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

The Seriousness of Play

This is the text of my reflections (and the readings) from the service this past Sunday, July 8, 2018, at the congregation I serve here in Charlottesville.  This was a multigenerational service which was not just about play, but was, itself, a time of play.

Opening Words:

The German wildlife photographer Norbert Rosing has a particular affinity for polar bears.  His work has been featured in National Geographic, and in 2006 he published, The World of the Polar Bear, which follows a family of bears over the course of a year in words and pictures.  You may have heard the story I’m about to tell.  (I’m quoting here, with slight adaptations, from one of the one of the websites that recounts this well-documented story.)

“The location was a kennel outside Churchill, Manitoba owned by dog breeder Brian Ladoon, who kept some 40 Canadian Eskimo sled dogs there when Rosing visited in 1992. A large polar bear showed up one day and took an unexpected interest in one of Ladoon's tethered dogs. [The bear was estimated to weigh about 1,200 lbs.] The other dogs went crazy as the bear approached, Rosing says, but this one, named Hudson, "calmly stood his ground and began wagging his tail." To Rosing and Ladoon's surprise, the two "put aside their ancestral animus," gently touching noses and apparently trying to make friends.  [Rosing notes that “polar bears and dogs are natural enemies and "99 percent of the bears behave quite aggressively toward dogs."]

Just then another large polar bear arrived and advanced toward one of Ladoon's other dogs, Barren. The latter rolled on his back, then the pair commenced playing "like two roughhousing kids," Rosing writes, tumbling around in the snow as he snapped pictures of the surreal encounter from the safety of his vehicle. The bear returned for more play sessions every afternoon for 10 days in a row.”  [From ThoughtCo., “Polar Bear and Huskies at Play – Analysis.”]

Reflections:  The Seriousness of Play

During the summer season the fundamental human question – the “Big Question,” if you will –  we’re exploring together is, “how to live a good life.”  This week’s answer is, “playfully.”  Before going any further, though, I want to be clear that in doing so I’ll be conflating a number of different things.  Play, of course, but also foolishness, clowning around, humor, laughter, and probably a few other things too.  But let’s start with play – a subject studied by Charles Darwin, Jean Piaget, Sigmund Floyd, Carl Jung and a host of other pretty serious people.  So … what, exactly, is play?

Patrick Bateson is emeritus professor of ethology at the University of Cambridge.  (“Ethology” is the study of animal behavior, focusing on behavior in natural conditions.)  Professor Bateson has written, “’play’ as used by biologists and psychologists is a broad term denoting almost any activity that is not ‘serious’ or ‘work.’”

Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College says, “[play] is self-chosen and self-directed … [with] rules that are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of players.”

There is no greater example of this than a game called “Calvinball,” which comes from the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes (created by Bill Waterson).  In Calvinball, “players make up the rules as they go along.  Rules cannot be used twice (except for the rule that rules cannot be used twice), and any plays made in one game may not be made again in any future games.”  Calvin himself noted, “No sport is less organized than Calvinball,” and that, “sooner or later, all [his] games turn into Calvinball.”  [from the page on Calvinball on The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki]  Sometimes it seems as though life is an on-going game of Calvinball, doesn’t it?  With ever changing rules?

People at the National Institute of Play – and yes, there is such a thing – have identified seven “types” of play:

• ·         Attunement Play
• ·         Body & Movement Play
• ·         Object Play
• ·         Social Play
• ·         Imaginative and Pretend Play
• ·         Storytelling/Narrative Play
• ·         Creative Play

Each of these seem to have two purposes.  First, they are just fun in-and-of-themselves.  Just about all animals seem to play, and while scientists have identified utilitarian reasons for this play, they’ve also had to admit that play behaviors are also simply enjoyable, are done just for the pleasure they bring.  Secondly, though, are those utilitarian reasons, and through play – as infants, children, and adults – we learn all sorts of things.  In attunement play, for instance, an infant and its parents smile and giggle at each other, coo and talk baby talk, tickle and laugh, and learn how to make connections with others.  When a young cub – whether a lion or a human baby – jumps up and down they’re experiencing the pleasure of their bodies, and learning about gravity and the realities of the physical world.  Object play – banging on pots and pans or playing with dolls (or action figures!) helps with learning how to manipulate that world, and builds eye/hand coordination and all that goes with that.  Social play helps one learn to read, and send, social cues.  (Here’s an interesting thing … in dogs, wolves, and other canids, for instance, there are certain cues that what’s coming is play.  We’ve all seen a dog throw its front legs out, drop its head low, while keeping its back up straight, with its tail wagging.  That’s a clear sign that it wants to play, and any animal that doesn’t follow that up with play, that’s “cheating” or “lying,” faces ostracism from the rest of the pack.  If you say you’re going to play, you’d better play.) 

