Brian Ferguson
November 30, 2008

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

 

 

Today’s reading is an excerpt form Sin, Evil, and Economics by contemporary Christian Theologian Sallie McFague.

Thanks to technologies of communication, transportation, and commerce, the world of the twenty-first century is more deeply interconnected than ever before, and it is increasingly clear that the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism.  Not everyone chooses to recognize the primacy of that language, and some speak defiantly in other tongues, but there can be little argument that it has become the global discourse with which all others must contend.  It is the defining myth of our time.  

While we each have choices to make about the degree to which we will “buy into” the myth, practically no one on earth has the freedom to opt out altogether.  It is that pervasive and that powerful.  And at the heart of capitalism, I have argued, is the exact dynamic of freedom and bondage as described by the famous Christian theologian Augustine’s theory of evil.  Capitalism assumes that we are creatures of desire, and it stokes our desire for lesser goods to the point of addiction, finally rendering us powerless to opt out of its dynamic.  What would it mean, after all, to get “outside” of capitalism in today’s world? Even those who want nothing to do with it, who view it as the pinnacle of Western corruption or imperialism, or whose minds and bodies bear the scars of its excesses and exclusions, are nevertheless pulled into its captivating influence.

Strangely, while market capitalism began with a classic Christian view of humanity based on selfish greed—the basis for the allocation of scarce resources and the eventual “trickle down” of prosperity for all in the twenty-first century—it has eventuated in a näive, optimistic, narrow, and undifferentiated view of sin and evil. Classical economic theory claims that the very core of who we are—individuals motivated by insatiable desire for more and more goods—is the basis from which to build the good life for all. From the selfish desires of billions of human beings turning the earth’s resources into goods for sale, prosperity for all will presumably come eventually. 

This vision of the good life, however, neglects two huge facts: the just distribution of the earth’s resources as well as the limits of these resources. We now know that these matters are not mysteriously taken care of by the “invisible hand” of economics; on the contrary, the insatiable greed of billions of human beings causes horrendous injustice to other creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as undermining the sustainability of the planet itself. 

But market capitalism does not deal with the tragic dimensions of sin and evil; its view of sin is narrow and viewed only as a sin against God, even though the implication of unregulated greed results in sin against neighbor and nature. By bracketing sin within the limits of the violation of God’s will, it eliminates from view the massive evil that our individual choices have created for others on planet Earth.

 

Prayer

The following are the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk BuThich Nhat Hanh.

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. 

 Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.  

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.  

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, nd of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.  

Amen

 

Sermon - Religion and Economics

With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, there is now the seasonal tumble into the Christmas holidays.  This past Friday apparently marks the beginning of the Christmas season, a beginning marked by shopping rather than any religious significance or perhaps shopping is religion for some people.  The media attempts to whip up excitement about the beginning of the Christmas shopping season as if it is some sort of race or competition.  The mantra seems to be “they who buy the most present wins.”  We are told about the must-have goods this season and the so-called bargains to be had.  Those of us with children have already been barraged for a few weeks about the gifts our children want.  A list that seems ever-changing – or perhaps I missed the point and my daughter’s new requests were additions to her list of desires and not replacements.  I might have a very disappointed daughter this Christmas as she receives only one of her many requests.

Looking for someone to blame for these endless requests for presents, I blame at the media.  Then I realize that my five year old daughter is too young to read and she doesn’t watch television but she has this remarkably impressive communication network which keeps her supplied with all the information about the latest hip toys.  This week I read an article  where a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had asked the Toy industry to cut back on its marketing to children due to the severe economics hardships which are particularly affecting families.  The Toy industry Association’s response was a firm defense of current marketing practices by asserting that children “are a vital part of the gift selection process.”  It appears to me the toy industry association sees children as their most effective and certainly most persistent sales people.  So begins the child on their life-long role as consumers.  With little regulation of advertising to children then we leave the individual parents battling the massive forces of advertising in a David and Goliath battle where we have taken the sling slot away from David and given it to Goliath.

While the creation of desire for some product by advertising and the resulting peer pressure is most noticeable in children, I think most of us are affected by it.  The philosopher and environmentalist, Max Oelschlaeger, says “In so-far as Americans have a collective identity it is as the consumer who lives amid unprecedented material choice and the worker who bends the earth to our virtually unrestrained human purpose.”   Even in difficult economic times as we are experiencing now then consumerism permeates our society in so many ways it creates values and purpose for many people.  James Luther Adams, the 20th century Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. He says “The question concerning faith is not, shall I be a person of faith?  The proper question is, rather, which faith is mine?  For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts confidence in something.  Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you’ve found his religion.”    In listening to these words today, it appears to me that money, material possession, and our roles as consumers are defining meaning and value for many in our society therefore fulfills many of the roles of religion.  

Our economic system through consumerism and advertising is a powerful perhaps dominant cultural force in our lives today.  Yet as we reminded in the reading  from Melita earlier, it is based on individual self-interest which unless we control it is just the contemporary reincarnation of the sin of greed.  While Economics is often thought of as the study of money and financial systems, it is really a study of human decision-making for the allocation of limited resources.  Economics is about how we deal with scarcity and limits with money being an important mechanism to determine the allocation of resources “efficiently”.  Sometimes I find it hard to think of money as merely a tool in our lives since so often it seems like a goal in itself.  We choose our jobs based on it, plan our retirements around it, and it places very real limitations on the lives of most of us. 

 Some people say that money makes the world go around.  Another view is that money doesn’t make the world go around, but having it makes the journey much more pleasant.  Regardless money is important in our society and necessary to meet many of our basic needs.  But money can become an obsession for us as we desire more than necessary for their basic needs and distorting what is most important in our lives.  All of the major religions caution us to beware of money becoming an idol or a false God, yet religious institutions walk that difficult line of needing money for their own survival but not wanting to be obsessed about it. 

In the reading earlier, the author Sallie McFague  states that in the 21st Century “the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism” and asks the question of what it would mean to get outside of capitalism in today’s world?  We are all so submerged in the world of commerce both as workers and consumers that it is difficult to remember that there are some institutions that do not operate on the typical model of market capitalism.  Our non-profit philanthropic institutions are an example which collect donations then distribute goods and services to those in need.  There is no attempt to make a profit therefore they can provide goods and services to everyone free or reduced cost.  

Another institution that operates on the edge of the market capitalism system is this church.  Some might say that our church operates in the hardest aspects of both the non-profit and for-profit world.  Our income to support this church is through the donations of members like you – sounds like a National Public radio pledge drive - while much of our spending is in the world of market capitalism.  We cannot turn around to the electrical utility company and say donations are down this month so we can’t pay you but we will as soon as donations pick up.  I would love to see their faces at the suggestion.  

