First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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Jim Checkley
 February 22, 2009
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Is a Bold Hamster “Great” or Just What is “Greatness”?

Sometimes things just work out. Take this sermon, for instance. When I was asked to do this service, I quickly decided to talk about a topic that I have been fascinated with for a long time: what does it mean to be great? I was on the phone with Sally Scott and she asked me if I could do this date or that date, and we settled on February 22nd. I thought nothing special about it at the time.

However, forty-five years ago I would have instantly made the connection between February 22nd and George Washington’s birthday, because his birthday was a school holiday. In fact, back in those days we also got February 12th off from school because it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Of course, as it turns out, Charles Darwin’s birthday is also February 12th, and the same year as Lincoln. But while they named a city after Darwin in Australia, there’s no way in America – except maybe for a few isolated Royal Blue areas – that we’d get Darwin’s birthday off from school.

We just marked the 200th anniversary of both Lincoln’s and Darwin’s birthdays. Washington would have been 277 today – a number of no special significance since it doesn’t have any “zeros” in it. Nonetheless, there is an interesting mathematical fact about Washington’s birth year of 1732. Put a decimal after the “1″ and you have the square root of three – 1.732. Really. See, you never know what you are going to learn at a Unitarian church. I don’t know if this numeric coincidence portended greatness for Washington – perhaps a numerologist could tell us – but he certainly demonstrated greatness during his lifetime. As did both Darwin and Lincoln.

Like I said, sometimes things just work out.

The word great, like the words love and God, is subject to many meanings and often fierce debate. I’m beginning to believe I am an intellectual masochist because I keep picking sermon topics that are impossible to fully discuss in a 20 – okay 25 – minute sermon. So let’s narrow our theme today. When I’m talking about greatness, I do not in any way mean famous. Famous and greatness are two totally different concepts and the cult of celebrity often worships people who are decidedly not very great, but whom we hoist onto pedestals made of fluff, and which are either unsteady and fragile or else we – and I mean American society – are shallow and fickle. But really, what are the odds of that being true about America?

And I don’t have the time to explore the really wonderful topic of the “greatness” of villains, for example Lord Voldemort, who J. K Rowling tells us over and over in her Harry Potter books, has done great things – terrible to be sure – but great nonetheless. So for purposes of my sermon, I assume that we would all agree that Lord Voldemort – and the real characters of history like him – do not deserve to be judged as having greatness. And based on her many interviews and pod casts, I think J. K. herself would approve.

Instead, I am going to use William Shakespeare’s famous quote about greatness from his play Twelfth Night as a template to discuss what it means to be great and how we judge greatness. And although there are many who could serve as examples, including many women, African-Americans, and others, because the powers that be handed it to me on a silver platter, I am going to be a bit of a Taoist and go with the flow by talking about each element of Shakespeare’s quote using Washington, Darwin, and Lincoln as examples.

In Twelfth Night the comedic plot begins when Malvolio, Countess Olivia’s priggish steward, comes upon a letter that the merrymakers in the play have left for him to find. The letter is a fake anonymous love letter that Malvolio believes is from Olivia. The writer of the letter suggests that Malvolio can become “great” by doing certain things, each of which is more absurd than the last. Never questioning the authenticity or the origin of the letter, Malvolio proceeds to carry out the ridiculous tasks, until Olivia thinks her steward has gone mad and has him locked up.

Contained in the letter, which Malvolio reads aloud, is the famous quote about greatness: “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Although Malvolio says these lines, he is reading from the letter, and audiences both then and now immediately recognize that the term “greatness” has very little to do with Malvolio, who is ambitious, pretentious, and has an ego that far outstrips his qualities as a person. He is blinded by pride, and is a ripe target for the prank being played upon him. He is so out of it that he cannot see just how far from reality his own self-musings have taken him.

I suppose that the ability to recognize one’s own folly is a necessary antecedent to being great. Which would lead one to conclude that people who think they are great very often are not. We have all known a super-confident person of whom we cannot understand where that confidence came from. Humility seems to be one of the hallmarks of greatness, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’d like to take a look at each of the elements of Shakespeare’s quote and see what we can glean from them.

The first part of the quote asserts that “some are born great.” This is one of the ultimate nature over nurture claims. The implication is that there are certain inherent qualities to being great and that they are manifest in the person from birth. But is it true? If we were in any mainstream Christian church today, the overwhelming answer would be yes, for there can be no better example in Western culture of someone who is believed to be born great than Jesus of Nazareth. When you are born god incarnate, that would seem to coincide with the notion of born greatness. I suppose that would apply to some other religious figures from other religious traditions as well.

But what about everybody else. Are any of them – us – born great? Well, the answer, of course, depends on what we mean by “great”, but overall, I tend to think the answer is a qualified yes. I tend to think that some people are simply born with certain talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, that put them ahead of the curve, so to speak, when it comes to doing great things and eventually, being thought of as having attained greatness. Of course, simply having those talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, is not a guarantee that they will be translated into greatness. In fact, like so many things, there are probably tons of false positives out there; that is, people who were born with the qualities, but never lived up to them, or worse, betrayed them in a hurtful or harmful way.

And in the category of things working out, I would suggest that if we are going to agree with Shakespeare that some are born great, then George Washington is one of those of whom we might say he was born great. I don’t intend to go into any history lessons here, so you can all relax. But listen to this. In an essay called “The Greatness of Washington,” Christopher Flannery says: “What Shakespeare is to poetry, Mozart to music, or Babe Ruth to baseball, George Washington is to life itself.” Now that is quite saying something. Flannery continues: “This is by no means to say that [Washington] was flawless any more than Babe Ruth was a perfect baseball player or Mozart a perfect musician. It is merely to say that, if he had not lived, such greatness could hardly have been believed possible.” Here we have the description of a man who was born to greatness and who, through his actions, character, and decisions, upheld his end of the bargain. And consider the words of Thomas Jefferson from today’s reading. Now, you’re supposed to say nice things at somebody’s funeral, but what Jefferson has to say is itself extraordinary and his reference to “nature and fortune” points to somebody who was born for greatness. But for me the coup de grace on the issue is the story of Washington and the cherry tree.

Mason Locke Weems wrote a biography of Washington shortly after Washington died and recounted the tale that as a lad, Washington got a new hatchet, and proceeded to test it by chopping down a cherry tree. When Washington’s father saw the tree, he asked George if he knew anything about it. George is reputed to have said: “I cannot tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

Now in recent decades, there has been much ado about humanizing Washington, indeed, all the founders of our country, and in so doing, demythologizing both the men and their accomplishments. And in this regard, it is pretty clear that the truth of the cherry tree tale lies somewhere between Santa Clause and the Lock Ness Monster. And although Washington gave all the credit to his mother, the point is that Weems was trying to tell everybody that Washington was an extraordinary man, whose greatness was manifest when he was a boy, and thus is an example for us of one who was born great – not perfect – but great. And at that level, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not.

The next part of Shakespeare’s quote is that “some achieve greatness.” The achievement of greatness suggests hard work, dedication, and the accomplishment of something that is unexpected, or at least something that was not evident or obvious in the person. And I think the unexpected part is important because it means going beyond who we (or others) think we are and making choices that expand rather than contract our embrace of the world at every level and in a good way. Let me explain.

We human beings use the power of flight as a metaphor for freedom. But when a bird flies, it is doing something that is as natural to it as walking is to us. We can marvel at the grace, speed, and power of a bird in flight, but we would never say that a bird has attained greatness simply because it can fly. It is expected that a bird can fly. I feel the same way about people and their abilities.

If you are six-foot-ten and can dunk, does that make you great? I don’t think so. You have great physical prowess and we will admire you for it, perhaps, but I would never say that you had achieved greatness just because you could dunk. Similarly, we admire and perhaps envy really intelligent people because of their brain power. But are those people great just because they can figure out Sudoku with relative ease. Again I say no. And I suggest the same thing even applies to the gods we worship. Simply because a god is powerful and can kill us, or in the case of Yahweh, destroy towns or even the whole world, I don’t think that god is automatically great. Powerful, yes. Scary, yes. But partaking of greatness? I don’t think so. At least not because of this.

Truth is, there is an important difference between something being great and something having a quality of greatness. I had been thinking for some time about this and it finally hit me: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. I’ll say that again: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. This may be obvious to some of you, but it was an interesting revelation to me. The Great Wall of China is great because it is huge and they say it can even been seen from space. But the greatness of the Chinese people who built that wall and their culture, now that is something that must be judged and ultimately bestowed. Barry Bonds’ record of 762 home runs is great; whether we would say that Bonds himself embodies greatness in the world of baseball is something that is being debated and will be decided by the judgment of history.

Which takes me full circle: achieving greatness means doing something worthy and that is unexpected of you, because if it was expected, it might be great in some measurable way, like a falcon that can dive at 278 miles per hour, but greatness, true greatness takes something more, something beyond what is expected, something that encompasses more than just ourselves, and something that others deem to be admirable, good, helpful, and perhaps even amazing.

With this in mind, I’d like to take just a minute to talk about Charles Darwin. Darwin was a reclusive man who spent almost his entire lifetime coming up with his theory of evolution by natural selection. His great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin, lives in Australia and was quoted in last Saturday’s edition of The Age as saying that “[Charles] never did an honest day’s work in his life.” What did he do? An almost preacher, Darwin spent all his time observing and collecting beetles and other critters and thinking about the origins of life on Earth. He spent many years ruminating about his already formed theory of evolution through natural selection, and it was only when he learned that somebody else – Alfred Russel Wallace – had come to the same conclusions that he published his Origin of Species.

Darwin was not the first to say that life had evolved. His own grandfather had come to that conclusion. Nor was he the first to claim to know the mechanism for speciation. Lamarck had put forward a theory of how one species morphed into another, famously stating that the giraffe evolved its long neck by stretching for leaves up in the trees, and then passing on the gain; but he got it wrong. Darwin, however, got both evolution and its mechanism right.

These were huge ideas that encompassed the entirety of life on Earth. And Darwin published and stood behind them at a time when doing so went against the great weight of society and culture – like so many who we call great, he courageously broke the mold. As Chris Darwin says, “Every age suppresses the unthinkable; Darwin expressed it.” And it is something Darwin was vilified for then and continues to be vilified for by some today. And it is for these reasons, and the fact that his theories, as they have been developed over the last century and a half, form the very foundation of modern biology, that he achieved the greatness that has been bestowed upon him.

The last part of Shakespeare’s quote is: “some have greatness thrust upon them.” And here I guess, I would have to quarrel a little bit with Shakespeare, although in matters of English usage, that’s probably a dangerous thing. While not as poetic, I would rather the quote had said “some have the opportunity for greatness thrust upon them.” Because I don’t think greatness can be thrust upon anybody. It is something that is earned – even if one is otherwise born for greatness – and not something that can be thrust upon one for the obvious reason that the thrust could just as easily cause the person to fail. What’s really going on here is that some are placed by fate, chance, destiny, or choice, in a position where the circumstances are so extraordinary, that if the person can handle them, can successfully weather the storm, and perhaps even achieve great things, then that person will be judged to be great.

Having greatness thrust upon one can, of course, be applied to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln ascended to the presidency after the ruinous Buchanan administration, and at the onset of the Civil War. He was literally thrust into a position of power just as the country was violently breaking apart and for four years had the weight of the fate of the nation on his shoulders. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and is credited with ending slavery and saving the Union.

In a recent poll of historians conducted by C-SPAN, Lincoln just topped Washington as the best president of the United States, while Buchanan was dead last and is, in every respect, somebody who the world tried its best to thrust greatness upon, but who failed miserably. In many ways it is no accident that Buchanan, the worst president, and Lincoln, voted the best, came back-to-back during the tumultuous years heading up to and including the Civil War.

Well, that takes care of Shakespeare’s quote – or does it? Because you may recall that the full quote starts out: “Be not afraid of greatness.” What are we to make of this? In my last few minutes I want to talk about this part of the quote because I think, frankly, it is the most important part of all.

The first question to ask is why would anybody be afraid of greatness? I mean, you’d think that being great would be, well, great. But, I think the answer is pretty obvious, actually. Consider the men and women whom you think have attained greatness, however measured and by whatever means. I would bet that the person lived large, with courage, took risks, assumed great responsibility beyond him or herself, and was original in thought and deed to the point of breaking the mold of society and culture. In all events, I would bet, they went beyond what was expected of them and reached out beyond themselves to impact the world for the better. Finally, I’d bet that many of them, at least, exhibited one more characteristic – a willingness to leave the pack behind, to take the lonely path, and often to create something for others, something that they themselves did not or could not share in but which they protected for the benefit of others – people we often call heroes.

And here, finally, is where we get to talk about hamsters. I’ll bet you were wondering about that. Being a bold hamster takes courage, you see, because while there may be food just around the corner, there could also be a snake or a large bird. And if I were a hamster, it would be difficult to be bold, difficult to take those steps or take those positions or take those stands that place one at risk, especially on behalf of others or an important idea. But that’s what great people do. That’s what makes them great. Now people aren’t hamsters, but I think the point of the analogy holds. And so we might ask ourselves, are we like the bold hamster, venturing forth despite the risk, or are we somebody who Shakespeare was talking to, somebody who holds back because of the fear that we are going to be the bold hamster who is soon lunch?

