The Best Place to Hide From God

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 5, 2017, to the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  As always, you can listen to it if you prefer.

It was during the first few years of my first settled call that I first started working with a spiritual director, and this guy was the real deal -- spiritual director, Episcopal priest, and Jungian analyst.  A seeker’s trifecta.  I remember one day when we were talking about the wrestling I was doing in my spiritual life – wrestling with the powerful pull of that "sacred something," combined with a concomitant dread bordering on terror.  I remember at some point saying, "It's not supposed to be this hard, is it?  I'm a minister, for God's sake!"  "Hadn't you heard?" he replied.  "They say that the best way to run away from God is to join the ministry."  I’ve heard this now, a number of times in the years since.  I've said it more than once myself.  I've also heard it put another way:  the best place to hide from God is in church.

Before I go on let's assume that I'm as Unitarian Universalist as you are, so it's not likely that I'm talking about that "God."  And I do understand that some of us "God" is not only something we don't believe in, even more, it's a word with literally no meaning.  For some of us, talking about "God" is like talking about "unicorns with Ph.D.s in astrophysics" -- it's not a question of "belief" or "unbelief."  It's an issue of nonsensicalness. 

So don't call it "God," then.  That's language that makes sense to me, that's meaningful to me, but if it's not for you, by all means, don't use it.  We sing "Spirit of Life" here most weeks.  Perhaps you can substitute that whenever I say, "God."  The UUA's Statement of Sources uses the fairly long phrase, "that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."  For that matter, call it "The Force" -- "an energy field created by all living things [which] surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together."  In a book that collected children's descriptions of "God" there's one I love:  "the really real."

Whatever you call it, we're mostly likely talking about pretty much the same thing -- the beating heart at the heart of life; the Mystery; the aliveness, the isness of things; That Which Cannot Be Named Nor Known; the really real; ruach elohim; Life; Love; God.

So why would anyone want to run away from this?  Why would anyone try to hide from it?  Why would anyway feel "dread bordering on terror" at the thought of facing -- Life?  Love?  The heart of the heart of things?

In her wonderful book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gives voice to at least one of the reasons in her description of the modern Christian church -- because it's dangerous.

"On the whole," she wrote, "I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches,” she says, “are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

"Children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. ... Ushers should issue life preserves and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."  Sounds kind of frightening when you put it that way.  “[T]he sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  Have you ever noticed that just about the first thing angels say in every encounter they have in the Biblical accounts is, "Be. Not. Afraid."  That's the kind of thing you say to somebody who's scared silly. 

Why do people so often try to run away from, try to hide from, this experience I'm calling, "God?"  Because deep down we know -- we know -- that in such encounters we should be wearing crash helmets and life preservers.

"Absorption" is one of the things my Spiritual Director said people often fear -- the feeling that if we ever truly had a deep encounter with that "sacred something" we would find themselves ... absorbed.  A perhaps absurd, though not necessarily unhelpful analogy -- in the Star Trek universe there is a species known as the Borg, and everyone who encounters it is "assimilated," forcibly brought into The Collective that is the Borg. All individuality is erased, the life you've known is obliterated and, of course, "resistance is futile."  A somewhat less odd example comes from Buddhism.  It is said that when Siddhartha had his enlightenment experience he was tempted to remain in that bliss, rather than return to the world to teach.

Deep down we know – we know – that there’s the risk of being drawn out “to where we can never return.”  That, or changed.  Drastically, irrevocably changed.  In the Hebrew Scriptures Abram’s God changed his name to Abraham, more than a mere symbolic transformation; and in the Christian Scriptures, Saul’s God transforms him into Paul, transforms him into one who now championed what he’d only recently condemned.

There’s a Jesuit priest whose writings have always spoken to me.  His name was Anthony De Mello, and he was born and raised in India, so he brought something of his early Hinduism to his Catholicism.  I purchased his book Awareness with great eagerness to glean more of his wisdom.  Imagine my surprise to read this:

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up.  The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it.  You don’t want to be happy. […] I [am] saying that we don’t want to be happy.  We want other things.  Or let’s put it more accurately:  we don’t want to be unconditionally happy.  I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. […]  We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions.

When I was doing my Spiritual Direction training with the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, I had the opportunity to study with the great Gerald May.  He told the story of being in prayer, fervently committing himself to following God’s will.  He said that he “heard a voice,” and it asked him (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your wife?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your career?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “What if you had to give up fishing?”  He said he never prayed that prayer again.

We run from deep, true encounters with the Holy and the Sacred because deep down we know – we know – that we might be called on to change, and we don’t want to change.  Not really.  Or, as Fr. De Mello noted, we want to change as long as we can keep doing this or that.  We say we want to change, transform, grow, evolve, yet whether we say it or not what’s really true is that we want to change, transform, grow, evolve on our schedule, under our conditions.  And we know – or, at least, we really, really fear – that that’s just not the way it works.

Earlier Leia told us the story of the boy with holes.  And let’s be honest, all of us have holes, don’t we?  All of us have spaces in our lives – in our hearts, in our souls – that feel empty.  Incomplete.  And because of these “missing” parts, the boy acted out in ways that were not, shall we say, in alignment with his “better angels.”  We know about that, too, don’t we?  Maybe we don’t try to sabotage other people’s fun, maybe we don’t try to interfere with other people’s lives … or maybe we do, but not consciously, or in such conspicuous ways.  But who here can say that they always act from the best parts of themselves?  Who here cannot say that it isn’t sometimes our holes, our wounds, our brokenness that direct our behavior?

