It's Almost Enough

This is the text of the Reflections I offered on Sunday, June 30, 2019 to the congregation I have served for the past 8 years.  It is the last Reflection I will offer as their Lead Minister.  It is also quite possibly the last sermon I will offer for quite some time, because I do not expect to seek out another pastorate.  Beginning in September I will become a student again as a Chaplain Resident at the University of Virginia hospital.  I will say that it's been quite a ride.

I’m going to tell you a couple of stories this morning.  Not the kind of stories we Unitarian Universalists usually tell one another; not the kind of stories to which we usually even give much credence when we hear others tell them.  Oh, to be sure, this isn’t true of all of us, yet as a generalization, and as we’re most often seen by people in the wider world, our elevation of and commitment to “The Rational” leads us to see such decidedly irrational stories as I’m going to be telling to be ... problematic at best.  Historically, at least, Unitarianian Universalism has encouraged a healthy skepticism; we’ve been largely agnostic at heart.  The English author W. Somerset Maugham once observed,

“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and they have a very lively sustaining faith in they don’t quite know what.”

The first story happened a whole bunch of years ago, back when a primary tool for mass communication was “the list-serve.”  A colleague posted asking for help about a conundrum in which she’d found herself caught.  A member of the congregation she served had died recently.  A short time after the memorial service the deceased woman’s husband came to talk with her.  “Don’t tell my son any of this,” he said.  “We’ve always been extremely rational in our family – we believe that if you can’t see, touch, taste, hear, or feel it, it’s not real.  We don’t go in for any of that spiritual ‘woo-woo;’ we’re scientific rationalists all the way.  So, if my son knew about this he’d think I was losing it.” 

The “this” he wanted to talk to my colleague about, and which he wanted to keep from his son, was that since his wife’s death he’d continued to feel her presence.  Literally.  He knew, he knew, that it wasn’t a memory, or wishful thinking, or a delusion, or a psychotic break.  He still didn’t believe in any kind of “spiritual woo-woo” – ghosts, life-after-death, spirits.  He was still committed to logical rationalism and the proof of the senses.  Yet he also knew, knew, that he had been experiencing the undeniable presence of his wife even though she had died.  As you can imagine, this was throwing him for a bit of a loop.

But that wasn’t the problem my colleague was writing about.  She’d been able to talk with this man about his experiences, trying to help him make sense of them.  The problem came when the woman’s son came to talk with her.  He also requested that she not tell his dad about what he was about to say, because he knew his dad would think he was losing it.  But since his mom had died he’d been experiencing her almost physical presence.  It didn’t make any sense to him, it didn’t fit with anything he believed.  Still, he was rock-solid sure that these experiences were real, nonetheless.

So, that was her conundrum.  It was obvious that these two men needed to talk with each other about their experiences, yet she felt beholden to respect each of their requests not to tell the other.  So … what was she supposed to do?

Her question was pretty quickly and easily answered.  A whole bunch of us agreed that without breaking her promise she could say to either one – or both – something along the lines of:  “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about, and I know that you think your son (or father) would think you’re losing it, yet I’d seriously encourage you to take the risk of talking with them about it.  I think you owe it to your relationship with each other and with your wife (or mother); I also think you might be surprised by the response you’d receive.” 

As I said, her question was quickly taken care of, yet the thread that grew out of it went on for several months, as I remember.  And that’s because, slowly at first, person after person posted something that began like, “I’ve hardly ever told anyone about this, but …”  They’d then go on to tell the story of something rather “unbelievable,” something that didn’t align with our profession’s much touted rationality, yet which the person knew with every fiber of their being was true.  Some confessed that they’d actually never told anybody about this thing; one even noted, “I’ve never even told my wife about this.”  Yet on and on the litany went – post after post, day after day, story after story – experiences that didn’t make sense yet which the person who’d experienced it knew in their core were real.

We may be inclined to disbelieve this kind of thing, yet I’d remind you of the words Shakespeare had Hamlet say to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  More recently it’s been observed, “The universe is not only more strange than you imagine, it is more strange than you can imagine.”  I’d always believed that it was the scientist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke who coined that phrase.  This week, though, I’ve learned that it actually goes back to a passage in the 1927 essay “Possible Worlds” by the British-Indian physiologist, geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and mathematician, J. B. S. Haldane:

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.”