The existence of all elements of this religious community is dependent on the donations of money and time from you the members of the congregation.  You are asked to donate what you can financially to sustain and grow our community.  There is no market mechanism that determines the price in competition with other churches.  Could you imagine charging for people to come for our worship services - $20 to hear the senior minister, $5 for the intern minister and a refund if you don’t like the message?  Perhaps I’ll talk to stewardship about this idea.  Not only is the idea crass it misses an important point about why we are here.  We have our message, our culture, and our values which we wish to promote to all who are interested.  We believe our religious vision has value but we also believe that it is too important, too valuable for people to be prevented hearing our vision due to lack of money.  Most religious groups want to transcend the artificial limits placed on access to places and experiences based on limited money.  

Those limits are placed by our economic system in an attempt to handle the scarcity of a resource and in a desire to make a profit.  Religion is attempting to remove these limits by seeing our message and values as a source of abundance not a cause for scarcity.  Most of us are attracted to our religious community because our lives are improved in some way by being here.  Many of us feel affirmed by being part of this community, some of us have had life changing experiences here, and I know people who feel our Liberal religious message has been life-saving to them.  How do you put a dollar price on such a place?  You can’t.  The work is too important but such activities have a cost.  Therefore as a religious community we let each of us decide for ourselves about the value of the community we have here and the contribution we wish to make to ease that cost.  We are outside much of the market system since we give our service away without charge and those of us who choose, contribute our money and time as we determine is appropriate.  

Our economic system is very efficient at delivering a variety of products and services to people for a low price.  That is its purpose and we all live with the benefits of that.   Our economics system was never developed to be the promoter of values for our society that was what religion is for.  Values such as ecological sustainability and greater justice for more people are not promoted in our current economic system unless the consumers force it to.  Our consuming habits are perhaps the clearest way that we express our moral choices on a daily basis yet there seems to be a strong separation between our economics and our religion.  The famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie said  that Christianity should not interfere with how money is made and only get involved in how its surplus should be dispersed in the form of charity.  It seems that many religious organizations have not moved beyond such thinking therefore often fail to critique our economics system where it may be exploitive of people or abusive to our environment.  If injustice in our society is caused by unethical production of goods, unsustainable consumption of resources, or deceitful advertising it not only appropriate to address the issues but I would say our religion calls us to do so.

In the reading we heard earlier, the author Sallie McFague  discusses the use of the Christian doctrines of sin and evil in addressing the harm excessive and unregulated greed is harmful to our world.  Her critique of market capitalism is that sustainability and justice for all inhabitants are not its central goals of the system.  Now we do not talk about sin or evil much in the pulpits of our Unitarian Universalist churches perhaps that is why many of you are here and not at other churches - but I think the ideas behind the doctrines if not the terms themselves can be useful in addressing the excesses and exploitative elements of our economic system.  

Now, the Liberal Religious tradition has moved away a long time ago from the doctrine of Original Sin where humanity is inherently depraved but the concept of sin itself is more ambiguous for us.  I feel comfortable with McFague’s idea of sin being an excessive concern for ourselves at the expense of the needs of others or sustainability of the planet.  Sin is something we are responsible for and can control through the choices we make.  McFague defines evil as the institutions, practices, and attitudes resulting from an exploitive economic system based on excessive individual self-interest, which creates suffering and deprivation in our world.  For example, it may seem in my self-interest to buy a product at a low price but if the product was made by forced child labor then I think it is appropriate to call this a sinful act supporting an evil system.  Strong but I feel appropriate words.  We can replace sin with wrong and evil with bad, it is the meaning not the words that are important.

With these concepts of sin and evil then this sets up a great tension between our economic system and religion.  Market capitalism believes that the good life is built by each of us pursuing our own enlightened self-interest.  Religion cautions against excessive self-interest and reminds us that through our interdependence we are called to care for one another and our planet.  I think this is a question we deal with daily during satisfying our own needs is when does our enlightened self-interest become excessive self-interest?  How do we, as religious people and consumers who desire to lead a good life, deal with this tension in our self-interest as we go about our busy lives and with the child who has just made yet another request for a Christmas present?  You really want an easy answer for this one aren’t you – alas there isn’t one.  We have to accept that tension between enlightened and excessive self-interest as real and difficult.  Our choices as consumers can have a negative impact therefore we should be intentional and thoughtful about our purchasing choices. 

The stewardship of our planet and welfare of all people is particularly important in the age of the Global Economy since the environmental impact and exploitation of people may occur far from our purchasing of a product therefore could remain invisible to us unless we are vigilant.  The notion of interdependence between ourselves as consumers and the workers who produce the goods, wherever in the world they are, leads us to take responsibility for buying products that were produced without exploitation.  Examples of exploitation would be child labor, coerced labor, or paying non-livable wages.  

If our individual consumer decisions create an economic system that prevents those in need receiving basic necessities and those producing the goods a reasonable quality of life, then our individual decisions should be able to change this system.  I, like many of you, have tried with my consumption habits to move beyond the obvious criteria of price, function, and style to consider the following factors:

Try to distinguish between my true long-term needs and my short-term often misplaced desires.

Can I borrow, barter or get used whatever I am wanting?

Consider factors other than price such as how goods were produced including working conditions, reputation of company involved, and environmental impact.

These criteria do not make shopping easier since they take effort and any desire for perfection will be very frustrating.  The goal for me is greater intention and awareness in my consumer habits, which allows me to bring my religious values into my everyday life in a meaningful way.  We are both beneficiaries of our market capitalism system and often sufferers in the hardships created by it.  

Our economic system is good at delivering products for a low price and handling scarcity.  It was not designed to and therefore does not do a good job of determining values or what is valuable.  In our consumer culture today it is too easy to confuse price and value – they are not the same thing.  Just consider what is most valuable in your own life – I suspect it has nothing to do with the price you paid for them assuming they even had a price.  The love of friends and family, the old photographs we have, a book of special importance to us, that great piece of music that brings us to tears, or that life-changing experience that might even have happened in this church.  Those items are dealing in a currency that is far more important than money.  They are dealing in the eternal values of finding what makes our life worth living and meaningful.  Let the economic system determine price, we are the only ones that define for ourselves what has value and worth in our lives.

__________________

Jones, Serene and Lakeland, Paul.  Editors.   Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes  (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005)  p.141, 148

Crary, David.  Meltdown fallout: some parents rethink toy-buying  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081129/ap_on_bi_ge/toy_worries (accessed 29th November, 2008)

Oelschlaeger, Max Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental crisis.  (New Haven, Connecticut.  Yale University Press, 1994)  p.96

Parke, David  The Epic of Unitarianism  (Skinner House, Boston, 1985)  p.149

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland  Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)  p.148

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland  Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)  p.141

Meeks, M. Douglas  God the Economist:  The Doctrine of God and Political Economy  (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1989)  p.20

Jones, Serene & Paul Lakeland  Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)  p.148

WE NEED YOUR HELP.

We have more then 300 MP3 audio files of sermons on our web site. 

Our goal is to post audio files of all our sermons through Aug 2000 on the web site. But, some of our master tapes are missing so we need your help.  Look through the list below. If you have any of the audio tapes on the list bring them to the First UU book store.

