The Other Side of the Mountain

My recent post about depression stirred up a number of responses in folks.  Like most bloggers I have folks leave comments here on the site, and others comment on the links I post on FaceBook.  Since I'm a rather public blogger, that is since I also have a public role as the lead minister of a church, people come up to me on a Sunday morning, or at some point mid-week, to tell me what they think of what I've written.

And there are all sorts of reactions to a post like that.  Some call it "brave."  Others say, "TMI."  The vast majority of reactions I got to this one were positive -- it's amazing how many people suffer silently and who are grateful whenever anyone helps them to remember that they're not alone.  There were also, not surprisingly, a few voices who thought that such revelations about my struggles are not appropriate for someone in my public role.  These folks would like to be able to look up to their minister in the pulpit and see someone who's got it all pretty much together.  (Or, at least, perhaps more together than they do!)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School of 1838, said that the preacher's calling is to give people "life pass through the fire of thought."  (I've always maintained that it's also to offer "thought passed through the fire of life," but that's probably a post for another time.)  I can also remember a preacher at a friend's ordination saying that a traditional term for our profession is "parson," and that etymologically what this means is that we are called to be "persons."  Professional persons.  To live our life fully and authentically.  And when I put these two ideas together I feel that that has to include those "too dark" or "too much light" experiences like the one of the other day.

Still, that's not the only reality.  Not for me; not for anyone.  As the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh says, "life is full of suffering, but to suffer is not enough."  And, so, today I offer this other message:

Dub Fx - The Rain Is Gone from Domins on Vimeo.

 

 

Pax tecum,

 

RevWik

 



A Speck in the Eye of God

My blog post for today will not be the text of my sermon this morning.  If you want to listen to it you can, but there is no manuscript to publish.  One of the primary differences between a sermon and, let's say, and essay is that the later is meant to be read while the former is meant to be heard.  Preaching is an aural form, and while you can certainly read the words that a preacher spoke you cannot really experience the sermon without listening to it.  (And, not to put too fine a point on it, but you really can't experience it fully without actually being in the room as it is spoken -- preaching, done correctly, is a conversational act, despite how one-directional it may seem.)

So like, if I may use a rather grandiose analogy, a Tibetan Buddhist sand painter who carefully prepares to create those elaborate and elegant mandalas and then, when it's been completed, brushes the sand away, I preached today without notes.

Besides, if truth be told, the real sermon was in the pictures and, so, that'll be my blog today.  (Along with some additional information that wasn't in the sermon.)

We started things off with another one of John Boswell's incredible Symphony of Science videos.  This one features Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is called "We Are Stardust:"

Cool, right? 

I love Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I fully agree that it's appropriate that a YouTube video of one of his lectures comes up when you Google "Greatest Sermon Ever."  Yet despite how much I love and admire this man, it was Richard Feynman's contribution that I wanted to focus on.  He's the man who says, "Stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways -- the tininess of us; the enormity of the universe."  

That brought me to a couple of pictures.

The first was inspired by a quotation of Carl Sagan's:  "One of the great revelations of space exploration is the image of the earth -- finite and lonely -- bearing the entire human species through the ocean of space and time."  (No wonder we'd sung John Mayer's "Blue Boat Home" at the begining of the service!)  So, of course, we looked at that iconic image of the earth:

 

But with Feynmann in mind we sought a sense of perspective -- the tininess of us and the enormity of the universe.  So we contemplated this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it orbited Saturn, looking back at . . . well . . . us.  (That's us above the arrow.)

Wild, right?  So next we took another step on our journey and looked at these two pictures:

The first is an image of the known, observable universe.  For a sense of scale, that's roughly 46 billion light years from side to side, meaning that it'd take you roughly 46 billion years to get from one side to the other . . . if you could travel at the speed of light!  And although that looks extremely congested, remember that the dark spaces are really incomprehensibly far apart.  (And I was informed, via email before the service, that my noted estimate of 100,000 stars in our galaxy and 100,000 galaxies in our universe was grossly low.  The true count is more like 200-400 billion for each!)

The second image, though, is the one that really gets me.  It's not a different angle on the same image, it's something entirely different -- rather than the observable universe, it's the electron cloud inside a hydrogen atom.  And as I said this morning, quoting The Matrix's Oracle, if that doesn't bake your noodle, try these on for size:

 

Are you beginning to get the idea that the real message of the morning was:  WOW!