So the boy in the story sets out to find completeness.  Wholeness.  (And there’s that lovely wordplay in the story that is etymologically accurate – hole, whole, and holy all share the same root; they’re a … whole … lot more connected than we probably often think.)  And the journey on which he embarks is not an easy one:

Wind whistled through his holes and blew him about.  Branches snagged him and stopped him short.  Vines grabbed him.  Animal sounds frightened him.  The river roared right at him; its spray splashed and soaked him.

Sounds a lot like a description of the spiritual journey, the journey of our own quest for deep completeness.  Wholeness.  Holiness even, maybe.  No wonder we try to run away from the call to embark; no wonder we try to hide from the summons.  Who would want to intentionally deal with all of that.  Life may not be perfect as it is, but it’s a darn sight better than that.  I may not feel entirely complete, but at least I’m somewhat comfortable.

But here’s the thing.  Despite the wind, and the branches, and the vines, and the threat of animals, and the roar and spray of the river, the boy journeyed on.  He persisted.

And he eventually came to that other village, where there was that other boy, that other boy who had his own holes but who was a complement to our hero.  The whole story is an allegory, of course, but that other boy isn’t really another boy.  If we take on this quest we’re not going to find another “us” out there, another person who will complete us.  (That kind of romanticism is best left on the silver screen.)

Yet even if there isn’t another “you,” or “me,” the promise of the spiritual journey is that there is that which will make us whole.  Make us holy.  I don’t believe that there’s anything that will fill all of our holes, yet that doesn’t mean they will always be nothing but empty space.  (How that works should be the subject of another sermon someday.)

For now, here, this morning, I just want to point out a problem I had with the story.  After the two boys merge into one, they say goodbye to the people in that second village.  That second hole boy leaves his home, and journeys back, now one with the first boy, to the first boy’s village. 

That doesn’t seem fair, does it?  Why didn’t the newly whole boy stay in the second boy’s village?  Why did he have to give up his life?  Why did the first boy get to return – transformed, yes, but able to resume his life more or less as it was?

I don’t believe he did.  I believe that there’s an untold epilog to the story.  I believe that, after returning home, and thanking that woman for her faith in him, this newly whole boy said his goodbyes as well.  He had to.  Having taken the journey, having found the completeness, the wholeness for which he searched, his adventure was really just beginning, and, so, he had to set off again, in search of new lands for he was, in truth, a new person.

And maybe, in the end, that’s what we fear.  Maybe that’s what we run from, what we hide from.  Because we don’t want to be new, at least not so new that we have to give up the old.  But that story is an allegory, and it may not mean exactly what it seems to mean. And the angels say, “Be not afraid,” and maybe they know something we don’t.

I’ll give Fr. De Mello the last words:

Spirituality means waking up.  Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.  They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  [This sounds a lot like our own Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most live lives of quiet desperation,” and live lives that are not life.  De Mello continues:]  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.  […]  [T]ragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.

In this season introspection Christians call Lent, in this month when we, here, are exploring the idea of “risk,” let us take that risk of truly looking within, truly venturing in, of not running from but running toward.  Let us take the risk of the journey, of waking up, of seeing the beauty of “this thing we call human existence,” of discovering the holy wholeness of our hole-y lives.

Closing Words:

Our closing words are a poem from Mary Oliver.  It’s one you may be familiar with – “The Journey.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Prophetic Role

This is the text of the sermon I delivered at the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  As always, you can listen to it if you'd prefer.

“After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.”  This description of a then still upcoming television program was published in a Scottish newspaper last week.  It continues, “Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the ‘What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War’ setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”

I checked it out.  This was actually published in Scotland’s Sunday Herald as its description of Friday’s coverage of the Inauguration.  “The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 …”

It was quite the weekend in DC, wasn’t it?  About a quarter of a million people gathered on the Washington Mall on Friday to see Donald J. Trump sworn in as the nation’s 45^th President.  On Saturday, an estimated half of a million women, children, and men – but mostly women – descended on DC to make their presence and their voices seen, heard, and felt.  Throughout the country, it’s been estimated that roughly 3-4 million people gathered in solidarity with what was once called “the Million Woman March.”  And initial, rough estimates says that nearly 30,000 people gathered in the more than 670 sister demonstrations around the world.  That … well … that’s a lot of people wanting to “speak truth to power,” a phrase that’s often identified as being of old Quaker origin but which seems to have actually been coined by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.

We’ve been exploring this month what it means to be “a people of prophecy,” and, perhaps more specifically, what it would mean to say that our Unitarian Universalist faith calls on us – as congregations and as individuals – calls on us to be “a people of prophecy.”  The two busloads from our congregation who joined that gathered throng in DC, and the thousands of other UUs around the country, were living examples of at least part of the answer.

One way of understanding the word “prophecy,” of course, is to think about soothsayers and oracles, fortunetellers and clairvoyants.  That’s not how I’m using the word this morning.  Instead, I’m talking about “prophecy” as that thing those well-known prophets of the Jewish tradition were all about.  I’m talking about “prophecy” as, “speaking truth to power.”

The Talmud teaches that during the Biblical period there were hundreds of thousands of prophets: at least twice as many as the 600,000 who were said to have left Egypt.  For a variety of reasons, however, Jewish scripture only identifies 55 of them.  The majority, but not all of those remembered, were men – there are stories of seven female prophets.  And while that certainly isn’t it a lot, it’s worth noting that the Talmud reports that the prophetic ability of at least one of them, Sarah, was superior to that of her husband, Abraham.  God told Abraham to listen to his wife and to do whatever she told him to, and said that he did not “ennoble” her, but that she “ennobled” him.  Sarah would have brought Abraham to the March.

