First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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Victoria Shepherd Rao
26 June 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER: Prayer for the End of Things

May we find peace at the end.

At the end of a conversation with a friend or a stranger, may we find peace.

At the end of a period of hard work, when we have struggled to complete a task or tried hard to find an approach to work together with others, may we find peace beyond our fatigue.

At the end of an outing, or an event we have been looking forward to, or a vacation we’ve planned endlessly for and lived through in the seeming blink of an eye, when it is time to return again to the regular rhythms and routines of our lives, may we find peace in the ordinary.

At the end of the day, when we retire to our beds, let us reflect on the fullness of our being, recounting our moments of strength and failure, and may we seek peace beyond our stories- peace for ourselves and peace for our world.

And at the end of our lived, whenever our time comes to the still, breathless place where we must let go, let us find us beyond this life.

So be it.

SERMON: Farewell Musings

First off, I want to share a few impressions of GA – the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association – that is taking place right now in Fort Worth, Texas. I attended for three days of the multi-day extravaganza. It is a lot like a film festival: there is so much going on – lectures, workshops, exhibitions, annual meetings, worship events – that you must decide what you want to do most, because you cannot do it all. It is a real exercise in expressing your priorities as a UU and it completely overwhelmed me at first. Then I decided: I wanted and needed to hear different UU theologies, and I did, everything from the universalism of John Murray-meets-Thomas Potter to Thandeka on the theology of land, water, food and place.

I wanted to participate in mega-church hi-tech worship with thousands of others, all singing together. I wanted to hear some award winning sermons being preached. I wanted to learn more about the credentialing process of ministers in our tradition. I wanted to get information about international liberal religious ministries and networks of interfaith ministries. And all of these things I did.

The offerings and possibilities of GA are many. I want now to encourage you all to make the pilgrimage for yourselves one year. One of the best experiences for me was to see old friends greeting one another. Possibly these friendships were built and have been sustained by the annual reunion. But to see peoples’ eyes light up, their enthusiastic waves, their running to embrace, it was such an upper! It was fun to meet with the folks from here among the crowd. There were about forty people from “our church” who went. I also met up with Hannah Wells (who is here among us today – welcome!) and I met Cathy Harrington too, both your interns before me.

It’s exciting to think that I’ll be one of the lucky ones running to greet old friends in the years to come. I treasure such a vision of belonging to the wider community of our faith, especially at such a time as this, as I prepare to take my leave from you.

This will be the last time I speak from your pulpit as your intern and I would like to take the time to address a couple of questions which have been asked of me in response to my sermons from the last few months.

These questions came from two long time church members, both former board presidents. One asked a question: What is so great about serenity? This came from a man who introduced me, the first time I met him, to the qualities of character he considered most definitive of Texan culture: resourcefulness and independence. He clearly valued these traits but he wasn’t so sure about serenity.

Serenity is like tranquility, and describes a calm or peaceful state. It is associated with serene weather – clear, fair, like a cloudless sky or a calm sea. In a person, serenity means to be free from disturbing emotions. I see serenity as a sign of an inner resourcefulness that can make some space in a person between their inner emotions and their outward demeanor. It makes the difference between being reactive and responsive: a serene person is a person who is aware of her emotions, not controlled by them; a serene person values her emotions, learns from them, but is not defined or determined by them. Then the emotions become a resource for such a person, not the source of their well-being, or lack of it.

So, what is so great about serenity? Well, maybe as someone trying to develop pastoral skills, I have been giving a sub-textual message that serenity is great – great for a minister or a chaplain, someone whose job it is to reflect others’ state of being back to them as a mirror. But then again, we come from a tradition of the ‘priesthood of all believers,’ and that means we all are called to show and demonstrate with our lives the love of God, or the benevolence and possibilities of Life. And we are all better able to do that from an inner landscape that is calm and undisturbed by stormy emotions. So serenity then is good for connecting to our own truth beyond our emotions, and for connecting with others. And I’ll own up to my bias that in life, it is connecting with others that seems great to me. It is a calling into significant, meaning-filled relationship with people, that’s what ministry means to me. So, what’s so great about serenity? It can facilitate real, deep connections between humans. That’s my answer.