We will return them through the book store after we make copies. Just stick an address label on them so we can identify which are yours.

Davidson Loehr
Brian Ferguson
23 November 2008

 

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

 

 

PRAYER:

Thanksgiving is part of a harvest cycle, where we plant and then hope we can be thankful for what we reap.  In that spirit, I want to share a short and thankful focus from the Buddhist tradition showing us what we hope for every time we plant seeds – whether in the ground, in our lives or in our worship services:

Now we have finished. Everyone stand and we will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because even if we did not have a great enlightenment, we had a small enlightenment. If we did not have a small enlightenment, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So let’s thank the Buddha.  (Hsuan Hua)  

Amen.

 

HOMILY:  Harvesting Thanksgiving — Davidson Loehr

Since I needed my Thanksgiving reflections today to be focused on something significant but fairly distant, I want to use a metaphor to transpose some deeper dimensions of Thanksgiving into history, politics and life.  This may sound like the opening to the sermon of a few weeks ago, when I said I wanted to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek.  But it’s a homily, not a full-length sermon, so it won’t be that ambitious.  

Thanksgiving, as we know, is a harvest festival, in the tradition of harvest festivals going back to ancient times.  They planted, then they harvested what they had planted.  What did they plant?

On the literal level, they planted the usual stuff – beans, squash, other vegetables, they cultivated orchards and the rest.  But deeper, it’s different.  So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving in this country, which happened in 1621. 

You all know much of this story.  In December of 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts. 

Mother Nature wasn’t on their side, though Father Time was.  They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. One hundred and two of them arrived here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died. 

Imagine this!  102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food. 

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead. This was the preparation for the first Thanksgiving, and there was not a yellow Happy Face in the bunch. 

The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. According to one source, the menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill. 

But now let’s explore the metaphor.  What did the Pilgrims really plant, that let them reap this feast?  They certainly didn’t plant venison, wild turkey or oyster seeds. 

What the Pilgrims really planted were two crops:  hope, and empowerment.  They planted hope rather than fear or despair, and empowerment rather than just rolling over and dying.  

That’s an easy segue from history to politics because, to put it in a contemporary sound bite, what those Pilgrims were saying to life was “Yes, we can!”

We are just near the beginning of a new planting season in American history.  And those seeds of hope and empowerment have been planted on lawns, bumper stickers and windows everywhere.  

That’s a huge part of the reason this amazingly unlikely man Barack Obama will be our 44th president: because after the last round of political seeds planted and the harvest we have reaped from that, people were simply starving for hope, the power to make a difference, and the chance to make a difference.  We don’t yet know how this new planting will work out, or what kind of harvest we will have. 

But we should look over the last crops we’ve planted, because the harvest is damned near killing us.  

Think of some of the seeds we have planted during the past three decades or so:

– We planted the seeds of what the French have called “savage capitalism”: an endorsement of high-level greed with only the barest of government restraint.  We planted ideas and behaviors intentionally exalting profits over people, stock prices over the livelihoods and lives of human beings.  And in the harvest was a crop of American workers forced to compete with the cheapest labor in the world, and unable to do so. 

– We sowed the idea that healthcare was a market product deserved only by those who could afford it, rather than a necessary protection of all our citizens, as every other industrialized country in the world does.  And we have reaped a harvest of perhaps fifty million citizens who cannot afford to be protected from accidents, disease, or astronomic medical bills that have plunged millions into bankruptcy and desperation. Also in the harvest are an estimated 18,000 deaths a year credited to their lack of adequate health care protection.

– We planted the idea that we could use our armies to invade any country with something we wanted.  On one level, we’ve done this for a very long time, as have other strong countries. But in the last seventy years, the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq was the first invasion of a sovereign nation on that scale since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.  And from this planting of violent militarism, we have harvested the deaths of over 4,200 American soldiers, and many times that number torn apart physically, mentally or both, as well as the deaths of nearly 1.3 million Iraqis, guilty of trying to defend their country from a foreign invasion, or of just being unfortunate enough to live in a country whose oil we lust after.  

I could go on down the list of bad seeds we have planted and the bitter harvests we have reaped, but you all know those seeds, those crops, and those harvests of shame.

Choosing the seeds we will plant is not an isolated act.  It is interconnected with everything that follows.

The wonderfully wise ancient Greeks coined a famous, short formula for how this kind of sowing and reaping works.  Here’s how they put it:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

Plant an action, reap a habit;

Plant a habit, reap a character;

Plant a character, reap a destiny.

We rob ourselves if we treat Thanksgiving like a superficial happy-face festival.  The harvest metaphor is too rich for that, and offers too much insight and power to ignore. 

We plant, we reap, then we hope we can be thankful for the crop.  But whether we can be thankful or not depends on what we planted, and our diligence in nourishing and attending to it. 

No planting or crops are ever perfect.  History doesn’t show us anybody who was ever that good.  Even the wonderfully wise ancient Greeks had slavery, limited rights for women, allowed only about ten percent of the adult population to vote, and seemed to care about only those who excelled above the rest.  The United States of America has, at its best, grown up around a very different dream, from very different kinds of seeds.  

I wonder if you’ve ever read the full poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which our Statue of Liberty stands.  She intentionally contrasts our dream with that of the Greeks, because she says we want a different kind of harvest.  Her poem is titled “The New Colossus,” named in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.  Listen to the poem in terms of the harvest metaphor we’ve been using, and see if you don’t hear the American Dream in a new way:

 

The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

 

Those are some of the most fertile seeds of hope and empowerment ever planted.  That message, “Yes, we can!” is the most fundamental expression of the American Dream.  Let us plant, in our nation and in our hearts, seeds of hope and empowerment.  Let us tend to them, nurture them so they might flourish.  Let us hope Mother Nature and Father Time will be on our side.  And then let us pray that when the harvest comes, we can give thanks.