Gender identity aside, the prophets all spoke out for justice and against the injustices they saw in the society around them.  Amos, for instance, cried out because he saw that the wealthy and the powerful oppressed the poor and dispossessed while, at the same time, pretending to be religiously observant.  He said that the way those who had power treated those who did not was the measuring stick by which God would judge the whole nation.  “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; I take no delight in your assemblies. … But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Hosea preached that the primary focus of God’s judgement was on the religious and secular leadership who willfully ignored God and deliberately abused those under their control.  And while both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah were to pay the price for this, the people themselves, if they repented, would feel God’s mercy.  “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings"

Micah rebuked Israel because of dishonesty in the marketplace and corruption in government, and warned that when a nation’s leadership fails to set the right example for their society, the society will crumble.  “He has shown you, O human, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Over and over again the men and women the Jewish tradition remembers as prophets bravely lifted their voices to warn, to rebuke, to challenge.  They said, in essence, “the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be, and if things don’t change, there’s going to be hell to pay.” 

Cypress did some research for this morning, and came across the book What Manner of Man is the Prophet? written in by the Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Heschel.  Heschel was one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century, as well as a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.  In his book, Heschel identifies a number of characteristics of the Hebrew prophets.  Here are a few:

In and through the prophet’s words, the invisible God becomes audible.  The Hebrew word for prophet – navi – comes from the term niv sefatayim, which means “fruit of the lips.”  In his initiatory vision, the prophet Isaiah sees a seraphim take a live coal from the altar in the Temple and place it, burning, on his lips.  The prophet speaks for God – you could say that through the prophet the people heard God’s words in a human voice. 

It doesn’t really matter what word you use to describe this thing the Hebrew Scriptures call “God.”  Call it, “The Good,” or “Truth;” call it, “Justice,” or “Love,” or “Spirit of Life.”  The point here is that the prophet speaks for – and from – something larger than themselves.  It isn’t just an individual noting her or his preferences or personal biases.  When the prophet speaks, something larger is speaking.  When Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; or Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of NETWORK Lobby; or Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother; or Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X's Daughter; or Gloria Steinem; or Angela Davis – when these women spoke yesterday, it was not simply their voices that were heard.  Each of them – and all of the other speakers on the dais in DC, and those at rallies and marches around the country and the world – spoke for and from something larger than themselves.  The spoke on behalf of the three million women, children, and men who had gathered, of course, and the hundreds of thousands more who were there in spirit, yet they spoke on behalf of something even more than that.  Call it “Love,” call it “Justice,” call it “God” … call it what you will, but it was speaking in and through those human lips.

And like the prophets of old, these modern-day prophets challenged the whole country, not just those individuals or groups that might seem most at fault.  That’s another one of Heschel’s observations about the prophets of the Jewish tradition – they never said that society’s problems were simply the fault of “those other guys.”  You never heard a prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures warn of God’s judgement only on the “one percenters,” or the “fat cats on Wall Street.,”  or “the crooked media.”  Oh, they had no problem calling out the politically powerful and the wealthy elite for their behavior, or misbehavior.  Yet they were equally clear that when things got really bad – as they inevitably would – it was going to be everyone’s head.  Heschel says that the message of the prophets was that while “few are guilty; all are responsible.”  While few are guilty, all are responsible.

Drawing again on the rallies yesterday, no one was intended to take away the idea that “those people,” over there, the ones who voted for Trump, let’s say, or the ones who were, and are now, actively working with him, no one was saying that “those people” need to change their ways while the rest of us just go only living as we always have.  On the contrary, the hard truth of the prophetic imperative is that each of us is going to have to make some fundamental, and unvaryingly unwelcome, changes in the way we live.  We, together, all of us, have to change, have to do things differently, have to be different.  Heschel says that “the purpose of prophesy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner person as well as to revolutionize history.”  It’s not just “them,” it’s “us” too.  Because, of course, ultimately there is no “us” and “them.”  “We” is all there really is.

There is one other aspect which Heschel says is common to all of the Biblical prophets – besides the fact that it seems like an awful job – is that while their message begins with a message of doom, but ends with a message of hope.  “the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be, and if things don’t change, there’s going to be hell to pay.”  That’s how it begins.  Invariably, though, the prophet then says, “but things can change.  Things don’t have to continue being the way things are right now.  Instead of descending into hell, we can, together, create heaven on earth.”

Those 3 million women, children, and men – cis, trans, and other – did not gather in cities and towns from Abaline to Zebulon did not come together to declare, “We give up.  We’ve lost.  We have been overcome.”  Quite the contrary.  They said, “We’re not gonna take it.  We will not be silenced.  We will not be cowed.  We will change the way things are into the way they should be.”

To say that we Unitarian Universalists are called to be “a people of prophecy” is to say that it is our faith’s mission to affirm and promote, to advocate for, to work for the principles we hold so dear:

·         The Inherent worth and dignity of every person;

·         Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

·         Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

·         [The] free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

·         The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

·         The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

·         Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

As “a people of prophecy” we add our voices to all those prophetic voices – past, present, and into the future – who will not stop until justice rolls on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Doing Nothing ...

This coming Friday -- January 20th -- is the day on which Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States.  There will be, not surprisingly, protests and demonstrations as well, but "the eyes of the world" will be on the West Lawn of the Capital Building in Washington, DC.  People have wondered what our congregation is going to do on the 20th, what our response is going to be.

Nothing.

Individuals, of course, will be doing all sorts of things.  And the congregation I serve is sending two busloads of people to join with the thousands of other women, children, and men who are gathering the next day for the Women's March on Washington!  In the days, weeks, months, and years ahead the members of Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist will be doing many things in response to the actions of this new Administration and the Congress.  But on Inauguration Day itself, we will not have any formal response at all.

Why?

This is not a case of "sticking our head in the sand."  In the days since the election it's been a not uncommon thing to hear people say that they intend to turn off their TVs and stop reading the paper for the next four years.  I've heard many people say that it's just too painful to pay attention to the daily -- hourly -- bombardment of bad new and surreal behavior.  I've heard this from people within the congregation and from the wider national and international community.  It is just too painful to bear, so they're going to tune it all out.

