A Review of AFTER THE GOOD NEWS

I recently had the privilege (and good fortune) of being asked to read and review the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd's new book, After the Good News:  progressive faith beyond optimism (Skinner House Books).  I was going to read it anyway -- Nancy is one of my favorite Unitarian Universalist writers -- so I was excited to know even before I'd even started I had already been asked for my opinion!

After the Good News is easily one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time – it should be required reading for every religious professional (ordained or otherwise) who is serving a faith community that considers itself liberal or progressive, as well as each and every member.  In fact, after reading just her Introduction I found myself seeing the liberal tradition I serve with new eyes, and challenged to change because of it.

With her usual self-depreciating humor, solid scholarship, and a willingness to prophetically challenge people she so clearly loves (among whom she explicitly includes herself), Nancy lays out the roots and present ramifications of the, 

“oft-unacknowledged arc of history that doesn’t seem quite so triumphant; a narrative of the liberal church that stands counter to the rampart-holding optimism we proclaim in our most stirring hymns.”  

In cogent and lucid prose she makes sense of the confounding resistance to efforts for real change experienced even among congregations that are calling for it.  She makes clear why it is so difficult for so many people in liberal and progressive faith communities to recognize and acknowledge ourselves (particularly those of us who identify or are identified as white) as participating in and perpetuating the very systems and structures of white supremacy we are so committed to ending (even if unconsciously and unwittingly).  In fact, she explains that it is our very enthusiastic optimism and faith in the vision of "Beloved Community," important as it is, that can make us oblivious to the luxury, the privilege we have to keep ourselves at a distance from the reality of the suffering oppression has caused historically and causes still.  

Yet After the Good News does not simply convict liberal and progressive religious traditions for their inability to recognize their own complicity in maintaining the injustices we would end.  It also provides a pathway by which these traditions can evolve beyond their past in order to live more fully into the vision of Beloved Community we espouse.   

“If liberal religion is to step into a future of engaged, anti-oppressive work,” she writes, “we will be called to serve not only because others are broken or the system is broken, but because, as Bryan Stevenson says, ‘I am broken too.’” 

The empowering and inspiring vision is important, yet Nancy calls us to move beyond our ingrained optimism and to recognize the work of liberation as not just for those who have been marginalized by society, but for us all.  As the Indigenous Australian academic, artist, and activist Lilla Watson has written, 

"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together."

To do this will be hard, painful, and disorienting, and Nancy is clear about how challenging this transformation will be.  Ultimately, though, she is hopeful because of her faith in, and very obvious love of, the people who make up these liberal/progressive traditions.  After the Good New delivers a prophetic message that will be extremely difficult for some to receive, yet which is fundamentally a message of hope.  After reading it, my hope is renewed and deepened as well.

After the Good News:  Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism is available from inSpirit (the UUA's bookstore), as well as through Amazon (as both a paperback and an ebook),  BarnesandNoble.com, and GooglePlay.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

If Trees Could Talk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, January 7, 2018, at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Bare Tree" (© Erik Walker Wikstrom  2012)

During that tree planting ceremony I was talking about during the Story Time, when it got to my mentor and friend Ed Lane, he talked about spending time in Sequoia National Park, out in California.  He mentioned, in particular, one tree there – the largest and oldest tree in the Park – the General Sherman Tree.  (It was named after General Sherman in 1879 by naturalist James Wolverton, who had served as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry under General William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War.)  This tree – not only the largest in Sequoia National Park, but in the world, I’ve learned – is estimated to be about 2,000 years old, and Ed mused on the stories that tree could tell, if only it could talk.

“That tree first grew around the time that Jesus was on the earth,” Ed said.  It would have been able to observe the thriving cultures of the Monachee and Potwisha peoples, the arrival, and eventual dissolution of the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, a experimental socialist colony established there in 1886 (which renamed the tree the Karl Marx Tree, and which is remembered in the name of the largest and most eco-featured residence at local Twin Oaks Community).  This tree would be able to tell of Colonel Charles Young and his company of the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, who served as caretakers of the, then, 13-year old national park.  And, of course, it could talk about the visit of Ed and Helen Lane, in more modern times.  Oh, the stories that tree could tell, if only it could talk.