The title of this sermon is, “It’s Almost Enough …,” and it comes from one of my own experiences.  (One of my own stories.)  In 2001 I was enrolled in the Spiritual Guidance program of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.  (That’s the same program Wendy Steeves, the Office Assistant here, recently completed.)  The program is largely done at-a-distance, but all of the participants come together for a 9-day retreat once in each of the two years.  There was a lot of instruction, a lot of prayer, a lot of silence, a lot of time for contemplation -- and a whole lot of “spiritual woo-woo,” that irrational stuff that’s eschewed by so many UUs. 

On one of the first days of the retreat we were given a prayer exercise.  It’s Shalem’s perspective that prayer isn’t something we do.  Rather, God is always praying in us, and what we do in what we call prayer is to quiet ourselves enough to hear God’s prayer in us for us.  I’ll note that Shalem is decidedly ecumenical in orientation, even with their deep openness to other faith traditions and spiritual perspectives.  Still, a theistic perspective is core to their understanding of life (the universe, and everything), so the concept of “God” is foundational to them – albeit not with its most common understanding.  Anyway …

In this exercise we were asked to try to find an “inner place of peace … a mood of meditation,” and to allow the thought (or feeling) of a person we knew well to rise into our consciousness.  In other words, to listen for who God might be praying for in and through us.  When we felt that we knew the who, we were then to again try to quiet ourselves and listen for the what, to listen for what God’s prayer might be for that person.  After a little while we were then invited to do the same thing for someone we didn’t know all that well, and, then, finally, for someone we were having some kind of difficulties with.

When I was focusing on someone we didn’t know that well, one of the other participants kept coming up. I saw her in my mind’s eye, standing with Jesus.  He knelt in front of her and she put her hands on his head.  She then sunk to her knees, and the two embraced as they both began to cry.  (Weird, right?)

I honestly don’t think I’d even said more than a couple of words to this woman by this point in the retreat, so you can imagine it was with a little trepidation that I approached her during a break to tell her about this “vision” (if you will) and ask if it meant anything to her.  She looked really shocked.  She said that some years ago she’d had a hands-on healing ministry but had gotten scared by something and had stopped.  We’d been told to come to the retreat with a question to ponder – her’s was whether she should start again.  She felt that the vision I’d had during prayer was at least a pointer toward her answer.

A few days later someone came up to me and said that in her prayer that morning I kept coming to mind, along with the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord.”  The hymn draws on a story from the Hebrew Scriptures in which the character of God keeps calling out to a young Samuel by name.  Each time Samuel answers, “Here I am, Lord.”  This was also the hymn we sang a lot at the Methodist church camp the year I first felt my call to ordained ministry.  My question for discernment was whether I should remain in the ordained ministry.  This person’s prayer, though she could have had no way of knowing it, was a pointer for me toward my answer.  (And here I am I, 18 years later.)

Stuff like that happened a lot that week – prayers being answered, needed messages given and received, we even had a couple physical healings.  A whole lot of “spiritual woo-woo.”  At the time I considered myself a Zen/Taoist/neo-Pagan/historically Christian/currently atheistic Unitarian Universalist, so all of this didn’t fit with any of my “philosophies.”

The cohort with whom I went through the program consisted of Catholic nuns and priests, pastors from various Protestant traditions, lay people, a staunchly rational atheist humanist psychiatrist, and a Zen/Taoist/neo-Pagan/historically Christian/currently atheistic Unitarian Universalist.  Early on I became good friends with two of the other participants – a Baptist clergyman and a Presbyterian laywoman.  (I’m glad to say that we’re still friends all these years later.)  I don’t remember any longer which of us coined the phrase, but whoever said it, it stuck.  Whenever we’d hear one of these stories about something “queerer than we can imagine,” we’d reply, “You know … it’s almost enough …”  Actually, the full phrase was, “You know … it’s almost enough to make you believe in God.”

Physical healings; seeing/hearing answers to questions we didn’t know were being asked by people we’d never met before; miracles, for want of a better word, both big and small … and we’d say, somewhat ironically, that these were almost enough to make one believe in God.

I know, I do know, that “God” is one of those words many UUs don’t want to hear in their sanctuaries during Sunday services.  It’s meaningless.  It’s harmful.  The fourteen times we uttered it during the Opening Hymn, and the eight or so times Adam said it, were more than enough for some of us to last a year or two.  The Sunday after Virginia legalized same sex marriage I put on the altar two placards that had been created for a protest planned that were no longer needed.  One said, “All Love Is Equal;” the other said, “God is Love.”  So strong is the allergy to traditional “God language” among some of us that I know at least one member of this congregation came in that morning, saw the sign on the altar with the word “God” on it, and then turned around and left in disgust.

