PRAYER:    Come holy spirits.  Enter the hearts of those who believe that    Love is better than hate    Understanding is holier than bigotry    Peace is more blessed than war    Come, holy spirits, enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.  Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.    We confess to too many smallnesses.  We confess that we are too often selfish, serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.  We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.    And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.      And so come, holy spirits.  Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to high callings.  We will make ourselves ready.    Come holy spirits, come.  Amen.

SERMON: Spirits — Holy and Otherwise

    For me, the subject of the Holy Spirit begins with a biographical story.  When I was six, I hated the Holy Ghost.  I was in a Presbyterian Sunday School, which I loved because the teacher loved children and told us wonderful stories each week.  The cement-block walls were an awful chartreuse color, but there was a color poster of a blue-eyed, brown-haired Jesus surrounded by six-year-olds, so it was a friendly place to be.    Then one Sunday, with no explanation, the wonderful old Sunday School teacher was gone, and taking her place was this horrible woman who seemed to hate both stories and children.  She tried to teach us theology, but we all heard it as another story – though not a very good one.  The title seemed to be “Trinadee,” and it started out OK.  First, there was this God up in the sky.  Well, Superman and Captain Marvel were up there, so there had to be room for a God.  That was fine.    Then this God had a son.  But we had his photo on the wall and he liked kids, so that was ok too.     But then, there was … this ghost.  The only mental picture I had was of Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and it was a ridiculous image to try and fit into that story.  When she finished, she asked us if we understood.  I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that about a story.  Trying to be nice, I said, “Well, it’s a pretty good story, but next time leave out the ghost.”     I didn’t yet know the word “apoplectic,” but that’s what she became.  “It is not a story!” she screamed.  Well, a six-year-old knows a story when he hears one, so I said, “Yes, it’s a story and it’s not a real bad one, but the ghost is dumb.  Leave out the ghost.”      From there, things escalated.  She told me that Jesus doesn’t like little boys who call this a story, and I said, “Well, then you can leave out Jesus, too.”      So a couple things happened that day.  First, my happy childhood Sunday School experience ended.  And second, by virtue of wiping out two-thirds of the Trinity, I became a Unitarian.      Ironically, when I grew up and understood what the concept of the Holy Spirit was about, it became one of my favorite religious ideas.  We are embodied spirits.  I agree with the mystics on that: we aren’t primarily bodies; we’re primarily spirits, wearing bodies.      Honest religion, the theme of the sermons this fall, is a phrase with two words.  Honesty is easy enough to do if you’re not afraid of crossing other people’s comfort zones or boundaries of orthodox thinking.     But also to be religious means we must be concerned about seeing and saying the highest ideals to which we can aspire.  Not because God commands us to, but because those ideals help define the healthiest and most deeply fulfilling life and world.      And the highest of the spirits is, as nearly all religions have said, a spirit of compassion and love for others, that can over-ride smaller and more self-serving ambitions.  The Catholic Church, and after them almost all of Christianity, calls it the Holy Spirit, and that seems the right name for it.  St. Augustine write in the early 5th century that the great gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift enabling you to love others as yourself — and that if you didn’t get that gift, you didn’t get much.

    Even though the idea of one single holy spirit vastly oversimplifies how complex we and our many spirits really are, it’s useful for speaking not about the spirit but about our own longing for the sense of peace that could come from stilling our quarrelling voices, of raising our own selfishnesses to the higher level of equal concern and compassion for others.  You can find this yearning expressed simply and poignantly in some of the great religious poetry.    Here’s just one line from a famous Catholic prayer called “Come, Holy Spirit”.  See if you can’t feel the yearning from which this prayer could come: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.”     Don’t you wish it were that easy!  In real life, we usually have to tend to a variety of different spirits that drive us.  But the larger hope or wish is that we could just be filled with an overriding spirit of compassion and love that could somehow automatically choreograph all our disparate voices.  So some of the religious poetry can speak to this yearning of ours, whether we think in terms of gods or not.      Here’s part of another, a poem written by a woman named Edith Stein, who the Catholic Church made into St. Benedicta.  She seems to have been one of those rare people who was filled, possessed, by this spirit of love.  Just listen to these dozen or so lines from her poem and see if they don’t have an emotional, a spiritual, effect on you, as she stands in awe of this gift within her:Novena Of  The Holy Spiritby St. Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)  Who are you, sweet light, that fills meAnd illumines the darkness of my heart?You lead me like a mother’s hand,And should you let go of me, I would not know how to take another step.You are the spaceThat embraces my being and buries it in yourself.Away from you it sinks into the abyssOf nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.You, nearer to me than I to myselfAnd more interior than my most interiorAnd still impalpable and intangibleAnd beyond any name:Holy Spirit eternal love!     One thing this spirit business is about that’s frustratingly right is that it seldom seems to be under our control.  We can control our behaviors under most circumstances, but it’s much much harder to control what we wish we could do, how we feel, what we love or hate.  Those things seem to be beyond our direct control.  You can quit smoking or drinking, but not wanting a smoke or a drink as easily. We can be nice to someone we hate, but it’s a whole lot harder to want to be nice to them!  The reason – and this is really what today’s sermon is about – is that this spirit business is not only much more complex than Western religion implies, but also very different.  So I want to talk with you about spirits – holy and otherwise.      The word “spirit” is a rich, multi-layered word.  If you look up synonyms, you find things like vital essence, presence, disposition, and my favorite, enthusiasm.  The Greeks turned spirits into daimons and gods, for they saw people filled with these powerful dispositions, and saw the same dispositions appear in every generation, as eternal presences that outlived us.      That word “enthusiasm” still contains this ancient history.  It comes from the Greek en-theos, which means “filled with a god.”  And we are indeed filled with gods, filled with spirits that are the most significant thing about us.  Sometimes we call this character, which also comes from a Greek word meaning a deep kind of mark that identifies us, which is what our guiding spirits do.      And we are still driven by spirits you can recognize in the Greek stories of gods and daimons.  They are still with us, thirty or forty or more centuries after the Greeks first noticed them:    Harpies.  You hear someone screaming “I’ll tear that creep’s arms off!  I’ll rip out her hair, gough out his eyes!  She’ll never escape my wrath, never!  I’ll make him suffer forever!”  (Add the wordless screaming “Harpie” sound)  We’ve all heard this voice, maybe from our own mouths.  It’s the spirit of unmitigated rage and vengeance.  These are the voices the ancient Greeks called the Harpies: dangerous, vicious supernatural forces of rage and vengeance.    Or you hear somebody say that “Of course might makes right, and the fact that the US is the mightiest military power on earth gives us the right to invade and occupy Iraq, sell off its assets, take control of its oil, kill over 700,000 of its people, and if they don’t like it, let them try to stop us.”  This is the voice of Ares, the Greek god of war.      Or someone does something absolutely destructive and dumb, and says they couldn’t help it because they were in love, and you’re hearing a modern incarnation of Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans called Venus.      You could go through the rest of the ancient Greek gods and daimons and recognize them from people in your own lives, maybe from your own life.  The Greeks saw these spirits as so powerful and everpresent they sculpted statues of them, and built temples to them.    In some ways, one of the most interesting of the ancient Greek Olympic deities was the goddess Hestia: the only Greek deity not drawn or sculpted, though there were altars to her.  Hestia makes it more clear that these spirits are invisible dynamics, not really supernatural male or female deities.   And Hestia is invisible but terribly important.  She was the goddess of the hearth, the home.  She represents the feeling, the presence, that makes a house feel like a home, or a church service feel like a worship service.  It may be invisible, but everyone knows whether it’s present or not, and its presence makes all the difference.    We are embodied spirits.  When you meet someone you knew in childhood but haven’t seen for many years, what you really recognize as you talk with them is that spirit or character that was distinctive about them.  “