The other question I wanted to deal with was a direct response to a particular remark I had made in a sermon wherein I wondered about the experience of being hit by a car and lying injured by the side of the road. I had said that I hoped I would be able to rest my cheek on the ground under me, whether it was dusty or greasy or bloody, knowing the earth as an inalienable mother, upon whom I might safely rest, trusting death as much as I have trusted life. It was this last idea that sparked the question, how? How do we learn to trust death?

Trusting death – that is perhaps a novel way to view death. We might intellectually accept the inevitability of death but chances are we’d rather not think about it if given the choice. No, we deal with it when we have to – when we are confronted by it, or stopped short in our tracks by it – and then our mix of emotions is heavy isn’t it? Shock, disbelief, anger, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, regret, anxiety, an overwhelming complex of feelings envelope us as we move along the series of events unfolding in bedrooms, hospital rooms, and funeral homes. Indeed, is there any trust there in that picture? Death is the unwanted visitor separating us from our loved ones and sometimes, from our hopes and dreams – how can we, why should we, trust it?

People of conventional faiths may trust that death is the beginning of eternal life, ‘dead in Jesus, alive forever with God,’ or that death is the transition point from one life into another as within Hinduism or Buddhism with the tenants of reincarnation. Atheists may also share a kind of faith in death as a merciful nothingness where there can be no pain because there is no thing at all. Other, even less conventional views, wonder about the after-death experiences reported by people who have actually been clinically dead but who have returned to life: the whole white-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel scenario; the your-whole-life-flashes-before-your-eyes; the feeling of encompassing love. Such compelling stories as these can enchant open-minded religious liberals, encouraging an understanding of death as some kind of a passage between worlds or realms of being. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, no less, became such a believer, who, at the end of her career, twelve books after her famous 1969 book, On Death and Dying, asserted that death did not exist, but was merely “a portal” to another stage. She said, “Death is only a transformation from a physical field of energy into a psychic field of energy.” (Globe and Mail obituary, Aug.26, 2004) And so, there are many ways to trust death and our worldviews or religious views matter to our understandings. And they always have.

We can look at whole heritages surrounding the care of souls at the end of life. I refer to the ancient traditions as revealed in various ‘books of the dead.’ The ancient Egyptians were entombed with such books. Theirs were like instruction manuals to help navigate the journey from life to death. The Celtic tradition of death mid-wifery, which influenced later monastic infirmary practices around Europe at the turn of the first millennium, was a set of practices for giving active care to the dying based on the understanding that people needed coaching a the end of life in much the same way as women need coaching through the process of childbirth. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has become quite popular recently in the West, there are detailed instructions for the dying and for their companions and care-givers at the end of life including many prayers to be read to the dying person during the different stages of their transition from life to death to life, to help confront especially fearful emotions, and facilitate a calm and clear state of consciousness throughout the process.

There is a collective wisdom on the universal experience of dying to be found in these traditions. Their varied cultural and religious roots do not point to different but to recurring approaches to death. And we can learn from the repeated patterns in the teachings that have helped past generations to trust death. So, let’s review the principles which emerge.

First, there is the basic idea of a good death. That would be a peaceful death and it is achieved through close attention to the actual process of death through its many stages. Kubler-Ross identified the stages of grief in the dying process, you probably know them, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In hospices today, care-givers recognize the final “active dying” stage. In the Tibetan tradition, there were over forty different stages identified and each stage was met with particular sets of practices, prayers and rituals, all designed to support the dying person as well as their companions. A good death included constant care-givers so that the one at the end of life would not be alone in approaching death.