I do understand that what has been and still is so often referred to by that word, “God,” is utterly meaningless and has been used to inflict great harm.  Yet I also know the philosophical definition of the word:  “God” is, “that than which no greater can be conceived.” This means that whatever “God” is, it’s the greatest, the best, the most awesome, the most life-affirming, the most expansive … it’s that for which no greater attribute can be conceived.  The way the word “God” has been and is still so often being used is incredibly limited and limiting.  The way the word “God” is all too often (mis)understood simply can’t be what that words is really pointing to because it’s so easy to imagine something greater.  And this means that those understandings of “God” simply can’t be what “God” is.  The word “God,” when properly understood, is so unlimited that no less an authority than Saint Augustine said, “if you can understand it, if you can comprehend it, it’s not God.”  (Si comprehendis non es Deus.)

When I did my chaplaincy training all those years ago my supervisor told us what she’d say when a patient told her they didn’t need a chaplain’s visit because they didn’t believe in God.  “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in,” she’d say.  “I probably don’t believe in that God, either.”  That “God” isn’t what “God” is.  And if that “God” isn’t God, then God might after all have meaning even for us skeptical, agnostic, rational UUs who “[disbelieve] almost everything that anybody else believes, and [who] have a very lively sustaining faith in [we] don’t quite know what”

In his address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson asked those freshly-minted ministers,

“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, [are people] made sensible that [they are] an infinite Soul, that the heavens are passing into [their] mind; that [they are] drinking forever the soul of God?”

Not given dogma or stern warnings, but told that they are, themselves, intimately a part of what God is; that they are inseparably part of something truly larger than themselves.  The answer is “not in too many” Unitarian Universalist churches today, I’m afraid.

And in his essay Nature St. Ralph described an experience he had when he was,

“Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball [I love that phrase!]; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

In how many churches, by how many prophets, are we told that we are “part or parcel” of God?

I believe it was the first sermon I preached during candidating week for the first congregation I served which some encouraged not to give.  It was called “A Feather on the Breath of God,” a phrase used by the Catholic saint Hildegarde of Bingen to describe herself.  “Don’t talk about ‘God’ right out of the gate,” some people advised.  “It doesn’t go over well.”  (Yet here I stand, 25 years later.) 

Since I started out talking explicitly about God it seems right to talk explicitly about God in this last sermon, too.  Truth be told, I’ve done so in many, many sermons over the years since – maybe even in most of them, honestly.  I didn’t always use that word; you may not have even noticed.  But I did.  That’s because when we talk about “God,” we’re really talking about the Ultimate Reality in which, through which, and by which we live.  What a child once called “the Really Real,” in which, as the Apostle Paul put it, we “live, and move, and have our being.”  When we talk about “God” we’re talking about that which “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together” (to quote the esteemed theologian Obi Wan Kenobi).  We’re talking about, really, the only thing that’s really worth talking about – because that toward which the word “God” points is not some angry and judgmental anthropomorphic cosmic cop on the lookout for any infraction.  No.  When we talk about God we’re talking justice, we’re talking about truth, we’re talking about life, we’re talking about love.  What else should we be talking about?

Look around you.  Really open your eyes and look around you.  Look at your own life.  What do you see when you do?  A child’s open smile.  The warm touch of the person you love, and who loves you, most in all the world.  Leaves rustling on the wind when a stultifyingly hot day shifts with an incoming storm.  The pastel pinks and blues of sunrise; the vibrant crimson and azure of sunset.  The realization that you’ve found an answer for which you were seeking.  The courage to act on it.  Comfort in times of your own brokenness; strength when others need it from you.  Beauty, even in the presence of brutality.  The healing of body, mind, and spirit … even when there is no “cure.”  People who challenge our complacency; people who help point the way when we feel lost; people, plain and simple, other people.  Animals, plants, rivers, rocks, stars.  Moments of clarity about what really matters most.  Every breath we take.  (Every move we make.)  The sound of music.  The sound of silence.  The sound of life lived well, of life lived poorly, of life lived the best we can.  The sound of life lived in love, and love lived in our lives. 

All of that is real.  Really real.  All of it shows us, grounds us in the truth that, as I’ve been saying for years, “we are one human family, on one fragile planet, in one miraculous universe, bound by love.  All of it revealing the truth that we are not alone; the truth that in the end justice will prevail.  All of it reminders of the twin truths that life is stronger than death and that love is stronger than anything.  All of it God.