Character” is a word that meant a very deep identifying mark, and a famous Greek saying was that your character is your fate: its style will determine who and what you will be, and how people will remember you.      So the spirit that you’re expressing at the moment gives you your character at the moment.  And the spirit that comes to define your life defines your character and your fate.  You can probably think of people in your own lives who come to mind, people you can and do sum up very simply: she’s so selfish, he’s so vain, she’s so very caring, he’s such a trustworthy friend.    And while we’re on words, there’s the great German word “Zeitgeist,” which means the “spirit of the times.” Whole eras can be defined by spirits.  Classical music was defined, as many music historians have said, by the spirit of Apollo, as Romantic music was defined more by the spirit of Dionysus.  The Hippie movement of 35 years ago was defined by the spirits of peace, sexual liberation and individual freedom, and those spirits – I think they were mostly the four goddesses Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, and the wildcard god Dionysus – choreographed much of that generation, as some here can remember.      It choreographs, defines, drives, is the god that rules for better or worse.      This is where the Greeks had a more honest and accurate picture of human nature than our Western religions have.  Our Western religions want to talk just about the Holy Spirit, as they want to talk about just one god, as though there could ever really be just one dynamic in charge.  The Greeks saw that we have numerous spirits in us, several or many drives that push us in different directions, that they’re seldom compatible, and that the real goal in life is achieving some nuance, and the ability to moderate the quarreling tendencies we have.  The Greeks originally had twelve Olympian deities, though not all sources agree on the same twelve.  But they were saying they could identify at least a dozen styles, dynamics, biases, spirits that we can always find driving the lives of ourselves and others.  And the gods and spirits seldom agree, and usually bicker, just as they do in our own mind and our culture.      That’s where Zeus came in.  As the top dog among the Olympian deities, the Alpha Male among the gods, his job was to try and harmonize all the bickering voices.  That’s our job, too: to harmonize the bickering voices that drive us.  There were gods that neither Zeus nor the Greeks respected, even though they had to acknowledge their power.  Ares, and god of war, wasn’t respected by Zeus because he was all passion and no reason.  And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was also all passion and no reason.   In the stories about Aphrodite, almost no one’s life was made better by crossing her path.  It ended badly or tragically for the humans, this passion that followed lust wherever it led, everything else be damned.  Without using our reason to play the role of Zeus and balance the often selfish voices within us, we are unlikely to live wise or fulfilling lives, and unlikely to be much blessing to others.      One of the themes in these sermons is our task of evolving beyond the chimpanzee politics that are rooted very deeply in us, the notion of power gained to serve our own selfish ends rather than to serve others.  And this is where we tie back to chimpanzee politics.  Because each one of these spirits – with the exception of the Holy Spirit – is selfish, concerned only with getting what it wants, no matter what harm it does to us or others.  Hermes is a sneaky guy nobody can trust, very clever at using words to persuade anybody of anything.  He creates advertising campaigns that sell Americans on eating unhealthy food and becoming unhealthy people, or cars that guzzle gas and pollute the air, or a thousand other gadgets that run up credit card bills so tens of millions of people are buried under interest rates of 20-30%.  Even in ancient Greek mythology, neither humans nor gods could trust Hermes.  He was always out for himself.      But so were the other spirits.  The god of war destroyed Germany seventy years ago, and may yet destroy

America in our lifetimes.  The spirit of Apollo can make organizational or corporate clones of people, subordinating them to structures of authority and ignoring their humanity because that spirit can’t see their humanity.  Zeus’s philandering, his sense that the Alpha Male need not be faithful, destroys trust, commitment, and the relationships upon which we and our society depend.  His wife Hera’s fury at being betrayed by Zeus and her endless search for revenge, like Poseidon’s inability to stop carrying a grudge — the entire Odyssey is driven by Poseidon’s ten-year grudge against Odysseus for killing his son — these have some justice to them at first, but soon become so selfishly obsessive that they destroy the lives of others around them.  Any single spirit is selfish.  We are mostly driven by just a few of them, and our hardest job is like Zeus’s: creating a harmony between our conflicting urges and desires, that can let us be a blessing to ourselves and others. 

    In modern medicine, we describe cancer as a kind of growth that cares only about reproducing its own kind of cells, even if they kill the body.  Left untended, that’s what individual spirits or gods do, too.  They each in their own way further the art of chimpanzee politics by being unable to see anything beyond what they want right then.  This includes, many many times in Western history, the God of Western religion.  Dishonest religion and bad priests have so often turned that god into a blood-thirsty demon rather than a spirit that could be called holy.     If we’re going to do honest religion, we need to talk about gods.  So let’s understand gods.  They are not critters in the clouds.  They are imaginative constructs, concepts, leading us to centers of psychological and sometimes natural power.  And religion – as any Buddhist can tell you – is not about gods.  So in honest religion, we can ask – and need to ask – how useful these gods are for us today, as we try to find ways toward healthier ways of being that are less selfish, more integrated, and more compassionate toward the much larger world around us.     And here, I think the idea of Zeus is really much more useful than the idea of the Hebrew god Yahweh.  God can’t pull all of our various drives together well, because the obsession with monotheism – which is really mostly an obsession with priestly and political authority – can’t recognize how many other spirits really are present in our lives and our world.  And Western religion almost never invites us to identify with God – that could get you burned at the stake, or committed to an institution – but to worship him, through the rules and rituals made by the people who dress up in his clothes and talk in holy words.  That’s not helpful.  The Zeus story, understood psychologically, teaches us that we are the ones who must learn to play the role of Zeus within our own little circle of spirits, mediating and moderating between our various desires to serve – not our own selfish interests, but something larger, more inclusive, more life-giving to ourselves and others.      Here’s what that sounds like in pretty ordinary language.  This is from Felix Adler, the Jewish intellectual who founded the non-theistic Ethical Culture Society back in 1876:     The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear. (An Ethical Philosophy of Life)     To add a little to that, it’s usually by finding the right gods, the right spirits in others that we can bring out the right spirits in ourselves.    This is close to the Buddhist idea of the sangha, the holy community where healthy transformation is possible because health and wholeness are held as the norm by the community, and the lower spirits of selfishness are disempowered.    We can talk about honest religion all we like.  But without the commitment and discipline to have a community that can discredit our persistent habits of working only toward the things we like, we’ll just be doing chimpanzee politics.  Then your money and your energy and hopes will go to fund a social club to please the most clever and manipulative, whether in a church, a club or local or national politics.  That’s chimpanzee politics.  It’s also human history and human nature.  But it is that selfish part of human nature we’re here to evolve beyond, by seeking the community of bigger, better, less self-serving spirits.  We’re seeking Holy spirits rather than merely clever ones.  It is one of the most important of all human aspirations, and the only adequate goal for honest religion anywhere.    Still, the eternally frustrating fact is that, as the Greeks saw over 3,000 years ago, these spirits are not under our direct control, and it often feels like the most we can do directly is open our hearts and minds, and pray that they come into the larger place where we’ve made them welcome.    So we’ll end with a prayer, on behalf of this church, but also of all honest religion anywhere.    Come holy spirits.  Enter the hearts of those who believe that    Love is better than hate    Understanding is holier than bigotry    Peace is more blessed than war    Come, holy spirits, enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.  Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.    We confess to too many smallnesses.  We confess that we are too often selfish, serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.  We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.    And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.      And so come, holy spirits.  Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to higher callings.  We will make ourselves ready.    Come holy spirits, come.    Amen. 

PRAYER:

An ancient prayer said, “The heart daily hopes, yet daily
fears that for which it daily hopes.”

We hope for miracles, changes of all kinds, wondering how much else would change for which we’re not ready. We’ll quit a bad habit like smoking, drinking or drugs, to find that now we can feel the deeper problems those habits had tried to hide, and it can make the old demons look attractive. We often do fear that for which we hope.

How much of our behavior comes from wanting to be safe - financially, professionally, personally safe? How much of our behavior
comes from just wanting to be adequate? How powerful the feeling of inadequacy is! As though we’re broken, not knowing how to be fixed.

Where is the still center that might offer a kind of calm for which we yearn? If it can’t come from outside - from buying, owning,
driving or wearing it - how can we find, inside of us, that “peace that passes understanding”?