 

HOMILY:  Brian Ferguson

Confession is not part of our Liberal religious tradition but I do have a confession to make. The Thanksgiving holiday remains a bit foreign to me. Now being Scottish I didn’t grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday but I don’t think we Scots are an ungrateful bunch. Yet again Scottish weather with its continuous rain and howling wind does not encourage a great sense of gratitude in anyone - except perhaps umbrella makers. The North American Thanksgiving holiday does not conjure family memories or traditions for me as it may for many of you. It also feels for me too close in time to Christmas - a holiday which has always been important to my family. Thanksgiving gets in the way of Christmas for me. Perhaps I’m missing the point but Thanksgiving seems to be predominantly about stressing oneself in preparation for the upcoming Christmas season. We attempt to fly or drive somewhere along with everyone else then express gratitude by eating too much. I’ve been your intern minister for three months now so I thought it was time you saw my curmudgeon side. That was it. The grinch that stole Thanksgiving.
More seriously, while not having a personal tradition of Thanksgiving I feel taking time to give thanks for our spiritual and material possessions to be a healthy practice. Meister Eckhart, the wise 13th century mystic, once said that if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. The idea of “thank you” as a prayer, as an earnest appreciation of something beyond our selves, resonates with me. Giving thanks when we are healthy, content, and life is going well seems easy and appropriate to do. We are probably too busy having a good time to do it but expressing gratitude would be the right thing to do when life is good. Giving thanks after we have come through hard times and recovering might even give us a heightened appreciation for the simple gifts in our life. What about giving thanks during tough times such as many of us are experiencing now? How do we adopt an attitude of gratitude when many of us are struggling with the various hardships we are experiencing as a nation, as a religious community, and as individuals? I struggle with expressing gratitude at this time. Avoidance or complaining would be so much easier.
There have been many studies conducted saying that during times of economic hardship two things increase - going to movies and alcohol consumption. Such times of uncertainty can lead us to want to escape from our present circumstance. Temporary escapes from a difficult situation can allow us some relief from stress and gain some distance from the issue at hand. Taken to excess such escapism can also lead to an avoidance of reality and an abdication of responsibility. At the other extreme of escapism is the tendency to look to blame someone or something for the difficult circumstances. Blaming others for our own misfortune can really feel good in the short term. We hear of plenty of blame for the global economic conditions – Wall Street, predatory mortgage lenders, greedy Chief Executive Officers, our President, the Republicans, Chinese imports, immigrants to this country – of which I am one. Voting for the Democrats four and eight years ago is not an immunization to our own responsibility or complicity for the current turmoil. Similarly voting for John McCain a few weeks ago is not an abdication of responsibility for what happens in the next four years.
If escapism and blame are unhelpful in tough times then how can expressing gratitude be useful? We usually express gratitude in return for something we receive such as the help of another, a gift received, or simple appreciation of our good fortune. The gifts that life presents us are not always apparent in times of hardship. We are more sensitive, perhaps overly so, to what we have lost or have fear of losing than what we have. We may have less than we had a year ago, financially many of us have a lot less than just two months ago. Do we give thanks for the contents of the half full glass or dwell on the losses of the half empty glass? In hard times the half empty glass seems the much easier option.
Another wise person, who also happened to be my manager in my first job said to me that “it doesn’t have to be a good experience to be an experience.” I have found this observation to be very useful at various times during my life. Life provides learning opportunities whether we want them or not. Perhaps in times of hardship rather than times of plenty we can find what really is most important to us as we are faced with limits, loss, and scarcity. Times of hardship force us to make difficult decisions that we would rather avoid. External events force us to give up things that seem important to us and sometimes we find those things to have been more of a burden than a treasure.
Many of us turn to religion to make sense of the hardships and losses we experience. Sometimes it can feel that religion is just a spoil sport in our life. When things are going well for us religion can be the nagging reminder that tends to dampen our happiness by making us feel guilty for our good fortune and reminding us of the suffering of others. Some religious leaders call this encouraging humility but really we just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time. Alternatively, when things are going badly for us, then religion becomes the voice of hope or explainer of our fate – have faith then things will turn out alright or there is a reason for our hardship. The famous American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed the function of the preacher was “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” In my less gracious moods this actually sounds like it could be fun. I think that is my curmudgeon side again.
While this view of religion as a counter-balance in people’s lives between comfort and affliction is popular amongst many I find it too simplistic and unhelpful. How can we in good faith separate people into the comfortable and the afflicted? Life is just not that simple. In our own lives most of us have that intertwining of good fortune and suffering simultaneously. Our jobs provide us both a livelihood and high level of stress. Our families can be both a source of support and a burden. Retirement is an opportunity for freedom and a source of insecurity. Even our religious community can provide us with both heartwarmth and heartache as we deal with the uncertainties of life. I think many of us have both doubt and suffering in our lives simultaneously with hope and strength. Religion at its best helps us to be grateful for the good in our life while providing comfort to the distresses of life. Good religion reminds us that we can be both the givers and the recipients of the great eternal values of gratitude, compassion and loving-kindness.
We are not individuals isolated from our surrounding community and our actions matter. Ultimately, this is what I am most thankful for since I do believe what we do and how we do it matters. While not everything we do may seem to be religious, I believe that how we do things can and should be religious. When we treat others with honesty, compassion and respect it is religious. While it can seem our small actions make little difference to the greater events around us, our actions matter greatly to those around us and most directly affected by them. I actually think our actions especially actions of gratitude, kindness and compassion are more significant in times of hardship and uncertainty. At such times people are in more need of help and support while there is less in terms of money and goodwill.
For me, the greatest gift expressing gratitude we have to give, is the gift of service to others and in troubled times it is often harder for us to give. In tough times then this gift is more needed and more appreciated, therefore our gift of service to others returns to us by making us feel more valued. The gift of service to others allows the giver to feel useful and the recipient to feel cared for. A gift that addresses the most basic human needs of being valued and being useful perhaps reflects a variation on our traditional view of Thanksgiving. Or perhaps our gift of service to others is a prayer that says thank you to the miracle that is each of our lives and maybe that is the very essence of Thanksgiving.
Or perhaps my view of Thanksgiving is too foreign for you in which case I’ll remind you of the Buddhist prayer Davidson read earlier: Now we have finished. Everyone stand and will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because if Brian’s message of giving thanks through service to others was not enlightening, then we had Davidson’s message. If Davidson’s message of a harvest of hope and empowerment was not enlightening, then we had the music. And if the music was not comforting, at least we had comfortable seats. So let’s thank the Buddha.

Davidson Loehr
16 November 2008
First UU Church of Austin, Texas
www.AustinUU.org

 

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

 

 

PRAYER:

Let us find a spiritual North Star to steer by when we are torn between life’s over-rated pleasures and its under-rated treasures.

We want to feel the difference between being opportunistic and being authentic, and learn how we can better choose the one that gives us more and better life.

Let us find the determination not to do what we should not do, the courage to do what we should do, and that elusive wisdom that lets us tell the difference.

How often we chase after things we don’t need, like dogs chase cars, not knowing what good they’d do us if we caught them.  Can we learn to yearn for what we need rather than what we merely want?

And as for our lives – if they can’t be as long as we would like, can they be as rich and rewarding as we wish?

These are just some of the questions we feel along life’s path on this day as on many days.  We offer them up, to speak them out loud in the hope that the person who hears them will be us.  

Amen

 

 

 

SERMON:   The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

 

There’s something exhilarating about being present when high ideals and aspirations are discussed, even if all we do is listen.  We consult experts in diet, exercise, ecology, finances and a few dozen other areas, all important, all with a few really gifted and motivated people available to pass on their inspiring visions to us, and it feels well worth the money we’ve spent.  In the meantime, we stay overweight, out of shape, eating poorly, handling our finances poorly, and the rest of it.  Still, it’s inspiring.  