Look around you; really look around you, my friends, and really see.  And you know what?  It’s almost enough …

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Crossing Over

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, June 2, 2019 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.  This was the Sunday of our annual Bridging Ceremony, the uniquely Unitarian Universalist rite of passage from "youth" to "young adult."  It might be worth noting that these words were illustrated by project images.  (I've put the images at the end of the post, and noted throughout where they came.)

Prior to the reflection we watched a clip from an episode of the BBC Documentary "Human Planet," about the "Living Bridges of Meghalaya."  It's awesome.

There aren’t too many rituals that we Unitarian Universalists all share.  The vast majority of congregations light achalice at the beginning of their worship services, covenant groups, and some meetings, but not all congregations do.  And many UU communities celebrate an annual Flower Communion, yet I don’t think it’s even most.

Back in 1967 the Rev. Peter Raible took songs from the hymnal that was then in use, Hymns for the Celebration of Life, and, as he described it, “freely translated” them, creating Hymns for the Cerebration of Strife.  One of the more popular, sung to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy” was, “Coffee, Coffee, Coffee:”

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee,
Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated,
Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Though all else we scoff we
Come to church for coffee;
If we're late to congregate, we come in time for thee.
Coffee our one ritual,
Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip instantly.

Coffee the communion
Of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power
At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

So there’s that – the Coffee Hour.  Yet not even all of us drink coffee.

No, the one ritual that I believe is celebrated in every Unitarian Universalist congregation is what we’re about to do here today.  As far as I know every Unitarian Universalist congregation marks the transition of its young people from being youth to being young adults.  We don’t have a first Communion.  We don’t have Confirmation.  We don’t have Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.  We don’t send our children out into the woods to come back adults.  Instead, we have the Ceremony of Bridging.

Bridges are symbols with deep roots in our cultural consciousness. From “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and “A Bridge Too Far,” to “Bridge of Spies,” “Bridge to Tarabithia,” and, of course, the 1995 classic, “The Bridges of Madison County,” bridges evoke so much.

Fundamentally, bridges represent getting from here to there, here to somewhere else. (1)  They cross some kind of chasm, connect two places separated by some kind of gulf. (2)  Some bridges take a long time to traverse (3), while the journey over some others is pretty quick (4).  Some bridges are solid (5), when you’re on them you feel safe, secure.  Others are a little more … sketchy (6).  Some (7) are improvised, rather impermanent.  Others (8) you know can last for centuries.  Like those bridges in Meghalaya. (9, 10)

This morning I want to lift up three messages I find in this metaphor.  I’m talking particularly to our bridges, of course, yet I think we could all do well to listen.

First, even on the most solid of bridges crossing over from here to there is an act of faith.  You don’t always know (11) where there is.  We generally know where here is, but where there is, (12) and what’s waiting for you on the other side is not always so clear.  Sometimes you’re not even sure what’s under you, (13) what’s supporting you, what's keeping you up.  Yet we all have to cross over the bridges of our lives when we come to them. 

Oh, we don’t always have to be in a rush about it.  (14) Sometimes we’re able to take our time. (15)  Eventually, though, we all have to cross over the bridges of our lives. (16)  If we want to keep moving forward, that is.  If we want to truly be Alive, that is.

The second message in bridges is that crossing a bridge can be a dangerous thing.  That’s why so many movies set a fight scene on a bridge (17) – it ramps up the tension (18), because we all know, viscerally, that when you’re crossing a bridge from here to there, (19) there’s always the danger of falling.  Of course, there are some bridges that don’t give any cause for concern (20) -- they're not all that high, and a fall wouldn't be so bad.  And there are others that are built (21) so as to inspire every confidence, constructed to assure you of your safety.  But not all bridges are like that. (22)  There are some bridges that are truly dangerous (23) to traverse.  We know that we cross over them at our peril. (24)

Yet even these we have to cross if we want to keep moving forward and be truly Alive.  The truth is that even when it’s a bridge like this – and I hate to tell you, if your doing it right, you’ll come to such bridges more than once in your life – even when it’s a bridge like this – and maybe especially when it’s a bridge like this – it is actually far more dangers to our life’s journeys if we refuse to cross, and instead settle for staying stuck where we are.