We did get a little more speculative:

And I noted that some people might find this a little too "fringe" for their liking.  Too big a leap.  Perhaps skepticism was about to kick in.  And here I'd meant to delve a little bit more into the mystery of the Dogon people who Michelle Ba'th Bates had mentioned in her opening words.  This is an ethnic group from Mali in West Africa who, it is said, demonstrated remarkable knowledge of astronomy -- knowledge that shouldn't have been knowable.  It is said that they had made drawings that included astronomical features that simply aren't visible to the naked eye and which cultures with more advanced sciences only discovered fairly recently.  Most famously they are said to have known for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years that the star we call Sirius A is actually a binary star.  Advanced cosmological computations had postulated the existence of a Sirius B, but it wasn't actually observed until the science of optics had advanced to the point of making a telescope that could see it in the 1970s.

Now, as you can imagine, there are some rather fanciful explanations as to how they could have known this, and there are some equally passionate detractors who are certain not only that the whole thing is a hoax but that they know exactly how it was perpetrated.  To the best of my knowledge, though, neither side has fully adequately proved their point and, so, we may well be left with this mystery.  (Which, as Michelle also noted, goes along with questions about how the pyramids could have built with such precision, how Stonehenge could have been built at all, etc.)  My intention is not to try to convince anyone of any of this but, rather, to simply try to shock us awake to a reality that was perhaps best articulated by scientist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke -- "the world is not only more strange than you imagine . . . it's more strange than you can imagine."

And that's really the point of all of this.  I noted that while poets may have said this, and while mystics may have said this, that doesn't necessarily stir the soul of some Unitarian Universalists.  But here are scientists saying it:  we live in an incredibly and constantly amazing universe, and not only do we live in it but it lives in us.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it in John Boswell's song --

Look up at the night sky

We are part of that

The universe itself

Exists within us

We are star dust

In the highest exalted way

Called by the universe

Reaching out to the universe

Interconnected web indeed . . .

Pax tecum,

RevWik
 

Movie Review: Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead

As I have repeatedly said, this is the film that started it all for me.  It tells the story of Joe Cross, an apparently very successful Australian man whose "successful" lifestyle had gotten him to the point where he could be described by the title of the film and where he was, as he says, "one cheesburger away from a heart attack."  He also had a severe and dibilitating autoimmune disease for which he was taking multiple medications, including steroids.  He decided that something had to change . . . that he needed to "reboot" his life.

He remembered that as a child his body had been able to manage pretty well at healing itself and concluded that his unhealthy lifestyle -- particularly his unhealthful eating habits -- had robbed his body of that ability.  And since he knew that eating healthy foods -- particularly vegetables and fruits -- would be key to helping his body recover he decided to supercharge the process.  For sixty days he would eat consume nothing but fresh vegetable and fruit juice, infusing his system with the micronutrients and phytochemicals he had been denying it.

And since this is a movie it needs some kind of hook, so he decided to come to the United States -- home to his favorite unhealthy foods -- and travel across this country while fasting, introducing as many people as he could to his experiment.  Along the way he meets a trucker -- who by coincidence has the same rare autoimmune disease, and who is also "fat, sick, and nearly dead."  This man, Phil Stapels, decides to try Joe's approach, and the film chronicles both of their efforts . . . and their results.

There is a lot of pain in this film -- few people who are in the condition of these two men got there without some amount of personal pain that needs to be addressed -- but also a whole lot of hope.  The film is honest, and surprisingly humerous.  (Joe is a wonderful narrator and guide.)  It's filled with a lot of solid information, and is crammed full of inspiration.  A quick look at the movie's FaceBook page, or the community of "rebooters" on it's website, and you'll see countless testimonials from people who've seen the movie and tried the practice (although many for a lot less than 60 days!) and who have seen incredibly exciting results.  (If you look carefully you can find my own contributions to both of these sites.)

If you think your life could benefit from a "reboot," this movie might just be the trigger that you need.

In Gassho,

RevWik

PS -- a reminder that I will be hosting a public viewing of this movie at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist, in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday, February 1st and again on Wednesday, February 13th.

Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead - Official Trailer from Team Reboot on Vimeo.

Not Whether . . . But When

I've been thinking about the weather lately.  In part because I now live in Virginia and experienced first-hand a month or so back what my old stomping grounds in the Northeast have just experienced -- the power of the derecho.