Another consistent teaching in these traditions was that it was necessary to prepare for death throughout the course of a lifetime. That the art of dying was not radically different from the art of living but brought with it some powerfully transformative opportunities to review our lives with new perspectives and to heal our souls. “Dying is nothing to fear,” echoed Kubler- Ross in our day, “It can be the most wonderful experience in your life.”

The earliest hospices in Europe, the scattered monastic infirmaries, were places where people from all walks of life, and religious traditions, went to die. They were treated with a variety of physical and what we might call psycho-spiritual techniques. Music was used extensively- in fact, there is some evidence that the West’s musical scale emerged from these institutions, medicines were used to control pain and maintain lucidity, chants were used to regulate breath through pain and discomfort, and psalms were used to give expression to the full range of the dying person’s emotions – including anger at God.

Death was consistently viewed as a sacred end-of-life transition, and it presented a unique opportunity for significant spiritual healing. The vision of the good death was in play then and it is in play still – 82% of Americans would, upon being told they had very little time to live, prefer simply to go home. They want to die in their own beds, surrounded by family, in a setting that feels natural.

But because we don’t dwell on [death], and because we haven’t thought about it, the system that has sprung up to care for the elderly and the terminally ill is neither medically nor ethically consistent. In different regions of the country – even among hospital rated the best- there are huge variations in the kind of treatment given to dying patients. It seems that the most important factor in determining whether a particular region has a high rate of medical intervention on behalf of the terminally ill – risky operations, respirators, artificial feeding – is not local religious practices but the local availability of hospital beds and the number of local doctors. (Washington Post editorial by Anne Applebaum, Mar 31, 2005)

So, how then can we learn to trust death?

Well, we can be proactive about all the practical concerns: make our wills, make sure we give legal rights to folks who understand our wishes for our end-of-life care. This congregation has a great resource for such tasks with AMBIS, the Austin Memorial and Burial Information Society, a church-affiliated consumer organization dedicated to a consumer’s right to meaningful, dignified, and affordable end-of-life choices. We can join the new movements towards at-home funerals and after-death care in the home. We can take the radical step of beginning to attend to each other, our families and friends, at the end of our lives – to sit with one another in death vigils, and attend to the profound experiences of caring for the dying, learning the lessons they can teach us about living.

We can take seriously our own spiritual pain before death’s shadow falls, asking ourselves: Is my life filled with meaning and purpose? Do I have a sense of reconciliation within myself and with others? Do I have a deep sense of connection with the people and things that matter most to me? The answers to such questions are in us, and they can guide us in seeking out the spiritual healing that will build lives worth living and set us up for a good death – a peaceful, conscious letting go- surrounded by a circle of friends, or lying by the side of a road. We can then take the courage we’ve cultivated in living fully into the end-of-life experience, whatever we conceive it to be, claiming for ourselves a good death that we can trust. “Dying is nothing to fear,” said Kubler-Ross, “It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived.”

But let’s face it, none of us know when we will die, it could be tomorrow, it could be tonight. So, we need to make an effort to trust, life and death, and to live in the only moment we can- in the now- in the now, and with each others’ blessings, let us endeavor to trust, as people of faith, we are called to nothing less.

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Davidson Loehr
Victoria Shepherd Rao
19 June 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We are all the caretakers of sacred treasures. It isn’t something dramatic, not a prop from an action movie. It’s about our souls, our spirits and the spirits of others. Those are our sacred treasures.

The German poet Rilke wrote that the vision that calls us forward blesses us, even if we do not reach it. It’s like saying that if we can learn to live life in the right key, we’re blessed even if we don’t get the melody just right.

It’s saying that we need a certain kind of seriousness about life, that life deserves, demands that we take seriously the question of how we are to live our lives.

Theists would say that we must stand before God, but that God has mercy. The Romans used to say that we should always live as though all the noblest people of history were watching us, then only do those things we would do in front of that audience: very challenging, not much mercy. These sound and feel nearly impossible, and quite intimidating.

Then we remember Rilke’s insight, that these visions that call out our true names, that call us forth into lives of such high ideals, such high integrity – that if we take them seriously, these visions will bless us whether we reach them or not.