So that’s two things – as we live our lives we will be faced with crossing over a bridge the end of which we can’t always know, and we will have to cross them even though we do know that it can be dangerous.  The third lesson comes specifically from those living bridges of Meghalaya. (25) The third lesson is that the bridges that are the strongest (26), that will truly stand the test of time, are those that we create with others (27), those bridges that are really Alive not only because they grow and evolve but also because they are made by living and loving hands. (28)  

You who are bridging today are about to cross a bridge (29) from here to there, from being seen as youth to being known as young adults.  And this bridge you cross has been lovingly built and carefully tended by your parents, your siblings, your friends, your teachers at school, your teachers here at church, the people who make up this Unitarian Universalist faith, and all those who have crossed over this bridge before you.  You, too, have a part in building this bridge, because as you cross it you leave something of yourself.  You add your own unique beauty, and you strengthen this bridge for all who will cross over it in all the years to come.

In this distinctively Unitarian Universalist ritual, one of the few shared by every Unitarian Universalist congregation, we recognize that you are young adults; that you’ve reached a milestone, a turning point, a transition in your lives and that we, as a community that loves you, recognize, mark this moment and honor this passage.

Oh, one more thing.  Despite the roughly 1,200 words I’ve just spoken, in the end it is up to you to determine just what the bridges of your life mean, and what messages you will glean from your crossings.  (30)   

Pax tecum,

RevWik

(1)(2) 

(3)(4)

(5) (6)

(7)(8)

(9) (10)

(11)(12)

(13)(14)

(15)(16)

(17)(18)

(19)(20)

(21)(22)

(23)(24)

(25)(26)

(27)(28)

(29)(30)

The Cost of Freedom

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 26, 2019 to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Every year until his death in 2012, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced legislation to change the date of Memorial Day from what it is now, the last Monday in May, back to what it had been before, May 30^th (regardless of what day that fell on in any given year).  That change occurred back in 1968.  If Inouye, who entered the Senate in 1963, took up this cause immediately, he would have introduced this bill over 40 times.

Marking Memorial Day on May 30^th goes back to the mid-1800s.  The precursor of Memorial Day was Decoration Day.  The “official” history, the one we most likely learned in school (if we learned about any of this at all), is that in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the head of an organization of Union veterans, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, declared that May 30^th should be a day for decorating the graves of the more than 620,000 soldiers who died during the war, “whose bodies,” he wrote, “now lie in almost every village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”   It didn’t matter on which side of the war you’d fought – Logan believed that the ultimate sacrifice paid by both Union and Confederate soldiers alike deserved to be remembered.  It is said that he thought the day should be celebrated in the spring, and that May 30^th was chosen because it was a date on which no battle had been fought, making it a day to honor all the soldiers who died in all the battles of the war.

The story we most likely weren’t taught in school is that in 1865, at the very tail end of the war, as the white residents of Charleston, South Carolina fled the city in advance of the arrival of Union troops, the Black citizens remained, welcoming the troops back to the city where the war had begun four years earlier. 

A makeshift prison for Union soldiers had been erected in the middle of what had been a race track.  The men who died there buried hastily in a mass grave.  After the Union soldiers arrived, Black workmen from Charleston dug up the remains of those soldiers and re-buried them with proper respect, creating a proper cemetery.  Above the entrance they placed a sign that read, “Martyrs of the Race Track.”  This new cemetery was dedicated on May 1^st, with a parade that included 10,000 people and which the New York Tribune described as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”  It seems to me that this, truly, was the 1^st Decoration Day, and is the real root of our modern Memorial Day.

But why did Senator Inouye, and a large number of veteran’s groups, care about the date on which Memorial Day fell?  Why would he try year after year for more than forty years to get it changed?  The last Monday in May is easy to remember and plan for; May 30^th would be a Saturday one year and then a few years later it’d be a Wednesday; it’d keep moving throughout the week.  Inouye fought for the change in part because the last Monday in May made it so easy to plan for.  He, and as I said, a great many others, feared that what was going to be planned for each year was not how to honor the people who had died while serving in our nation’s military.  Instead, people would be figuring out what to do with a three-day weekend and the official beginning of summer.  In 2015, Marine Corps veteran Jennie Haskamp wrote a piece for The Washington Post in which she shared her frustration that meaning of Memorial Day had become “grilled meat, super-duper discounts, a day (or two) off work, beer, potato salad and porches draped in bunting.”  She argued that it should be a day to remember and reflect on the truth that freedom comes at a cost.