Hearing about gifted religious visionaries and prophets is like this, too.  This is the third in the series of three sermons on the early 19th century thinkers who helped define Unitarianism as a separate religion in America, a religion that was derived from, but distinct from, liberal Christianity. All three men were in their 30s when they delivered the sermons that Unitarian students are still required to read.  William Ellery Channing was 38 when he delivered the sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35 when he gave his address at the Harvard Divinity School – the last time he was invited to speak there for 30 years.  The minister I want to talk about today was Theodore Parker, who was just 31 when he delivered a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” in 1841.  I have to say that Parker is my favorite of the three, and was from the first time I read their sermons nearly thirty years ago.  

Parker was an almost mythic person.  Born the eleventh child of a farmer, he grew up very poor.  He was mostly self-educated, then wound up graduating from Harvard Divinity School.  By the time he entered the ministry, he could read twenty languages.  After he died, at the age of 49, it was discovered that his library was the largest personal library in America, with about 50,000 volumes.  His biographer (Henry Steele Commager) said that Parker wrote notes in the margins of almost all of them.  If he actually read them all, that would be almost three books a day from the day he was born.  

At his peak, he preached to around 3,000 people, the largest audience in America – without a microphone.  His sermons routinely lasted over an hour, were thoroughly researched and brilliantly written.  Besides being the most powerful and combative voice of liberal religion in America — he was far more combative than either William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson — he was ferociously active on behalf of women’s rights, prison reform and especially anti-slavery causes in the 1840s and 1850s, well before that was a cause most Unitarians would touch.  That was partly because many wealthy Unitarians made a lot of money from the business of slavery, and partly because it was a rude subject, not suited to high-class cocktail hours.  They looked to their ministers for comfort, not challenge.  

He was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South.  One story about him that shows both his courage and his ferocity is about the time that he performed a wedding ceremony for two escaped slaves, holding a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other, to shoot anyone who tried to stop him.   

Martin Luther King once said, “We begin to die the day we become silent about the things that matter.”  As far as I can tell, Parker never had one of those days in his life.  He was uninhibited in his writings against dishonest religion.  The things he said in just this one sermon defined the theological debates in America for the next generation, and are still relevant and powerful.

But I want you to hear his words, because he was very good with words.  So imagine, if you can, sitting in a Unitarian church on May 19, 1841, when American Christianity – including Unitarianism – was still quite supernatural and often so conservative that it would feel a bit like today’s right-wing Christianity.  Imagine hearing some of these words spoken by a brilliant and fiery 31-year-old preacher.  (I’ve paraphrased some of these excerpts, to transport them from early 19th to early 21st century ways of speaking.) — 

 

While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands. 

Anyone, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one area passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next.  The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted with [a lot of] dirt. 

Since our various theologies are so transient, why do we need to accept the teachings of men, as though they were the word of God?

Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, rather than the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves.  It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, any more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his words.

Wasn’t Jesus our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God. Viewed in this way, how beautiful the life of Jesus is. 

God’s word will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing.

… Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God. 

Real religion gives men new life.

One hundred sixty-seven years later, many of these words would still send most believers into fits of apoplexy.  

For Parker, the only sanction that religion requires “is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us - Christ and the Father abiding within us.”  This is the permanent religious core of genuine Christianity, for Parker; the rest is transient and dispensable — including the creeds, orthodoxies, rituals, costumes, and if yo think about it, even the churches and ministers. (Gary Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 1805-1900, p. p. 86).   

As you can hear – though Parker seemed not to hear it – the logical implications of his insights pulverized the intellectual foundations of Christianity, theism, and all religions, reducing them to little more than ways of talking about high morals and ideals – which of course can be done without using any religious language at all.  

Even if his ministerial colleagues couldn’t articulate it, they must have felt the force of this earthquake in the foundations of their comfortable faith, because they reacted by cutting him off from the privileges of ministerial fellowship.  Nearly all of the Boston area ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him, and some refused to speak to him (Dorrien, p. 88). 

The Unitarian ministers told Parker it was his moral duty to resign from the Unitarian Association, but he was both too bright and too shrewd to make it that easy for them.  He said they would have to expel him, thereby showing they do have a creed.  They backed down — my image is that they had their tails between their legs.  And so, as one historian puts it, “The first Unitarian heresy trial was over (Dorrien, p. 90).”

Parker believed the time had come to sweep away all religious authorities except the authority of reason and spiritual intuition (Dorrien, p. 99).

True Christianity, he said, is not about the death or divinity of Christ, but about the death of sin and the life of holy goodness in our heart: “Each man must be his own Christ, or he is no Christian (Dorrien, p. 99).”  He defined real Christianity simply as “Being Good and Doing Good” – not needing any miracles or supernaturalism or creeds — or churches or ministers.  This drew complete outrage from nearly all clergy, including the Unitarians.

At first, Parker naively hoped that American Unitarianism could become America’s best religious hope, but within a few years, decided that it was so unwilling to see or to think that there was no hope for it.  

It’s a little confusing that he continued to insist on calling himself a Unitarian – especially since the leading Unitarian ministers wouldn’t claim him, swap pulpits with him or speak to him, and wanted him to resign.  

But Unitarianism was a complex thing in the Boston of his day.  It was a religion of the upper class, associated with intelligent, educated and sophisticated people, and Parker wasn’t willing to let go of that identity, which he had worked so hard to earn.  He had grown up as a very poor boy, worked hard, married a very wealthy woman.  They moved in those social circles – though Parker’s anti-slavery work really ended their welcome there, too. I think that giving up the “Unitarian” label would have felt to him like losing that social and personal identity.  

He wanted the rest of the Unitarians to grow into the larger and more honest understanding of religion that he had found.  He said the Unitarians were “standing still, and becoming more and more narrow and bigoted from year to year….  There is little scholarship and less philosophical thinking among the Unitarians,” he wrote.  ”Some of them engage in the great moral movements of the day, such as the anti-slavery movement.  But the sect as such is opposed to all [intellectual] reforms (Dorrien, p. 101).”

His opponents used his notorious radical social activities to label and smear him, partly so they wouldn’t have to answer his powerful critiques of their unexamined but comfortable religion.

So Theodore Parker lived the powerful contradiction of preaching to the largest crowd in America while being deeply alienated from the Unitarians, and spurned as unbearable by most respectable high-class socialites (Dorrien, p. 103).  No matter how fierce he was in public, he grieved his whole adult life in private over the continual attacks and rejection from the people and the denomination to whom he believed he offered valuable but unwanted help.  

In January of 1859, he was told that he was dying of tuberculosis.  It did not diminish his spirit, and one of the most inspiring things he ever wrote, he wrote in his Journal after receiving this death sentence: “I am ready to die… nothing to fear.  When I see the Inevitable I fall in love with her (John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900, p. 352).”  

Since his wife had money, they could travel.  He left Massachusetts to spend his last year traveling Europe, and settled in Rome.  He would die in Italy in 1860.  A few months before he died, he wrote another memorable line to a friend: “I have had great powers” he said, “and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).” 