These are among the most serious issues we face in how we live our lives, despite my somewhat tongue-in-cheek analogy. Let’s face it: it is not likely that any of us are going to attain the greatness of the historical figures I talked about – or could have talked about – today. But so what? I believe there is a bit of bold hamster in all of us, enough at least that we can see the path. But I suspect most of us anyway also have a bit of that fear of greatness, of taking the next step along that very path that might lead to greatness – the greatness each of us is capable of achieving.

Part of the purpose of this church and our religion is to help us to grow beyond our comfort zones, to embrace more than what is in our little world, and to think seriously about the gods whom we serve and how well we serve them. I think we can all walk the path of greatness because we can all do something that is unexpected of us, that breaks our own mold, if not that of culture and society, is larger than we are, and reaches beyond ourselves to impact the world for the better.

And if that’s true, then how do we know if we are on the right track? I offer two observations. The first is pretty simple. One measure of how big we are on the inside is just how far and how large our embrace is on the outside. The larger the scope of our embrace outside – be it family, community, country, or cosmos – then the bigger we are on the inside and the higher the likelihood of greatness. But always remember, greatness is not something that we ourselves decide. Greatness is judged and bestowed by others. So here is the second test.

In the Wizard of Oz, after gifting the Tin Woodsman with a new heart, the wizard cautions him by saying: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” It’s the same with greatness, for greatness, like the heart, is not measured by the great things you have done, but by how much honest admiration and respect you are afforded by others, especially those who know you or who you have touched.

Martin Luther – the guy who started the Protestant Reformation – thought that the Epistle of James did not belong in the Bible because James teaches that “faith without works is dead,” whereas Luther believed that it is only by grace that people are saved by God. I’m on James’ side on this one. We are all given gifts by nature, we all have our dreams, our passions and our hopes for our lives and for the lives of our children, family, friends and others. Without action, without works, those gifts are wasted and our dreams and hopes nothing more than electrical impulses in our brains that will one day be silent and lost as a grain of sand upon an endless beach.

Let our greatness be to live fully and fearlessly, to use our gifts in the service of our best and most illuminating gods, and to embrace as much of life outside ourselves as we can, and like Lamarck’s famous giraffe, stretch our reach to encompass ever more, until we surprise even ourselves. And then let them judge how we have lived – those who have known us and those who we have touched – and they will nod a knowing nod and smile a knowing smile for greatness.

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Presented February 22, 2009
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin
 Revised for Print
 Copyright 2009 by Jim Checkley.

And just because I know you’re dying to know, George W. Bush was 36th, or sixth from the bottom, just edging out Millard Fillmore and a touch behind John Tyler.

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© Hannah Wells
June 4, 2006
First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for some measure of comfort and peace for those who mourn significant losses. They are members of your church community; they are the families of lost military men and women, and they are the survivors of natural disaster.

Let us rejoice for our lives, for all that we have: a soft bed, good food to eat, a choice of what to wear each morning. The future. Let us reflect – gently, but with conviction, with courage.

Which part of us is given the most permission, the most air time, the most control? Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose? Do we know who that person is? Are we giving ourselves the right “to be fabulous?” Are we giving our best self a chance to live?

Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about failure and success.

Let us love ourselves in the story we find ourselves in. We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are important, that failures are the means to hard-earned growth and happiness. With calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings.

May we keep close to our hearts the certain knowledge that the nature of our world, and of ourselves, is always to be in flux. No state of our being is ever permanent.

May we each honor the other’s response to change, and the need to make a better world. Each of us are on a different path that we have been called to take.

May compassion be our guide, for ourselves and each other, and may courage be our salvation.

AMEN.

SERMON

This feels like a homecoming. It reminds me of when I preached for the first time at the church I grew up in; First Church of Austin is my second home church, I hope that’s alright with you. And I’m so pleased that the children’s choir of Tulsa is here to hear me preach today. When I was your age, I found myself forced to sit through an entire church service – I think it was summer, no Sunday School, no RE wing to escape to. The subject of the sermon was failure, and I’ll never forget it. The main message was there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only not trying. I could grasp that, as an 11 year old, or however old I was. When we’re kids, we are asked to succeed a lot; we’re not asked to fail, but we should be. We should know that option is open to us.

What this minister was saying in his sermon is that it doesn’t matter as much what the outcome is, it matters that we are part of the process of something, that we participate, that this is more important than anything. And at a young age, this is absolutely true. I won’t Pollyanna all the way for you here, it’s true that as you get older, it does matter more and more what the outcome is. But for a youth, it’s a message of courage – just have courage, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it matters that you try at the things you’re drawn to, that you get to know yourself by figuring out what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at.

When I was an intern minister here for nearly a full year, one thing that helped me greatly was to know I had “permission to fail.” That was Davidson’s phrase (Davidson was my supervisor and is the Senior Minister of this church, for the many visitors who are with us today). It was perhaps the most attractive thing about this church for internship, because it seemed to turn failure on its head and take the sting out of it. It was okay to fail! In fact, it was expected. Failure didn’t seem like such a specter then, and instead of walking on egg-shells trying to do everything right, I could just be myself.

Of course Davidson was not shy about telling me when I did fail. Mostly this had to do with the first drafts of sermons. I pretty much failed all of first semester with my preaching; I just didn’t get what I was failing to do. But I finally succeeded with the sermon I delivered at the very beginning of the new year. I had an “a-ha!” experience, and I finally got it. I doubt I ever would have understood what I was doing wrong, what was missing, unless someone wasn’t kind enough to tell me how I was failing – over and over.

And now I’m a working minister delivering a sermon on the topic of failure. If I fail at a sermon on failure, is that a success? I’ll worry about that later.

What are some of your most prized failures? The failures that you learned and grew from, and never could have succeeded without? Which failures do you still need to learn from? Maybe we’ve failed to maintain our health, or spend enough time with our families. Maybe we’ve failed to nurture our creative sides. Maybe we’ve failed to reach some kind of cherished ideal.

We tend to forget, though, that ideals aren’t meant to be reached. We set high ideals to remind ourselves of what we want to be close to. But we don’t reach them.

The truth is, that, most of the time, we are off-course. The nature of the world and of us is one of imperfection.

Perhaps some of you remember when, 30 years ago, the commercial plane The Concorde, began flying across the Atlantic for the first time in less than 4 hours. Because of its phenomenal speed, the course was actually maintained by two computers, one to take course readings every few seconds, and one to correct the course when it was going off-course. A passenger touring the plane asked the pilot, “what percentage of the time is the plane off-course?” The pilot smiled, and replied, “About 99 percent of the time, sir.”

This story was taken from Rachel Remen’s collection, the woman I inevitably end up borrowing from in so many of my sermons, as Davidson taught me to do. She asks, “Might it be possible to focus ourselves on the purpose we wish to serve in the same way… [as] the Concorde? Once we stopped demanding of ourselves that we be on course all the time, we might begin to look at our mistakes differently, giving them… a frictionless response. They will not prevent us from reaching our dreams nearly so much as wanting to be right will. [my italics]

Those who have the courage to offer us honesty, to be our navigators, might even come to be seen as worthy of… gratitude… “You are off-course,” they might tell us. “Why, THANK you,” we might reply. “

She goes on to say, “Serving anything worthwhile is a commitment to a direction over time and may require us to relinquish many moment-to-moment attachments, to let go of pride, approval, recognition, or even success. This is true whether we be parents, researchers, educators, artists, or heads of state. Serving life may require a faithfulness to purpose that lasts over a lifetime. It is less a work of the ego than a choice of the soul.”

If we’re using our souls to choose a destination, it is enough to be heading in the right direction. We get in trouble when we make the ideals of the world our destination. We cannot choose a trajector – or a path to follow – under the guidance of what is outside of us. These are the questions I don’t think anyone can answer for us; we have to ask our own souls, our own spirits: We have to begin inside ourselves and ask, am I trying to succeed in becoming more human, more whole? Do I do what I love? Do I know what my gifts are, and does it offer some gifts to others?

While they don’t have to be the gifts the world wants, we do need to offer the world something; but it has to be what we are able to offer. Nobody gets all the gifts, and there’s wisdom in being delighted with the few we’ve got – loving to use them and offer what little we have to offer. Howard Thurman, a theologian, can help us figure out what this is when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Sometimes the gifts we have, though, aren’t the ones we would choose for ourselves. There are always going to be things, that, in the end, we wish we’d been better at; there are failures we regret, but there are probably some gifts we’ve been given too that we didn’t even know we gave to others.

There was a very successful businessman named George who got diagnosed with lung cancer. He was told he didn’t have much time left. He said to his therapist, “‘I have wasted my life… I have two ex-wives and five children. I support all of them but I don’t know any of them… I don’t think they’ll miss me. I’ve nothing behind me but a lot of money.’”

It turns out that the business of this man was selling a gadget of medical equipment that he invented. The therapist – who of course is Rachel Remen, this is another of her stories – had another patient who used this device, and knew that it had completely changed her life. Her name was Stephanie. Rachel asked her if she might write a letter to the dying businessman, to thank him. The woman wanted to have him over to dinner, and he came. Rachel Remen writes,

“The week after this dinner, he sat in my office shaking his head in wonder. He had expected to have dinner with this young couple, but when he had arrived, George was welcomed by Stephanie’s whole family. Her mother was there, her three brothers and sisters, several of her aunts and uncles, and a crowd of nieces, nephews, and cousins. Her husband’s parents were there, too, and many of her friends and neighbors – the whole community of people who had sustained her in the years she was an invalid. They had decorated the little house with crepe paper, and everyone had cooked. It was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration.

But George told Rachel that wasn’t the most important part. George said, “‘They had really come to tell me a story; they had each played a part in it and had a different side of it to share. It took them over three hours to tell it. It was the story of Stephanie’s life. I cried most of the time. And at the very end, Stephanie came to me and said, “This is really a story about you, George. We thought you needed to know.’ And I did, I did.’”

Rachel asked, “How many of these things do you make every year, George?”… “close to ten thousand,” he said softly. “I just knew the numbers, Rachel. I had no idea what they meant.”

That kind of story asks us to measure success and failure correctly: by our effect on others, by the gifts we’ve shared, not necessarily by the world’s standards – or maybe even our own standards.

Another inspiring tale of failure is about West Point graduate Capt. Ian Fishback, a story you perhaps already know, but merits repeating. It’s a story about doing the right thing, in the face of failure on an enormous scale.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in Spring of 2004, Fishback, from experience, knew the tortures were in accordance with interrogation procedures. According to him, those terrible things were done to prisoners on a regular basis. But as a by-the-book officer, Fishback held his tongue, that is, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disavowed the evidence of torture before Congress, testifying that “the letter of the Geneva Conventions” had been followed in Iraq. “That,” Fishback said, “is when I had a problem.”

He told Human Rights Watch, “It is infuriating to me that officers are not lined up to accept responsibility for what happened . . . That’s basic officership, that’s what you learn at West Point. It blows my mind.”

Fishback could have chosen to stay anonymous, but instead he crafted an open letter to Sen. John McCain, accusing the top officers of contributing to murder by refusing to set clear guidelines. In the letter’s conclusion, he wrote, “If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.”

What courage it took this young man to tell it like it is! To express so succinctly the exact nature of this national failure, this international humiliation and tragedy. The fact is our country is not anywhere near on course, the fact is our ideals of freedom, the democratic process, and justice have been abandoned.

One of my failures as a minister has been speaking out against the war. I don’t feel I’ve done enough of it – but I’m making progress; I did do an anti-war sermon about 5 weeks ago, and rite of passage occurred. I got yelled at after the service by an elderly couple. I mean, really yelled at. It was amazing though, my grandmother happened to be standing there and she came to my defense – she started yelling right back at them! And I shuffled away. I’d never been yelled at before like that after a sermon, so I knew I had pushed some buttons.

The truth is I’m optimistic! I don’t want to push buttons perhaps so much as urgently share the message that we can be optimistic as a country.

I’ve got a wonderful quotation of George Clooney’s. He says, “I think we’re really great at this as a country: We do dumb things, and then we fix them. Pearl Harbor: We grab all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps. Well, that’s not very sporting of us, but we fix it. In the fifties, we grab people because they read a newspaper and bring them in for investigation. Pretty dumb. Vietnam? Pretty stupid. But there seems to be a tide turning. The Democrats aren’t providing the answers, but the Republicans aren’t getting free passes on everything. You don’t get to say you’re either with us or with the enemy anymore. So I’m an optimist about the United States.”

I think Clooney may be on to something there, and I agree: We are going to rise to the challenge of this country’s failed sense of direction. We will once again orient ourselves to the North Star, to a trajectory that is noble, and we will set a course. I know we will!

When you’re told you can either succeed or fail, either way you are being challenged. Our country was built on challenge, and I think it’s one of the nameless anchors of liberal religion as well, of Unitarian Universalism. We don’t get a lot of religious direction necessarily, we each have to challenge ourselves to identify our own noble trajectories. When we find ourselves seriously off-course in life – when we are failing – that’s our opportunity to re-orient and embrace the challenge of setting a new course. It was Edwin Friedman, a brilliant family therapist, who said, “Challenge is the basic context of health and survival, of a person, of the family, of a religious organization, or even (in the course of evolution) an entire species.”