Stephen Stills – of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young – wrote a haunting song called, “Find the Cost of Freedom” which came out as the B side to their song, “Ohio,” written about the Kent State massacre.  The song is deceptively simple – it’s just two lines long:

“Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground. 
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.” 

Simple, right?  The complexity, the ambiguity of the song comes when you ask yourself who it’s talking to and what it’s talking about.  Soldiers are told that they are fighting for freedom, fighting to defend democracy, fighting to make the world more safe.  And I don’t know anyone who has ever served in the military, especially during times of war, who doesn’t know all too well that those things come at a cost.  Rows, and rows, and rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery; column after column, line after line of names on those polished black granite walls of the Vietnam War Memorial.  More importantly, and more impactfully, the cost of this particular father/mother/brother/sister/friend who will never attend another Memorial Day picnic.  This may not have been the band’s intention, but this song is talking to and about them.

At the same time, though, those who were protesting the military industrial machine also saw themselves as fighting for freedom; it was clear that they, too, needed to be willing to “lay their body down.”  And nearly every mass protest since, nearly every concerted effort for change, has seen at least some, “buried in the ground.” The song talks to, and about, them as well.

There are a number of different kinds of freedom, all of which come at a cost.

A woman who speaks up about sexual harassment in the workplace, seeking freedom from the prison of misogyny, has often paid for that freedom with the loss of her position and having her reputation dragged through the mud.  A trans teen who comes out, seeking freedom from the false identity society demands of them, may pay the cost of that freedom in rejection by family and friends, and all too often with emotional, psychic, and bodily harm.  A woman of color who dares to speak her truth in her own voice, seeking freedom from the oppression of a society that demands she speak and act in ways acceptable to white folk, can pay for that freedom by having to endure an angry backlash and attacks on her character.

There is a cost to freedom.

When someone comes to realize that divorce is the right thing for them, seeking freedom from a painful and maybe even dangerous marriage, they pay for that freedom in friends who take sides, loss of income, or status, or the dream of what they’d thought life would be like.  Choosing to leave the safety of a career, seeking freedom from something soul-sucking to pursue a passion, has the cost of the incredulity of those around them and the loss of what our society deems “security.”

The Catholic priest and Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton said that the purpose of our lives is to free ourselves from the “false self” in which we are trapped, so that we can live deeply, fully, richly the life of our “true self.”  This is something every religious tradition teaches – that we live imprisoned in suffering, delusion, sleep, sin, not-life, and that we should wake up and strive for freedom.

In the Hebrew scriptures it is said that it took Moses and the Israelites 40 years of wandering in the desert after leaving their captivity in Egypt before they entered the Promised Land of Canaan.  The distance between the two could actually have been traversed in less than two weeks.  One rabbinic interpretation is that God led them on that long, wandering way because all of those who had grown up with a captive’s experience and a captive’s mentality had to die before the people could enter the freedom of the Promised Land. 

Is there something in your life that you feel traps you, preventing you from living full and free?  Is there something that you do, or don’t do, because you feel that you “should,” or that it’s “expected” of you?  Is there some part of you that is stunted, held back, imprisoned?  Our faith challenges us to risk the discomfort, the pain, even, of striving for freedom – ours and that of “all of us imprisoned,” as our Opening Hymn put it. 

It tells us too, though, that there will always be a cost.  The journey from what was to what can be always requires us to leave things behind, even things that have been precious to us; it always calls for a “death” of some kind.  That is why so many of us so rarely attempt it.  We fear the cost will be too high.  Yet the experience of those who have come before us, and even our own lived experience, tells us that the cost of not making this journey, of remaining in our prisons, is even higher still.

This is one of the reasons that we so highly value community, because change is frightening and potentially dangerous … nearly impossible if we try it alone.  Together, though, we can encourage one another, inspire one another, carry one another when the going gets really tough.  And when we make it to the other side, enter the freedom of our own “promised land,” we may one day be able to look back at that which we left behind, that which had had to die, and then clean and decorate their graves knowing that the cost we paid was worth it.

May it be so.

On Justice, Truth, and Peace

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 5, 2019 in the congregation I serve here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel whose words are at the heart of the piece the choir just sang, was a Jewish sage and leader who lived a little less than 2,100 years ago. Rav Muna, the other rabbi quoted in the choral piece, was one of the two rabbi who edited an early version of the Talmud, known as “The Talmud of the Land of Israel.”  Commenting on the teaching of ben Gamliel that “on justice, truth, and peace the whole world stands,” Rav Muna said something that Amy Bernon didn’t include in her song.  He said that in truth, those three things are not three separate things, wholly distinct from one another.  Rather, he taught, those three things are really only one thing.  That’s why, as she quoted, “where justice is done, truth is done, and peace is made.” 