The oldest tree in Virginia, until it’s death in 2008, was a bald cypress dating back 1,000 years or more which lived in a remote swamp 80 miles southeast of Richmond.  (I couldn’t find anything about the tree that claimed its title as the oldest tree in the Commonwealth today.)  Oh the stories that tree could tell; the things it witnessed. 

The oldest tree in the world, until 2013, the oldest individual tree in the world was Methuselah, a 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristlecone, in the White Mountains of California.  It didn’t give up its status because it died, but because an even older tree has been discovered – another Bristle Cone Pine, in the same region, that is 5,062 years old. 

By contrast, the oldest living animal on the planet – again, until recently – was Adwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise, estimated to have been roughly 255-years old when it died.  The member of our own species with the longest lifespan was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997, at the age of 122 years, 164 days. (She was born in 1875.  To put that in some perspective, she met Vincent van Gogh when she was 12 or 13.)  The oldest living person today is a woman from Jamaica named Violet Brown, who is 117 years old.

The oldest living person today could tell stories of our history over the past hundred years or so, but the oldest tree, if it could talk, could tell tales of the past 5,000 years.

Besides being, I hope, at least at least a little as interesting to you as it’s been to me to learn all of this, why am I spending time on a Sunday morning giving something of a biological history lesson?  Because I believe that trees can talk, and their collective longevity gives them more than a little perspective.

What do I mean when I say that trees can talk?  A member of the congregation emailed me this week, having seen today’s topic, and told the story of a very difficult year for his wife and himself.  While he was in the hospital, he was able to see a tree outside his window, and he was moved to write a poem:

Outside my window

Is a tree

Large, imposing, yet graceful.

It's arms extending

Reaching towards Heaven.

Though last month stripped of leaves

Its fingers left intact

Provide haven for perching

Flocks of dark starlings.

Hundreds flying and landing

In perfect unison

Against fall's backdrop

of

Clear, blue skies.

Years later, while sharing this poem, someone suggested to him that the tree he was looking at, the tree that inspired that poem, was a living metaphor for … him.  He concluded the email, “I wonder if perhaps, that tree, at that critical point in my life, did talk to me.”

And, as I said to our children earlier, every single person in that circle during that tree planting ceremony – almost 25 years ago now – had a story about a tree – or trees! – that had touched their lives and, it’s really not much of a stretch to say, taught them something important.

We’ve begun, this year, to order our liturgical cycle not only by monthly themes – and this month it’s the image of a bare tree, but seasonally as well, taking a category of life’s Big Questions.  For the winter it’s:  why is life so full of pain and struggle, and what can we do about it?  Why do people we love die?  What do dreams shatter?  Why do our dreams so often elude us?  Simply, why is it so often so hard between the twin realities of being born and having to die?

Those are questions which, ultimately, have no answers – no definitive nor, for most of us when we’re in the midst of the struggle, fully satisfying answers.  But the “what to do about it?” piece, does.  And I think – not surprisingly given what I’ve said so far – that one of the places we can go for those answers is, not surprisingly, trees.

Trees, as the examples I’ve given, are often long lived, so they take the long view.  If those trees could talk they would tell stories of joys and sorrows, loss and gain, celebrations and consternations, hard times and good times, and they would tell us that all of these things come and go.  No one experience of reality is eternal; no one experience lasts forever.  And so it is with us.  Our lives see this same rising and falling, ebb and flow, and whatever hard time we’re going through at the moment will pass.  It is as certain as the branches of the bare tree bringing forth new leaves in the springtime.

They would also remind us that even in those hard times all is not lost.  As the poet in our midst noted from his hospital bed, even the bare branches in wintertime, “provide haven for perching / flocks of dark starlings.”  And so, for us, even in the midst of our struggles, when it might appear to us that there is nothing good, there always is something to celebrate.  I do not mean this in a pollyanna-ish way, the so often too glib idea that “every cloud has a silver lining,” as if that should make everything “okay.”  As Monday’s page of my Grumpy Cat calendar said, “Don’t forget:  every silver lining is part of a larger, darker cloud.”  Yet without denying the reality of that cloud, trees tell us that even in the times of our own winter bareness we can be on the lookout for those starlings.