We are not broken people, and not inadequate. We come here unfinished, but not broken. There are things we would add, would change, to help find a more fulfilling home for our thoughts and feelings.

We seek these things here, now in this place. We seek these things together. We seek these things.

Amen.

SERMON: Oh God, is it my turn?

What I’m doing in the three sermons this month is a kind of Unitarian heresy because I’m revisiting the idea of a trinity. The 19th
century Unitarians rightly rejected the notion of a supernatural trinity, where the man Jesus was physically fathered by a sky god, and the Holy Spirit was an actual presence connected with God and Jesus. That is superstition, and not very interesting. But as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries, some of the best Christian thinkers had been defining the trinity as a psychological concept rather than a supernatural one - and that’s both more interesting and more universal. So that’s what I’m looking at this month.

It’s still probably easier to understand this three-part idea by looking at the Buddhist version. They also see religion or life
divided into three different but complementary arenas, which they call Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. “Buddha” means a source of insight and wisdom. We need a source of insight into the human condition and wisdom about living well. You can call that God, or Buddha, Allah, Science or Reason - or you can just call it Truth or Goodness or other abstractions. We need something there, and something that will stand up to our toughest questions and most personal needs. That’s part of what last week’s sermon was about.

But Buddha, God, Allah, Truth, Goodness or the rest of the grand abstractions won’t do a thing unless we make them ours, and try to guide our lives by them, embody them. In Christian thought, this is called “incarnational theology.” Others see it as a kind of existentialism, meaning ideals aren’t real until we give them the form of our own life. The Buddhists call this dharma, meaning the personal work we need to do to recognize our Buddha-nature, to nurture the Buddha-seed they believe is in each of us.

Others might put it differently by saying that we have to become the change we want. But the message is about the same in each of these ways of talking.

And the third part of this trinity of living within a new kind of awareness is what Christians call the Holy Spirit, which I’ll talk
about next week. The Buddhists, as always, talk about it in more down-to-earth ways, as the sangha. That means the community where these important life concerns are held to be sacred, and protected.

This morning, I want to talk with you about how, in liberal religion, the first two parts of this psychological trinity connect: how
high ideals can be transformative for you. Or, how do you go from potential to actual change?

Almost every Sunday, you’ll hear stories here about the kind of ideals and insights into the human condition, that have been
transformative for many centuries and may be transformative for you. Think of those stories each week as packets of seeds being passed out. They’re good seeds, from good stories that have mostly been around a very long time. They seldom sprout quickly. They mostly just sit there in the background of your mind, like possibilities whose time hasn’t come.

But sometimes your life will take a turn and some of the ideas and stories will come alive for you, when it’s the right time. Here’s
a story about what that can sound like. It’s taken from Anthony de Mello, who was born into Indian Hindu culture, then became a Jesuit priest. He saw all religions as variations on deep themes common to all people, as I do and as many religious liberals do. He collected spiritual stories from all over the world, and had a gift for reducing them to short, bite-sized things.
Here’s one:

Parable: Who are you?

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference. Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140

This “Who are you?” question is a question that is always hanging in the air in any good church. A good church is an invitation to
come into a space where we are committed to holding up very high ideals and given the chance to see how we measure up, and what we might like to change.
It’s like being able to study with masters: stories from many of the world’s great religions and spiritual thinkers. Since we’re religious liberals, they’re all welcome. We’re not trying to make you into theists, Christians, atheists or anything else. We’re here to become more whole, more integrated, more authentic people. And any teaching or story from any source that’s in touch with the possibilities that lie within us is holy thread from which we can weave the fabric of our fuller humanity. That’s one of the great freedoms of liberal religion: all is holy that can connect with life in deep and more life-giving ways.

But traditional religion usually uses such dramatic terms it can feel like going before a god who wants to know who you are and will
only accept answers more perfect than almost anyone could give. Then you think, in a fearful voice, “Oh God, is it my turn? Is it my turn for this test I’m bound to fail?” That drama lets churches and priests use fear to exalt not God but themselves and their church’s dogmas. They claim to mediate your salvation, which empowers them far more than it empowers you.
That’s not honest religion.

Making it all sound so dramatic can create a lot of fear around the idea of changing your life story - for that’s what religious
transformation is about: changing your life story, living out a different part in a different script.

Literal or authoritarian religions often try to protect your soul, spirit, by molding you into the shape of their beliefs. They
mean well, but it’s a kind of salvation by obedience and conformity, a “cookie-cutter” salvation that seldom fits actual human beings. It’s easiest to see when they talk about the place of women or gays or people who ask too many questions. They often have a kind of cookie-cutter to put you into the shape they think everyone should have. There’s some comfort in that, I imagine, but it’s not how liberal religions do it. Liberals try to protect your soul, your spirit, by providing a kind of greenhouse where it’s
safe, and you can find the spiritual nutrients to grow and change, in an atmosphere that offers you courage rather than fear. Liberals religions are about a salvation by empowerment. I mean liberal Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or atheism. The liberal, open, style of religion is about salvation by empowerment.

Still, it’s a do-it-yourself kit. Most of the time here, you’re not thinking about changing your story or changing very much at all.
You’re doing your life, and you find something interesting or stimulating about coming to a place where these stories are told, and so many others seem willing to ask questions that take them beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. So you file these things away somewhere and get on with your life.

But sometimes that “Who are you?” question can come at you with real force, and you can’t find a good answer in the way you’re living. Maybe you just need to talk it out. That’s one of the things our Listening Ministers are for here. They’re people who have had about thirty hours’ training in learning to be good listeners, to provide a space where you can just talk confidentially, and tell your story. Often, that’s the first step in discovering the wisdom you have inside of you. Most of us really do know what we should do, if we stop to think about it. If you’d like somebody to listen, just call the church office and ask for Extension 18.

Changing your story is crossing over a boundary, breaking rules you once lived by, disappointing some people’s expectations of you, and there’s no way around it: it’s hard.

The classic story of wrestling your way across an old boundary in the Bible - one of the best in any tradition - is the story of
Jacob wrestling with something supernatural at the Jabbok river. It is one of the more ancient stories in the Bible, from a time when it was believed that all boundaries were guarded by spirits that didn’t want you to cross over beyond them. Today, we know there’s a lot of truth to that. There is something that makes it hard to break out of old ways, old stories and roles.

So Jacob was to cross over, and in the middle of the night this thing - a god or an angel, depending on whose interpretation you take - began wrestling with him. Jacob wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t let go. The spirit was powerful, and dislocated his hip. But still he wouldn’t let go. Then the spirit pleaded with him to let go because the sun was coming up. That’s another way you know this is an ancient story - the forces of the night can’t survive in broad daylight. There’s a lot of truth to that too, psychologically speaking. The light of day makes most monsters disappear. So Jacob wouldn’t let go unless the spirit blessed him. Finally the spirit
blessed him and gave him a new name - his spiritual name, perhaps his deepest name. He was named Israel, which meant “One who has wrestled with God and with men and has prevailed.” And though the struggle gave him a limp, he became father of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Jacob story is a myth, of course, which means it isn’t about something that happened in history, but something that can happen always and anywhere, especially when we cross over old boundaries. These old demons are very real. Today, we may call them primitive psychological scripts that still run our lives, and it can be quite a struggle to get out of their grip, to cross beyond the territory where they rule.

Jacob’s was a dramatic, extreme kind of awakening for a dramatic, extreme character. Most of us are less dramatic. But for
anything to happen, we have to take it inside ourselves and let it help transform us.

It’s about defining yourself in a different, higher, currency, and we do wrestle to do that. When we do, we come to embody, to
incarnate, higher ideals and aspirations than we had been settling for. That’s what’s meant by “incarnational theology,” or doing your dharma. It’s about living your life in the key of life, the key of integrity. If you look at it through that musical metaphor, then a good liberal church is trying to play sacred melodies. The difference from more conservative churches is that we draw our sacred melodies from all over the world, because our goal is to see ourselves as children of the universe, rather than just children of one local creed or dogma.