This put me in mind of another saying that has this same interlocking progressive structure.  It’s actually from our Unitarian kin in Transylvania.  I imagine that our friend the Rev. István Török leads the members of our partner congregation in Olteviz in saying this with some regularity:

Hol hit—ott szeretet
Hol szeretet—ott béke
Hol béke—ott áldás
Hol áldás—ott Isten
Hol Isten—ott szükseg nincen

Elizabeth North, the Director of Music at our congregation in Concord, Massachusetts and a Unitarian Universalist composer extraordinaire, set this text to music.  It’s #1043 in the teal hymnal. (I’ll note that Beth took a little liberty with the last line):

Where there is faith there is love
Where there is love there is peace
Where there is peace there is blessing
Where there is blessing there is God
Where there is God there, there is no need.

Let’s sing that together …

Do you see the pattern?  Where justice is done, truth is done – they’re one and the same.  And where justice and truth are, peace is made.  If faith exists, then hope exists, and love exists, and peace exists, and blessings abound, and God – however you conceive of that Sacred Something, that Unlimited Love that undergirds all that is – where that is, we have all we need (which is the original last line).

For the longest time I’ve had a magnet on my refrigerator with words taken from the writings of Lau-Tzu.  It also has this same understanding of the simultaneity, the essential, fundamental equivalency of what might seem to be different things. I’ll bet that a number of you know it:

“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.” 

I did a lot of research for these Reflections – facts and figures, Jewish history, world history, current events …  I’ve thrown all that out.  (Although I will post that version on my blog next week for those of you who are into that sort of thing.)  I threw all of that because as I wrote I kept hearing a little voice in my head.  It was our Associate Minister, Rev. Alex.  Her voice was encouraging me not to tell you things you already know – about how if we look around us there seems to be so little evidence of justice, truth, and peace in our world today.  “They know that,” she said in my head.  “They’re already living with that, living in that.  What they need is to have some thoughts about what to do with that.”  And she’s right.

What do we do when we live in a society, and increasingly a world, where injustice can seem to be the norm, where truth appears to be under attack, and where peace is hard to find?  If on these three things the whole word stands, what do we do when those supports are looking increasingly unstable? 

Well … if justice, truth, and peace are not three separate things but only one thing; and if faith, love, peace, blessing, and that Holy Whole in which “we live and move and have our being” co-exist; then for there to be any of them in the world, they must first be alive in our hearts.

So … how do we bring these needful things to life and nurture them in ourselves?  We cultivate them.  We work at it.  Sorry, but there’s no other way.  No shortcut.  We have to work at it.  We make choices day-in and day-out, responding to the situations we find ourselves in rather than reacting to them out of our cultural conditioning.  We ask ourselves again and again, “What is the truth here?  What does justice look like in this encounter?  What would Peace do?”  (WWPD)

This morning I’m going to suggest three things, three ways that we can do the work of developing peace in our hearts.  Although justice, and truth, and faith, and love, and all of those things are needed in our world, I think peace provides a good model of how to respond to our own heart’s need of them. 

So … three things we can do to cultivate, to develop, to strengthen peace in our hearts:

First, we can put ourselves into direct contact with beauty.   We’re surround by beauty here right now – after the service wander around the sanctuary and take in Marissa Minnerly’s paintings.  On the drive, or the walk home, grey though the sky is today, look at the flowers you pass.  Really notice them, how their colors pop.  Let their beauty into you.  Go out into the woods, get onto a river or lake, drink deep the natural world.  Look into the eyes of a loved one, listen to their voice, reminisce about the good times you’ve had and about all the good times to come (as Willie Nelson says in one of his songs).  For that matter, listen to music.  Music is a great way to put yourself in the presence of beauty.

I have to pause here a moment to express my deepest appreciation to the choir, to Scott, to James.  I often hear clergy colleagues bemoaning the fact that they so rarely get to worship themselves, because they’re so often facilitating worship experiences for others.  I tell them that I get to worship every single Sunday.  St. Francis of Assisi is remembered as saying to his companions, “Preach always.  When necessary, use words.”  Each and every Sunday I get to – we get to – hear powerful preaching and profound sounds of prayer.  I’ll let you in on a secret:  when Scott plays a Prelude, or James plays the Musical Meditation, or whenever the service switches from words to music, I forget all about all y’all.  I don’t give you another thought.  I just open myself and let the beauty of the music wash over me, flow through me, and I revel in the mastery we’re experiencing.  That is worship here for me, and even though I think that from time to time the preacher has something worth hearing I know that many of you feel as I do. 