Trees put down roots.  Some have very shallow roots, and those are easily knocked down during powerful storms.  The ones that have roots that go deep can withstand the hardest winds.  Remember, as the poet Marge Piercy noted in a poem (that’s at #568 in our hymnals), “More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.”  If we listen well to the teachings of the trees we will sink our roots, too, deep into the soil of our lives, deep into what grounds us and nourishes us.

At the same time, as Taoist sages observed centuries ago, the winds of life can break a tree that is too rigid, too stiff.  Flexibility is a lesson we so often forget – the flexibility to bend with those winds, to resist the urge to fight them, to push back, but, rather, to accept them as they blow, knowing that the time will come when the winds end and we can rise again.

Three more teachings, quickly.  (There are so many more that I can’t mention before my time, and your patience, runs out … but which, perhaps, may give you a conversation starter during the time of fellowship in the social hall following the service.  Go up to someone and say, “Hey, what have trees taught you?”  And then, after listening to their answer, you can say, “Here’s something they taught me.”). 

First, after the first service someone on their way out told me that trees grow best in a diverse environment, with different species.  A grove which has only one kind of tree in it doesn’t do as well.  I don’t think I need to elaborate on the lesson there.

Second, those Bristlecone Pines I mentioned – Methuselah and its successor?  Again, someone on their way out of the first service asked me if I knew what else it needed to live so long, besides the obvious sun, water, nourishing soil:  fire.  It needs fire to survive.  This, too, is something I don’t need to expand on.

The lesson I want to offer you of the teachings of trees comes from a fact about trees that I haven’t mentioned yet.  Those long-lived trees I talked about earlier?  They are individual trees.  There is another type of tree, a tree that grows in colonies, which, though made up of individual trunks and branches, are considered to be one living organism, because they share genetic markers and grow from one root stock.  The oldest of these is not 1,000 years old, or 5,000 years old.  The oldest living colony tree is … wait for it … 80,000 years old. 

The lesson here, too, is obvious, but I will spell it out – don’t go it alone during the hard times.  Be part of a colony.  Remember the truth that if we are like trees, then we are colony trees, connected at our roots to one another, part of one another.  This faith community can help to us to have the lived experience of being part of a larger whole and, if this community does its job well, points us to the reality of our interconnectedness with all those who ever were, all those who will be, and the entirety of the earth and the cosmos on which and in which we live.

There is no avoiding the hard times we will unavoidably experience in this life, but the world abounds with lessons about how to cope with them.  As I said to our children, I hope that in this day (this week, this month, this year, this lifetime) you keep your eyes open to trees, and to the wisdom they offer.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Does the Government Have an Obligation to "The Least of These"?: a response to Rush Limbaugh

A few days ago, during the visit of the Pope to the US, Rush Limbaugh asked a question on his show.  He said that he wasn't asking it rhetorically, that he really was curious and wanted to know.  I assume that the people who read through what must be a tremendous volume of correspondence will never pass this on to him, yet I'll send it to him nonetheless.  I thought I'd post my musing here, too.

Limbaugh's question was this, "Is there anywhere in the Bible where Jesus says that the government should help people?  Or does he say that individuals should help one another?"  I've heard other conservative pundits ask this same question and, obviously, their implication is the same -- that the moral argument of the government doing anything to address income inequality (and its related social consequences) is fundamentally misguided.  Jesus told people to help one another.  He didn't tell people to ask the government to do it.

I've heard this assertion put forward enough times that when Rush recently did as well I found myself really musing over it.  He's right, of course, as far as it goes and as far as I know.  I do not believe that Jesus is remember as every saying that it was the job of government to take care of the people.  But here's what else I know:

First, it seems obvious to me that we don't really know what Jesus said.  He didn't have a stenographer following him around.  Instead, people told one another what they remembered him as saying.  Those people told other people and the telling of the stories continued for a hundred years or so until people began to write them down.  Those writings, then, went through a myriad of translations -- not just among various languages but also through the eyes of people with different understandings and purposes.  What we have to look at today, then, is the heavily interpreted memory of people's memories of earlier people's remembrances of what Jesus said.  While I know that this is generally identified as liberal interpretation of Scripture, I also don't believe that Rush and the others are among those who believe the alternative theory that the New Testament texts were originally dictated by God for inerrant word, and that God has since guided the efforts of all of the many translators.