The hardest part may be deciding which challenges to pour our hearts and souls into, because we can’t do them all. The one we should pick is usually the thing we have the most fear about doing. We have to ask, what challenge is going to honor my life, my family, my community, my country, my planet?

You have permission to fail. You also have permission to succeed.

No matter how old you are, do not be afraid to do the things that make you come alive! Because what the world needs is people that have come alive.

---

The contents of this story are taken from the December 29, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

 

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Hannah Wells
July 4, 2004

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Dr. Davidson Loehr and Hannah Wells
June 20, 2004

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© Hannah Wells
May 30, 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

For the soldiers who are working so hard as we speak,
and for the soldiers who have already given their lives,
may our thoughts be with them, especially this Memorial Day.

May we wake up to the reality that we are not as separate from them as we think, just as we are not as separate from anyone else;
may we understand how deeply connected we all are.

May we remember how connected we are to generations past
and to the soldiers who gave their lives many decades ago;
they are standing close behind us and we give our deepest thanks.

May we come to understand that war is a part of who we are
regardless of how noble the cause. Our kind has been dying prematurely of wars and disease since the beginning of our time. May we always take time to remember those who left us too soon.

And may we extend our deepest warmth and support to those families who are left behind, whose long lives stand before them; young mothers and young children.
May we be aware of their sacrifice and pray for their strength.

May we pray for the leadership of our beloved country, and pray for an end to the chaos in Iraq so our troops can come home. May we be patient, may creative solutions be found to an unprecedented struggle, and may our support for our troops hold steadfast regardless.

May we let there be time for the most difficult emotions to unfold surrounding this war and more recent wars.

Dear spirit of life, please help us, as one nation, to take responsibility for our mistakes, to acknowledge the harm we inflict upon others and upon ourselves. Let us be that brave. Amen.

SERMON:

On “Washington Week In Review” on the TV PBS station early Friday evening, the anchor woman ended the program by saying, “and for those of you who are fighting in these wars that we only talk about, thank you for your service.” When she said that, on the one hand I was struck by the honesty of her statement, but on the other hand it seemed kind of cheap.

Every Memorial Day I’m aware of some kind of uneasiness that I can’t quite name, but this year I’ve gotten closer to putting a name on it, and I think it’s shame. Since Jr. High when I became a tune to the context of United States history, every Memorial Day I’ve had the vague awareness that there’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay. Around Memorial Day there’s a bit of a time warp, or perhaps several wrinkles in time that closely juxtapose every major war of this country – the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War. All these wars come to mind because we know in our hearts that several of these wars were worth fighting. And we wonder how the world would be different if the good wars hadn’t been won.

I know my life is what it is because the right side won those good wars. Reflecting on this is the stuff of a healthy kind of patriotism – this gratitude and humility – knowing I could never return the favor, so to speak. It’s this reverence for a kind of dedication and courage and violence that I’ll never have to experience. And maybe that’s where the vague feeling of shame comes from – that cheapness of “thank you for your service” seems to belie a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement to a service that not only equals the loss of human life, but some things that are worse than death.

Some of the men who came back from Vietnam would have preferred to come home in a box because their lives had been ruined. Losing your soul and your sanity can be worse than death. Discovering humanity’s capacity for evil with your own hands can be enough to ruin a life, even if the events took place in minutes. I bring this up because I think the country is still reverberating from the pictures of torture by our own soldiers’ hands. And yet it seems like a silent reverberation.

This country doesn’t do well with shame and remorse. Like a dysfunctional family, we pretend it isn’t there and so it festers harmfully in a state of non-recognition. If you consider the behavior of our foreign policy in the frame of a family system, the question comes up: are we repeating a mistake now because a generation ago we never acknowledged and mourned properly the mistake of Vietnam? We never, as a whole nation, took the time to ritualize an acknowledgement of the shame of that event, the remorse, the defeat, the waste.

In some ways, the Bush administration is a scapegoat. Sure, we’re in Iraq now because of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeldt. But the fact is history is repeating itself in an effort to reach an opportunity of healing that never took place after Vietnam. That’s my theory. There are different actors now, there are different reasons, there are not as many casualties, thank God. But we’re about where we were 32 – 34 years ago. We’re scared, we’re worried, but most importantly, our country as a whole is in a state of denial of the shame and remorse we’re experiencing as a result of the atrocities taking place in Iraq. And not just to the Iraqis, but probably even more so the atrocities happening to us.

See, the thing is, we are so deeply connected to one another – that is a spiritual law I am certain of and I think we forget about 99% of the time – we are so deeply connected to each other that ALL of us are fighting the war in Iraq. And the reason I say this is because I believe that any of us, put in that situation as a soldier, would probably commit the same abuses, the same tortures. All of us possess the capacity to do evil, and under the precise conditions – when the enemy is invisible, when our friends are dying bloodily around us, when the level of frustration and anger are so high, and our supervision has effectively condoned it – all of us are prone to committing these kinds of acts as a group, or alone.

What I’m trying to get at here, is not only do we need to acknowledge that all of us as a nation have blood on our hands because it’s the truth. But we need to stand in solidarity and likeness with our soldiers ALSO for the sake of healing, for the sake of grieving as one nation, for the sake of saving the souls of these young soldiers who were put in that situation by their higher-ups; for the sake of acknowledging the shame as one nation.

How do we do this? I think by naming it, by talking about it, by acknowledging it. By honoring our soldiers who are suffering the worst of this useless sacrifice. For the sake of our soldiers we need to share the shame with them and not pin it on them. We need to experience a healthy kind of shame that recognizes there’s no way we can make up for this. We can’t make it up to the children who are losing their parents or the parents who are losing their children. The war will never be over for them – for the family members of fresh casualties, the war is just beginning.

Thank goodness for the arts – for books, for movies, for music, for sculpture – these seem to be the only mediums in which our culture has attempted to address the truth of Vietnam, to give ourselves opportunities to grieve. But these are only voluntary opportunities; eventually we’ll have the same kind of movies and books written about Iraq that we have about Vietnam. But those opportunities aren’t compelling enough to do the kind of grieving work this country desperately needs to cleanse itself as a whole. I know I’m fantasizing here, but wouldn’t it be great if our leadership – whether Republican or Democratic, it doesn’t matter – declared a holiday for the specific purpose of mourning the event of Vietnam? For the specific purpose of acknowledging we made a big mistake? The Wall of Names is great, but the Wall is very quiet.

The fact is Vietnam just wasn’t that long ago. Yesterday Davidson emailed me the interesting factoid that of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, less than 1/4 are still alive, and about 1,100 are dying every day. So I’m surmising that means that of the Americans who survived serving in Vietnam, at least half are probably still alive. I doubt there’s many people in this room who would not say his or her life has somehow been affected by the Vietnam War. The point is that this recent history is still terribly relevant and for the health of the family history of this country, I think it still needs to be dealt with somehow.

I want to talk more about this war stuff in the context of a country family system history. I learned a lot about WWI and WW2 growing up, especially WW2. I remember that history was totally overwhelming. I don’t know a thing about the Korean War, except that it was Communist related (I think) and that *MASH* was based on it. And then there’s Vietnam which I learned the most about by watching the television series China Beach, which I think was around the late 80′s. I also read Johnny Get Your Gun. Saw Platoon. I loved that show China Beach and almost every week I cried when I watched it. It wasn’t a comedy like MASH; looking back, I’m surprised such honest television was aired for as long as it was.

When I began writing this sermon and the word shame popped up, at first I wondered if I should dismiss it as embarrassing “liberal guilt.” Liberal guilt because I know my Dad didn’t have to fight in Vietnam because at the time he was a member of the educated class – he was a Freshman in college at Duke University when he became subject to the draft. But the reason I know this is more than liberal guilt is because I have inherited from my father the shame he carries surrounding Vietnam. I know I have – otherwise watching those China Beach episodes never would have affected me the way that they did. I was born just around the time the war ended! I didn’t personally lose anyone in that war, as most of my peers didn’t. And yet I know that my generation has inherited the shame and the guilt of that war. What it amounts to is a lot of sadness and that nameless uneasiness around Memorial Day. I guess we’re still figuring out what to do with it. This is just another theory, but I wonder if the generations getting successively more self-destructive has something to do with this nameless shame we’ve inherited. I don’t know.

I’m a sensitive person, so maybe I’ve just paid more attention to it. But I’ll never forget the day when my father and I were canoeing in a pond up in Wisconsin, on a very quiet serene day with no one around. I think I was in High School. Somehow we got on the subject of Vietnam. My father’s shame around Vietnam was made concrete when his roommate in college flunked out of Duke, got drafted, and was killed in the war. So he knows that he escaped a similar fate by the savior of education and being able to succeed at it. Sure there’s some liberal guilt in there, but it’s so much more than that. It’s survivor guilt; this stuff goes way deep into the psyche. It’s the trauma of losing thousands of peers. It’s trauma that goes beyond my comprehension, and yet I’m getting a taste of it watching all these young people die in Iraq.

There’s this song that my father knew about Vietnam, an a capela folk song by the artist Steve Goodman. He started singing it to me that day in the canoe, but he couldn’t get through it all the way because he had to cry.

The song is sung in first person as a young widow of the war. And I want to share it with you because I think one of the best ways to honor our soldiers who have died is to also acknowledge the families that so many soldiers leave behind. Young, just getting started families, young mothers and children. Their sacrifice should also be honored.

This song is called “Penny Evans.”

Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21.
 A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.
 And I have two infant daughters, and I do the best I can -
 now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

I remember I was 17 when I met young Bill.
 On his father’s grand piano, we’d play good old Heart and Soul.
 And I only knew the left hand part, and he the right so well -
 he’s the only boy I slept with, and the only one I will.

And it’s first we had a baby girl, and we had two good years.
 And it’s next the one a notice came, and we parted without tears -
 it was 9 months from our last good night the second babe appeared.
 It was 10 months and this telegram, confirming all our fears.

Now every month I get a check, from an army bureaucrat.
 And it’s every month I tear it up, and I mail the damn thing back.
 Do you think that makes it alright? Do you think I’d fall for that?
 You can keep the bloody money and it won’t bring my Billy back.

I’ve never cared for politics, and speeches I don’t understand.
 And like wives took no charity from any living man
 But tonight there’s 50,000 gone in that unhappy land;
 50,000 heart and souls being played with just one hand.

And my name is Penny Evans, and my age is 21.
 A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.
 And I have two infant daughters, and thank god I have no sons -
 now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.
- Steve Goodman

I’ve been scouring the Internet the past couple days, looking for stories behind the faces of the American soldiers getting killed in Iraq. I didn’t find as many as I thought I would. And again, I think this is to keep us numb. If we knew too many of the stories of the fine young men and women this country is losing, we’d have to feel that shame head-on.

I think I’ve driven my point home about the suppressed shame that the country is suffering, and the need for it to be expressed on a larger scale so we can be free of its clutches, so we don’t keep passing it on to our children. But I realize that it’s also just plain and simple sorrow that I share with my parents’ generation. The kind of sorrow that will always be with us.

I want to try to end on a positive note; I know this sermon is not uplifting. There’s just no way to sugar-coat what’s going on. But I hope being honest with ourselves can be uplifting, and offer hope for healing, for a healthier future. It’s not “this too shall pass.” What we want to have and work towards are sharing scars from these wars – wounds that have healed but still hurt when we touch them. We can’t pretend they’re not there. These wars, whether we’ve participated in them or not, are a part of who we are, they are a part of our American psyche, they’re a big part of our story. We need to try to integrate this truth into our national identity as well as we can – grow with it – and not ignore it at our peril.

Our soldiers are not victims. If they’re victims, then we’re all victims, and we’re not all victims. They are literally our warriors, they are survivors, they are doing the hardest job in the world. I am very proud of them and I support them as we all must. We’re here because of them.

Those wrinkles in time I mentioned, juxtaposing all our major wars – they’re not so much wrinkles – all those wars stand very close behind us, without the help of a wrinkle in time. The past isn’t nearly as far behind as we think. Vietnam was like yesterday; World War II a short 50 years ago. We are such a young country – just a couple centuries old.

At this time, I’d like to ask anyone here today in church who has served in a war to please stand.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the most I can offer and I really mean it,

“Thank you for your service.”

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Hannah Wells
May 16, 2004

Coming of Age Credos
Emily Withers, Coralee Trigger, Patrick McVeety-Mill

YRUU Reflections
Ian Reed, Will Boney

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© Hanna Wells
May 2, 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

I remember well the first time I announced to a group of people that I considered myself to be a Transcendentalist. The words had barely crossed my lips when that small – and usually reticent – part of my brain that demands a higher degree of specificity asked “Whatever do you mean by that?”

Well, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I had just been reading too much Emerson, but I doubt it. I don’t believe the things I believe because Emerson also believed them. In fact, there’s a pretty wide gap between my beliefs and Emerson’s on a great many things. Emerson would, no-doubt, say to me “You are no Transcendentalist.” But I also think that if Emerson were alive today a good many of his beliefs would be different.