While understandable, that is a response born out of privilege.  (Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those I've heard saying this have been people who identify as White.)  People who look like me have the choice to pay attention or not.  It is one of the privileges our White Supremacist culture bestows on people who look more or less like me -- the ability to decide how much to let our lives be disturbed.

Of course, as you move down the privilege pyramid -- which places white, heterosexual, cis-male, well educated, financially comfortable people people at the top of the pile -- the number of discomforts a person cannot escape increases.  People who identify as women, for instance, have no choice but to be aware of misogyny, whereas those who identify as men can, if they wish, push it out of their consciousness.  Women of color are forced to continually face both misogyny and racism.  You see how this works.  Poor, lesbian, trans-women of color, with little formal education have very limited ability to tune out things that are disturbing.  Those of us who say that we just can't bear to think about any these things are demonstrating our relative places of privilege.

The reason TJMC is making no formal response to the inauguration is not, then, because of a desire to "pretend it isn't happening."  Nor is it an oversight.  Instead, it's a choice.  Of the many things that can be said of our incoming President, one that is inarguable is that he craves attention.  He hungers for the spotlight ... thirsts for the affirmation of the masses.  As I noted, on Inauguration Day the eyes of the world will be upon him and all of the pomp and circumstance that surrounds such an event.  And all of that attention will feed him.  He will be at a feast.

On both Twitter and Facebook I recently suggested that an appropriate response -- an act of resistance -- is to pay absolutely no attention to President-elect Trump as he assumes the highest office in the land.  For this one day, avoid watching or listening to coverage, don't click or comment on anything you see on social media, hold back from writing anything about him, the incoming administration, the inauguration itself.  Demonstrate resistance through a disciplined decision to afford him absolutely no attention at all on the day which under other circumstances is one of the most celebrated days in a President's term.  I'd encourage people not to even speak his name.

For that one day only.

Then, of course, we all need to turn our attention back to making sure we show up where needed, ally ourselves with those whose voices and whose presences are routinely marginalized and ignored, struggle to become comfortable with the discomfort of being with others whose pain is different than ours and who may even see us as part of the source of that pain.  Tune in to the coverage of the Women's March to ensure that it has tremendous ratings.  Spend Saturday the 21st writing letters to your elected representatives, speaking up and out for those who are most threatened.  But for that one day, refuse to give Donald J. Trump what he seeks most of all -- our attention.

This is why the congregation I serve has no plans for any formal response.  Our faith calls us to resist injustice, and this is one way we can do that.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

A Day of Silence

In The Wizard of Earthsea wizard Ged inadvertently lets loose on the world a great evil.  He tries to undo his mistake, but the evil is too powerful for him.  And then it begins to chase him.  To hunt him.  And as Ged flees, his pursuer grows more powerful.  Eventually, the young wizard decides, "not the hunted, but the hunter be," and he begins to chase down his enemy.  And as he does, the evil grows weaker and weaker.  It fed on his fear.

When I took  myself and my dog to class so that they could train me to help him behave his best -- stay with me for a minute -- they said that what a dog craves nearly as much as food is attention.  So when, for instance, a dog jumps, and you loudly scold it for doing so, you are actually reinforcing the unwanted behavior because you're giving the dog the attention they crave.  (Even if it is negative attention.)  The best thing to do is to turn your back on your dog, ignore it, refuse to give it what it wants.

Donald Trump craves attention.  Hungers for it.  Feeds on it.  We know this about him.  Whatever else may be true of him, we know this.  Is he mentally ill?  Stupid?  Cunningly shrewd?  We honestly can't claim to know.  But we can know that whether he his mentally ill, stupid, and/or cunningly shrewd, he has an insatiable need for attention.

This Friday, Inauguration Day, he's going to get it.  The "eyes of the world," as they say, will be upon him.  And oh how he will feed on it.

So let's not feed him.  By most accounts Donald Trump lost the popular vote by roughly 2.5 million votes.  The majority of the people who voted did not support him, and no doubt many of those who did are now wishing that they hadn't.  What would happen if each of these people refused to give Trump any attention -- positive or negative -- on Inauguration day?

Let's commit to each other that on Friday, January 20th, we will not:

• watch, listen to, or read any coverage of the inauguration
• post anything having to do with Trump, or his administration, on any social media;
• respond to anything we see posted;
• click on anything we see posted;
• talk about the Inauguration, the new President, or his administration.

I am not suggesting that we bury our heads in the sand.  Vigilance will be required during this Presidency as, perhaps, in no other.  But for one day let's refuse to give Donald Trump the thing he wants most -- our attention.

Spread the word -- #TwitterSilence

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Resistance in the Home

This is the text of the reflection I offered to the community of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, January 31st, 2016.  As always, you can listen to the podcast.

There were a lot of folks from here who were at the Open House of the Islamic Society yesterday.  [How many of you were there?]  One of the things we were told was that if a Muslim lives her or his daily life with an awareness of Allah, then everything they do is a form of worship.  And maybe the place we can see this best is in the family.  When children honor their parents, parents care for and nurture their children, and spouses love and support one another, then the various ways they do these things become forms of worship.

Now ... I don't know about you, but my home doesn't always seem like a house of worship.  Maybe yours doesn't either -- the home you're in now or the home you grew up in.  Maybe it seems a little more like Moishe's from our story earlier:  too many things getting underfoot and not enough time or space to breathe.  [Here is a link to one version of that story.]

And maybe we're a little bit like Moishe, ourselves.  I know that I sometimes think -- more often than I'd care to admit, actually (although I guess I just did) -- I sometimes think the things that are getting in the way, the things that are resisting me on my path to a happy life, are "out there."  The biggest source of my greatest resistance can be found in the external realities of my life, and that if I could only get those things to change, I would be fine. 