Second, even if you do subscribe to the idea that the Christian scriptures are not just "God-inspired" texts but "God-written" texts, you still can't claim to know everything that Jesus said.  After all, in the Gospel of John (21:25) it is written, "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."  So ... did Jesus ever say that the government had a responsibility to care for its citizens?  We don't know, and never will, because, "Jesus did many other things as well."

Third, the question itself is flawed.  The government of Jesus' time was the local branch, if you will, of the occupying Roman government.  It was not the government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."  It was an occupying force that obliterated the governing structures of the Jewish people themselves.  When the Jews did have their own independent nation the Prophets did call the government to task for not taking care of the people -- especially the poor and the strangers among them.  And Jesus is remembered as revering the Prophets, and is remembered as chastising the closest thing the Jews had to their own government -- the Temple structure.  Remember his condemnation of the money changers, and the entire system that upheld the Temple hierarchy?  (If not, re-read Mark 11:15-19, Luke 19:45-48, and John 2:12-25)  Think of the many times he called the Pharisees and Scribes to account for not caring for the poor and the suffering -- these stories are not remembrances of his just talking to and about individuals, but of his critique of those who held power.  So, it is apparently possible to demonstrate that Jesus is remembered as saying that it was the responsibility of "the powers that be" to take care of its people.  But if you want to be strict in your interpretation and limit yourself to whether or not he spoke of the official government, the government of Rome, it is a false parallel to whether or not he would call our own government to account.

Fourth, there is not only the fact that the occupying Roman government is not an appropriate analog to our democratic government today, there is also a difference of scope.  Jesus lived his entire life in an area smaller than the state of Vermont.  It is one thing to expect the poor and the suffering to be cared for by individuals alone in such a small geographic area, but when we're talking about the entire United States?  Our problems are incredibly larger, more complex, and more intimately intertwined than could possibly be handled on a local lever alone.  The reasons people are hungry, and homeless, and in a myriad of other ways in need are national in scope.  Whatever Jesus is remembered as having said he said in and to his own people in his own time and place.  A community the size of the United States was never, could never have been, imagined.

Fifth, the closet followers of Jesus, those whose stories are told in the Book of Acts, organized their communities with care for one another a foundational principle.  It is written of them that,
  "all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need." (Acts 2:45).  Further, it is remembered that, "[T]he congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them. ... there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds of the sales and lay them at the apostles' feet, and they would be distributed to each as any had need.…" (Acts 4:32 & 34)  Apparently this egalitarian, some might even say "socialist," approach so seriously that we have the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11) in which two of the community who decided to hold back some of their wealth for themselves were struck dead as a result.  If Rush and the others are really suggesting that we look to the teachings of Jesus to inform our social structures, this is the way those who are remembered as knowing him best organized themselves.  

Finally, after the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 C.E., and the formation of what, by the 13th century would come to be called "the Holy Roman Empire," we did see a government that at least in name was rooted in Christian principles.  In a book called Germany and the Holy Roman Empire the author notes that there was imperial legislation in 1530, 1548, and 1577 that, "obliged all rulers to take care of their poor," and that, "even in times of crisis, measures that almost all governments had in place undoubtedly brought relief to many.  The deserving poor were neither demonized nor criminalized."  Did Jesus say, specifically, that governments should take care of the poor?  Not that I can tell if we're being strictly precise, but it does seem that those governments that claimed to be following his teachings and example felt that they should do so.