I read Emerson because I agree with most of what he says about the way we should live – the proper approach to life and nature – and I enjoy the way he expresses the ideas that we share. A lot of the Transcendentalists’ thinking came from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the principle ideas that Kant put forth was that certain knowledge is intuitive – it’s built into the structure of our minds–and is not the result of experience. Knowledge that is of an intuitive nature he called transcendental, thus the term Transcendentalist.

Kant said that we cannot know the real world because we see and understand it through our own perceptions and concepts. Our view of the world is distorted by the way our minds work. From there he, or at least his followers, went on to say that we form our world, and not the other way around.

Ayn Rand once wrote that “Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.” This may be the case, but I find room in my rational worldview for a little mystery, and I celebrate that mystery as something that adds a wonderful dimension to my life.

If I’m designing a building that has an overhanging beam, I know that I must design for the inflection point – the point at which bending forces in the beam change direction and shear forces are greatest – and I know that I can employ the quadratic equation to find that point. But I never forget that the quadratic equation is no actual thing; it is merely a mental construct. To use Kantian language, there is no ‘thing in itself’ that exists outside our minds.

While I do not believe that the physical world is the product of my thought, I do believe that there is more to matter than it’s molecular and chemical composition. I believe that there are categories of knowledge that are outside the bounds of science, and that things have meanings beyond their physical reality, even if those meanings are created by us and are, therefore, somewhat arbitrary.

I’m comfortable knowing that there are bounds to human knowledge. Many of things that we would want to know are not knowable. I accept this and even embrace it. I choose to view life and the world we inhabit with a sense of mystery and wonder. I celebrate the transcendent things. That’s what I mean when I say that I am a Transcendentalist.

Beyond this way of viewing life – of celebrating the wondrous and the beautiful–I embrace the idea of self-culture as expounded by the New England Transcendentalists. Today we might say self-correction, rather than self-culture. This is a simple idea, really. I have ready work with the correction of my own faults and weaknesses, so I need not worry about yours. Surely there is nothing easier to do than to find fault with others, but easy tasks don’t provide much sense of accomplishment, no matter how well we carry them out.

Another point upon which I agree with the New England Transcendentalists is that we owe it to ourselves to go through life with our eyes wide open, alert to the world and to the ideas that are shaping it. A few weeks ago Dr. Loehr spoke from this pulpit of the concept of G’d as a man fully awake. Emerson lived a life of such mental intensity that Robert Richardson titled his excellent biography of him Emerson: The Mind on Fire. But Thoreau, who knew Emerson as well as any, and better than most, was still able to write in Walden that he had never known a man who was fully awake. “How”, he asked, “could I look him in the face?”

One could easily assume that these people we know as the New England Transcendentalists set the bar too high; that none could possibly reach it. But they were addressing the ideal, the fullest potential of humanity. Why should we not strive toward that goal? If we’re striving toward so high a goal – the goal of being fully awake to life – then it’s of less consequence if we fall short of our goal.

I enjoy living a simple life – a grounded life – even while dreaming of the infinite possibilities that we possess. If this sounds attractive to you, then there might be a little of the Transcendentalist in you too.

PRAYER:
Hannah Wells

As Spring hesitates before it turns into Summer,
let us consider our own hesitations.
Let us take time to confront our fears, and then discount them.
May we let our fears be washed away by a heavy Spring rain,
so we can wake up to a morning like this one, with our hearts calm,
our purpose clear, and the brilliant fire of our souls ready to work.

May we be washed of fears, anxieties, and self-concerns
because we wake up to a morning such as this and are certain that the world needs us.
For while we can notice the beauty that surrounds us,
the world is not only a beautiful place.
As wildflowers wilt in the sun, and bushes drop heavy blossoms,
so too are things falling apart in the fragile world we live in.

Rather than work to meet our needs, may we see that our own needs are met when we work for the needs of others.
May we enlarge ourselves to transcend the self.
May we become so big that our service in the world becomes
our center; our service becomes who we are.

On a morning such as this, after a much needed storm has replenished life, may we also be replenished so we can engage the beauty of the world, its poetry, its natural art.
May we be enchanted.
And may we see that the most poignant beauty of all lies in where the world is broken and hands are busy at its repair, many, many hands, quietly repairing what is broken.
May we find our hands among them, touching this beauty.
May our desire to improve the world and our desire to enjoy the world, become one.
May compassion become our rapture.
Amen.

SERMON:

Let’s begin this morning with a trip down memory lane. Do you remember that certain book you read, perhaps when you were 13, a senior in high school, in college, or early adulthood, that book that completely changed how you understood life and your place in the world? That book that you loved so much because you felt like it enlightened you, made you privy to important knowledge. What book from years ago do you still think about, refer back to, look at life through the lens of?

When I was 13, that book was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye. It was so funny to me! Holden Caulfield, a young man, criticizes everything about society with sharp wit, particularly all the expectations of the upper middle class – doing well in college, social climbing, marriage. To him, everything and everyone was so phony. Yeah, I thought when I was 13, I agree. I didn’t want to have to work hard to be “popular” in school, I didn’t want to work hard to earn A’s in my classes either. Holden Caulfield was an awkward middle schooler’s HERO.

Holden Caulfield affirmed my teenage tendencies toward what sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism.” That was one of the other chunks of reading that left an indelible impression on me, which I read Spring semester of my Freshman year in college. I was a Sociology major, ready to learn how I could save the world, or at least look darn good trying to. Robert Bellah and his team of sociologists published Habits of the Heart in the mid 80′s, a reader-friendly book about how our American values of individualism are impeding on our sense of commitment to public life, to being responsible, civic-minded citizens, and how the kind of church we go to plays a role in this.

Bellah tore the Unitarians apart in this book, charging that there was nothing in this denomination that obligated one to serve the greater good with total commitment; there was nothing rooted in strong religious principles that instructed one to serve his or her community as equivalent to serving the ideals of one’s faith. I remember reading this, and thinking, “my God, he’s right! We Unitarians don’t hold each other to anything!” Bellah goes on to associate the Unitarians with the historical/cultural tradition of “expressive individualism,” and mentions figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, who he said “put aside the search for wealth in favor of a deeper cultivation of the self.” But it was Walt Whitman, Bellah said, who most epitomized the American cultural tradition of “expressive individualism.”

Bellah wrote, “For [Walt] Whitman, success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life.”

I have this quote hi-lited in the copy I still kept from college. In the margin, is an arrow pointing to it with the word, “Yeah!” I was all for Whitman when I first read this. I remember all the students in this class greatly resisted the ideas in this book, such as wanting a life rich in experience being questionable, as something to be reconsidered or discouraged altogether. We took it out on the professor, who we called a “stodgy nerd with bad breath.” I know that in those years, I wanted to do everything that reeked of Whitman’s definition of “rich experience.” I wanted to travel the world, learn about exotic cultures, back pack in the far reaches of the wild, fall madly in love, run in a field of wildflowers, swim naked in Lake Michigan – whatever was popularly qualified as romantic experience I went after, and did.

Thankfully, my sociology teacher was a gifted educator, and through his lecturing I finally got what the main meat of this book was trying to say: to be an “expressive individualist” is selfish! It’s self-serving, self-absorbed, but most importantly, it limits the actualization of the self since the self can only be actualized within community, within a broader mode of being and acting in larger society. What does this mean? It means that the smaller our scope of attention is in the world, the smaller our sense of connection to humanity becomes, and essentially the smaller we are. If I only focus on myself and what feels good, the less I actually participate in the world, in contributing to the common good, in serving what is larger than myself.

While all those things aren’t bad in and of themselves – the traveling, the hiking, smelling the flowers – I realized that this was only a small part of what life is supposed to be about, of what is truly challenging and enriching, of what is character-building. Those things are good for MY soul – but they have no connection to the WHOLE soul of humanity.

I didn’t figure this all out right away, but eventually in young adulthood I’ve come to realize that it’s only through serving the common good that my life becomes “rich in experience,” or “a life of strong feeling.” It’s only when I forget myself that I can finally become myself. We can only become our best selves in a community of people who know us and trust us and like us. We become known when we work with others toward the spirit of what is good for a shared community – I know now that this is the only way I can find authentic peace and wellness in my life.

If anything, we are the most miserable when we can’t see beyond our own wants and must-haves. People divorce as soon as they perceive that their “needs” aren’t being met. If you think about it, self-absorption is an evil force because it tends to break relationship. It pushes us into isolation. The only way to counter this isolation and separateness is to engage in my interpretation of Emerson’s “Oversoul,” which you read in the Responsive Reading this morning:

“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

Unfortunately Emerson stops short of being explicit of HOW one can engage this luminous reverence of life. He seems to imply that it is an individual experience. While undoubtedly we’ve all experienced individual moments of grace that seemed rooted in the divine, I would argue with Emerson that such experiences only scratch the surface of engaging what is at the center of the sacred.

Perhaps what is at the center isn’t blissful at all; no rapture, no ecstasy, no enchantment. Perhaps experiencing the divine is only found through a culmination of hard, quiet effort to make the world a better place, to keep life safe and sacred.

This is why the sacred is so elusive! It cannot exist in immediate gratification, it’s impossible. The Transcendentalists of the 19th century seemed to make the mistake that it is easily accessible, if only we paid better attention to our senses, our thoughts, and feelings. But nowadays, that’s the way things are, that’s the entrenched status quo – we are paying too much attention to ourselves. For us living in the post-modern world, the real challenge is to get our minds off ourselves, off our personal stresses and concerns. All this self-improvement seems to have led to a neglected society.

So I propose that Transcendentalism for today is to transcend our selves. How can we act in and experience the world beyond the self? Imagine that who you are can be represented in con centric circles. The small circle in the middle is you. The first circle around you is your family, the next circle your friends, the next circle your church community, the next your local community, the next circle your state, then your country, then finally the biggest circle is the world. It’s like rings in a tree trunk. When our lives act in those bigger circles, we become bigger, stronger, more wise. If we only act in the first tiny circle of our selves, we stay small; we don’t grow.

The American Transcendentalists of the 19th century got one very important thing right. They had faith in the highest ideals of our human capacities; they truly believed that we could successfully serve those ideals. They believed that life could be rich in experience, in beauty. But the problem is that what they defined as beautiful and sublime tended to not go past their noses. It was too self-contained. They trusted in their intuition, but whether their hunches were good or bad, right or wrong, made no difference in the world around them.

The health of our individual mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual states are all very important – I’ve preached many times on how it is essential to heal our wounds in those areas with courage and perseverance. But our healing isn’t complete or as relevant until we are able to give back to the world, or learn how to give for the first time. We work to heal for the same reason we take time to grieve – so we can participate in the world again. That’s when life is beautiful, when we can overcome or transcend our personal struggles to a place where we can give of ourselves fully once more.

The people who are so good at giving have healthy relationships with their egos – that is, they don’t think about their ego that much. They know that caring for their own hearts and minds and souls is an indirect process that happens primarily when they focus on how they can serve others.

Personal healing is important, but we probably don’t need to worry about ourselves as much as we do. I know I’m still trying to learn this. There is a concept in Buddhism called “not-doing.” It means that we let things take care of themselves, we don’t try to over do it, or try too hard. It’s having faith that while we continue to focus on living the best lives we can and be the best people we can be, that our personal issues and problems have a way of solving themselves. Finally we get to a point where we realize we don’t need to be solved – we don’t need to be “fixed.” Things tend to work out when we simply continue to participate well in the world. Our flaws and our so called “personal growth issues” don’t seem to matter as much when we become good at helping others.

When the Trancendentalists talk about trusting their intuition in terms of possessing knowledge that precedes experience, I want to say, ‘yes, that unconditioned knowledge is there, but I can only trust it if it doesn’t have to do with myself. I can trust it and follow it if it points to the highest ideals that serve humanity as a whole.’ I like to think of this trustworthy knowledge that we’re all born with as the knowledge of the Kingdom of God. I believe we all possess it, deep within our psyches, and life is about doing all we can to uncover it, to actualize it. We can discover that the Kingdom has very little to do with the self – the self becomes only a vehicle, a conduit for doing good in the world.

The Kingdom of God not only transcends the self, it actually saves us from the prison of self-absorption,the constant clamor of the ego.

One of my friends is studying the Kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism. He told me that his teacher explained to him that the constant yammer in our minds that keeps all our attention on ourselves is actually the devil speaking. The voice of our ego is the voice of the devil. I know that sounds heavy-handed, so let’s just use it as a tool of metaphor. I think it’s comforting – because what it means is that that voice of anxiety in my self isn’t my true voice; it isn’t the voice I need to listen to or act on. According to my friend, the Kabbalah teaches that it’s the voices within ourselves that are faint, that are hard to hear that we should be trying to listen to. The quiet voice that says something like, “maybe I need to go over here and see how I can help someone.” That is our true nature, not this ego-driven one.

If we’re going to pay any attention to our intuitions at all, they need to be the intuitions that come from this center, from this sacred center. Not the center of the self, but within those larger circles. Transcendentalism for today ought to focus on attending to what our center is to be; what is the circle of the largest diameter within which we can define ourselves? To what degree shall we transcend ourselves?