I think a lot of us might have been feeling like that a couple of weeks ago when the PowerBall jackpot was so high -- think of how our lives could have been improved if we'd have won!  But on a pretty regular basis we think like this too -- if only my older (or younger) sister or brother wasn't being such a pain in the neck; if only my parents would let me play that video game that all of my friends are playing; or if only the kids would clean their rooms, or my spouse would remember to put dirty dishes in the sink, or my grown kids would stop treating me like I'm the child now ...  The list could go on and on. 

This kind of thinking makes sense, although it's absolutely, completely, and totally wrong.  This life ... right now ... exactly as it is in this moment ... is the only life we have, and the only life we can be happy in because right now ... this moment ... is the only thing that's real. That's what the Rabbi's little game was all about -- getting Moishe to realize that he didn't have to change anything about how his life was in order to be happy.  The life he returns to after getting all of those animals out of his house was exactly the same life he'd been complaining about as too stressful, but now he realized just how much peace there was in it.  Absolutely nothing about the external realities of his life had changed ... but he had.

He had changed, which means that the resistance to his living a happy life wasn't really "out there" the way he -- and we, all too often -- thought it was.  The resistance is "in here."  He -- we -- are the source of our own greatest resistance.

So what do we do about that?  If we are the source of the greatest resistance in our lives, what are we going to do about it?  Well ... I am going to ask for a volunteer.  Thanks.  I'd like you to put your arms straight down at your sides.  Now ... I'm going to hold them here where they are and you're going to push against me as hard as you can.  You're going to resist having your arms at your side by trying as hard as you can to raise them up.  Okay?  Ready?  Go.

Didn't get you too far, did it?  Okay, now we're going to do that again, only at a certain point I'm going to let go, and when I do I want you to stop trying to raise your arms.  Got it?  Okay.  Go.

What happened?  Your arms rose up on their own, right?  You didn't have to do anything, they just sort of floated up.  When we stop resisting, when we let go of our resistance, we just naturally rise up.  Things get lighter.  Easier. More spacious.

When I was younger one of my favorite books was by Richard Bach, the author of Johnathan Livingston Seagull.  (It still is one of my favorites, actually.). The book is called Illusions:  adventures of a reluctant messiah.  At the beginning of the book there is a parable.  [So as not to engage in copyright infringement, here is a link to the text.]

"The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go."  "The river delights to lift us free."  Love delights to lift us free ... Life delights to lift us free ... use whatever metaphor you like.  The point will be the same.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith affirms that Life -- this life, my life and your life, Life itself -- is not ultimately meaningless.  And our faith affirms also that there are mysteries and wonders that transcend what reason alone can explain away.  Our Universalist ancestors called these transcending mysteries and wonders, "Love."  We could call them "LIfe," or "the River," but whatever you decide to call it I am here this morning to remind us of what we all once knew -- that our true work is the voyage, the adventure, that we can only take when we let go of the rocks to which we cling, when we stop resisting the current of Life, of Love, and allow it to lift us free.

It's not always easy, of course, nor is it guaranteed to seem successful at first.  I think my favorite part of that parable is when the hero is "tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks" just as he had been warned he would be.  Yet he kept trying, kept believing, kept having faith, and so should we. 

Our lives with our families -- whichever of the myriad forms your family might take -- might be where we'll see most clearly how often we forget that we, ourselves, are the source of the greatest resistance in our lives because it is so easy to blame it on one of the others. Yet when we remember where the resistance really lies, then (with practice) we can remember to let go, to stop resisting, and we will find that our arms are not the only things that rise on their own.  "The river delights to lift us free ..."  Perhaps we should stop resisting and let it.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Resisting Injustice

This is the sermon I preached at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on January 17, 2016.  As always, you can listen to it if you prefer.

You’ve probably never heard the name Ephraim Nute.  (But it is a pretty cool name, isn’t it?)  You’ve also probably never heard about the 2011 book that Skinner House published about him:  The Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute: Scandal, Bloodshed, and Unitarianism on the American Frontier.  (And how’s that for a title?)  I was on the Editorial Board of Skinner House when the manuscript for The Incredible Story was nearly passed over, and I was one of the people who argued – somewhat passionately, as I remember – that we simply had to publish this book.

Ephraim Nute was a Boston-born Unitarian, ordained to the ministry in 1845 at the age of 26.  He served congregations in Massachusetts for about a decade before feeling the need for a new adventure.  He followed that urge by volunteering to go to Kansas to start a new church there.  The year was 1854, Kansas was still a territory, and it was the year that Congress passed the now infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act which said that as these territories were admitted as new states in the Union the settlers would decide for themselves whether or not to legalize slavery.  As you may remember from a U.S. History class, these disputed territories were one of the matches that ignited the Civil War.  In Kansas, in 1854, the struggle between anti-slavery activists and pro-slavery proponents was so fierce that this period is referred to as, “bleeding Kansas.”   Starting a congregation in that context is the “adventure” Ephraim Nute signed on for.  When he left, one of the gifts given to him to help with his new ministry was a revolver.

The story of “scandal, bloodshed, and Unitarianism on the American frontier” is a pretty exciting one.  If anyone knows a screenwriter looking for a project, I’ll happily loan them my copy.  It’s that amazing.  An example:  There’s a chapter in the book titled, “Bibles and Breechloaders.”  When Nute would go back East to visit family, and friends, and the office of the American Unitarian Association, he would return with his wagon loaded with cases of books for his community.  Only … the cases were actually filled with the Sharps breech loading rifles. 

These were the rifles some called, “Beecher’s Bibles,” because of something the famous New England clergyman Henry Ward Beecher was reported to have said (and I’m quoting here from an 1856 article in the New Your Tribune):

"He (Henry W. Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well. . . read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who [support slavery]; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp's rifle."

The Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute recounts his harrowing journeys with those crates of “books” in his wagon, as well as all of the times he was beaten, shot at, arrested, imprisoned, nearly lynched …  All I can say is that the parish ministry has certainly changed some since then!  That, and that there’s no question that this was a preacher who put his faith into action.

And he wasn’t alone.  Among our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors are people who risked much in their support of the cause of abolition.  In fact, at least one historian of religion suggests that one of the reasons we see such slow growth in Unitarianism in and around this period is because of the number of radical Unitarian preachers who were so public in their opposition to slavery.   Not every one of our forebears would make us proud, of course – the President who   signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law, Millard Fillmore, was a Unitarian, for instance.  Yet in 1845, 170 Unitarian clergyman published an anti-slavery declaration in William Lloyd Garrison’s magazine The Liberator, and a list of some of the most active and well-known abolitionists would include quite a number of Unitarians and Universalists.  And our ancestors were involved in less public ways as well:

• The belfry of our congregation in Olmsted, Ohio was a station on the Underground Railroad.
• Our congregation in West Roxbury, Massachusetts gave sanctuary in their building to several escaped slaves and Freedmen.  Their Pastor, the Rev. Theodore Parker, kept a pistol in the pulpit, letting it be known that he would shoot anyone who tried to forcibly remove them.  He kept a sword by his writing desk as well, because his home was a sanctuary also.
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an African American woman who drew huge crowds of New Englanders to her lectures on the anti-slavery circuit.  Some say she was the most popular of all the abolitionist speakers of her day.  She was also a Unitarian.
• The Rev. Samuel Joseph May, who served our congregation in Syracuse, New York, was known to take up collections during the Sunday service explicitly for the purpose of aiding fugitive slaves.  (He also encouraged the Free Blacks in his congregation to sit up front rather than in the segregated back.  But that’s another story.)
• In Pennsylvania, our congregations in Meadville and Philadelphia, along with a seminary the Unitarians established in Meadville, were all known stations on the Underground Railroad, as were the Universalist congregations in Indiana County and Girard.

I could keep going, of course, but this could easily turn into a history lesson.  (If it hasn’t already done so for some of you!)  In my research I did come across a history paper written in 2002 for a course at Starr King School for the Ministry.  It’s called, “Unitarian and Universalist Denominational and Individual Involvement in the Anti-Slavery Movement Prior to the U.S. Civil War.”  Not quite as catchy as Scandal, Bloodshed and Unitarianism on the American Frontier, but it’s quite an interesting paper nonetheless (even though the author doesn’t even mention our dear Ephraim Nute even once!). [For those who are interested I’ve printed out some copies that you can find in the Church Office, and I’ll make sure that there’s a link to it when this sermon is published online.]  As I said earlier, a list of those most active in the cause of abolition would include a number of Unitarians and Universalists.

This is true of the women’s suffrage movement as well.  Judith Sargent Murray?  One of ours.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton?  Susan B. Anthony?  Yep.  Them too.  Jane Addams?  Lucy Stone? Olympia Brown?  Mary Rice Livermore?  Julia Ward Howe?  Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.  In fact if you look at both the leaders and the rank and file of pretty much all of the movements for justice in U.S. history you’ll find Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists well represented.  Resisting injustice is not something new for us; we’ve been at it for a long, long time.

That’s actually the reason I advocated for Skinner to publish Bobbie Groth’s book about her great-great-grandfather, Ephraim Nute.  I saw it as providing proof, if proof were needed, that our modern movement’s strong anti-racism, anti-oppression emphasis is not new but has roots that go deep.  I remember saying that the “incredible story of … scandal, bloodshed, and Unitarianism on the American frontier” offered an explanation of why we 21^st century Unitarian Universalists see this work as so important.  Simply – it’s part of the makeup of who we are; it’s part of the truth of who we’ve been. 

Yet even though realizing that resisting injustice is part of our faith tradition’s genome may point toward an explanation of why we are engaged in such work today, I am not sure it says all that much about why we are, and have been, engaged in such resistance.  We’ve been there, we’ve been doing it, but why have we been there doing it?

This week I stumbled upon a pretty cool resource, a rather long page on the website of our congregation in Albion, NY that contains … well … I lost count of how many pithy quotes from Unitarian Universalists it has.  One that sprang out at me is by the Rev. Forrest Church,

“Unitarianism proclaims that we spring from a common source; Universalism, that we share a common destiny.”

This is part of the answer to that why.  From their beginnings, the theologies of the movements that merged into us emphasized the unity of our human family and the universality of human experience.  You know the saying, “until all of us are free, none of us is free”?  That sense of interconnectedness, of mutual responsibility, has been a part of our theological understanding since the beginning.

Fundamentally, Unitarian Universalism is, and always has been, a humanist faith.  By this I don’t mean that we are atheists at heart, although, of course, some of us are.  Humanism has taken many forms – from a religious Christian humanism to a secular transhumanism.  So, saying that a person, or a faith tradition, is “humanist” doesn’t really tell you all that much about their understanding of, “the sacred and the holy.”  Well, actually, that’s not completely true.  All forms of humanism stress that here – this place, this world, this universe, this “sphere of human experience,” if you will – is in-and-of-itself both sacred and holy, needing nothing out there to bless all that is right here.  There’s a great line in a litany about what our faith does, and doesn’t, affirm – “it is more important to get heaven into people now, than to get people into heaven later.”  Whatever may or may not come next, this world is where the action is.  That’s humanism, and that’s foundational to our movement.