And that, I suppose, is the ultimate response I have to Limbaugh's question:  even if Jesus did not specifically say that governments had to take care of the poor; even if he did intend to limit his overwhelmingly undeniable and inescapable emphasis on mercy, compassion, and "the least of these;" even if we capitulate to all of that ... why not do it anyway?  What is the government?  Representatives of the people, and, for that matter, a just a group of people.  Why should they not feel the same obligations that individual people are supposed to have just because they have come together as "government."  (Specifically, to quote Lincoln again, a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people.)  Some may wonder if Jesus ever said that the government should be obliged to take care of its own poor and needy.  I'll just ask in return, "Did he ever say it shouldn't"?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Helicopter God

There is a relatively new term making the rounds in parenting circles (and discussions):  helicopter parent.  This describes a mom or dad who hovers around their child, always watching, whether needed or not, and who swoops in to rescue their child at the first sign of trouble.

While this is apparently a growing phenomena, it is also one that's being (rightly, I believe) criticized.  Firstly, if a parent hovers too closely to their child that child is constantly recieving the message that they aren't to be trusted.  This isn't the intent, of course, but it is the result.  "You need me to be watching over you," is the message that the behavior itself is sending.  "You're not safe/strong/smart/something enough to handle the world on your own."  This is not, as you can imagine, the kind of message we want to be giving our children if we want them to grow up as strong, independent adults.

The second problem with this parental approach is like unto the first -- if the parent always swoops in to save the day whenever there's the slightest problem, the child has no opportunity to learn problem solving skills for her or himself.  They'll always be looking for someone else to do things for them, waiting to be saved from every predicament.

This morning one of my children asked me to help him do something.  Actually, to be more accurate, he asked me to "help" him by doing it for him.  I told him that he could do it himself and made sure that he really did understand how.  And then I let him do it.  When he asked me why I didn't help him I told him that I had, and that now he'd not only done it but also knew he could do it himself and didn't need to wait on me to do it in the future.  This doesn't mean that I never "help" him by doing things for him; I just want to make sure that he learns how much he's capable of doing on his own.

It strikes me that a lot of so-called "religious" folks have the idea of a helicopter God.  This "God" they imagine is always hovering around, always watching, and ready to swoop in at a moment's notice.  Of course, this isn't what people actually experience most of the time, but it's what they seem to expect.  Let's unpack that last line a little bit.

When, as the saying goes, bad things happen to good people lots of folks turn their faces skyward and shout, "Why?!?!?!?"  They wonder why God isn't "answering their prayers" -- by which they mean "fixing this problem in the way I want it to be fixed."  Essentially, people are asking their "God" why God isn't helping them, by which they mean  "doing it for them." 

This is what turns a lot of people off from the very idea of "God," that their experience of living suggests that if there is such a thing as a "God" she/he/it is doing a really lousy job.  Why is there so much suffering in the world?  Why aren't my prayers being answered?

But what if God were more like a parent than we'd like to admit?  This, of course, is all metaphor and analogy because whatever God might be God isn't really like anything we can conceive of.  The inconceivable is just that -- inconceivable.  But still, throughout time and across cultures people have imagined the divine as parent . . . and what if that metaphor has some real truth to it?

Well, then, wouldn't a helicopter God be just as bad as a helicopter parent?  Wouldn't God's children be receiving the message that they aren't to be trusted?  And wouldn't they have a hard time learning how to fix their own problems and clean up their own messes? 

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus is remembered as saying, "Which of you [parents], if your child asks for a fish will give a snake instead?  Or if you're asked for an egg, would give a scorpion?  If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God do for you?"

If God "is" a parent, then God is the greatest, most perfect parent possible.  And a helicopter parent is just not an example of perfect parenting.

In Gassho,

RevWik

But What If Life's Hard?

If it were up to me, I might just leave our TV on the Discovery Channel.  After all, that’s where you can find MythBusters, and Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe; Cash Cab and Dual Survival.  It’s the home of Shark Week, and that annual extravaganza of mechanization and mayhem, Punkin’ Chunkin’.

Of course, if we left the TV on Discovery then we’d miss out on some other family favorites – Good Luck Charley, iCarly, Phinneas and Ferb, Spongebob, and the kitty half-time show during the Puppy Bowl.  (Not to mention SyFy’s Eureka  and, okay I’ll cop to it, FOX’s American Idol.)