When we realize the extent of our power as individuals to act in the world, we come to understand what the Kabbalah teaches, and what some wise philosopher also concluded: that every act we do is either an act of creation or an act of destruction. For the sacred is not only elusive, the sacred is fragile – the Kingdom of God is difficult to access, we know that true moments of grace between human beings are rare. If we are the spiders and the sacred is the web, which connections with the world are we going to extend to? Which parts of the web are we going to repair, slowly, meticulously, but with great intention and purpose?

Sure life is beautiful! The Transcendentalists of the 19th century perhaps served an important historical function of their time – to counter an increasingly industrial mindset, to try to preserve nature against production and development, to uphold a mind set that dismissed an agenda of ruthless progress. That’s still applicable in today’s world. But we need to take more steps outward.

Today we know life has beauty to offer us; that is a given. And it’s well advised that we do recharge our batteries every now and then in nature, that we do spend time just being with ourselves, star-gazing, watching the ants work. YES, there is so much beauty in the world and we are well advised to notice it – God does get mad if we walk by the color purple and don’t notice it.

But what is really going to drive you to act in the best ways possible in the world? To what ideals are you so accountable that they transcend the need to serve the self, that serving these higher ideals becomes a priority, perhaps even your life’s work?

In the Spring of my senior year of college I had to present a final project to the Sociology department. They had given me permission to spend an entire quarter writing poetry, rather than do some kind of social service internship, because I didn’t want to just serve the world, I wanted to be a poet in the world, too. I remember I began the presentation to all my professors and fellow students with a favorite quote from E.B. White. He said,

“It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world – and when to respond to the challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world . . . this makes it hard to plan the day.”

May we transcend this quandary. May we discover that, after all – to improve the world and to enjoy the world are in fact the same thing.

May our joy be our service. May our service be our joy.

© Rev. Davidson Loehr
and Hannah Wells
11 April 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Sheri Goodwin

Good morning, my name is Sheri Goodwin and I consider myself a Contemplative Christian, otherwise known as a Christian that meditates. Like most of us, I have grown up a seeker, yearning to understand the Truths of this world. I grew up in a devout Christian family and have gone to church all of my life and I thank my parents for giving me that strong foundation.

Like many, I began to question my beliefs in college and thereafter. Most of my experiences with church were very positive, yet the religion was something that was given to me, not a discovery that I experienced on my own. So, I set out to get to some NOs as Davidson puts it, before I could get to some YESes.

Within the last several years, I have sought understanding through Buddhist teachings, esoteric Christian teachers, and other spiritual books. I have had two very special guides in my life, Pamela and Lisa, who are my teachers and spiritual supporters.

The Dalai Lama says that we can’t choose our religion. What I understand him to mean is that all major world religions have one common belief – that Love is the way to overcome our suffering and that sacred scriptures from different religions can lead us to discover God or that love or oneness or light that is in us all. I believe that, and have chosen to continue my understanding based on my Christian foundation.

I have also studied and been influenced by the Enneagram which is a study of nine personality types and how our personalities, when unhealthy, keep us from knowing that essence of God that is in us. Since I’ve discovered the Enneagram, there is literally not a day that goes by that I do not think about it. It’s not a religion, but it is a tool for transformation.

There are three triads of personalities based on body, mind and soul centers. My personality type, the Nine, is in the body triad and is known as the Peacemaker. I’m always searching for peace and comfort in my life. Sometimes that peace seeking is demonstrated in healthy ways and sometimes in ways that gives me just the opposite.

So, that summarizes my background, but why the topic of resurrection? When the worship associates met, I proposed the topic as a challenge to myself because it is central to Christianity.

As part of my preparation, I observed Lent. This year, I gave up the chief fixation of the nine: laziness. Nines are not lazy in the sense that we know it. In fact I’m quite active. Laziness in this sense is not engaging in life, kind of numbing out when things get stressful.

With Lent, I have gotten up earlier than usual in the mornings to do yoga, meditate and read. I’ve consciously tried to engage fully in life. Part of my reading included The Gospel of Luke who, among the four Gospels represents the body, the sacrifice.

I hadn’t really been back to the Bible in many years and this was a truly wonderful experience for me. In Luke, there are three passages that jumped out to me; all things that Jesus said:

1) The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you. – Luke 17:21

2) Those who seek to save their life, will loose it; and those who lose their life will keep it. – Luke 17:33

3) For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive. – Luke 20:38

To paraphrase, God is within me. I have to lose my life to have life. It is not a God of the dead, but of the living. God, to me, is a force, energy, the good virtues that can be found in us. Simply, God is Love.

I found those words in Luke especially important because I believe that I can choose a resurrection. It’s an internal choice. To me, suffering or non-life, is all the things in our human condition that aren’t Love – like anger, resentment, not forgiving, fear – all those things that cause me to churn. The things that make me lose sleep. Going through the process of dying to those things, is as Jesus says, losing MY life and seeking God within me in order to have a better life. One that is truly alive! To me, that is choosing resurrection. That is choosing Love.

Making that choice moment by moment is not easy and I fail more than not. I think it involves a conscious choice of forgiveness. Forgiveness of ourselves and forgiveness of others. I find the Enneagram a helpful tool in guiding me to this forgiveness. The Enneagram sheds light on the essence that we really are, not the personality that drives us. It helps me identify what to die to to create a transformation. It’s in our everyday life that we are given the opportunity to resurrect.

Jesus’ teachings and his resurrection are about choosing Life. Choosing the Love that I have in me if can die to the things that keep me from it. That’s when I experience resurrection. That’s when I experience God within me.

PRAYER:

We pray for the spiritual resurrection of ourselves and those we love.

To be born again, born of a Spirit that can be called Holy – we pray for that.

If the glory of God is a human being fully alive, then we pray this Easter that the glory of God may become incarnate in all those people who are open to and eager for it, all those people with “eyes to see and ears to hear” this good news. And we pray that we may be one of those people.

It does us no good if Jesus was the son of God, unless we also may become the sons and daughters of God.

It is Easter, the time of becomings, the springtime season of hope, of life, and of all things filled with light, wonder and trust.

Let us be creatures of Easter, hosts of the new birth and new life sung by all the bright, greenly spirits of things.

Let us become co-conspirators in this vast cosmic plan to replace death with life, fear with trust, and despair with hope.

It is Easter. Let us prepare for our resurrection: here and now. Let us welcome into our hearts the exuberant gifts of another spiritual springtime, another precious resurrection of the spirit.

Amen.

HOMILY: The Easter of Nature: Life Over Death
Hannah Wells

Among my colleagues in Seminary school, it is in vogue to criticize the popular method of celebrating Easter in the UU faith. They lament, “Easter is about MORE than bunnies!” Or as one told me recently, “I am SO disappointed that my church is having a FLOWER communion for Easter AGAIN this year.” Apparently talking about Jesus on Easter has become much more cool.

One of the best stories from my UU upbringing that my parents like to tell was when my Mother prepared a very nice meal for Easter one year, I looked at all the food and asked my parents with genuine curiosity, “Is Easter some kind of religious holiday?” I was about 10. They were amused, but my Mother also said, “thank God she didn’t ask us that question in front of my Mother.”

It’s true that when I went to Seminary I had a Jesus Renaissance – mostly because I didn’t know a thing about him. Meeting Jesus late in the game has its perks; I got to know him with no beef against him. I love referring to Jesus in my sermons now and I consider his teachings an important influence on who I try to be. However, the popular UU interpretation of Easter has always held a great deal of meaning for me, too.

I grew up in a part of the country where it is cold and mostly gray for at least 7 months out of the year. Chicago-land, that is. Usually toward the end of every winter, I was depressed and suffering from seasonal affective disorder from not getting enough sunshine. So when the first crocuses poked their little green heads out among the snow patches, it was cause for great excitement. All the signs of Spring were a great relief . . . The pink cherry blossoms on the trees that reminded me of fluffy scoops of raspberry frozen yogurt. The tulips and snap dragons in my Mother’s garden. The first murmurs of cicadas and crickets through the screens of open windows at night. The first hints of humidity and warmth in the air. It really felt like a process of something frozen in me thawing out each year.

Easter was always around this time, and so it came to symbolize the survival of another winter. Longer days, even the buzz of a lawn mower was a welcome sign of Spring. Soon I could walk barefoot around the yard, ride my bike to the public pool, collect bugs and fire flies with my neighborhood friends.

I remember I tried to start a “nature club” once in my basement. I instructed my friends to draw pictures of trees, flowers, and rainbows to hang on the walls, and the pinnacle of excitement would be to catch a butterfly or a fat shiny beetle. One year we had a flood and there were thousands of centipedes we saved and put into a plastic box. Anything we ever caught died the next day – which taught me that in order to live, things in nature had to be free.

Perhaps I was destined to have an appreciation for nature and the outdoors as an adult, regardless. But I think an emphasis on revering nature in the UU church I grew up in played a role. Every year we had a flower communion for Easter. It took me a while to understand that the flowers represented the ecological resurrection we were paying homage to. As simple or even as clumsy such a ritual is, it always struck me as a beautiful and passionate expression of gratitude for the coming of Spring.

The minister instructed the church to smell deeply of the blossoms’ scent. Even if the aroma wasn’t strong, it still smelled like the earth. Smelling fresh flowers was as good as drinking the blood of Jesus to me; it was a communion – because the flowers symbolized Spring and Spring always saved me.

When framed well, the message of Jesus and the metaphor of his resurrection is very powerful. But I think the flowers and bunnies approach to Easter can be powerful too. Because it’s about taking note of what we seem to take for granted – that every year Spring faithfully returns. If we had to choose between photosynthesis and theology, I think the trees would win – that’s how we breathe. The miracle of life on this planet! Being just the right distance from just the right-sized star, a planet that has just the right balance of gases and elements to support such a variety of life forms. Isn’t that story rather marvelous? And true beyond a doubt?

What’s important is that we take time to be dazzled by the arrival of Spring, the turning of the seasons, by life’s constant surge forward. Everything in nature – including us – goes through cycles. If parts of us didn’t die, new parts of us couldn’t be born. A year is a long time – it takes that long for a typical tree to bear fruit. All the important things we cultivate in our lives take a long time, too.

And then there are the flowers and the bugs – they don’t live very long at all. There are many spectacular things about life that happen very quickly, and if we don’t take time to see them, we miss the small ways that life moves forward.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I got to visit with my youngest niece who is still a toddler. I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving, and in these few months she has learned how to walk. In this time, she has also become her own little person with her own personality! She’s not even quite two years old, and I couldn’t believe how feisty and tough she was. As I was spinning her and her big sister in circles on their tire swing in the back yard, she’s so little I was afraid she might fly off. But she just held on tight, closed her eyes, and squealed with delight. I spinned the tire faster and faster and the expression of joy on her face just deepened. She held on, no problem. I had to squeal with delight myself because there is nothing like watching a young child discover joy, discover LIFE.

That’s what Easter can be about – noticing how life moves forward. Gratitude in the form of delight, just for the blossoms, just for the light, just for joy.

What would Jesus do? I think he’d smile to see God’s children delight in the Kingdom.

SO enjoy the Easter egg hunt! Enjoy the chocolate bunnies! Hippity, hoppity, these symbols are sacred. Happy Easter

 

 

HOMILY: The Nature of Easter: Choosing Resurrection
 Davidson Loehr

I don’t think of Easter as a Christian holiday, but as the Christian variation on themes older than recorded history. There is a whole range of ideas that have clustered around the vernal equinox, the beginning of spring, the start of the planting season for agricultural societies. It’s always been about the victory of life over death, light over darkness, spring over winter, hope over despair. Those are the themes that arise from the human soul, turning the change of seasons into a metaphor for hoped-for psychological changes – just as Christmas is another “cover” of the winter solstice, the rebirth of the sun.

Then I’m interested in how the different traditions handle these timeless themes, and how useful their efforts are for us today.

In looking at the messages of Jesus and Paul on the subject of resurrection, there is really a quite surprising lesson to be learned. This might be the first time you’ve heard it, even if you grew up in a Christian church. (If it is the first time you’ve heard it, shame on your ministers!) The lesson is that both Jesus and Paul are quite clear that nothing about their message involves the bodily resurrection of Jesus or anyone else.

Both Jesus and Paul taught on two different levels. They said things that sounded literal and supernatural, but also said the deeper meanings were hidden from the simple or unworthy, and were available only to those with “eyes to see and ears to hear” as Jesus liked to put it.

People asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was coming – they understood it as a supernatural thing, like special effects in a movie where a large powerful creature changes the world around right before your eyes. His answer could hardly have been more clear. He said No; this kingdom isn’t something you can point to, it is not coming; it is within or among you, or it’s nowhere. The kingdom of God and the point of religion, to Jesus, were not supernatural, and not postponed until somewhere else and later. They were spiritual, psychological, and were available here and now or nowhere and never.

In the Gospel of Thomas, he said the kingdom of God is already spread out on the earth, and people don’t see it. It is not supernatural. We have everything we need, and only we can bring about the kingdom of God, through our actions. He thought we should know that we are loved, that all others are equally loved, even those we can’t stand, and that when we treat ourselves and others like brothers, sisters and children of God, the kingdom of God will be here, because that is what the kingdom of God is. Period, Amen, end of sermon, end of religion.