And it’s because our faith tradition teaches that “this world is where the action is” that we, as a people, have always been drawn to the work of resisting injustice.  We look around us and see all the work there is to do.  To paraphrase the words of the poet Adrienne Rich (that you can find in the back of our hymnal at #463):

[Our hearts are] moved by all [we] cannot save:so much has been destroyed
[we] have to cast [our] lot with thosewho age after age, perversely,with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world.

So much has been destroyed – so much is being destroyed – and looking around ourselves we and our forebears have seen this and are compelled to act.  And we are compelled to act because of one other aspect of our faith tradition’s teachings – that Love is our foundation, our “ground of being.”

So when we look around us at all that we cannot save, all that has been destroyed and is being destroyed, we do so through eyes of Love and we are compelled by Love to do something.  We are compelled to resist the injustices we see – it’s what we’ve always done and what we’re doing now, and what I fully expect Unitarian Universalists will keep doing as long as we last.

Now … there are those who say that every sermon should end on an uplifting note, or a charge to action, or, as Arthur likes to put it, a “so what?”.  I guess I’d have to say that this sermon is going to end on an “I thought you ought to know.”  I thought you ought to know that our Unitarian Universalist tradition has a long and storied history, an incredible story of a people who can inspire and make us proud.  I thought you ought to know that we are part of something, friends, that’s larger than any of us, larger even than TJMC.  This community is part of something larger than itself – a community that stretches far into the past and will extend far into the future.  And that community has always been on the frontlines, always been resisting injustice, always been striving to create a world of freedom and justice for everyone without exception.  We are a part of that.  We are a part of that.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Resistance to the Dominant Culture

This is the sermon I preached at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, January 10, 2016.  As always, you can listen to the podcast if you prefer.


If Unitarian Universalism were to have a pantheon of saints, right up there among them would be Ralph Waldo Emerson.  That’s what I usually call him, actually – St. Ralph.  While Unitarian Universalism has roots that go way, way back to the earliest days of the Jesus movement – even before it had taken the name “Christianity” – for the casual observer it might appear that our movement had its origins in the early nineteenth century with the Transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalism, as some of you no doubt know, was a philosophical, literary, and religious movement that stood in contrast to more traditional schools of thought at the time.  People like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Walt Whitman, and, of course, St. Ralph himself trumpeted the triumph of the individual.  “Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.”  That’s from Wikipedia; this is from the pen of St. Ralph himself:

“There is a time in [everyone’s] education when [they] [arrive] at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that [they] must take [themselves] for better, for worse, as [their] portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to [them] but through [their] toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to [them] to till. The power which resides in [them] is new in nature, and none but [she or he] knows what that is which they can do, nor does [she or he] know until [they] tried.” 

That’s from his essay Self-Reliance.  (And yes, I updated the gender-specific language.)  The Transcendentalists bemoaned the state of things as they looked around and saw them – people had lost faith in themselves, in their own innate wisdom and power.  In earlier sermons I’ve quoted a marvelous passage from the writings of Emerson’s friend Thoreau about how the proper people of his day would much prefer talking about the prophets of old than to have a prophet at their own table.  But the call of the Transcendentalists was to ignore all outside influence, no matter how well entrenched, and to rely only on oneself.  “Self-reliance” was more than the name of one of St. Ralph’s essays; it was the rallying cry of these revolutionaries.

Emerson admonished the 1838 graduating class of Harvard Divinity School to, “first of all, go alone; … refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination.”  Elsewhere he wrote, “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.”  And, of course, Thoreau gave us the idea of listening to the beat of a “different drummer.”

So we have here one kind of resistance.  (You knew I’d get around to that eventually since that’s our month’s theme – what it means to be a people of resistance.)  Our Transcendentalist ancestors called on the people of their day to resist the pull of the crowd, resist going along with tradition and expectation for their own sake, and, instead, to listen to their own inner wisdom and the pull of their own hearts, minds, and consciences.  It’s a call that still resonates with us today.  When Newsweek magazine dubbed us “the quintessential baby boomer church” this was, no doubt, a part of what they were referring to.  Like the Baby Boomer Generation in general, we have made an idol of the individual and a fetish of our freedom.

It’s part of the DNA of who we are.  Many of us are here for precisely this reason – because here we can each be free to be ourselves with no external coercion.  To many, this is the great thing about our movement – that we’re all dancing to the beats of our own inner drummers.  (Actually, some of us aren’t even all that particularly into percussion … and that’s okay too!)

And yet …

I haven’t used that two-word transition in a while, but here it is.  All that I’ve said so far is true, and yet …

The Opening Reading came from an article in UU Word magazine written by the Rev. Cheryl Walker.  It’s called “Power of community; the peril of individualism.”  In it she describes her movement from her childhood involvement with the Nation of Islam to her discovery of Unitarian Universalism in her adulthood.  She describes the joy of this discovery in words that many of us will feel very familiar with:

I fell in love with being an individual in a faith community. I was like a kid in a candy store. Me, me, me. My faith, my journey, my religion. It’s all about me. This religion was created with me in mind, just waiting for the day that I would show up and make it complete. Of course I didn’t say this, but I sure felt it. I could breathe again, I could sing, even if I didn’t know any of the tunes—and I did read ahead to make sure I wasn’t going to sing anything I didn’t agree with.

We, too, might not say it out loud, but let’s be honest … I’ll admit that that’s pretty much what I was feeling the first time I discovered a UU congregation:  “My faith, my journey, my religion. … This religion was created with me in mind …”  Some of you probably felt this way, too.  Some no doubt still do.

Yet the passage Adam read, and even just the title of the piece – “Power of community [and] the peril of individualism” – notes that there is a downside to this Worship of the One.  And it seems to me that this downside is being investigated more explicitly in recent years than I’ve heard before, especially when addressing questions like, “Why aren’t we growing more as a movement?” and “How come people visit our congregation and don’t stay?” and “Why can’t we attract more … ?”  (And you can fill in your own favorite group that you’ve observed not being well represented here.)