Why am I telling you all of this?  I’ve been referring a lot lately to the teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.  I’m going to do so here again.  As anyone who knows his teachings can tell you, Thich Nhat Hanh puts a great deal of emphasis on smiling as a spiritual practice.  He has said, as do most Zen teachers, that it’s essential to put in two daily practice sessions of at least twenty minutes each.  He has also said, however, that if one can’t manage to do that that one session is better than nothing.  And if you can’t manage one twenty minute session each day, then you should aim for ten.  If even that’s impossible, then try and take five real breaths at some point during the day.  And if you can’t do even that, then try to smile one fully authentic and aware smile before getting out of bed.

Smiling as a spiritual practice.  He once famously wrote that it is true that the world is full of suffering.  This, after all, is the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – “life is suffering.”  But Nhat Hanh doesn’t stop there.  The world is full of suffering, he says, but it is also full of the blue sky and the eyes of a baby.  “It would be a shame,” he wrote, “if we were only aware of the suffering.”  Breathing in, I relax body and mind.  Breathing out, I smile.

But one day one of his students approached her teacher and said, “But what if my heart is full of sadness?  How can I smile?”  What if I’m going through a difficult period?  What if I’m angry?  Or grieving?  Or scared?  What if I’m trying to figure out how to keep everything from falling apart?  What if I can’t imagine how I’m going to make it through another day?  How can I smile?

I know this question.  I’ve known heart ache.  I’ve known pain – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual agony, not to put too fine a point on it.  I’ve known loss, and I’ve known rage, and I’ve known fear.  You have too, so we know this question – what if our hearts are full of sadness?  How can we smile?

Some of you know that I’ve been sick off and on for the past several weeks.  Some of you have been in classes or meetings that I’ve had to cancel or postpone; some of you have been wondering why I didn’t respond to that e-mail or phone message you’d left.  Some of you’ve seen me and just had the feeling that something wasn’t right. 

Most of you, I hope, haven’t noticed anything.  I’ve been here in the pulpit or in the office; in a class or in a meeting; and you haven’t had an inkling that there was anything wrong.  As I said, I hope that this has been most of you.  But some of you have seen something, and what you’ve seen have been the physical and mental manifestations of the Depression I’ve been wrestling with off and on for some time now.

No doubt the stresses of the move here – both the challenges and just the newness of it all – exacerbated something that’s normally quite well controlled.  As most people who deal with depression will tell you – those who have it and those who work with us – it can often be as innocuous as well-monitored blood pressure or well-medicated allergies.  But every once in a while it’ll flare up.  Mine has been flaring lately.

So I know the question of how can I smile when my heart is full of sadness, because I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately.  How do I deliver a sermon on gratitude when I’m feeling like this?  How do I offer inspiration or encouragement when I feel such a lack of both?  The answer is the answer Thich Nhat Hanh gave to his student, and it ties us back to my bit of personal revelation about my viewing habits with which I began this sermon.

Each of us, Nhat Hanh said, is like a television set.  We each have many channels at our disposal – perhaps as many as hundreds of channels we could have playing on the screen of our life.  Yet often we get stuck on just one channel – sadness, anger, fear, playing it safe.  Often we get stuck on just one channel – out of all of the channels available to us – and then we begin to think of ourselves as being that channel.

This, of course, would be like my television set becoming convinced that it is the Discovery Channel.  This is like me becoming convinced that I am my depression, or that I am my victimization, or that I am my hoplessness.  I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.

But the truth is far more complex.  (Isn’t it almost always?)  Like a television set I actually have hundreds of channels to choose from.  I may, for any number of reasons, be spending an inordinate amount of time on the Depression Channel, but somewhere on my dial the Joy Channel is just waiting its turn.  Somewhere there is the Enlightened Buddha Channel.  Somewhere there is the Christ Channel, and it’s just as much a part of my basic package as is the channel on which I’ve gotten stuck.