I do also want to put in a good word for words, though.  I was brought up by parents who shared with their kids a love of words, and to this day a well-crafted sentence brings me joy.  A few years back my friend and mentor, the Rev. Gary Smith, served on the panel that interviewed candidates for the position of Professor of Homiletics at the Starr King School for the Ministry, our seminary out in Berkley, California.  He told me that there were two questions he asked each prospective professor:  who is your favorite poet, and what was the last novel you read?  He asked these not only because if you’re going to make your living with words – which we preachers do – then you should regularly engage with the work of others who share the craft.  He also thought it important because both poetry and fiction are acts of imagination, of taking the world as it is and opening it up, exploring it in new ways, creating something revelatory.  Poetry and (good) fiction are beautiful in a very deep sense of that word.  And they are avenues for that direct contact with beauty that can help us cultivate peace in our hearts.

My second suggestion is to regularly do things that fill us up.  Modern life can be so … draining.  It can take so much out of us, the day-in day-outness of our lives.  We can go for long periods of time – for some of us extremely long periods of time – without having the opportunity to replenish our souls, our spirits.  The things we’re doing may be really important, even enjoyable, yet the often pressured pace depletes the peace we, and the world, so desperately need.  For there to be peace in the world there must be peace in the heart. 

The concept of “extroverts” and “introverts” is often misunderstood, seeing “extroverts” as people who like people and “introverts” as people who … prefer their cats.  It’s not that at all.  There are a great many people who are introverts who really like being around people, and extroverts who enjoy being alone.  The real differences is that an introvert’s spiritual/emotional battery is refilled by solitude, while the inverse is true of extroverts – they get charged by being with others.

So for those of us who are introverts, we need to find time, make time, to be alone, and to be alone with nothing to do.  No laundry, no shopping for groceries, no making of lists.  Of course, we can do those things if doing them feeds us.  The point here is, as one of my spiritual teachers put it, “don’t do anything that you have to do, that you feel obligated to do.”  So make time for this solitary not-doing regularly.  Not every once-in-a-while when the opportunity presents itself.  Regularly.  Frequently.  We should schedule it in our day timer.

For those of us who are extroverts, we need to schedule time to hang out with people we enjoy.  And I don’t mean those social events we kind of have to go to, parties (or meetings) we feel obliged to attend, those gatherings that have some kind of purpose to them.  I mean just hanging out for the sake of hanging out.

Making the time and space for those things that fill our spirits, along with putting ourselves, regularly, into direct contact with beauty – these things can help us to develop the peace in our hearts that is essential if we’re to survive these times we’re in.

One last thing.  (And given my background as a magician, juggler, fire-eater, escape artist, and clown you should probably be expecting this one.)  Play.  “Life’s too mysterious,” a greeting card said, “don’t take it serious.”  Find a young child and get down on the floor and play with them.  Heck, get down on the floor and play even if there’s no child anywhere around.  From the floor there’s an entirely different perspective on things.  Go to kids movies – superhero films come immediately to my mind, of course, but Toy Story 4 and The Secret Life of Pets 2 are coming out soon.  Do something silly because it’s silly.  A therapist I know (who I consider a rabbi, a wise sage) told me once that he’d like to write a book about how our lives could be so much healthier if we’d try to laugh, really laugh, full-throated, no-holds-barred laugh at least once a day.  He said that he worked in a group setting he made it a practice for the staff, and that it made all the difference.  (When I told him about how much our staff laughs when we’re together he was impressed, even envious, and said that we must be doing something right.)

So .. to cultivate peace in our hearts, in our lives, we can ourselves into direct contact with whatever we find to as expressions of Beauty – wherever we find them.  We can take time, make time, to do what (re)fills our spirit, taking care to avoid doing anything that we feel like we have to do, are supposed to do, feel obligated to do.  And we can play, be silly, laugh – early and often.  These three things can help us to create peace in our hearts without which there cannot be peace in the home, among neighbors, in the cities, in the nations, or in the world; without which the world doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Amen.

Pax tecum,

RevWik