Let’s listen again to the Rev. Walker:

While I loved this faith, and still do, I wondered about its people. It took a long time for me to decide to sign the membership book. I love the promise of this faith, but when I, as a person of color, look at us I wonder, How can we say we affirm our Principles and yet fail to accomplish the most simple yet difficult task: creating a community where everyone can come and be who they are? We love our individuality so much we cannot make room for someone else’s. [Let me repeat that:  We love our individuality so much we cannot make room for someone else’s.]  We are unwilling to give up even a piece of our individuality to create a community where all truly feel welcome.  [My italics.]

Even more challengingly, she writes the words we heard earlier:

True community doesn’t happen unless everyone is willing to give up some of their identity as an individual to take on the identity of the group. If this doesn’t happen, then we are merely a group of individuals sharing common space but not becoming a community. It doesn’t mean that we go to the extremes of everyone wearing the same clothing, praying the same way, if at all, or believing the same things. However, it does mean that we move individualism from the center of our focus and replace it with a new concept of shared community, in which everyone gives up a little so that we can gain a lot.

“True community doesn’t happen unless everyone – [And that means me and that means you, you know.  “Everyone” means specifically me and you and isn’t some nebulous abstraction.] – is willing to give up some of their identity as an individual to take on the identity of the group.”  I think that I can say in all honesty that I’ve never met a Unitarian Universalist – or, to be fair in case I’ve forgotten someone, more than a small handful of Unitarian Universalists – truly willing to make that exchange, even though we all talk a lot about the importance of community.  Be honest –  how many of us would say that we’re really, truly “willing to give up some of [our] identity as an individual to take on the identity of the group”? 

I believe it was my colleague Tom Schade who suggested some time back that the real legacy of our Transcendentalist forebears is not their celebration of the individual, it’s their resistance to the culture of their day (which most certainly did not honor the importance of the individual as an individual).  What we need to see in their example, Tom said (and if it wasn’t Tom I apologize to whomever I’m not giving credit to), is the stance of critical resistance to the demands of the dominant culture, resistance to the crowd’s call to conformity.

And if that’s their true lesson, then today we should absolutely be trumpeting the importance of community.  And not the kind of community that’s really just a bunch of individuals coming into the same place from time to time and calling itself “a community,” but the kind of deep, rich, interconnected community in which part of our identity as individuals is our identity as part of the community. 

Now … I think that one of the reasons this is so hard for us is that many of us, maybe even most of us, don’t really feel comfortable bringing our whole selves, being our whole selves, when we come through these doors.  A lot of us are holding part of ourselves back because, even here, we don’t really believe that we would be fully accepted for the totality of who we are:  “I’m a Trinitarian Christian,” maybe or, “I’m a fiscal conservative.”  “I’m not a registered Democrat.”  “I don’t have a Master’s Degree.”  “I use Food Stamps.”  “I’m an atheist.”  “I have guns.”  “I don’t believe that abortion should be so accessible.” “I’ve been diagnosed with Bi-Polar Disorder.”  “I can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods so I get my groceries at Wall-Mart.”  “I don’t particularly like Batman.”

A lot of us here – and I’d dare say nearly all of us here – have something about ourselves that we hide … even here.  And this isn’t true just here, of course, so despite our movement’s well-publicized and celebrated elevation of the individual the truth is that we do not fully trust these … I was going to say “communities” but I think I’ll go with Cheryl’s phrase again, “group of individuals sharing common space.” 

Always there is a balance, always there needs to be a balance, between the individual and the group.  The Transcendentalists who came before us, as a people of resistance, stood up for the part of that individual/communal equation that was being undervalued.  They saw around themselves a culture of conformity and reminded the people of their time that as important as it is to belong to a group it is essential to be oneself.   They said that the claim of community was a siren song, and they advocated for, and modeled among themselves, a strong and clear resistance to its call.

Today, the culture around us has shifted and it’s all individual all the time.  We’ve lost sight of what true community really is, and what it can do and be.  The balance has shifted.  So now it’s our role as a people of resistance to encourage, and to model, a strong and clear resistance to the idolatry of the individual.  It is our task, now, to remind people that as important as it is to be ourselves, it is essential that we create community.  And the paradox is that it’s essential because, ironically, it is only in real community that we are free to be ourselves.  Only in the kind of real community we’re talking about this morning can I find the kind of trust of one another that gives me the courage to risk being myself, my whole self; and when I can trust enough to take that risk, you feel the trust to courageously do the same.

Cheryl Walker describes this as, “the most simple yet difficult task,” this creating of real community.  It’s what we say over and over that we want to do, and yet as long as we place individualism in the center of our focus it simply will not happen because, as we’ve heard several times now, “true community doesn’t happen unless everyone is willing to give up some of their identity as an individual to take on the identity of the group.”

Over the coming months our pledge drive team will be encouraging us in various ways to consider just what this community means to us.  I would ask, is this community one to which you can bring your whole self?  Is this the kind of community for which you would give up a piece of yourself?  Does it hold for you an identity that you’re willing to take on as yours?  Are you inspired here to value your own individuality a little less so that there is room for someone else’s?  (Especially if that someone is a kind of individual you don’t particularly … cotton to?)

If so … great.  Spread the Good News!  Tell your friends and neighbors, and be as generous as you can be with your time, your talent, and your treasure to ensure that this community can flourish.  And if not, consider what value it would have for you if it were and then, I pray, commit to doing all that it is within your power to do to create it.  As a people of resistance we Unitarian Universalists are called on to resist the ways our culture is unhealthy and to provide a living model of what can be.  We can start right here.

Pax tecum,

RevWik