I remember a liberal Baptist minister I knew a dozen years ago, who made a point in one of his sermons by reading from the Bible, the French existentialist Albert Camus and the Indian Hindu Gandhi. Parts of the sermon were read on a local radio station, and at our weekly ecumenical luncheon, a more conservative Baptist asked him how he could quote atheists and Hindus. “We can’t reduce God to the limits of our own understanding,” he said. “The Holy Spirit includes everything that is holy.” That’s the
spirit of liberal religion.

Anything that can help us toward the kind of awakening religion is about needs to be welcomed in, to help the seeds sprout, to help turn potentiality into actuality.

And when the potential begins to become actual, it releases its power, and some magic happens. Denise Levertov wrote a short poem about that magic moment:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,” by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me-a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic-or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

I can. I can wrestle with this. I can change this. I can do this, because I’m not alone. A mighty spirit of life and health is in me, helping me, becoming me. I can. It’s the moment of rebirth, of knowing you’re a child of God, a child of Nature, a child of the universe, and no one can take that away from you. Not by threats, violence, injustice, put-downs, nothing. When this becomes our most fundamental identity, when we believe this - and it’s always a matter of faith, not being able to prove it scientifically - it is transformative. It can give birth to a kind of hope that’s otherwise hard to come by. We are then living under a blessing there may be no other way to get. Despair can come when we feel that life is through with us, and hope comes when we realize that life still expects good things of us: expects us to come alive. Like the woman who woke up wanting to know who she was - and just wanting to know that made all the difference. It’s being born again, taking our dharma seriously, incarnational theology. This transformation is the miracle some people come to church every week hoping for.

Still, It can sound so dramatic, you think Well, my life isn’t lived on such a dramatic scale, and I couldn’t begin to be that
dramatic or bold. But it isn’t always such a dramatic thing. I was talking with the medical assistant at the doctor’s office this week, asking what he’s doing, what he wants to do. He said he wants to learn X-rays, then hopes to be a technician with MRI and CAT scan machines. Then he said, “I used to be pretty bad, and then we had my daughter. She’s 2-1/2 now and the joy of my life. She’s changed me. Now I want to raise her right, and do what’s right for her and my wife.” There’s a man who has had a change of heart that led to a change of focus in his life. That’s a religious transformation. It doesn’t have to involve God-talk at all. It’s being transformed to live in the key of life - your life.

Theologians can make anything sound so remote you can’t imagine relating to it. But honest religion is very down-to-earth. We’ve all had those moments when we were moved to take ourselves more seriously, to serve higher callings, and they’re moments we’re still proud of. When those moments come, we reach for higher aspirations, and try to find a place where higher aspirations are taken seriously. At it’s best, that’s what a church is for.

We know from thousands of news stories that churches are very often not at their best. Dishonest religion leads to hypocrisy, bigotry, hatred, and a whole host of values that make our lives and our world worse rather than better. At its worst, religion is an enemy of much that is decent and noble.

But at their worst, so are politics and “family values”.
Honest religion, like honest politics or healthy family values, is about rejecting lower ideals and serving higher ones: rejecting bad stories and choosing better ones. These paths of honesty and courage are some of our best routes toward becoming better people and a better society. That’s part of what this church is about.

Here’s another way of putting it - another one of those stories. Traditional religions exist to empower themselves and their story as much or more than to empower their people. So many of them will say that whatever we need that’s good can only come from God, and of course they know what God wants of us better than we do. So what we need isn’t in us. We are unworthy, and we have to go begging for it. That kind of theology gives nonsense a bad name!

Religious liberals live within a more abundant story that says the purpose of religion is to awaken us to possibilities that are already inside of us, like a Sleeping Beauty. So one of the best myths of religious transformation that I know of doesn’t come from the Bible, but from “The Wizard of Oz.” I especially like the deep theological reading of the story done by the rock group America, where they say, “Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have.” The message is as good as the grammar is bad.

The characters were in the land of Oz, which is one of those mythic boundary places like the banks of the river Jabbok. And like Jacob, they start by thinking only the great Wizard can give them what they need: a heart, a brain, courage, home. That’s like begging a god or a church for approval, as though they had the authority to give it. But Jacob, if you think about it, didn’t get anything from that strange night spirit that he didn’t already have. He beat him. He held on, he wouldn’t quit. He earned his new name. God never did give nothin’ to Jacob that Jacob didn’t already have.

And God, or Oz, can’t give you anything you don’t already have, either. But sometimes the stories of gods - or of great wizards from the Land of Oz - can reawaken those buried treasures in your heart. And then, for a moment, you know who you are. It is like a being struck on the shoulder with the flat of a sword, granting you honor, and a task. And you know, for that moment, that you can. In that moment, it can feel like anything is suddenly possible. And it may be, you know - it really may be.

PRAYER          (This prayer’s story has much in common with today’s sermon theme.  It’s the first prayer I ever wrote, back in 1982.  I did my ministerial internship at a UCC/Disciples of Christ church in Hyde Park (

Chicago): a very liberal and creative Christian church.  At some point, the minister told me I was to write and deliver the prayer for a coming Sunday.  “I don’t pray to things,” I said.  “I don’t care,” he said.  “Here, we pray.”  “So I’m supposed to pray to something?”  “Oh no, it will be much harder for you.  You need to write something that is a prayer and feels like a prayer, but which you can say with complete integrity.  This should be interesting.”           And so … please join me in an attitude of prayer:     We pray not to something, but from something,  to which we must give voice;   not to escape from our life, but to focus it;   not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul. We pray that we may live with honesty:   that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;  that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear  that we ignore the still small voices within us,  that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:  to those people, those experiences, and those transformations  that can save us from narrowness and despair.  And we pray on behalf of these hopes  with an open heart, an honest soul,  and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.          AMEN.   

SERMON: The Difference Between a Church and Disneyworld         

Before talking about

Disneyworld, I need to talk about chimpanzees.  Last month, I repeated a version of the sermon called “Chimpanzee Politics” that I had done last spring.            What drives chimpanzee politics – and most of ours – usually boils down to selfishness, getting power and privilege for those in power, and the few allies they have in their drive to gain and keep that power.            And that’s why it’s so significant that the key sin, the fundamental human failing noted by all religions I know about is the sin of selfishness.  If we’re to evolve beyond our closest relatives the chimps, we have to do it psychologically,  politically and culturally, because human cultures move much faster than biological evolution can adapt to.  At their best, religions are about helping us evolve beyond chimpanzee politics.  They are about expanding the sense of who we are and what we’re here to serve. This runs throughout human history, going back at least 2500 years.  For Confucius, living well meant living for one’s largest sense of self, which meant that we need to see ourselves as small parts of the much larger social world, the whole society.  We need to expand our sense of “self” beyond ourselves.  Then we should act in ways that serve that larger self.            In Western religions, that larger horizon is called “God.” Most people use the word God as though there were a critter somewhere above the sky, a guy, a big fellow who watched, heard us, could make good or evil things happen to us, much like the god Zeus from ancient Greek religions.  But that’s not honest religion, and it’s not useful.  For the best thinkers in all religious traditions, the word “God” is not the name of a critter; it’s a symbol, a symbol of that highest creative horizon we can visualize.  And it doesn’t matter what we call that larger horizon — whether we call it God or something else — as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our lives and our behaviors.  That’s what we’re about here: trying to call forth that larger sense of who we are, and lure ourselves into it.  That’s what all honest religion is about.            This isn’t just about liberal religion; it’s about honest religion, which is a much larger category.  Here, for example, are some words from a preacher I’ve never quoted or heard of, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from

Georgia:

          “God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere….  He’s a spirit.  He ain’t got no body….  The only body he’s got is us.  Amen.  Thank God.” — That’s honest religion.          As some of you know – but most of you probably don’t know – this phrase “honest religion” is an especially important phrase this fall.  This past Thursday the third ad of a thirteen-week ad campaign appeared in the Austin Chronicle.  The ads are about 2” high and 5” wide, and are very simple.  The first ad had only two lines, and simply said