Because life is full of suffering AND it is full of the shinning eyes and impossible little fingers of babies; it is full of cries of suffering AND quiet calm, both.  And when my heart is full of sorrow, when my life has gotten hard, when the suffering overwhelms the miracles, then it is essential that I know where to find the Gratitude Channel and switch out my viewing habits so as to remind myself that life is more than the malaise.

This isn’t easy to do.  Sometimes it isn’t even possible to do, not right now, at least.  Like during Shark Week you really can’t change that dial right then.  Okay, that’s not my best analogy but I know you get my point.  Sometimes it’s too much to even pick up the remote and aim it at the TV; sometimes you just gotta lie there and watch what’s on.

But the time will come – often before you’re expecting it – that you can change the channels, and that’s where the practice of gratitude comes in.  Practice something long enough, often enough, and it begins to become a habit.  Practice noticing the things in our lives that we can be grateful for, and it begins to become a habit.  A habit we can draw on, an autonomic reflex we can stimulate, when we can’t do anything else.

One of my favorite Tich Nhat Hanh-isms has to do with just how important it is to make a practice of mindfulness, a practice of awareness, a practice of smiling, a practice of gratitude; how important it is to make this practice a part of our lives during the good times, the easy times.  Practice, he says, is like sewing a parachute, and you don’t want to begin sewing your parachute as you are jumping out of the plane.  You don’t want to begin sewing your parachute as you’re jumping out of the plane.  It’s important to develop the practice of gratitude when it’s easy to do, so that you will have the practice to help you when it’s not.

Last week, in the depths of despair, I was forced to consider the practice of gratitude because I’d promised to encourage you to consider it.  It’s hard to immerse yourself in the “attitude of gratitude” without at least a little of it rubbing off.  And then there were Wendy’s reflections, and Leia’s story, and Thomas’ ruminations (which he’d intended for this week but which I needed – both professionally and personally – then instead), and there was Scott’s music . . .  and there was the spirit of this community, a wildly healing balm of breathtaking beauty.   (And as those of you on FaceBook know, on the way home I blasted some Cream as loud as I could crank it.)

And the channel changed.  My mood changed.  The world I was living in – or, more precisely, my perspective on that world – changed.

You can smile when your heart is full of sorrow . . . because you can.  Because, at some point, you have to.  Because even if all you can manage is one fully authentic and aware smile at some point during your day, it is another stitch in your parachute.  And if you can keep up that stitching then when the time comes that you jump – or fall, or are pushed – out of that plane, you’ll discover that you’re not really falling as you’d feared you would be.  You’re flying.

I want to leave you with a story.  The story of Samuel Hearne, who in the early 1770s was leading an expedition to explore to the mouth of the Coppermine River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. At one point in the journey his party was attacked by a party of Native Americans who made off with most of their supplies. I don’t know whether this incident occurred before or after a group of his party attacked and massacred a group of Cooper Inuit at Bloody Falls.  But you can imagine the feelings after they were attacked and their provisions taken –in a foreign and unknown land, a dangerous journey still ahead, most of your provisions gone, the possibility of further incidents, the guilt, the fear . . .

Now I don’t know much about Samuel Hearne.  I haven’t been able to learn whether he had sisters or brothers; whether he’d had a family of his own.  He seems to have been a good man who was truly horrified by the massacre carried out by his own people.  Still, I don’t know much about Samuel Hearne, but I do know one thing.  I do know is that he was well practiced in the art of gratitude.  I know this not because of any commentary that survives about the man but because of the comment he made in his own journal the day after the raid.  With all of the uncertainty, the tension, the anxiety that must have surrounded him at that time, Samuel Hearne wrote these words:  "The weight of our baggage being so much lightened, our next day’s journey was more swift and pleasant."

That’s someone who knew how to find the Gratitude Channel.  "The weight of our baggage being so much lightened, our next day’s journey was more swift and pleasant."

Why?

Sometimes . . . okay, often . . . someone will come up to me, knowing that I'm an ordained minister, and ask me "Why?"

Why did this bad thing happen?

Why didn't this good thing happen?

Why is life the way it is?  (Why is MY life the way it is?)

