or others. When does this tension really stretch and strain us? It is when we are talking about money. I've seen some congregations suffer through long congregational meetings, arguing over the smallest details of the budget. Not pretty. Better to find ways to build the trust in committees to make those decisions. Better to work to develop a history of good decisions around money, so we trust that the money is raised and spent wisely.
Trust, in a way, is a spiritual practice. It requires balance. If you are too trusting, you put yourself and those around you at risk. Not trusting enough, and we close off opportunities that life presents us, and we miss the chance to interact with new people or try new things.
The second tension that money places in bold relief is sharing. How do we create a system in which we contribute according to our ability and receive according to our need, and do this efficiently? I remember as a kid, trying to convince my folks to raise my allowance. When that failed, my brother and I tried to talk them into a kind of 'fee for service' arrangement where we'd get paid by the chore. Nope. My mother was pretty adamant that our allowance was paid just for being part of the family, not on the basis of what we did.
In churches, this same sort of dynamic sometimes pops up. I've visited churches, both in our denomination and outside, where it seems everything has a price. There's a jar set out -- $2 for a cup of coffee. There are fees for children's and adult religious education classes.
Some of our old historic Unitarian churches even rented pews. If you visit some of the old Boston churches, you'll find pews sectioned off by low walls -- creating pew boxes, that wealthy families would rent by the year. In a few churches of our Puritan forebears, these pew-boxes even had separate outside entrances, so you didn't have to interact with the hoi-polloi.[4]
I rather prefer the idea that we all share together in the various expenses of this church, that there are few items that require extra fees. Certainly there is the possibility that some will take more than they choose to give, but this process ebbs and flows with the changes that life brings. Part of our challenge as a community is the discernment that helps us know when people should be supported by us because they are in need.
In the larger society the tension emerges between the idea of common-wealth, and individual ownership and rights. I am convinced that a large part of what made this country great was a sense of shared responsibility in creating public schools, public libraries, freeways and open roads, national parks, among other resources of our common wealth. Many of our early Unitarian leaders were instrumental in founding some of these institutions. While it is true that private ownership and the free market also contributed to our greatness, I worry that we are out of balance now, and we've lost this sense of common-wealth. That loss makes all of our lives smaller, more separate, and less full.
The third item of money tension, and perhaps the most important, is purpose. Does how we earn our living fit into our sense of life purpose? Does it track our values? Often there are tradeoffs here, tensions, as people try to balance supporting their families with doing work that is worth doing.
Similarly, how do our values align with how we spend our money, save it, and give it away? I do not need to delineate the details of this conflict, as most of us face this daily, for we are bombarded with advertisements urging us to spend, save, or give in specific ways.
These tensions arise even in making our pledges or estimate of planned monthly giving to this church. I hope we all will think carefully about how much we can give based on how our values align with the sense of purpose of this community, our mission, what we are doing in the world. The generosity of each pledge should be deliberate, it should be well thought out. Each pledge represents a personal linkage of your life purpose to the larger purpose of this institution.
Lynne Twist worked for many years as a fundraiser for The Hunger Project. In her book, the Soul of Money, she describes learning the importance of purpose early in her career. She had two back-to-back fundraising visits. The first was to the CEO of a major agribusiness concern that had been receiving some bad press. Lynn described how this executive half-listened to her pitch, then slid a preprinted check across his desk to her for $50,000, a huge sum for her. But, as Lynn said,
... he had no genuine interest in our work, ... to end world hunger. This was a purely strategic move. He ... wanted the company to look good in the media. In purely financial terms, it was to be a simple transaction: Handing me this check for $50,000 bought his company an opportunity to mend its reputation. But as he slid the check over to me, I felt the guilt of the company coming right across the desk with the money. He gave me the money and the company's guilt.[5]As a good fundraising professional, Lynn thanked the man for the check and went on to her next meeting, which could not be more different. This was in a church basement in Harlem, in an old building where rainwater was dripping in all around in buckets placed to catch it. Lynn realized she was the only white-skinned person in this crowd of about seventy-five people. She made her pitch, and then there was silence, one of those kind of long silences we who speak publicly dread. Finally, near the back of the room, Lynn saw a middle-aged woman stand up. Lynn recalls what she said.
"Girl", she said, "My name is Gertrude, and I like what you've said and I like you. Now, I ain't got no checkbook and I ain't got no credit cards. To me, money is a lot like water. For some folk it rushes through their life like a raging river. Money comes through my life like a little trickle. But I want to pass it on in a way that does the most good for the most folks. I see that as my right and my responsibility. It's also my joy. I have fifty dollars in my purse that I earned from doing a white woman's wash, and I want to give it to you."[6]She came up and handed Lynn $50 in small bills, and the others came up too. Lynn realized that this money, barely 1% of the check she received earlier, would do more good to end hunger, than that big check. For behind these small bills there was good intention, and joy.
Lynn made a decision. When she got back to her office she returned the check with a note suggesting that the company put the money behind something it could believe in.
Now the story doesn't end there. Lynn heard from that same CEO years later. He told her he had retired, and as he reviewed his career, the returned check stuck out as a pivotal memory. He realized that he now wanted to do something with his money, he wanted to make a difference, he needed a new sense of purpose. He ended up supporting The Hunger Project and donating many times the amount of the original check out of his own funds.
Lynn concludes,
"No matter how much or how little money you have flowing through your life, when you direct the flow with soulful purpose, you feel wealthy. You feel vibrant and alive when you use your money in a way that represents you, not just in response to the market economy, but as an expression of who you are. When you let money move to things you care about, your life lights up. That's really what money is for."[7]In our reading, UU minister Lynn Ungar tells us,
This is the lifeline --It is through our touch that grain and flour become our bread, our sustenance. In the same way, money is nothing without our touch. It is only when we share it and put it to use that it has any meaning at all, any chance of satisfying us. It is wise for us to consider how we put our money, our sustenance, to use in this community. So we should ask ourselves some questions.
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.[8]
What are the possibilities, the dreams of this church community? Can we trust others in the community to share in the efforts that carry us toward our common purpose? How will this community sustain us in the future? What miracles will emerge from our involvement, our touch, our support? What can we offer toward this higher purpose.
Following this service when we sit together and share a meal of soup and bread, we will explore some of these questions. Our visitors today are welcome to join us, and as you are our guests, we will not ask you for a financial pledge.
If as Joseph Campbell suggests, money is congealed energy, then perhaps our pledges are distilled gratitude for this community. Let us release the energy behind money, releasing our gratitude, and release life's possibilities which this church represents. When you direct the flow of your money in alignment with your life, you find deep joy.
Notes:
1. Jerrod Mundis, Making Peace with Money, 1999, p. 168.
2. John Dominic Crossan, "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography", 1999. Chapter 3.
3. Paul Krugman, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", New York Times Magazine, Sept. 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html
4. Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England, 1891, p. 33.
5. Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money, 2003, p. 99.
6. ibid., p. 101.
7. ibid. p. 119.
8. Blessing the Bread: Meditations, Lynn Ungar, 1996, p. 1.
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