Apparently this word has been in use to describe this particular weather phenomenon since 1877, but I'd swear that I'd never heard it before knocked down the branches and trees all around my home and knocked out the power to tens of thousands of people.  I mean, truthfully, I honestly don't remember ever hearing about derechos before that time.  And then, oddly enough, there's a second one in the national news spotlight in less than a month.  Weird.

There are a lot of weird things happening in our weather these days.  And since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth hit our mass consciousness, more and more the phrase "climate change" has become part of our lexicon.  And our experiences.  Summers are hotter; droughts are longer; storms are more powerful.  Our global climate is changing.  Weird things are happening in our weather.

There are, of course, folks who deny the whole notion of climate change.  Most often they seem to focus on the question of the causes of these changes, although they do sometimes question the reality of the changes themselves.  But most of the time even that challenge is in essence a challenge to the idea that human activity is the root problem and needs to be changed. 

Some try to challenge this call for change by noting that the planet has heated up and cooled before and since there weren't coal-fired energy plants and pervasive automobile pollution the last time this happened that what we, as a species, are doing today is obviously not to blame.  Different interpretations of the data involved can, apparently, support such a position . . . and I am not a climate scientist so I know that I can't speak authoritatively about this.  I do remember one of the important lessons in my college class on statistics -- "the numbers" can be interpreted in so many different ways that just about any point can be supported.

So I find myself unwilling to declare that the so-called "Climate Change Deniers" are wrong.  At least, not entirely.  Let's argue for a moment that the science really isn't clear yet.  Let us, for the moment, agree to take a deep breath and, for the sake of furthering the discussion, decide that the question of the cause of climate change isn't something we are able to answer with any certainty.

Let's look at the effect.  It is certainly clear that something weird is happening with our weather this day, and it also seems to be true that there have been previous shits if global weather patterns.  The earth has heated up, and cooled off, before.  And whenever this has happened before there have catastrophic changes to the earth's ecosystems.  Animal and plant species died off in tremendous numbers.  And while it is certainly true that life has continued to flourish, the life which continued was not life as they knew it before the changes occurred.  Sure, the earth survived but that's cold comfort for the dinosaurs.

Whatever the cause, it seems as though our global climate is, in fact, changing.  And, again whatever the cause, we can safely assume that, as in the past, these changes portend that life as we've known it is changing too.  Doesn't it seem to make sense to stop arguing about who or what is at fault and begin trying to work together to figure out how we're going to adapt to this changing reality?

In Gassho,

RevWik

More Lessons

 

I haven't yet watched this film myself, but it's definitely going on my list. Should it be on yours?

In Gassho,

RevWik

PS -- two nights ago I finally watched Supersize Me.  If you've ever eaten at McD's . . . a lot . . . you should watch it too.

Learning Something Every Day

About a month ago my doctor suggested that I watch a movie.  It was called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and it may well have been the catalyst for changing my life.  (I am currently on day seven of what I hope to be a thirty day "fast" of only freshly made vegetable and fruit juice.)

As part of my regimen to keep me inspired I've been watching other movies as well:

• Forks Over Knives
• Food Matters
• Food, Inc.

Each of these films has its own strengths and weaknesses.  I am sure that people who know more about nutrition and molecular science can quibble about various specific aspects.  (I have a feeling that that'd be especially true in Food Matters.)  Yet all of them together confirm what seems to me to be a very important message --

The food we eat today is literally different from the food we ate 50 or 100 years ago.  And I don't just mean the kinds of foods, I mean that the foods themselves have changed.  The nutritional quality has changed.  In some cases the molecular make up has changed.  And these changes have not been for the better.  The food we eat today is not as healthy for us -- and in many cases is now seriously unhealthy.  At the most extreme, the food we eat today is poisoning us.

And, so, all four of these films calls us to a different way of eating -- a whole foods, plant based diet.  The science is pretty convincing, so why aren't more people responding?


In Gassho,


RevWik

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

Some Inspiration for Valentine's Day

Recently, a friend of mine hooked me up with this very inspiring story from the instersection of the worlds of Texas football and Christianity:

When I first saw this I was moved, deeply moved.  Remember, this took place in the world of Texas football where they're serious about their football.  To root for the other team?  Well, that really took something.  And to ask people -- anyone, anywhere -- to step out of their comfort zones and do something out of the ordinary?  Lots of risks involved here.