Usually I try to refrain from giving any kind of answer.  It's my experience that most people, when asking the question, are not really looking for some kind of answer.  The question is a way of giving voice to grief, or anger, or confusion.  So instead of providing some kind of answer that's not really wanted anyway, I try to find out what other thing is embedded in those words that seem like a question.

But every once in a while I do answer.  And when I do, I usually go to the place that Rabbi Harold Kushner went in his classic book When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  This is my interpretation, of course, but what I took away from that book is that the reason bad things happen to good people is . . . well . . . because.

There's a story told about a man who was living a really miserable life.  It had been miserable for some time and seemed like it was only going to get more miserable as time went on.  He sought help from psychiatrists and psychologists.  He talked to ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams.  He sought out philosophers and poets.  And then one day, after seeking for years the answer to why his life was so miserable and what he could do about it, the man found himself in a remote wilderness area where there was rumored to be an incredibly wise guru.  He found this guru and said to her:

"My life has been filled with disappointments for as long as I can remember.  One thing after another seemed to go wrong or didn't live up to my expectations.  There has been pain and suffering -- both physical and mental. Things I wanted I wouldn't get; things I had I'd lose.  Why, oh why, is my life like this?"

The guru paused for a moment.  She looked on the man with eyes filled with compassion.  And then she said, simply, "because everyone's life is like that."

That's what I remember Rabbi Kushner as saying -- bad things happen to good people because bad things happen sometimes.  There is no "why" to it.

At the same time as I was reading Harold Kushner's book I was also reading James Gleick's book Chaos:  making of a new science.  I remember thinking that there was a connection to be made between the two.  Chaos theory holds that what at first might appear to be chaotic randomness in fact contains at a deep level a tremendous amount of order and that, at the same time, what might seem orderly and structured has within it incredible levels of chaos.

I thought of all of this because, this evening, someone asked of me the question "why?"  And also because I came across this video.  I think that there's a connection to be made:






In Gassho,

RevWik

On Love and Suffering

Today is Speak Up For Universalism Day -- a day designed to coincide with the publication of Rob Bell's new book Love Wins:  A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  This new book espouses the view that God's love is all embracing, leaving no one out.  It is being greeted as heresy in some circles, and as a daring new teaching in others.  Among Unitarian Universalists, however, this is one of our foundational theological assertions.  The Universalist church has always maintained that "God is love" and that that love knows no bounds.

A colleague of mine posted this on FaceBook:

How can we affirm all-embracing inescapable love as the most powerful force of the universe in the face of catastrophe, with Japanese bodies washing ashore in the thousands and nuclear meltdown threatening? We do not know the answers, but we know they have something to do with our hearts breaking for all the suffering in the world. The truth that "love wins" does not mean there is universal happiness. Suffering is not noble, but it is a fact of life and the recognition of it connects us around the world.

I responded that I had once heard someone say "If God is Love, then God can do only what Love can do." This is still saying quite a lot -- love is a very powerful force -- but it is not all-powerful. An "all-embracing inescapable love" cannot control tectonic plates, but it can comfort and console the suffering of those devestated by an event such as the ongoin tragedy in Japan. And it can move observers to action.

I like the metaphor of God-as-Parent.  A parent cares for her or his children, wants the best for them, longs to see them happy and healthy.  The bottom line, though, is that children have their own (free) will and can make their own choices.  A truly loving parent recognizes that and gives their children the freedom to grow and develop in his or her own way.  She watches them, cares for them, celebrates them and consoles them, but does not even try to control them.

So too, I think, with God.  What kind of God would control every facet of our life and living?  An overly-controlling God, that's what.  And what kind of God would cause bad things to happen, even if they "teach a lesson"?  A cruel and caricious one, that's what.  I simply cannot believe in a God like that; such a "God" doesn't deserve the name.

We Universalists have always asserted that God is love and that this love knows no bounds.  It holds us, but doesn't control us.  It fuels our living, but doesn't force us to suffer for the sake of some inscruitable "plan."

I have summarized my theology with this phrase:  We are one human family, on one fragile planet, in one miraculous universe, bound by love."  This love, which binds us together, is what I call "God."  And it is there in Japan, and in your own heart, too.

In Gassho,

RevWik