Also in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said that whoever drank from his mouth became like him: in other words, anyone who understood what he said had everything he had. He was no more or less a son of God than we were, if only we would open our eyes.

In another saying from the Gospel of Thomas – one of my very favorites from any time or place – Jesus said “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (#70) This is good modern depth psychology, and great ancient wisdom. Salvation, wholeness, being “born again, born of the Spirit,” is a spiritual – what today we would call psychological – reality that happens here and now or nowhere and never, if we are to believe Jesus.

And while St. Paul has earned a lot of bad press, sometimes he too was pretty clear about this fact that salvation and resurrection were spiritual or psychological, but never physical, never involving bodies, either ours or Jesus’s. I’ve picked a few passages from his letter to the Corinthians – a small contentious church of about 65 members that he founded. In the third chapter (I Cor. 3: 1-3a) Paul explains that he could not address them as “spiritual” people, but as men of the flesh, as what he called “babes in Christ.” “I fed you with milk, not solid food;” he wrote, “for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready?.” So he’s warning them before he begins that he’s only given them pap, not the deeper and harder religious lessons for which they are not ready.

The difference between “people of the flesh” and “spiritual people” for Paul is the difference between literalists who can only understand things magically, supernaturally, and those who understand that the riches of religion are spiritual or psychological, riches of personal transformation.

In I Corinthians 2:14-16, Paul writes “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man [on the other hand] judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we, Paul said, have the mind of Christ.

Paul echoes Jesus’ teaching that those who understand him become like him, and gain “the mind of Christ.” This isn’t blasphemy, it’s St. Paul. It can’t be blasphemy if Paul said it: it’s a sort of rule.

And “so it is,” he says, “with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body?. (50): I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (I Cor. 15:42ff)

Reading Paul, like reading the New Testament, is frustrating because he does write on two levels. He is writing to the “babes in Christ,” and has already told them he is feeding them milk rather than solid food. So yes, you can make either a literal or a spiritual, psychological, interpretation of Paul’s writings. And since he wrote it for the “babes in Christ,” it’s not surprising that it has been read literally. But he, like Jesus, gives enough hints that resurrection can not involve anyone’s body, that it is a kind of spiritual thing, a kind of persistence of the spirit of this powerful man Jesus.

This notion of a “spiritual persistence,” the sense that someone who has died is still powerfully “present,” is neither supernatural nor unusual. We still react this way to powerful and charismatic people; maybe you have, too. The last count I saw said that Elvis Presley has been “sighted” since his death over 250,000 times by people who won’t believe he isn’t still here in some way. Martin Luther King Jr’s spirit have remained powerful for many of us, 36 after his murder. Marilyn Monroe still lives as a cultural icon, people still buy photos and poster of her and put them in their rooms.

I saw an example of this that took my breath away a few years ago, and heard of another one after the first service this morning.

A few years ago, I was driving north through Indiana on Interstate 69 when I saw a billboard advertising the town of Fairmount, hometown of the 1950s movie actor James Dean. Dean made only three movies, all of which became classics (Giant, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause) and became a kind of cult figure after his tragic death in a 1955 highway accident.

I went to the museum and souvenir shop devoted entirely to James Dean, where the owner discovered – to his disgust, I thought – that I really didn’t know a lot about Dean. At one point, he said in a very serious voice “You must go up the hill and see his grave!” This wasn’t high on my list of things I’d like to do, so I asked him why. “To understand,” he said, “to understand his power!”

OK, I was hooked. I drove to the cemetery to look for the grave – people kept stealing his gravestone, I’d been told, but they’d just replaced it again a month or so ago. Up at the top of the hill, I found it. It was small, a regular dark red granite grave stone maybe a foot high and two feet wide. Then I saw what the man at the museum and gift shop had meant: the entire grave stone was covered in lipstick kisses! I imagine most of them had been planted there, and recently, by young women who hadn’t even been born in 1955. That’s spiritual persistence, the feeling that someone long dead is still very much here.

And this morning a church member said he visited Paris again a few weeks ago, and finally decided to find rock guitarist Jim Morrison’s grave there. It was nearly a shrine, covered with personal notes written to Morrison’s spirit, covered with burning candles and burned-out candles. To a lot of people, something about Jim Morrison is very much alive, thirty three years after his death in 1971.

It isn’t unusual. It seems to be how we react to the loss of powerful people, and Jesus would have fit into this category. So it’s no wonder that the sense of his “persistence” would have been described in supernatural or quasi-supernatural terms. But there was nothing supernatural in that sense, as Jesus preached and Paul indicated in his coded introduction to his church at Corinth.

Christianity has continued to be taught to the babes in Christ, as supernatural, magical, involving a resurrection of the body. But from the very beginning, its most powerful teachers said otherwise.

Much of this is would take too long to go into here, which is why I’m leading an eight-hour Jesus Seminar program here May 14th and 15th. I strongly urge you to make a place for this Friday night and Saturday program in your calendar. We need to understand what the man Jesus was really about, especially since Christianity is the dominant religion of our culture, and it is almost always taught at the level of “babes in Christ” rather than as Jesus taught it.

For here, I’ll stick to what the Easter message really is. Finding it is like an Easter egg hunt. You have to look through history for those few great Christian writers who did have the eyes to see and ears to hear. There, you’ll hear the same kind of message that Jesus delivered, and that Paul alluded to when he said those who understand have the mind of Christ.

Irenaeus, a 2nd century Christian was one of these. One of the things he wrote was this remarkable and wonderful statement: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Here was a 2nd century Christian who thought the real message of Christianity is not about supernatural magic, but about becoming fully alive.

And in the 16th century, another great Christian writer named Meister Eckhart, whose books are still available wrote of the incarnation of God in Jesus, that “God became man, so that man might become God.”

“It would be of little value for me,” he wrote, “that ‘the Word was made flesh’ for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be God’s son.”

Jesus would have said “Amen.” This was not a “babe in Christ,” but a mature believer writing about a mature belief grounded in the empowering teachings of Jesus. He wanted to become like Jesus, as Jesus intended.

And this Easter, I want to add my voice to these other voices and say that the Easter message for “babes” is not worth giving, neither now nor then. There is nothing supernatural going on, either in the 21st century or in the 1st century, because the world isn’t built that way. Jesus made this clear. Paul tried to say it in his coded way, as have first-rate Christian thinkers like Irenaeus in the 2nd century, Eckhart in the 16th century, and many others in all centuries.

Nor do you have to plow through dusty libraries for seldom-read words of some of the geniuses of Christian history. In all times and places, there are people who get it and who say so. I’m reminded of a passage from Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, where she writes, “Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you’re looking for.” There was a modern woman with eyes to see and ears to hear the real Easter message.

The supernatural religion for Paul’s “babes in Christ” is a religion of fear, trying to make believers feel safe. Jesus’ religion was a religion of trust, trying to help us come alive. Jesus taught that, as Shug put it, God is inside of us and everybody else. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” But first, we must choose to become fully alive.

It’s Easter, so in the most ancient traditions of this vernal equinox, Passover, beginning of spring and Easter, we have put brightly colored clues, symbols of life – locally known as Easter eggs – all over the place outside, which the children will be hunting for in a few minutes.

And for you, the clues are, I hope, just as brightly colored, scattered around in the air, in your imaginations, in the words of this morning’s service, and in the depths where you too seek new life for old. That’s the free gift of Easter, and it is available any day, any day at all. Because any day we choose resurrection is Easter. Today is Easter; let’s choose resurrection.

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© Hannah Wells
4 April 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Bill Reid

My name is Bill Reid. I have been a member of this church since 1973. For certain periods during this time I was very inactive. I have enjoyed being more involved over the last three or four years. I have become a member of the Worship Associate Program. In this program we suggest topics for the worship services and we participate in the worship services. I posed the topic for today: Where do Unitarian Universalists find absolution? What I mean by absolution is from my dictionary – it is to set free, or release as from some obligation, debt, or responsibility or from the consequences of guilt, sin, or penalty. It is forgiveness for an offense or shortcoming.

In posing the question, I am reminded of the Peanuts cartoon: Linus asks questions like: what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is truth? Lucy turns to Charlie Brown and says, “There are more questions than answers, so it’s better to be the one asking the questions.”

How this question arose. I was raised a Southern Baptist. I have since learned that not all Southern Baptists are fundamentalists and believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. However, the branch I was in was fundamentalist, and I was an enthusiastic and unquestioning Baptist through high school.

Baptists believe that religion is a personal relationship between the human soul and God. The grace of Christ and the mercy of God are available without mediation of any priest or minister. For Baptists, the formal act of baptism is the closest thing they have to absolution. Baptists believe in Baptism by full immersion the way John the Baptist did it in the Bible. It is a public demonstration of faith. The old life of sin is washed away and a new life of faith emerges. Baptism was limited to adults, those mature enough to understand the meaning of baptism. I was baptized when I was about 11 years old. In the Baptist view, I guess I am carrying around all my sins since that time.

Baptists believe that each believer has a duty to proclaim his faith and urge others to accept Christ. This was one of the beliefs that first got me to thinking and doubting. I was supposed to bring others to Christ and the Baptist church, and if I (or some other Baptist) did not make that effort, then the poor unfortunate soul who had never heard of Jesus would die and and go to hell. This seemed like an overwhelming responsibility to me, and it made me feel guilty. Sometimes I would wonder about the Catholic Church and what it would be like to be able to go to confession on a regular basis and be relieved of all my sins by the priest. I did not pursue this.

In any event, I graduated from high school and left home for college and also left the Baptist church behind me.

I had nothing to do with churches for the next 14 years. Then in 1970, I was married, had two young children, had finished law school, and was working in Washington D.C. My wife and I joined a wonderful Episcopal Church and got involved in it. In that church, there are prayers of confession and absolution in the communion service. However, I do not recall a specific ceremony for absolution.

When we returned to Austin in 1973, we joined this church. Our own ceremonies do not include an express confession and absolution, although I have attended ceremonies in this building, such as the winter solstice celebration, in which letting go of old burdens was part of the ritual.

I suspect that nearly all of the world’s religions deal with this problem of how to obtain forgiveness or relief from our shortcomings.

The Lord’s Prayer from the New Testament includes the request for God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I have found this prayer to be a very helpful mantra when I am seeking calm or relief from stress. Often when I am going to sleep, I just repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Whoever wrote it was very wise. I realize that it is in language that many here do not feel comfortable with, but I feel free to use my own definitions and it lets me remind myself that there is somebody or something–other than me–running the world, and that my part in it is relatively minor. It reminds me that I only have to deal with each day as it comes and “our daily bread” is all we really have to have. It reminds me that I have to acknowledge my own shortcomings before I can do anything about them or get help in dealing with them. The prayer helps me remember that it is just as important to be willing to forgive others as it is to ask for forgiveness. This very common and well known prayer helps me find some relief, or absolution. At least it is a start.

The question remains – How do Unitarian Universalists obtain Absolution? I am looking forward to hearing the sermon on this subject.

PRAYER:

God of many names, spirit of life, great mysterious:
 Forgive us our trespasses,
 as we forgive those who trespass against us.
 May we keep it that simple.

May we see that often our greatest sin is to not let our hearts
 receive the blessings that surround us;
 may we wake up to the present moment.

May we see that the more we give, the more we can receive, that to forgive ourselves is to enable us to give more freely to the world.
 In order to give, we must learn how to receive, first.

May we find the courage to distinguish our own sins from the sins of others. May we admit that sometimes it is easier to focus on the shortcomings of others, rather than our own.

May we recognize that our greatest peace lies in acceptance, that it is great wisdom to absolve ourselves of false power. May we recognize how little control we have over so much of what happens.

And yet, may we connect with the source of our true power, may we take action and make use of our greatest strengths.
 May we see the places in our lives where we can choose.

May we keep close to our hearts and our minds that forgiveness is a prime messenger of love, and that it requires no special occasion.

On a daily level, amongst our relationships both precious and incidental, may we contribute to the spirit of a more forgiving world by seeing past the faults of others to their beauty, instead.

Rather than listen for the judgements, we can listen for the beauty.
May we listen for the goodness in others, as others listen for the goodness in us. 
Amen.

SERMON:

I began one of my last sermons by talking about the psychic I saw last June. That seemed to work so I’m going to try it again. I felt like this woman gave me a lot of helpful information about my family. She said that people tend to inherit their parents’ battles, who inherited the same kinds of battles from their parents and so on. Certain subconscious beliefs are passed down through the generations. She told me about one that my family had, that she thought went back many generations, and was on both sides of my family, both my mother’s and my father’s.

She said that we harbor a very, very subconscious belief – deep within ourselves – that we cannot be forgiven. This rang true to me as soon as she said it. Of course the question arises, what do we think it is about ourselves that is unforgiveable? But that doesn’t matter. All of us do things time and again that we’re not proud of, that we experience shame over. If we believe we CAN be forgiven, over time we let go of those negative feelings about ourselves and are free to grow in character. But in my family’s case, according to the psychic and for whatever reason, we believe somewhere down deep within ourselves that we cannot be forgiven. And regardless of why this belief exists, what’s important to understand is what effect this belief can have on how we live our lives.