Yet, really, in the grand scheme of things, you could say that this was a tiny gesture.  So the story is that such a tiny gesture could make such a huge difference in the lives of these kids from Gainesville State, the prison's school.  In fact, when I posted this video to FaceBook, one of my friends commented immediately that this one "unselfish act" on the part of the Faith Academy families could be a "defining moment" in the lives of these kids.

And maybe she's right.  It certainly seems like it was a powerful thing.

But I'll tell you what I'm interested in.  I'm actually more interested in how it changed the lives -- if it changed the lives -- of those parents and those kids from Grapevine Faith.  They had learned the Gainesville kids' names -- do they remember them?  Or have they forgotten them?  Was it one unselfish act, or was it the beginning of something?

And what about those of us who've watched the video?  What kind of moment has it been in our lives?

It's easy to see those kids and all they had to gain from this experience.  From my position of privilege it's easy to listen to this story and see the gifts going one way.  But that's not the way Love works . . . that's never the way Love works.

In Gassho,

RevWik

What Is This Thing Called God?

My friend and colleague the Rev. Stefan Jonnason recently posted a story to FaceBook about an exchange he overheard in one of the congregations he's served.  This church has a banner that proclaims its historic three-word theology: 

GOD

IS

LOVE

One especially ardant secular humanist approached another person he knew to be of a complimentary mind-set and asked, "Doesn't it drive you crazy to see that banner week after week?"

To which the other person responded, "Oh, you must be reading it wrong.  It's supposed to be read from bottom to top."

I've previously written about this idea that if "God is Love" then "Love is God."  Some folks within the various 12 Step movements have found this a way to make sense of the Higher Power concept.  Others have found that it helps with all sorts of theistic "language of reverence."  Try reading the famous passage on love found in the Christian scriptures -- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 -- replacing the word "love" with the word "God."  Changes the image of God for most people, doesn't it?

Here's another one.  I woke up with it actually.  The song's an old Cole Porter classic, What is This Thing Called Love?  What if the incomperable Sarah Vaugh were singing about God?

In Gassho,

RevWik

In The Image of God

Every so often I come across something on the Internet that I experience as so moving that, for me, it's a religious experience, and act of worship to watch it. This is such a thing.

A friend of mine posted it on FaceBook, and in my comment to her I said that such things give rise in me to two immediate thoughts. The first is that while I know that we humans are capable of acts of unspeakable barbarity and unimaginable cruelty, when I see something like this I am reminded that we're capable of incredible beauty and wonder as well, and I am given hope once again. 

And then I think that perhaps these things give us a glimpse into the meaning of the words, "made in the image of God." We cannot create the Grand Canyon, or a supernova, or mitochondrial DNA, but we can take an oversized hula hoop, the sounds of a piano and a cello, and a warehouse floor, and create, this:

wheel number from E and M-P on Vimeo.

How does someone "see" this before it's been done?  Surely no one has ever done anything quite like it.  This performer was literally creating a new performance style.  So how did he develop it?

And, for that matter, how did Beethoven "hear" the 9th Symphony?  Or how did Van Gogh "see" the Starry Night?

"We are made in the image of God."  That means, as I understand it, that we are compassionate, loving, wise, and creative.

Every so often I come across something on the Internet that I experience as so moving that, for me, it's a religious experience, and act of worship to watch it. Amen.

In Gassho,

RevWik

I can't help it . . .

My last post got me thinking . . . not in a profound way . . . not in a spiritually deep way (whatever that is) . . . but in that way that my brain sometimes works that those who know me well have gotten used to and that those who don't probably will never get used to.  So, for today's post, a revelation of sorts:

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Real You

Today I'm going to let someone else have their say in my blog -- two people, actually.  The words belong to Alan Watts, the Brittish philosopher who helped bring Eastern philosophy to a Western audience.  The artistic expression of Watts' words, though, belongs to John Boswell, the creative force behind the Symphony of Science videos that are among my favorite modern scriptures.  I hope you enjoy both.



In Gassho,

RevWik

PS -- in honor of Memorial Day on Monday I'll be taking the day off.  See you here again on Wenesday.

Mr. Deity and Prayer

For those who were intrigued by my reference to Mr. Deity earlier in the week -- this is a web show that I absolutely love in which God -- aka, "Mr. Deity" -- is portrayed sort of like a slick Hollywood producer.  I am sure that some people would be terribly offended by this, and I do think these folks go a little "beyond" every once in a while, but most often I think they make some really good points.  And almost always I think they make some really funny videos.  So here's Mr. Deity on prayer:



In Gassho,

RevWik