Honest Religion

www.AustinUU.org          The ads are all different, but all contain the words “Honest Religion.”  Most add a third line.  Last week’s was “Honest religion for skeptics,” and this week’s, in sync with the Austin City Limits music festival, is “Honest religion for music lovers.”  Other ads will mention families, straights and gays, or just ask “Got honest religion?”  You can usually find them in the Calendar or Arts sections.  They’re meant to be provocative and witty, like you folks.  But they’re also meant to remind us, and me, that honest religion is what we’re about here, in ways that not many churches can claim.            In honest religion, we have to try and say in plain words what we mean.  The only way we have to evolve past our deep animal selfishness — our real “original sin” — is through imagining ourselves as small parts of a much bigger reality that empowers and commands us.  And that means living to serve the highest ideals we can see and say.  Theists might say this is living to serve God; and that means things like truth, beauty, justice, never doing to others what we wouldn’t want done to us.          Almost every crime, every sin in life is a sin of selfishness.  The sins, the crimes, that seem to get the strongest emotional responses from us are sins of betrayal: betrayals of trust.  A business like Enron that betrays the trust of not only their stockholders, but also their employees, and cheats them.  Politicians who sell out the people who elected them in return for money and privileges from the lobbyists who own and train them.  Anyone who betrays the trust of the majority by using it to benefit only a small minority.  These are the faces that selfishness takes in our lives, the way we still practice chimpanzee politics in our daily lives.            We feel more betrayed when people use our trust to serve themselves than in any other case, I think, because we know that this selfishness is in all of us, and our greatest commandment is the commandment to outgrow it and learn to live for, and serve, others.  This is the goal of good character education.  It’s also a goal of honest religion.   The difference between a church and

Disneyworld.          So now we can talk about the difference between a church and

Disneyworld.  How many of you have been to

Disneyworld?  I wonder how many of you know what the four-word mission statement of

Disneyworld is? 

Disneyworld’s mission is “to make people happy.”  To make people happy – not aware, deep, informed, caring, nuanced or responsible.  Just happy.  And not happy for a lifetime, or even for years.  Just for a few days, leaving a happy memory.  It worked for me when I spent a week there with my wife and two young stepdaughters aged 9 and 12 years ago.           A church, on the other hand, is not here “to make you happy.”  You’ll find some things in a church that you’ll like, by joining groups, meeting new friends and so on.  But the church isn’t here to make you happy.  To put it in theological terms, a church is here to make God happy.  For some of you, that statement will communicate, and will be enough.  For others, it will be confusing or irritating or even useless, and you may have this mental image of something like a Cheshire Cat smile up in the sky: just the smile, nothing else: “God is happy”.  It’s a pretty silly picture.  But the word “God” is not the name of a Critter in the clouds.  It is a religious symbol, trying to point us toward feeling a relationship, a kinship, with the creative and sustaining forces of the universe, and the highest and noblest ideals to which we should be aspiring.  That’s what any honest religion will say.  It isn’t about

Disneyworld; it’s about this world, and our place and duty in this world. 

          A church is here to make God happy.  A church is here to articulate, exalt and serve the highest ideals we can see and say.  A church must be a kind of sacred space where these highest ideals are called forth, to help us evolve beyond the self-centered level of chimpanzee politics, and most human politics.            That doesn’t mean that everything that goes on here is religious.  Most of it is not: we have parties, dinners, book discussion groups, plays, music, all sorts of things that are fun to do, that make us momentarily happy.  But restaurants, book stores, theaters and clubs have those things, too.  What has to be different here is that, above all the activities and groups, there is this invisible sort of umbrella we call the church, which holds those high ideals up, always.  That’s what we’re trying to do in every Sunday service.  It’s our mission: calling forth those highest ideals and larger horizons, and making them present to us again.  There are very few places in life where you can count on finding that sanctuary for high ideals, but you can count on finding it here.            What high ideals?  Maybe your family or friends wonder just what we care about, or if there is anything sacred to us as religious liberals.  There is, and it is neither hidden nor fancy.  They are the same high ideals that every religion worthy of the name cares about: ideals that make us feel beloved of this place, and move us to pass the love on to those around us.  Though religions say this in different words – some in terms of gods, some not – there is not much variation between the high ideals of different human cultures or religions.           That’s what it means to say a church isn’t here to make you happy, but to make God happy.  We’re here to call forth a kind of “voice from above”: not a voice from above the sky.  That would have to be a very loud voice, yelling from that far away — it would scare the birds.  But a voice from above the fray of chimpanzee politics, a voice from above our clamoring for our own needs to be met.  It’s a voice saying that the answer to our self-absorbed yearnings is to grow beyond the self-absorption and to get absorbed in the work of a higher calling and broader identity.  It’s about the unfinished business of evolving beyond chimpanzees and bonobos – those apes who are our closest relatives on earth – into a truly humane animal that can be a blessing to others and to the earth.            That’s what honest religion is about, regardless of its brand name.            We yearn to have something in our short existence that somehow partakes of the infinite, the eternal – or at least something good and honorable that will outlive us.  We find our most satisfying identity not by shining spotlights on ourselves, but by becoming smaller parts of something larger.  To put it in god-talk again, a church exists both because we need things and because God needs things.  We say “God needs things” in the same way we say “Truth” needs things, or “Justice” or “Honor” need things from us.            We need to feel beloved by life, and by ourselves.  We need to feel that though we’re just here a moment, something about our moment is momentous.  Something about our being here is momentous.  We matter tremendously.  Western religion may say we’re all children of God.  That’s one poetic way of putting it.  Hindus may say your soul is part of the infinite and eternal forces that create, maintain and destroy everything in the universe.  Buddhist may say we have a Buddha seed within us, that we suffer from the illusions we create with words, but that we can wake up, that the light of enlightenment can turn on, even in us.            That’s what honest religion is about, and what this church is about: offering a place where personal and spiritual transformation is possible.  Tell your friends that, when they ask what we are all about here.            We are religious liberals because we won’t accept slogans, creeds, dogmas, rituals or mandated behaviors that come from priests, churches or traditions unless they feel honest, and they are useful to us and worthy of God — worthy of the highest we can see and say.  We reject creeds and dogmas not because we don’t care, but because we care too much to settle for mediocre versions of religion.   (The phrase “useful to us and worthy of God” comes from the 3^rd century Christian writer Origen, in his book On First Principles, Book IV.)          There’s nothing supernatural about all this.  It’s the part of our human nature we’re trying to nourish, whether you want to call it the Buddha-seed, the God-seed, or the depths of our potential to become more fully human and alive.            We’re all aware of needing to serve ideals higher than our own personal wants and needs.  These are the insights and yearnings that gave birth to all of our gods.           Here’s a very simple but important example of how high ideals become a commanding presence, taken from right here in this church.  This church has gone through some important changes in its culture over the past few years.  It’s getting younger.  If you have visited many Unitarian churches, you’ll usually find that the average age is near sixty, sometimes higher.            A few weeks ago, I had dinner with our new members.  About thirty were invited, I think about twenty could make it on the Tuesday night.  Not one of them was over forty.  The next night, I met with ten visitors at the monthly orientation meeting.  Eight of them were made of four married couples, all with young children.  The other two were men in their 50’s.  We seem to have babies and young children everywhere.  A few years ago, we had only three or four children in our middle-school program.  This year we have about twenty.            For many members who have been here for ten or thirty years, this is a huge change in the church’s culture.  They were used to having their circle of friends also be the effective center of the church.  No more.  Now they are a group among other groups.  Of course this happens every so often, but that doesn’t make it less painful for people seeing a whole lot of strangers – and with over six hundred members, and over nine hundred people in the broader church community, no one here will ever know more than a fraction of the people.            If we were just chimpanzees, those members who have lost their “Alpha” status would be forming alliances and trying to gain power to turn back the hands of time, get rid of all these strangers – that’s most of you folks – and somehow try and make it feel like the church where they first found a home ten, twenty or forty years ago.  But that’s not what’s happening.  Instead, they are finding ways to be noble people acting in noble ways, reframing their role to support a church that’s moving into the future.  You may remember the lines from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s great poem on children, where he says: You may give [your children] your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,But seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.           It’s wise and lovely poetry, but it isn’t easy.  It hurts to see time pass when it feels like it might be passing you by.  So I want you who are new to our church to notice how easy the members of this church make it for you to come in, take part, and take charge.  They are the role models that you can look back to in a few years when it’s your turn to pass the torch!           But see how this is an example of how serving ideals that transcend our own personal wants are transformative, both of individuals and institutions?            Now we come to your part in all of this.  It’s simple.  Your part is to be here, and be present.  We’ll promise honest religion for head and heart – that’s another one of the ads coming up in the ad series.  I’ll try and focus each Sunday on high ideals that can transform our lives and our world, and to present them in ways that may touch you, move you, and give you something worth taking home with you.  I try to make sermons both inspirational and educational.  Taken together, a year’s sermons are a kind of spiritual curriculum for both your critical and your compassionate sides.            But you have to be here for it to work.  Try to be here every Sunday.  We could serve some of the finest spiritual meals in the world, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if you aren’t here.  And if you want your children educated, they have to be here, too.  It wouldn’t matter how good a religious education curriculum were if kids were absent half the time.            So come in, get active, bring your creative and constructive ideas.  Add your voice.  Be present.  Make it your church.  Take this strong healthy church and make it stronger and healthier.  Make that the legacy you leave to the future here.          And support this institution financially.  Discover where you belong in the range of financial giving here, and settle in.  Our average pledge is about $1,400, but we have people pledging from very little to tens of thousands of dollars a year.  Think about where your income level fits in here.  Is it about average?  Lower?  Higher?  Find your most responsible level of financial support, and settle into it.  We’re not going to whine or beg – this is a grown-up church and you’re adults.  We do expect that you will be generous and pay your way here.  For those are also high ideals that help define and shape our character: supporting the institutions we believe in.  So pledge something, and be generous in your pledge.  It will absolutely transform the way you feel about this good church, and about yourselves.           That is what a church is finally about, and where it is most different from