The reason I bring up this personal family business is because it’s a good way to frame what the heart of the matter is when we talk about absolution. Because I think that this subconscious belief that one can’t be forgiven is probably not unique. Perhaps I’m projecting here, but to be hard on oneself seems to be an archetypal American trait, going back to the stringent standards of the Protestant work ethic that this country was built on, that still runs it. Our earliest ancestors on American soil had to work very hard – and to this day, I think we hold ourselves to very high standards of hard work and accomplishment. It’s a very prominent source of our identity; many of us depend on it to tell us who we are. I know I do.

But what if you think you aren’t who you ought to be? What if you don’t think you measure up to the high standards you set for yourself? I suppose this might lead you to think that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not good enough; that there’s something about you that can’t be forgiven.

So when we talk about absolution, we’re not just talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of those loaded terms that can lose its integrity if it’s given or received too easily. Before we can be forgiven, what is at stake is whether or not we believe we are WORTHY of that forgiveness. We can throw the word forgiveness around all we want, but what’s really in question is whether or not we believe we DESERVE it. Underneath the fancy theological word absolution, and even underneath the more user-friendly word of forgiveness, is the very plain matter of self-worth.

Because we can’t receive anything that we don’t allow ourselves to receive. We are the gate-keepers of our own hearts. Things like love, compassion, and forgiveness – we only get as much of these things as we allow ourselves to, no matter how much is freely offered to us. Whatever we believe is true about ourselves has a tremendous effect on who in fact we are. Luckily we seem to have more control over the beliefs we are conscious of. But what about the beliefs we don’t even know we’ve already convinced ourselves of?

From thinking a lot about this matter of unforgiveableness in my own family, I’ve come up with some observations of the consequences of it. The effect of this subconscious belief seems to go one of two ways. The first is that you try to make up for it. You go through life with this deep dent in your self-worth and are constantly trying to compensate. You over-achieve, you work too hard, you’re rarely satisfied with what you do accomplish. You notice the flaws more than the victories. And what ends up happening is you do indeed accomplish a lot, and while you gain the respect and admiration of those around you, you have a hard time giving yourself the same credit. You think, well, I could have done this better . . . you end up doing so many different things all the time that there’s never really a chance to breathe and just be. You’re constantly on the go, and to sit idle becomes so foreign to you that it’s actually uncomfortable.

The second set of tendencies you have if you subconsciously believe you can’t be forgiven is to live life in fear. A self-fulfilling prophecy of penance unravels. You don’t try for fear of failure. You get stuck in places you’re unhappy in, but don’t have the courage to get out of. Of course the resentment and anger builds up over time where you forget you’re the person who made yourself angry in the first place – the anger spills over to those around you.

Perhaps what is most damaging about both of these mind-sets is that we are cut off from our spiritual selves. What is true for both of these is that we never believe we are good enough just as we are. Just as I am without one plea . . . there’s a reason that song is so powerful when Christians are called to the alter at revivals. What is damaging about being cut off from our spiritual selves is that we cannot think of ourselves apart from the outside factors that define us – factors like career success, material wealth, our reputation, our family’s reputation. We cannot think of ourselves beyond these things because WE DON’T KNOW WHO THAT PERSON IS. We are estranged from the part of us that makes us whole. Do you know who your spiritual self is?

There are lots of metaphors to describe the spiritual self. I’ve always been fond of thinking of my spiritual self as the child within me – that little girl who I think is good no matter what. It’s the part of you that you can just be with and not judge – not hate and maybe not even love – but just know is good.

I’ve always loved the beginning of Genesis – it’s probably my favorite part of the Bible. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good . . . And God said, ‘let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’ . . . and God saw that it was good . . . Then God said ‘let the land produce vegetation’ . . . And God saw that it was good . . . And God said ‘let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years’ . . . And God saw that it was good . . . And God saw that it was good” and on down through creation.

It’s a beautiful beginning to the Bible because it says that life is from goodness. After 7 days of making everything, including humans, “God saw all that he had made, and it was VERY good.” This story doesn’t have to be true for it to be true – in the same way that there doesn’t have to be a God to believe in God. All of us come from this – from this beginning, from this goodness.

I’m pretty sure this is close to what the early Universalists had in mind when they reclaimed the notion of universal salvation, the belief that everyone – no matter what – is saved. The modern translation is that we are held in love, and we return to love. AND – the reason this is so is because we are forgiveable.

But what if being forgiven by God has no meaning for us? I think this is what Bill had in mind when he came up with this topic. Confession seems like such an easy out; you can even do “virtual confession” on-line nowadays at www.confession-online.com. Baptism might also seem like play-acting and superstitious. But I have to admit when I read Bill’s affirmation of faith, his description of the ritual really struck me: “For Baptists, the formal act of baptism is the closest thing they have to absolution. Baptists believe in Baptism by full immersion the way John the Baptist did it in the Bible. It is a public demonstration of faith. The old life of sin is washed away and a new life of faith emerges.” I looked at Bill and I said, “Wow. What if it really was that simple?”

Again, it makes me wonder that such a ritual doesn’t have to be true for it to be true. That’s the power of ritual – we make a public statement, or perform a ritual in community with others, in order to affirm: this is who I am. This is what I believe is true about myself. If what we believe about ourselves becomes in large part who in fact we are, then again, it is this matter of self regard that we really need to hone in on.

Perhaps religious liberals such as ourselves have a hard time with simple rituals because we don’t want to admit that in fact it is that simple; it doesn’t need to be complicated. Maybe all our high brow talk and intellectualism is preventing us from admitting what is just simple and always true: that we’re all children of God, children of the universe. That in the beginning it was good, and it’s STILL good. That for all our faults, screw-ups, and shortcomings, nothing can change this and we will never lose the capacity to be forgiven.

Like the Baptists, the early Unitarians believed that the grace and mercy of God was available to us without the mediation of a priest or minister, and eventually we felt that it was available to us without the need of a God. We trusted that we ourselves could choose the correct path in life because humanity was endowed with free moral agency. In other words, we can empower ourselves “to do the right thing.” There’s a phrase that sums up the early theology of our forebears pretty well: ‘the Universalists believed God was too good to damn them, and the Unitarians believed they were too good to be damned.’

I think there are three things that need to be in place in order for us to find absolution. The first is what I’ve been talking about already, this business of making sure we are ready to receive it, that we really believe we are worthy of it. I guess this will come easier to some than others.

I think that when each of us reach a certain point of maturity, we can become aware of what the recurring theme is of our life. It’s like an entrenched script written on our souls that we find ourselves reading again and again. It creates the subconscious beliefs we don’t even know we are convinced of. Likely it does go back many generations. Do you know what yours is? Because that seems to be the first step and only way to ensure that we get to write our OWN scripts, and not the scripts that were passed down to us.

We have a choice in life – we can think of ourselves as warriors or as victims. As a warrior we know we have to take action. No one’s going to do it for us. We acknowledge our free will, that we get to choose, and we take advantage of it. So it is this first step of absolution that is up to us, that essentially we do have to do on our own, which can involve the support of others, but in essence begins only with ourselves. We have so much power! I don’t agree with the early Unitarians, that we can be trusted to act out of a self-initiated morality – that doesn’t ring true to me. I think we are too self-indulgent for that. I do, however, think that we constantly underestimate the extent of our own power to dictate the direction our lives take. As soon as we fall into victim mode, we give up this power.

The second thing we have to do toward absolution is make sure we understand what we need to be forgiven for. This is about boundaries. Often we take on guilt and remorse that isn’t really ours. We blame ourselves for the mistakes and shortcomings of someone else. We let our sense of responsibility for ourselves spill over to others where it doesn’t belong. The operative psych. jargon here is co-dependency. Sometimes we think it’s easier to take on the faults of others than to face our own. It does take courage to figure out whose sins are whose. In close relationships, we sometimes think we’re the ones who are doing something wrong, when actually we haven’t done ANYTHING wrong. Sometimes instead of seeking absolution we need to instead identify what could be emotional abuse. Sometimes we need disillusionment more than absolution. It’s interesting that both words share the same Latin root of the verb, lucere, to shine, be light, be clear, to be apparent. In both disillusionment and absolution, we are being led toward the light, toward the safety of awareness.

I think it goes without saying that, when we do really make a mistake, we must have willingness to admit to our wrong-doing, to seek amends. Anyone who seeks absolution has probably gotten that far. The third and final thing that has to be in place is very important, and it’s what saves us from our isolation and reintroduces us to our spiritual selves. As powerful as we can be as individuals, no absolution can take place without the aid of another human being. Our self-sufficiency has its limits. It doesn’t need to be a priest or a minister, but it can be. Whether it’s to make amends to another person, or to admit to another human being the nature of our wrongs, this exchange between yourself and another has to take place.

It’s an incredibly important part of the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, because it’s believed that if you don’t find the peace absolution offers, you will not be able to stay sober for any considerable length of time. Alcoholics can’t afford to have things like guilt, remorse, anger, and resentment troubling us because it will lead back to drinking. That’s why we learn to be more forgiving and let things go more easily, and make more amends than is probably necessary. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Like Bill, that’s also my favorite part of the Lord’s prayer. It’s simple and uncomplicated. It’s a good way to live. And it’s not about the “Lord.” It’s just about being able to let go.

We can’t repair the relationship to our spiritual self alone – we need the help of others to do it. It’s give and take. It is just as important to forgive as it is to be forgiven.

So this is where we find absolution – when we reunite with the spiritual part of our world that makes us whole. This healing of relationship can only be done in community because the spiritual self does not exist in isolation – it is the part of us that connects to all of humanity – and it is “good.” It’s remembering this that reminds me that I am good – good enough, as I am.

I come from love, I am held in love, and I return to love. That’s the script I’m learning to follow. My soul re-writes and re-reads it all the time so I don’t forget.

What re-writing do you need to do? Re-writing our scripts in life is how we let go, it’s how we forgive. It’s learning to love. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.

So let us go seeking peace, and offering love.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.7MB)

© Hannah Wells
March 14, 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Two Poems By Herman Nelson:

Hold to that Breed (Kyrielle)

For all who hiked life’s rugged trail
to find new paths, triumph or fail.
A search for Truth, their only creed.
Hold firmly to that precious breed.

To those who bartered all to teach,
and sow their Truths in hope to reach
some mind to nourish fertile seed.
Hold firmly to that precious breed.

Those friends whom you can count in strife,
remain steadfast throughout your life,
such loyalty is rare indeed!
Hold firmly to such precious breed.

Our 49th

“Till death us do part!”
When young, in love,
those are only words.
It is not until they act,
you learn their meaning.

This 49th anniversary
of our wedding day,
without you,
I ruminate this knowledge.
I chew it up
unable to spit it out.
It is bittersweet
with the joy of you in memory,
the despair of living on and on
without your light to guide me.

I find solace in our children.
We mingle in their blood – ever –
and the blood of their children
and their children’s children
to the end of all eternity.

Sleep, now, my love, my lover,
and do not dream,
for dreams, spawn pain,
however pleasant.

You are eternal as atoms.
Wait for me.
Let us ride the stars together.

PRAYER:

The Ides of March are upon us, “beware the Ides of March!”

What have we to fear?

May we seek the wisdom of confronting our fears within ourselves, and not without. May we see that the fear we give permission to, can be asked to leave. May we not betray ourselves.

May we see that we can change our minds. That, even our most prized notions of integrity and self-reliance may in fact be the enemies of pride and separation, disguised.

May we know who our true friends are. May we know that humility and gratitude for life can be embodied in reaching out to these friends in our times of need.

May we see that the power to nurture what we choose to is in our own hands. We can nurture our fears, or we can nurture health and wholeness through actions, through initiative, through allowing ourselves to be known.

And may we see that it is in our power to ensure what is most important of all: that we do not have to be alone, that there are friends to make in unlikely places.

In a world that demands our attention, that demands our allegiance to icons that can seem hollow and distant, may we put our faith in what is in us and among us, and is most easily seen and touched:

Our intimacy and affection for each other – may we give it more freely, and when we are given it,

may we receive it.

Amen.

SERMON:

When I was very depressed at the beginning of last summer, I decided to go see a psychic who had been referred to me by a friend with very high recommendations. When you’re depressed enough, you’ll try anything! I thought she might be able to provide me with some hope and direction for the future – I figured even if she was a crackpot, I could still use the placebo effect!

I went to her house and we sat in her garden. She began by asking me questions “to get a feel for me,” she said. She asked me who were the dead people hanging around me, and I said I didn’t know, perhaps my grandmother. Already I eyed her suspiciously. She asked me why I was carrying so much pain in my body and I explained about the surgery on my left shoulder, and the slipped disk in my lower back. Then she asked me a question that absolutely knocked the breath out of me. She asked, “who sees you?”

Three simple words. It took my breath away because it got right down to the bottom of my loneliness. Who sees me? Meaning, who understands me? Who sees the REAL me? Not the me who tries to look good in front of others, or tries to please whoever I think needs pleasing, but sees me inside and out, all my passions, all my secret fears, all the bare, honest parts of me that show who I really am?

At first, because of the sadness and self-pity I was feeling at the time, I drew a blank. My god, I wondered, does anybody really see me? Am I really this alone? But then I smiled with relief because I remembered. Of course. I answered the psychic’s question, “my friends see me.” And then I added, “my friends keep me sane.” She laughed and said, “yes, that’s what friends are for.”