All three of the great Unitarian preachers of the early 19th century were absolutely brilliant men who stood head-and-shoulders above almost everyone around them – though whether any of them can really be called Unitarian is a different matter.  

William Ellery Channing, who named “Unitarian Christianity,” refused to join the Unitarian Association when it first began in 1825, fearing it would just dumb down religion and lure people to the lowest common denominator where they wouldn’t think for themselves, but would look for some sort of creeds (or principles) to recite.  To put it in modern terms, Channing feared that the Unitarian Association would grow into a narcissistic cult, where people were taught to worship the kinds of things that their kind of people believed — that’s a working definition of narcissism.  And their churches would tell them when they entered just what those things were that their kind of people needed to believe, and maybe even print them on wallet-sized cards.  And that’s one element of a cult.   

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the three, called Unitarianism “corpse-cold,” and was not considered a Unitarian by any of the leading ministers of his day.  He thought Unitarianism had become smug, shallow and irrelevant.  

And Theodore Parker, the most brilliant of them all, was blacklisted from all the Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his liberal thinking, was told he should resign from the Unitarian Association, and told that he wasn’t a real Unitarian.  One member of the church where he delivered his most famous sermon even said that he’d rather see every Unitarian church burned to the ground than to see Parker’s beliefs preached from a single pulpit.  

The important truth is that these three men stood out against the background of Unitarians of their day because the overwhelming majority of Unitarian ministers of their day were not memorable, and their beliefs and actions are hard to look back on with much admiration when we hear these stories.    This is true, of course, of all the great visionaries of history: they only stand out because the vast majority of people around them couldn’t see or wouldn’t pursue the vision they saw so clearly.  

So these three men were prophets of a higher truth than almost any Unitarians would or could see, though they continue to inspire new Unitarian ministers who are still required to read them.  The righteous words of those who opposed them are long, and deservedly, forgotten.  

These three weren’t serving Unitarianism, and they were all pretty clear about it.  They were serving what Parker finally labeled as the Permanent in religion: True Religion, Absolute Religion, Honest Religion.  And throughout history, those voices have always been a tiny minority in all religions — Unitarians are no better or worse than the rest.

We like to think that we listen to serious religious thinkers the way orchestras listen to the concert “A” that is played before all rehearsals and concerts, for them to tune to, though that’s not really true, because we so seldom do tune to their visions in any life-changing way.  We really listen to them the same way we listen to all the other experts and motivational speakers in so many other areas: diet, exercise, ecology, finance and the rest of them.  We may not be motivated enough or courageous enough to follow them down the demanding path of getting into our best spiritual shape, but we’re at least serious enough to listen, and to carry home some fertile seeds in the form of ideas.  

There haven’t been many thinkers in any religion who wanted to move beyond the easy comfort of fitting in with like-minded people.  That’s still why we come to church, isn’t it — to enjoy the company of like-minded people?  Just think of how strong that gravitational attraction is for you, and how much effort it would take to break free of that gravitational pull.  That’s a measure of how unlikely it is that great prophets will ever really effect the changes they see.  I think that’s why we’re actually happier with these outspoken types after they’ve died, when we can treat them reverently rather than seriously.  

But if these prophets, including Theodore Parker, are right, then getting in spiritual shape is as easy and as hard as actually thinking about who we are and why we are here, about what is most worth believing and doing.  

This seems to be what all the prophets have said in their many different ways: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the biblical prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, all the way up to relatively minor – but still stirring – people like Channing, Emerson and Parker.  

These were people at the Olympic level of spiritual development, no matter how out of shape they may have been in other ways – none of them was in very good financial shape, for instance, and I don’t think any of them lifted weights.  They were both empowering and troubling people.  They didn’t exist just to tell us that we’re really special just as we are, or that this business of authenticity is easy.  They said, as Jesus put it, that the road was narrow and very few ever wanted to take it, even though it was open to all.  They said salvation was free, but it wasn’t cheap.  It’s about transformation, not blithely following along with a group of like-minded people.  

Yet they are mesmerizing, aren’t they?  They’re like charismatic self-help gurus, only moreso.  I keep thinking of some of the words Theodore Parker wrote near the end of his life:  ”I have had great powers — and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).” 

There, at least, is where Parker was so much like the rest of us: we all have great powers that we have only half used.  Isn’t that one reason we come here – to keep being exhorted to develop the other half of our great powers, and to use them to help ourselves and our world come alive?  We come seeking wholeness, and so often we don’t want to admit that, if only we will, we can have it.

Davidson Loehr
9 November 2008
First UU Church of Austin, Texas
www.AustinUU.org

Video clips at Ustream

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

PRAYER:

(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)

We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.  

And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service.  Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed.  No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at. 

We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary.  But we don’t live in that world.  And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.

Amen.

 

SERMON:  The Audacity of Hope

Part A: Excited utterances

Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election.  I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote.  I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.

But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week.  Here’s one:

“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.  

Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:  

His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

“My parents … imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.

“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character.  This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy — or girl! — to the White House.  He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.

Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:

Maureen Dowd writes:

“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.  Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.  I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won.  She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)

And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:

“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy….  Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders.  The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.

“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened.  This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics.  It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media.  We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.

“So let’s be blunt.  Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)

Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here.  But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond.  He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.  

Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”

My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents?  Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history.  But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence.  Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago: 

“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”  

Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure — and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books.  And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book.  But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience.  It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.

Part B: the Manger of Hope

I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up.  An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.

And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare. 

But there’s something special about a message of hope.  In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him.  The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:

“In that single [word] ‘hope’ … I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones.  Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story….  Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; ….”  He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire.  Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.  

Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement.  Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless.  I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege.  Those who already own the country don’t need hope.  They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor — which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.  

This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy.  He’s not.  He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.  

But his privilege was earned, not bestowed.  It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements.  Our current president also attended elite schools.  But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them.  George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements.  Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.  

As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope. 

Here’s another kind of metaphor.  Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time.  The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines.  She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody.  But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it.  That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.  

But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s.  Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:

“… we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”  

Those are strong words!  Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.  

Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that.  But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago.  Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female.  Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.   

Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary.  As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.  

But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic.  As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts — he didn’t belong to any majorities.  Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans.  And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States.  He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.  

Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.  

If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House.    Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment.  It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment.  This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.  

 

Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes

We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make.  If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.  

I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you.  You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.  

I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us.  I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.  

I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either. 

This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out.  Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue.  And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change.  But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts — people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive — and I hope he does that.

I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades. 

I don’t know what that would look like.  I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough.  We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.  

So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before. 

PART D.  A Reality Check

Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense?  Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again?  That sort of thing does happen, as you know.  Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?

Well, several things suggest that it can.  Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin.  That was the one dramatic setback for many people.  But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens.  In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%.  In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view.  Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people.  New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them.  And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed.  As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them.  Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html).    Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.  

Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group.  Radical change is possible, and it is happening.  The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats.  Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated.  (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.) 

Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”  

“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.

“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.”  (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)

I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history.  But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:

“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).

I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true.  I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out. 

And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!

Brian Ferguson
November 2, 2008

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

Reading – All Souls by May Sarton

Prayer

At this time of year nature and our mythology remind us of the cycles of life and death.   Our environment seems less abundant as trees and plants prepare for winter.  Many cultures in our world claim that the veil between the living and dead is thinner at this time of year.  

For those of us coping with loss of friends and loved ones, that thinness feels vast - and thin.  Vast because our relationship with those who have died has forever changed.  Yet thin because our memory of the dead can keep them close and vital to us.  

The cherished memories of our loved ones who came before remind us of the love they gave us and our love for them.  We are reminded by them that how we live today matters not just to those with us today but the future generations to come.  

As those who came before influence us then we will in turn influence those to come.  If we influence others is not our choice, how we influence them is.  Our time in this life is limited but what we choose to give to others can be abundant.

May our love and concern for others guide us in preserving the memories and values of those who came before - and may we pass on to those who come after the highest values and spirit that enriched our own lives.

Amen 

Today’s reading
is a poem entitled Message in Colors by Spanish Poet Julie Sopetran. Here, in an impressionistic and sensory fashion, the writer tries to convey to us the kind of nostalgia that is a spiritual celebration on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. 

Sermon: What the dead can tell us about coming alive

Today, in the sanctuary we are blessed by these beautiful Altars that were created for our Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations here at the church last night.  Thank you to all of you who created them.  Amidst this explosion of color I am feeling rather drab in my dark suit with only my red tie looking like it belongs up here with all these colors.

This time of year feels really busy.  We just had Halloween on Friday and this weekend we also have the Day of the Dead celebrations.  The election on Tuesday means that we are only three days away from the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Election campaign.  The church year is in full swing with lots of exciting activities happening here most days of the week.  The relaxed days of summer seems a distant memory as Thanksgiving plans are starting to coalesce and Christmas is looming just around the corner.  Thank goodness for that extra hour we gained with the clocks going back last night, we need all the time we can get.  Yet time is a quantity we only have a finite amount of.  Our own health concerns or those around us are a constant reminder that we are creatures of finite lives.  We are particularly sensitive to these issues at this time of year since in many cultures this is a time where we do honor and celebrate the dead.  The Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead is one such tradition.

When I first came to the United States and encountered the Day of the Dead celebration, I naively thought it was just the Mexican version of Halloween.  The proliferation of skeletons in various active poses and sugar skulls seemed to suggest a similar emphasis on the fearful and otherworldly aspects of Halloween.  My assumption of any similarity with Halloween was mistaken.  Day of the Dead focuses on bringing family and friends together to remember and honor those close to us who have died.  

In the poem, Ron read earlier we heard about the atmosphere, beauty, and celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead tradition as families gather at gravesites or in homes with altars similar to what we have here.  The altars contain mementoes and other objects such as flowers, food, and drink.  The intent is to encourage visits from the souls of the dead so they can hear the prayers, music, and stories told in their honor.  The commemoration of the dead has warm and pleasant overtones for the participants.  In the words from the poem “grief battles with life and life wins, it is once again for a little while, happiness and playful tradition which overcomes reality.”   The reality is death but for a brief period through community celebration then grief is transcended.  This festive interaction between the living and the dead in a social ritual helps the living to remember how enriched they were by the lives of those no longer alive.  

Our Halloween celebration is also based on the idea of the dead being able to visit us at this time of year.  The difference is the dead are seen as threatening to the living therefore the tradition of wearing costumes to scare off the dead spirits.  What different approaches to the dead, one celebrating them, the other being fearful of them?  Halloween has no religious significance for us today but the Day of the Dead has its roots in two religious traditions.

The Day of the Dead celebration – and it is a celebration – has its roots back hundreds of years to the indigenous groups in Mexico.  These groups honored their ancestors through gifts and stories.  After the Spanish Conquests of Mexico, the Christian missionaries saw these celebrations as sacrilegious and tried to banish the ritual.  The Spanish had a fearful attitude towards the dead due to the devastation of the great plagues that killed one third of the population in Europe during the late Middle Ages.  After many years of unsuccessfully trying to end the practice, the Spanish Christians then decided to assimilate the celebration.  They moved the indigenous celebration from August to coincide with All Soul’s day which is today November 2nd.  All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic commemoration of the dead so there is a tenuous connection of honoring the dead.  

Christianity like other religions has been very effective co-opting indigenous holidays and making them Christian holidays.  The birth of Jesus on December 25th is widely recognized to be the co-opting of a Roman Solar holiday not the actual birth of Jesus.  The seeming coincidences of Day of the Dead and All Souls Day are not “God working anonymously” as some would claim but the appropriation of a less powerful group’s tradition by a more powerful group.  Interestingly, the Day of the Dead celebration as practiced by most people today has little connection to the actual rituals of the Christian tradition and strong connections to the original ideas of the indigenous, pre-Christian tradition.  

Sadly, like so many religious practices there has been some co-option of this holiday by that most dominant of all our present religions - consumerism.  The commercialization of holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Day of the Dead often take the important symbols of a religion and trivialize them as nothing more than products to be sold.  This may explain why on my first encounter with Day of the Dead I could not see a distinction from the overt commercialization of Halloween.  In the tradition of the Day of the Dead, the significance of the skeletons and sugar skulls are their material symbolism.  The skeletons are symbols for the dead family members, not to be feared, but to be loved and invited to join the celebration of their own lives.  The specific activity that a skeleton is engaged in is usually the favorite activity of the deceased person being honored.  

The desire to have some physical connection to a dead relative or friend is something I suspect many of us can relate to.  Many of us have physical keepsakes that remind us of those special to us.  The other important aspect of the Day of the Dead celebration is the idea of the gifts the living could give to the dead to bring us closer to their spirit and help bring their spirit more fully into our lives.  Of course in Liberal Religion we need to do some translation to bring the idea into our context but I think this is a potentially rich way of thinking for us.  What gifts can we give of ourselves today that would honor and bring us closer to departed family and friends?  Can we live our lives to honor those who through their love, values, and support made us who we are today?  Being a Liberal Religion each of us needs to explore those questions ourselves but perhaps hearing my own struggles with these questions might help you.

I mentioned earlier that this tie may be the only item belonging to me that belongs with these altars.  I was referencing the red color in contrast with the dark, austere colors of my suit.  Remember we Unitarian Universalists are religiously descended from the Puritans who were not famed for their bold color sense.  This tie also belongs on these altars for the symbolism it means to me.  I was given this tie twenty-two years ago for my brother’s wedding by my father. It was his tie and he gave it to me as a family gift.  My father died unexpectedly in January of this year.  Like many of us here who have experienced the loss of someone close to us and perhaps especially a parent whom we’re close to, it is a disorienting experience.  A seemingly ever-present pillar of your life is removed.  It is painful and destabilizing.  This tie for me is an important connection to the memory of my dad.