Disneyworld.  Let’s face it:

Disneyworld has better rides.  But when you get off the rides, you’re about the same as you were before they took you for the ride.  Church isn’t about being taken for a ride; it’s about transformation.  It is about being in an atmosphere where high ideals are sacred things, and where they will rub off on you, and you may become so glad they rubbed off.  

The blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.                               Leonard Cohen

            The joy of the music that we have been singing and the bleakness of that quote may seem out of place in the same sermon. But I believe that a life of integrity, a life worth living holds all of that and more. I’ll even go so far as to say that it may even be imperative that our lives be lived in that dynamic, uncomfortable, but ultimately creative state in order to be more fully ourselves and more fully useful in the world. And I believe that we are compelled as religious liberals to just that kind of life.               The blizzard of the world - surely we can understand that one. The onslaught of bad news of the dangerous state that our world is in is can be overwhelming.  It is so easy for cynicism, depression, increase in some of the illnesses of body and mind, and the loss of the will to reflect and then act in the world to be the responses to this. Parker Palmer, a noted educator and writer, in his book: The Hidden Wholeness writes that on the

Great Plains farmers used to run a rope from the house to the barn when a blizzard was likely to happen, so they would not get lost and die mere yards from their house in the whiteout conditions that blizzards produce. He suggests that we need an equivalent measure in this time for the impact of the blizzard of the world on our souls.

             First, he gives us a definition of “soul”: Other names from many traditions that can and have been used are: identity and integrity (humanism), spark of the divine, true self, inner teacher or inner light, original nature or big self are some of them. Palmer further suggests that the soul is that quality of ours that refuses to define human lives only as “biological mechanisms, sociological constructs, psychological projections, and/or raw materials for whatever society needs”  at the moment. As useful as these concepts can be to us in working with the complex reality of being human, I believe that to see only through those lens is to diminish what and who we are and to diminish our potential impact on this troubled world. For me the soul is that which has never given up, even when it has appeared to me and to others that I have done exactly that. It cuts through all the posturing that I ever did in various times of my life when I “knew” exactly what I was doing.              In my childhood there were plenty of reasons to deny my original nature or soul. I lived in a small rural town in the

California desert in the late 40’s and early 50’s, especially before rock and roll came to shake things up. The restrictions of that time and place were doubly hard on the extroverted, exuberant self that I was born as. When I was about 8 or so, a schoolteacher was leading us through some dances. To my delight she was bring movement from the outside to the inside, where it was usually not welcomed. The one I remember distinctly was the one where you had to go “Put your little foot, put your little foot.  Some of you may know the one. {Sing and demonstrate with turns}  I was having one of my increasingly rare extroverted moments when I declared that that was so boring, and then demonstrated some wild and exuberant dance to show what could be done. {demonstation}. I was quite pleased with myself. The teacher was a kind one, but still firm in that tradition of what was right to teach so I was promptly put in my place and the dance as it was continued. There it was in a nutshell. We were being taught to put away the whole of ourselves. Some of our most prized possessions of selfhood had to be denied. They had to be grown out of. Even at 8 years old we had to “grow up.”

             For years, as an adult, I occasionally dabbled in dance classes, always doomed to be not able to follow the forms and declared myself useless and even worse, stupid for having this impulse to move freely to my own dance that never really went away. Eventually, there came a time in midlife when I really could not stand it any more. I began to free dance anywhere that I could get myself to do it. At first that was only in the safety of my own home. Later, I frequented street fairs and happily danced away. I remember seeing a woman once who was about my age watching the dancers.  It seemed to me that she was watching me in a very wistful way and the seed was planted for a ministry: why should we give up activities that are precious to our soul, our true self, if they hurt no one? And is it possible that we may have more impact on the blizzard of the world if we do keep more than our culture allows for?              I understand now that there are difficult places for all of us no matter where or when we grew up. And each of us has our own selfhood, our own combination of precious gifts that we have to share with ourselves and others. One important question for me has been: how do we know what to keep and what to let go of from everything that we got from our childhood, from our families, from our culture, and, these days, from the relentless onslaught of media information that is nearly impossible to escape. Even impulses from within may be anything from fearful overreactions from the past, to addictions of body and mind (for myself, I include caffeine, chocolate, and online mahjong solitaire to that list), as well as the authentic voice within which has valuable wisdom to share. So how do we navigate this confusing reality? 

            One of the things that has helped me a great deal in my life have been the special people who reached into whatever self absorption that I was in and shook me up by going against all my assumptions about how the world worked and who I was. One of the first was my mother’s mother, a staunch Southern Baptist, who told me that I should avoid all those “tent meetings” where everyone got all emotional and went down to get saved. I should just sit down and figure out for myself what I believed and then live by that. I was stunned that a conservative Christian woman would say such a thing. It stayed with me since. It may be that it helped me hold to what I believed when my father’s Mennonite family took me to see the greatest tent show evangelist of the time, Billy Graham. When the call came on Youth Night to “Come on down for Jesus and be saved”, my oldest brother and I resisted the family pressure. I figured the that I had been baptized as a child, so I did not need any more saving, thank you very much. I have since been doing a great deal of sitting down and figuring out what I believe in and attempting to live by that. I don’t know what she would make of all of what I did with her advice, but I believe that being true to yourself was a value that we held in common.                     I went on to read widely and talked a good game about what I read, but somehow, for some years, it didn’t translate into a life living by any of that wisdom. I was disconnected from myself, attempting to live a life that I thought a college educated, and thus middle class, life ought to be. I had no way to process what was valuable in myself, in my growing up. My family didn’t know how to do the kind of transition that I was attempting either. I felt that I had no wisdom of my own, but distrusted any community that I tried out. It all sounded hollow to me. Eventually, after trying self-medication as a path, I threw myself on the mercy of a therapist. Sometimes, you can need a guide for a period of time. That process brought a great deal into focus and I left eventually with a great deal more tools to make the next steps.  