In fact, play is so important that some social scientists have found a correlation between the amount and quality of play in children and youth and the ability later in life to creatively solve problems and engage successfully with others and the world.  “Recreational deprivation,” as it’s called, has been linked to violent, antisocial adults.  As a rule, mass murderers, for example, seem to have had extremely poor play experiences as kids.

Now … this has been a lot of words about play, and in a moment we’re going to actually do a little playing together (so get prepared), yet there is one more think I want to say about play:  play provides perspective.  Play, playfulness, can be an antidote to the seriousness that can so easily threaten to overtake us.  Why do you think that late night comedians like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, and others are so popular today?  Because they take what’s oh so incredibly seriously – seriously disturbing, seriously infuriating, seriously scary – and they playfully skewer it.  They do what fools have done since time immemorial – taking the powerful down a notch, and in so doing, redistribute that power away from the tyrants and back to those of us who laugh and join in the game.  This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t take serious things seriously.  If that’s all we do, though, we risk becoming angry, bitter, and broken.

In her autobiography, Living My Life, well-known anarchist activist revolutionary Emma Goldman wrote,

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.

There’s a well-known quotation that’s generally attributed to Goldman, which she may well have never said, yet which sums up this sentiment both beautifully and memorably, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

In these days when, perhaps, a little revolution is in order, let us not forget the importance of dancing, laughing, playing.  It may be what gets us through.

Invitation to Play

Warming Up:  We repeat the following words in a call and response style, going faster and faster until we can go no faster.

Flea.  Flea fly.  Flea fly flu.  Vista!  Cumalata cumalta cumalata vista.  Oh, no no, no no de vista.  Eenee meeny decimeny ou wa ou wa o meeny; exameeny salamini ou wa o wah o meeny.  Beep diddle oh den doten bo bo skediten doten.  Yeah.  [spelling is phonetic!]

Literary Mad Libs:  The congregation is asked to call out suggestions of various types of words -- noun, plural noun, adjective, past tense verb, etc. -- which are then placed, in order, into the reading in their appropriate places.  The result (with the words in parenthesis) was then read back to the congregation.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the (rabbit/horse), 
not a creature was stirring, not even a/an (cucumber). 
The (oceans) were tucked, all snug in their (walnuts), 
while visions of (horrendous) plums danced in their heads. 
Then up on the (Wonder Woman) there arose such a clatter. 
I sprang from my (skateboard) to see what was the matter. 
It was St. Nicholas with his little (ridiculous) belly, 
That shook when he laughed like a bowl full of (funiculars). 
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work 
And filled all the (ministers), then turned with a jerk. 
And laying his (screwdriver) aside of his nose 
And giving a nod, up the (pimple) he rose. 
I heard him exclaim as he (flew) out of sight, 
“(slimy) Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Telling a Story One Sentence at a Time:  The congregation is invited to create a story, with the first person saying only one line, and then passing the microphone to the next person, who will add the next line.

Offering:  The collection was taken with top hats rather than the usual plates, and people blew bubbles during this time.

Closing Words:

“Play exists for its own sake. Play is for the moment; it is not hurried, even when the pace is fast and timing seems important. When we play, we also celebrate holy uselessness. Like the calf frolicking in the meadow, we need no pretense or excuses. Work is productive; play, in its disinterestedness and self-forgetting, can be fruitful.”  — Margaret Guenther in Toward Holy Ground

“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”  George Bernard Shaw


Pax tecum,

RevWik

God is a Playful Puppy

I recently read a book about St. Francis of Assisi -- John Michael Talbot's The Lessons of St. Francis:  how to bring simplicity and spirituality into your daily life -- in which I came across this marvelous passage:

"What is it about some religious people -- whether in Francis' day or our own -- that makes them think God is a cosmic killjoy?  That sancity must lead straight to solemnity?  That hymns must be funeral dirges?  They certainly don't get such ideas from God, who rejoiced as he created the universe, or Jesus, whose first miracle was to turn water into wine at a wedding feast.  Many people obviously don't understand what the anonymous medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing meant when he talked about 'the delight of the Lord's playfulness.'"

I've said before that I think one of the better images we could have of the divine is that of a playful puppy -- literally falling all over itself with exuberant energy and slobbering all over you and me with affection.  Nothing we can do will ever diminish the puppy's enthusiasm, its excitement and delight, its devotion . . . and so I think it is with God. 

If God's an old man in the clouds, then there's a twinkle in his eyes and he loves to pretend to pull a quarter out of your ear just so that he can see the way your face lights up.

The ancients didn't tell us that God feels love or is loving towards us, but that God is love.  Some have interpreted the mysterious revelation to Moses -- "I am that I am" -- as God saying "I am existence itself,"  Note that this doesn't mean, "I am all the things in existence," but rather, that God is existence or, as some have put it, is IS-ness itself.  God is love and, I would add, is exuberance, is delight, is joy.

For this, may we be truly grateful.

In Gassho,

RevWik