And so I want to begin this morning by posing the same question to you: “WHO SEES YOU?” Who is there in your life that you can let every single guard down for, with whom you can let your super-ego take a rest. Who sees the parts of you that so often seem to go unnoticed? And these don’t have to be the wounded parts of you – perhaps they’re the sides of you that you absolutely love but one would have to know you pretty well to see them. Maybe it’s the side of you who is sensitive to beauty, has a sly sense of humor, or cares very, very deeply about something. Who sees and understands where you are vulnerable? The parts of you where you lose your adultness, and become like a child again? Who can see all these things about you?

It is often not our parents or our children who can see these things. It’s because we can never be quite on the same level with them. We can never have the shared experience of living in the same generation. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to meet one of your parents as a peer, as the same age you are now? I’ll never forget my father’s reaction to the last scene of the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. In this scene, through a magical baseball field, a father comes back from the dead as the same age of his son, who is living. They are both in early adulthood, and the father is even a little younger than the son. Imagine meeting your parents even younger than yourself!

There had been ill will between the father and son, and it truly was a dream – to get a chance to reconcile this relationship with a simple game of catch. But what was truly dreamlike about this meeting was juxtaposing a father and son as peers. As two peers who could easily be friends. It was like Kevin Costner’s character couldn’t see the vulnerability in his father and have compassion and forgiveness for him until he saw him as he was as a young man.

I had never seen my father cry and I was in High School. He cried the whole way home in the car and my mother had to drive. I know that my father didn’t feel like he ever had much of a father-son relationship with his dad, let alone a friendship with him. My grandfather was still alive at the time, too, but it was obvious my father was mourning for what was irretrievably lost: to do the things that so many boys do with their fathers as they grow up. Just playing catch.

It’s important to make distinctions about age differences when we talk about friendship. At a senior lunch I attended recently at the church, Stan Hutchison and some others got on the subject of friendship. Stan said there’s a difference between the friends you make before you’re forty and the friends you make after you’re forty. I asked him later why he thought this was?

“Because when you’re younger,” he said, “there’s more energy for friendships, there’s more time and energy to get out and do stuff. There’s a bond in those older friendships. Those are the kinds of friends that you could drop in from out of town anytime without warning and knock on their door. But when you get older, you become more consumed by the relationships in your family.”

Many of us long to be friends with our parents and our children, and we are lucky when there is that semblance of friendship. But even when that is true, they are not the same as the friendships we have with our peers. It has something to do with what Jesus once said: “A prophet is not rejected except in his own town and in his own family and in his own house.”

What does that mean exactly? No, we are not prophets, but each one of us has a ‘prophet-part.’ Basically what this means is that there are parts of us that our families of origin will never “get,” because there are parts of us that have to grow away from them. Try as they might, our parents and our children will never see exactly who we are. The gulf of difference between children and parents is actually supposed to be a kind of soaring grace, and Kahlil Gibran picked the perfect metaphor to describe it in his poem of The Prophet. He talks about not being able to understand your children because they belong to the future “which you can never visit, not even in your dreams.” Then he compares parents to the bow and children to the arrows. He says to the parents, “The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and bends you with might that the arrows may go swift and far. Let you bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness.”

What an image! That the effort of parenthood produces a soaring arrow! It is this prophet-part of us that is one of the greatest distinctions between childhood and adulthood. It is the part of us that, once actualized and known to ourselves, marks a milestone of differentiation from our parents. No matter how much love there is between children and parents, there’s always going to be parts we don’t see. And this goes both ways – our children will never see us completely, either. As human beings, each one of us could not possess such a unique spark if we were so easily understood by our families.

To me, this is the absolute spice of life, this is humanity’s most enchanting quality – that we are each so different. What this means is that one of life’s greatest challenges is to understand others and to be understood. I don’t think we can overestimate the importance of being understood.

In a sermon about friendship, it’s important to talk about loneliness. It is strange how, as the population grows bigger, more people live alone and feel isolated. And when family life fails us, we can feel isolated in a home full of people. I am convinced that the number one ill effect of modernity is isolation. So much of modernity contains this dehumanizing side effect, whether it’s technology or increased competition in a market society – it is all compounded by one of the most foundational American values: self-reliance. Emerson meant well, but it is an inflated emphasis on self-reliance that can serve to keep us isolated from one another. There are times when we can’t and shouldn’t rely on ourselves alone. When you’re feeling bad, how good are you at asking others for support? Do you hesitate and try to figure it out by yourself, first?

They say that’s what friends are for, and that is absolutely true. We cannot be understood unless we allow ourselves to succumb to times of weakness in our lives. Times when we need to confide in another and say, “I don’t know.” Whether it’s with partners or friends, we need this intimacy in our lives to come to our full humanity, to understand and to be understood. Paula Weisner, a member of this church who has been a mentor to me, has a certain way of describing intimacy: intimacy, means ‘in-to-me-see.’ It’s only when you allow others to ‘in-to-me-see’ that this very human emotional need can be met.

There are many different kinds of friendships with different levels of intimacy – but what’s more interesting from a spiritual point of view is how friendship functions as nourishment for the soul.

One thing I’ve noticed in my studies for ministry is that friendship seems to be overlooked as an essential part of our spiritual lives. Where in the Bible does it talk about friendship? There are not too many places. Did Jesus have friends? Followers are not friends. Did Jesus ever talk about the human need for friendships? Not according to the authors of the gospels. One thing that is quite overlooked when people talk about Jesus is the fact that Jesus himself needed salvation, that he himself was in search of it, and that much of his teachings come out of a deep drive to be loved himself, to be understood. I believe this is true because I believe he was merely a human, like you and me.

In liberal religion, we tend to speak of salvation as worldly, and I believe very strongly that one place we find this salvation is in our friendships – to be profoundly understood is a kind of salvation. Salvation in friendship can come about in two important ways:

The first is what I have been speaking of – to be seen, to be known, to be understood in all our complexity and vulnerability and beauty. The second has very much to do with the conventional theology of salvation: to be forgiven. To be forgiven, despite our faults and our mistakes, despite our ‘sins.’ I don’t think most of us buy into the traditional theology of absolution – that Jesus died for our sins. I don’t think most of us are consciously concerned with whether or not God forgives us. But we do care that our loved ones forgive us, we do care that our friends forgive us for our mistakes, we do care that our friends accept us as we are.

Because as you know, friendships can have as many ups and downs as any other kind of close relationship. All of the aspects of love – passion, tenderness, separation, anxiety, anger, disillusionment, even triangles and unrequited affections – essentially all the emotions that render us human – emerge in friendship.

I know who my best friends are – they’re the ones that no matter how badly I screw up they’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing I could do that would make them stop loving me. It is a lot like ‘God’s love’ that traditional Christianity speaks of. It’s unconditional. Personally, I can find salvation in God’s love. However, quite frankly, I prefer the love of my friends over the love of a God who can seem abstract and distant. I know God is in me and loves me and has much to offer and teach me – but I need the down-to-earth, laughing, crying, hugging love of a friend more. It means more to me to talk with my close friends than to talk with God.

That has a classic heretical ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s because life is for the living! For now! On this earth, in this present moment! It’s the people we can touch with our hands, hear with our ears, and see with our eyes that matter the most. I’m a Universalist – I already know God forgives me, that’s a done deal! But it is in and among the living where I seek unconditional love. It is within human relationship where true salvation comes to pass in this life. That is the Kingdom of God Jesus spoke of.

It is the kind of salvation Frodo experiences when Sam Wise doesn’t give up on him, even though Frodo cast him away toward the end of his dangerous journey. Sam Wise knows that his friend is going through a rough time, a rough patch – and he knows his friend well enough that he didn’t really mean what he said – he knows his friend still needs him and he stands by, and forgives Frodo without a thought. And quite literally, he saves him. I realize that’s not how it was written in the book, but nevertheless it’s comforting that these kinds of friendships are being modeled in our mainstream media.

And what about the unlikely friendships in our lives that turn out to be some of our greatest blessings? There is a story in the Bible that speaks of this well. The Book of Ruth. Ruth, who is of a different ethnic background than her mother-in-law Naomi, and has no incentive to follow her back to Judah, where people of Ruth’s kind are hated, says this: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” It’s amazing what good can come when we don’t burn bridges! There is a definition of evil that says evil is the rupturing of relationship. So the opposite must be to salvage relationship. Perhaps the opposite of evil is not “good” – which is such a subjective term, but simply ‘relationship.’

I interviewed Herman Nelson for this sermon because I wanted to hear about his wife Helen, who died just over a year ago. Davidson remembers vividly the memorial service held for Helen at the church. “There were droves of people!” he said, and with some reflection he said, “I think it was because Helen was a good friend. She had many, many friends.”

Herman confirmed this and said Helen was always honest, straight-forward with everyone, and that she cared about people. He could not stress that point enough, how much she really cared about others. When she was ill, some women at the church here made her a lap blanket, and when she received it, the first thing she did was make a list of other people in the church who could use a lap blanket. She really paid attention to the needs of others.

She was a good listener, “which was lucky for me!” Herman said. Helen was good at keeping in touch with people – she loved to write very newsy letters to her friends who were far away from her. But perhaps the quality that attracted friends to her most was this: she could overlook their faults. And as Herman put it, “you dismiss the faults of others because you know you have your own.” Forgiveness is a natural, mutual extension of friendship, and Helen seemed to know this. When she heard the news that she had pancreatic cancer, the first thing she said was, “It’s been a good life.”

Talking about Helen brought up many memories for Herman. But it wasn’t until we’d already been talking for a half an hour that he paused, and held tears at bay to say, “it wasn’t just love! We were friends.” I asked him what he thought the difference was between love and friendship, and while sometimes there can be differences, after a few minutes we concluded that there can’t be true love without friendship. So it is friendship that is the foundation love is built on.

I would like to share a friendship story of my own. It’s my favorite one. When I was a freshman in High School, I met Erin, who had just moved to Illinois from Texas. Erin was different – she dressed different, she was a bit rebellious, and I thought she was very cool. We had lots of fun together. But Sophomore year brought personal crisis into Erin’s life and one of the results was dropping me as a friend. I was devastated! It was my first broken heart. I was sad for months about it, but slowly it turned into an uneasy hatred, and even though we had classes and worked as waitresses at the same retirement village together, we did not speak to each other.

The last thing we did together as friends was go to the local aquarium to buy fish for our fresh water fish tanks at home. That day I bought a beautiful creme colored Angel fish, that when the sun light shone on its scales, they turned iridescent colors. I LOVED that fish, and I let this fish have the whole fish tank to itself, because that’s what Angel fish prefer, anyway. Whenever I entered my bedroom the fish would greet me by coming up to the corner of the fish tank. That fish stayed alive almost throughout the rest of High School, well into the Spring of my Senior year. One day I noticed the fish tank’s heater had become unplugged, but for some reason, I didn’t plug it back in. I was too distracted by senior year.

A day or two later the fish died. And I held myself responsible for not plugging the heater back in. How could I? I felt terrible. I remembered I had bought that fish with Erin and I thought the only way I could feel better was if I called her up, even though our estrangement had gone on for two whole years. I guess I figured I had nothing to lose.

We talked for two hours. And toward the end of the conversation, Erin told me that she was a lesbian. It was the first time anyone had ever come out to me. It made sense, then – she had figured it out around our Sophomore year and didn’t know how to handle feelings she was having for me, for other girls in our group of friends she had abandoned.

We graduated a few weeks later after that telephone conversation, and it didn’t happen right away, but eventually we became very close friends again. She was just here with her partner and their new baby at Christmastime – they listened to me preach in the cry room. And you may have seen them recently on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, as they just got married in San Francisco and have received a lot of media attention with a very cute 8 month old baby.

Erin and I often wonder if we would still have become friends again if I hadn’t called the night my fish died. How else could she have safely come out to me, how else could we have begun to build our trust in each other anew? I realize now that in the same way I gave the fish space to herself, that was what Erin had needed too – she had needed space for herself. And even though I loved that fish, I am so glad that it died!

There’s a song I learned in Girl Scouts that is sung in a round: Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold. Stan is probably right – that the friends we make before we’re forty are different from the friends we make after we’re forty. Even at 30, I’m finding fewer opportunities to make the kinds of friends I have from High School and College. But this is a product of what kind of lives we have – we can choose to reach out more. We are never too old to make new friends.

And no matter how many years have passed – I assure you this never matters – we can track someone down and rebuild. Or we can rebuild the broken friendships that are nearer to us. It’s never too late to make the ‘dead fish call.’ When we give a friend who has hurt us another chance, we are doing sacred work because we are giving permission for relationship to bloom once more.

If it is true, as I believe, that the Kingdom of God Jesus spoke of as among us and in us is the salvation we find in human relationship, then to heal and nurture our friendships is sacred work. And to make an unlikely friendship possible is radical sacred work – when we choose to make the conditions possible for such an unlikely friendship to sprout in. We are surrounded by seeds of potential friendships!

I need to help the good seeds grow, until they’re close enough to “in-to-me-see.” Because I need that “in-to-me-see.” I’m betting that you do, too.