             One of the important things that I learned was that I could not throw out anything of who I was. I had to own all of it and move from there. Palmer calls this the move to wholeness. He tells us that wholeness is not some mystical state of Buddha-hood, but a state that “…means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” He considers devastation happening in a life  “…as a seedbed for new life”. This doesn’t mean throwing out grieving or expressing anger in the moment, for example, when devastations happen in our lives, as they inevitably do, but, when we are ready, moving into the next part of our lives to remember and experience joy and gratitude again. To me this means to live whatever life brings fully. I am still working on that one. I have problems with transitions for instance. My summer has been a process of many transitions one after another and occasionally I could hear myself getting a little whiney. I have surrendered to my whiney state when alone to delve fully into all that irritates the part of me that really just wants everything to be totally comfortable. It helps then when I remember that those transitions are exactly what I had hoped for. Even fervently hoped for.  I am not the only human being in the world that has any kind of transitions that they are dealing with. I am sure that you can think of a few or even many in your own lives. The act, joyous as it is, of having and raising children, for instance, has transitions built into it, constantly. Ageing, one of those non-optional realities of life, has its own transitions built in. Just to mention a few.  

            One of the other important things that I learned is that community, in some form or other, is essential, certainly for me. We may all have our own personal reasons for being in community, but I mean here the need for something even besides receiving and offering support, and acting together for common causes, for instance. I believe now that reading and reflecting on great minds and compassionate souls is the backdrop that informs my experiencing life, but that the experiencing of life in relationship is where the learning comes that can be made a real part of my life. If I see myself as a loving person, in community I can see the growing edge of that for me. Do I love only people who have roughly the same political beliefs that I do?  Do I treat myself in the loving way that I think others should be treated? What do I do when there are people who are difficult for me to love, for whatever reason? How do I let the inner life inform the outer life and visa versa?                        Palmer talks about the dance of being in solitude and being in community as the optimal way of having a life of integrity. The inner life informs the outer life and the outer life informs the inner. He compares it to being on a Mobius strip. This is a mathematical form that can be created simply by putting the two edges of a strip of paper together, but with a twist in beforehand. This causes the strip to be continuous, without any inner and outer. Thus the inner and the outer continually recreate each other. Our choices come in whether we will, “…walk that strip wide awake to its continual interchanges, learning to co-create in ways that are life giving for ourselves and others or sleep walk on the Mobius strip, unconsciously co-creating ways that are dangerous and often death dealing to relationships, to good work, to hope.” I want to add a caution against the either or character of his statement. I feel that it is more likely that there is a complex reality of being awake and being asleep that most of us inhabit. The world of habit, of comfort is not that easily gotten rid of. We need some balance to make sure we have some comfort, as we make those transitions in life.  But we can make progress on moving more into the creative interchanges, if we dare.                        The payoff for moving out of our comfort zones can be a big one. I began to get bold enough to start my own business, an unthinkable action for a person raised to believe that having a job was the only thing that I could ever do. It’s true that I folded within 5 years, the usual expectation for many new businesses. But I would not have missed it for anything. And it got me ready for the next transition, when I realized that I was going to do an even more unthinkable thing: enter graduate school to become a minister. I had no idea how that was going to happen, especially financially. But doors opened - that is another way that I know that I am on the right track, the doors keep opening. I tell people that my intention is to become an associate or assistant minister, but the truth is I really don’t know if that will be the specific ministry that will happen. A friend once suggested to me that when a door opens for us, we may find ourselves in a corridor with many other doors there. We may be in that corridor for a time before the next door will open. It’s evidently not my job to know everything, but it is my job to walk thru that next door and do what needs to be done there.                          As for being religious liberals, we have the history and tradition to point us in the general direction of what we need to do in this world. In the May 2005 UUA Commission on Appraisal document: Engaging Our Theological Diversity, there is a call for us to become more embodied, more mindful and more prophetic. Palmer reminds us “When we live by the soul’s imperatives, we gain courage to serve institutions more faithfully, to help them resist the temptations to default on their own missions.” I can’t think of anything that is more needed these days than that, both in our institution and others.  Meanwhile, do we need to get bolder and bigger in our actions? Do we need to hook up with more allies? I don’t know that I have the answers to those questions, but I do look forward to sharing some further thoughts with you as the year progresses. 

            Meanwhile, on the personal level, dwelling in that creative dance can give us more room for community, more room for the deeper levels of relationship in so-called ordinary life, and a deeper appreciation for that life. I can’t see myself doing good work in the world without the grounding of that life. I look forward to exploring that realm with you in our time together this year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that can so easily be found of devastations so large that there is no hope, I have also experienced these last three years the evidence, not as easily found, of thousands upon thousands of people world wide who have gathered into multiple organizations and other groups to work on the job of recreating the way that this world functions toward a saner and more life-giving way of being on this precious earth that is our home. I gladly join in partnership with them all to do my small part, while attempting to not underestimate the impact of one more increasingly awake life. They and this congregation are part of my network of ropes that keep me grounded in the onslaught of the devastations of our times.  What I can say for the present day is that it comes down to doing whatever works well for each of us to stay awake. Despite the blizzards and devastations of life, let’s be kind to ourselves and to one another. Let’s freely offer and accept support from one another. And let’s increase those times when we can feel gratitude and joy for this wonderful and precious life that we have been given.

Palmer, Parker J., A Hidden Wholeness: the Journey Toward an Undivided Life, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold       and it has overturned        the order of the soul.                          Leonard Cohen 

 

          The joy of the music that we have been singing and the bleakness of that quote may seem out of place in the same sermon. But I believe that a life of integrity, a life worth living holds all of that and more. I’ll even go so far as to say that it may even be imperative that our lives be lived in that dynamic, uncomfortable, but ultimately creative state in order to be more fully ourselves and more fully useful in the world. And I believe that we are compelled as religious liberals to just that kind of life.   

          The blizzard of the world - surely we can understand that one. The onslaught of bad news of the dangerous state that our world is in is can be overwhelming.  It is so easy for cynicism, depression, increase in some of the illnesses of body and mind, and the loss of the will to reflect and then act in the world to be the responses to this. Parker Palmer, a noted educator and writer, in his book: The Hidden Wholeness writes that on the

Great Plains farmers used to run a rope from the house to the barn when a blizzard was likely to happen, so they would not get lost and die mere yards from their house in the whiteout conditions that blizzards produce. He suggests that we need an equivalent measure in this time for the impact of the blizzard of the world on our souls. 

          First, he gives us a definition of “soul”: Other names from many traditions that can and have been used are: identity and integrity (humanism), spark of the divine, true self, inner teacher or inner light, original nature or big self are some of them. Palmer further suggests that the soul is that quality of ours that refuses to define human lives only as “biological mechanisms, sociological constructs, psychological projections, and/or raw materials for whatever society needs”  at the moment. As useful as these concepts can be to us in working with the complex reality of being human, I believe that to see only through those lens is to diminish what and who we are and to diminish our potential impact on this troubled world. For me the soul is that which has never given up, even when it has appeared to me and to others that I have done exactly that. It cuts through all the posturing that I ever did in various times of my life when I “knew” exactly what I was doing.  

          In my childhood there were plenty of reasons to deny my original nature or soul. I lived in a small rural town in the

California desert in the late 40’s and early 50’s, especially before rock and roll came to shake things up. The restrictions of that time and place were doubly hard on the extroverted, exuberant self that I was born as. When I was about 8 or so, a schoolteacher was leading us through some dances. To my delight she was bring movement from the outside to the inside, where it was usually not welcomed. The one I remember distinctly was the one where you had to go “Put your little foot, put your little foot.  Some of you may know the one. {Sing and demonstrate with turns}  I was having one of my increasingly rare extroverted moments when I declared that that was so boring, and then demonstrated some wild and exuberant dance to show what could be done. {demonstation}. I was quite pleased with myself. The teacher was a kind one, but still firm in that tradition of what was right to teach so I was promptly put in my place and the dance as it was continued. There it was in a nutshell. We were being taught to put away the whole of ourselves. Some of our most prized possessions of selfhood had to be denied. They had to be grown out of. Even at 8 years old we had to “grow up.”  