My dad was an honest, hard working, and plain talking person.  He was bright and inquisitive but not college educated and liked people to speak in plain language grounded in what he called the real world.  I remind myself to keep my words honest, respectful, and accessible.  My dad always loved a good argument and would often disagree with me just for the discussion.  Family discussions around the dinner table had always been a huge part of my family culture for as long as I can remember.  I believe the constant questioning and discussions in my family home set me on my long and winding path to finding a home in Unitarian Universalism.  When I question with honesty, sincerity, respect, and clarity then I believe I am closer to the spirit of my dad while serving important religious values.

Davidson in a sermon a few weeks ago gave a wonderful example of living life as if all the great people of history were watching – living under the gaze of eternity I think he called it.  As daunting as that sounds it does seem to be powerful guidance for living a good life.  I also think it is in keeping with this spirit of Liberal Religion to consider some of the people who are watching us to be our dead relatives and friends who we most admired and were influential on us.  When we invoke the memory of them to guide or motivate us in our lives then we are invoking their spirit and by doing so we are honoring them.  I believe this is what May Sarton was saying in the earlier poem:  

“Now the dead move through all of us still glowing, 
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend 
Our complex love, our mourning without end.” 

We are engaging with both the inspiration and the sadness of those important people who are no longer with us physically.  At the heart of grief and mourning is the struggle we have dealing with multiple emotions simultaneously:  the joy that person brought to us in our lives and the sadness at their absence, the anger at what is seemingly unresolved and fear of how we can live life without them.  Our mourning does not end since we are reminded of them as they continue to influence us through their example.

As part of the Day of the Dead celebration many Mexican families tell stories about the dead person each year to keep their memory and influence alive.  I think there is great value in this.  In our religion the memorial services fill this formal role on a one time basis shortly after their death.  We do not have a religious tradition of regularly telling a person’s story.  What I wanted to do for my dad became clear to me when I was clearing through photographs when preparing to move here from San Francisco in June.  

I was looking at some photographs and I found one of my dad when he was two years old and a photograph of when I was last with him just over a year ago.  I looked at him in both photographs and thought what really connects these two completely different people - the fresh-faced two year old boy in 1932 and the haggard face seventy-five years later which showed the years of discomforting illness.  What became clear to me is that it is the stories, experiences, and relationships connecting the people in the two photographs.  I realized that I knew only a small portion of those stories.  The father-son relationship, though intimate and important, is a limited lens through which to view any person.  

Being a father myself, I’m acutely aware of the narrow view my five-year old daughter has of me – I’m a mode of transportation and a rather large climbing frame but primarily I’m the authority figure who denies her all things fun.  Don’t believe her when she says I denied her any candy on Halloween.  I think I allowed her one piece.  To broaden my own view of my father I’ve undertaken a project to write his eulogy not from my own perspective or people I know well but from those who I do not know well and had a relationship with my dad very different from me. His friends when he was in the Air Force as a young man, the people who were his apprentices at work, and his brother in Canada who knew him during his early years.  This will help me get a fuller perspective beyond just his later life as a father and perhaps gain insights into why he was the person he was.  

When a person dies we can often freeze our relationship with them at the time of their death and not remember the changes that occurred in the relationship over the course of their life.  I believe that we can continue to change our relationship even with those who are dead by getting a fuller understanding of who they were.  As long as they are alive there is often that vain hope that they may still change to become the person we want them to be.  Seventy-six years wasn’t enough perhaps the seventy-seventh year of their life will be the one they make the change I desire of them.  Ah the eternal hopeful human spirit especially when it is about someone else changing and not ourselves.  

When a person dies we give up any hope of them changing but if we choose we can change our own beliefs of that person.  Perhaps what we wanted them to change was just not that important and we focus on those more important eternal attributes of the person that are important to us - their love for us despite our imperfections, their confidence in us despite our own doubts, or their friendship despite our sometimes feeling unworthy of it.  The death of someone allows us to reframe what we remember about their life – for good and for bad – and perhaps allows us to see the essence of the person beyond the often trivial disagreements that are so much part of our everyday lives.

Despite the inevitability of death for all of us, it is not a subject that is discussed much in our society.  There is often avoidance until it is thrust upon on us through our own loss.  Many people, religious and non-religious, often turn to religion or religious leaders for guidance at this time.  Religion is where we try to find some meaning and comfort about death.  Different religions have different ideas about what happens to us when we die.  Many propose some form of existence beyond this life, a hope that we will be reunited in some form with those who died before us.  I understand the desire for this but to me what happens beyond death is a mystery – and perhaps it is good that it is a mystery.  This allows grief-stricken people to find hope in different ways during difficult times.  I have seen the solace and strength that friends of mine have gained from believing they would be reunited with a deceased child or young spouse in the future.  This is not a denial of death but a belief in something beyond death.  I personally struggle to share their beliefs but I cannot be certain what happens after death and at times even feel a little envious of the comfort these beliefs give them.

What I can be certain of is that death is a transformational experience for those close to the deceased.  Our lives are changed as we are reminded of our own mortality.  We are finite beings with a limited time in this life and it matters what we do with our life.   I have heard the Spanish expression Manana described as meaning something might get done tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe next month.  I heard someone being asked if we had any equivalent of that expression in Scotland and he replied that we had no word to convey that sense of urgency.  Urgency is not a good way of determining what is important.  Our lives seem to be surrounded by urgency.  Urgency of creating Halloween costumes, making Thanksgiving plans, buying Christmas presents and even writing sermons.  While death gives us a finite time we should react to this restriction by prioritizing what really is important.

Manana can be thought of as something never being started because of procrastination, alternatively it can mean something will never be completed because it transcends our timeframe.  I suspect what is really most important is not what we get done before we die but those projects that we begin that will transcend our deaths.  For example the work we do in community to address the social ills such as poverty, violence, hunger, racism, and sexism.  This work to heal our world will not be completed in my life time – improved I hope but not completed.  By building institutions such as this church with our time and money we hope this work and the promotion of our religious values to others will continue after we are gone.  This is legacy work since it transcends our own life span.

I talked earlier about how a focus of Day of the Dead was the gifts whose purpose was to bring the spirit of the dead closer to us.  Our legacy is the reverse of this, what will we dedicate ourselves to now that will be a gift to others when we are dead?  Our time in this life is finite but our legacy and what we choose it to be is not.  How we preserve the memory and values of those who came before us and pass on our values and spirit to others are perhaps the most important questions we will address in our lives.  By acknowledging the reality of death and the losses we have in common we may find what is most meaningful in our life and worth passing on to future generations.  And when we do that we are honoring the full human experience and celebrating life’s longing for itself.

Sopetran, Julie,  Message in Colors from the book