          For years, as an adult, I occasionally dabbled in dance classes, always doomed to be not able to follow the forms and declared myself useless and even worse, stupid for having this impulse to move freely to my own dance that never really went away. Eventually, there came a time in midlife when I really could not stand it any more. I began to free dance anywhere that I could get myself to do it. At first that was only in the safety of my own home. Later, I frequented street fairs and happily danced away. I remember seeing a woman once who was about my age watching the dancers.  It seemed to me that she was watching me in a very wistful way and the seed was planted for a ministry: why should we give up activities that are precious to our soul, our true self, if they hurt no one? And is it possible that we may have more impact on the blizzard of the world if we do keep more than our culture allows for?  

          I understand now that there are difficult places for all of us no matter where or when we grew up. And each of us has our own selfhood, our own combination of precious gifts that we have to share with ourselves and others. One important question for me has been: how do we know what to keep and what to let go of from everything that we got from our childhood, from our families, from our culture, and, these days, from the relentless onslaught of media information that is nearly impossible to escape. Even impulses from within may be anything from fearful overreactions from the past, to addictions of body and mind (for myself, I include caffeine, chocolate, and online mahjong solitaire to that list), as well as the authentic voice within which has valuable wisdom to share. So how do we navigate this confusing reality? 

          One of the things that has helped me a great deal in my life have been the special people who reached into whatever self absorption that I was in and shook me up by going against all my assumptions about how the world worked and who I was. One of the first was my mother’s mother, a staunch Southern Baptist, who told me that I should avoid all those “tent meetings” where everyone got all emotional and went down to get saved. I should just sit down and figure out for myself what I believed and then live by that. I was stunned that a conservative Christian woman would say such a thing. It stayed with me since. It may be that it helped me hold to what I believed when my father’s Mennonite family took me to see the greatest tent show evangelist of the time, Billy Graham. When the call came on Youth Night to “Come on down for Jesus and be saved”, my oldest brother and I resisted the family pressure. I figured the that I had been baptized as a child, so I did not need any more saving, thank you very much. I have since been doing a great deal of sitting down and figuring out what I believe in and attempting to live by that. I don’t know what she would make of all of what I did with her advice, but I believe that being true to yourself was a value that we held in common.       

          I went on to read widely and talked a good game about what I read, but somehow, for some years, it didn’t translate into a life living by any of that wisdom. I was disconnected from myself, attempting to live a life that I thought a college educated, and thus middle class, life ought to be. I had no way to process what was valuable in myself, in my growing up. My family didn’t know how to do the kind of transition that I was attempting either. I felt that I had no wisdom of my own, but distrusted any community that I tried out. It all sounded hollow to me. Eventually, after trying self-medication as a path, I threw myself on the mercy of a therapist. Sometimes, you can need a guide for a period of time. That process brought a great deal into focus and I left eventually with a great deal more tools to make the next steps.  

           One of the important things that I learned was that I could not throw out anything of who I was. I had to own all of it and move from there. Palmer calls this the move to wholeness. He tells us that wholeness is not some mystical state of Buddha-hood, but a state that “…means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” He considers devastation happening in a life  “…as a seedbed for new life”. This doesn’t mean throwing out grieving or expressing anger in the moment, for example, when devastations happen in our lives, as they inevitably do, but, when we are ready, moving into the next part of our lives to remember and experience joy and gratitude again. To me this means to live whatever life brings fully. I am still working on that one. I have problems with transitions for instance. My summer has been a process of many transitions one after another and occasionally I could hear myself getting a little whiney. I have surrendered to my whiney state when alone to delve fully into all that irritates the part of me that really just wants everything to be totally comfortable. It helps then when I remember that those transitions are exactly what I had hoped for. Even fervently hoped for.  I am not the only human being in the world that has any kind of transitions that they are dealing with. I am sure that you can think of a few or even many in your own lives. The act, joyous as it is, of having and raising children, for instance, has transitions built into it, constantly. Ageing, one of those non-optional realities of life, has its own transitions built in. Just to mention a few.  

 

          One of the other important things that I learned is that community, in some form or other, is essential, certainly for me. We may all have our own personal reasons for being in community, but I mean here the need for something even besides receiving and offering support, and acting together for common causes, for instance. I believe now that reading and reflecting on great minds and compassionate souls is the backdrop that informs my experiencing life, but that the experiencing of life in relationship is where the learning comes that can be made a real part of my life. If I see myself as a loving person, in community I can see the growing edge of that for me. Do I love only people who have roughly the same political beliefs that I do?  Do I treat myself in the loving way that I think others should be treated? What do I do when there are people who are difficult for me to love, for whatever reason? How do I let the inner life inform the outer life and visa versa?                    Palmer talks about the dance of being in solitude and being in community as the optimal way of having a life of integrity. The inner life informs the outer life and the outer life informs the inner. He compares it to being on a Mobius strip. This is a mathematical form that can be created simply by putting the two edges of a strip of paper together, but with a twist in beforehand. This causes the strip to be continuous, without any inner and outer. Thus the inner and the outer continually recreate each other. Our choices come in whether we will, “…walk that strip wide awake to its continual interchanges, learning to co-create in ways that are life giving for ourselves and others or sleep walk on the Mobius strip, unconsciously co-creating ways that are dangerous and often death dealing to relationships, to good work, to hope.” I want to add a caution against the either or character of his statement. I feel that it is more likely that there is a complex reality of being awake and being asleep that most of us inhabit. The world of habit, of comfort is not that easily gotten rid of. We need some balance to make sure we have some comfort, as we make those transitions in life.  But we can make progress on moving more into the creative interchanges, if we dare.                    The payoff for moving out of our comfort zones can be a big one. I began to get bold enough to start my own business, an unthinkable action for a person raised to believe that having a job was the only thing that I could ever do. It’s true that I folded within 5 years, the usual expectation for many new businesses. But I would not have missed it for anything. And it got me ready for the next transition, when I realized that I was going to do an even more unthinkable thing: enter graduate school to become a minister. I had no idea how that was going to happen, especially financially. But doors opened - that is another way that I know that I am on the right track, the doors keep opening. I tell people that my intention is to become an associate or assistant minister, but the truth is I really don’t know if that will be the specific ministry that will happen. A friend once suggested to me that when a door opens for us, we may find ourselves in a corridor with many other doors there. We may be in that corridor for a time before the next door will open. It’s evidently not my job to know everything, but it is my job to walk thru that next door and do what needs to be done there.  

                    As for being religious liberals, we have the history and tradition to point us in the general direction of what we need to do in this world. In the May 2005 UUA Commission on Appraisal document: Engaging Our Theological Diversity, there is a call for us to become more embodied, more mindful and more prophetic. Palmer reminds us “When we live by the soul’s imperatives, we gain courage to serve institutions more faithfully, to help them resist the temptations to default on their own missions.” I can’t think of anything that is more needed these days than that, both in our institution and others.  Meanwhile, do we need to get bolder and bigger in our actions? Do we need to hook up with more allies? I don’t know that I have the answers to those questions, but I do look forward to sharing some further thoughts with you as the year progresses. 

          Meanwhile, on the personal level, dwelling in that creative dance can give us more room for community, more room for the deeper levels of relationship in so-called ordinary life, and a deeper appreciation for that life. I can’t see myself doing good work in the world without the grounding of that life. I look forward to exploring that realm with you in our time together this year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that can so easily be found of devastations so large that there is no hope, I have also experienced these last three years the evidence, not as easily found, of thousands upon thousands of people world wide who have gathered into multiple organizations and other groups to work on the job of recreating the way that this world functions toward a saner and more life-giving way of being on this precious earth that is our home. I gladly join in partnership with them all to do my small part, while attempting to not underestimate the impact of one more increasingly awake life. They and this congregation are part of my network of ropes that keep me grounded in the onslaught of the devastations of our times.  

What I can say fo