Honest religion is life-giving, even as it is intimidating. Yet there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are alive, and those who are afraid. Let us not be afraid to be alive.

Amen.

HOMILY: Spiritual Autobiography of an Intern
By Victoria Shepherd Rao

It was the end of November 2003, when I thought I better start looking for an internship. I had already graduated from a Baptist seminary five years earlier. I had also worked as a chaplain in a big teaching hospital for about a year after that. The next thing I wanted for my education in ministry was the chance to explore the role of a minister in a church. I had relatively little personal experience with such a role because of not growing up in a church.

First thing I did was to check out the Unitarian Universalist Association’s website, finding the “Internship Clearing House,” basically a list of all the congregations in the association who would be willing to host an intern for a set period of time. The list I downloaded was maybe of fifty or sixty different churches. How should I narrow this field I wondered and then I took the rational Indian approach to all things career – I looked for the best paying internships. That quickly narrowed the field to two churches, First Parish UU of Concord, or you all. I shot off email inquiries to both churches. We would be coming from India, so it hardly mattered where the church was, east coast, west coast, heart of Texas.

With the Concord church, the only other church which paid their intern $1500 stipend per month for a forty hour work week (which works out to $8.75 an hour for those of you who’ll be figuring it out anyway), there began a predictable process of emailing a contact person who sent me a list of required materials to be forwarded. But with this church, little did I know that my initial inquiry would be going straight to the head honcho. And thus began the whirlwind.

Now I was in India, where your day is their night and where your night is their day. When Texans go to bed, Indians are waking up. It is almost exactly halfway ’round the world. Which is how I came to learn very early on that Davidson is an insomniac who answers emails throughout the night. From the very first, Davidson gave me the treatment. He wanted to know where I was at spiritually, what I meant when I talked about Unitarian Universalism as a religion. If Uuism is a religion, what were its beliefs? And what was I wanting to get from an internship? Right off the bat, he made clear what it was he had to offer to an intern and that was clarity. He said, “I want interns to learn what (if anything) they really believe and then to be able to say it in ordinary language, with no jargon. “This is hard,” he warned, “and liberating.”

He told me he was a tough teacher but that his loyalty was fierce too, if you could earn it. And if I have learned anything it is that Davidson is true to his word. And I have loved that about him and that has helped me cope with his sky high standards for preaching. He introduced this bias from his second emailed note to me when he said, “Sermons are an art, a momentary intimacy, a conduit for insights, a reconnection with ultimate concerns. It’s our main art form and we should be good at it.”

Now, I probably should have turned around and run away when I heard all this but instead, I was totally snagged. In the time I had between our emails for the next ten days which followed I lived and breathed his questions. I could barely concentrate on anything else. Davidson started educating me about what he saw as liberal religion – good, honest religion that understands “all people and creatures as related and of value, not just some by some definition.” He kept up with the questions and I tried to field them as honestly as I could. But they are not easy questions to answer. Where are you at spiritually? Is there some kind of multiple choice answer to that, like you’d find in a woman’s magazine? Spiritually, where I am at is: a) saved by Jesus, or b) liberated from the church and doing okay, or c) exploring meditation and vegetarianism, or d) not sure. How would you answer such a question? Davidson invited me here in the end I think, because I had the guts to say, not sure.

For me at the time, I was pretty confused, especially after seminary, about what spirituality meant. Before I had had much contact with Christians, and the God they confessed, the spiritual dimension of an individual had to do with their character, their propensity to tell truth, to think and reflect about the consequences of their actions on others, about their propensity to see the humor in situations, to dance or clown or frown. This kind of spirit did not survive death except in the memories of others. This kind of spirit was not limited to human beings but most certainly included the individual natures of animals. This kind of spirit showed up in expressive forms. You could sense it in the observations of writers, you could see it in paintings and in faces. You could feel it in an embrace.

When I got to seminary, it was the first time in my life that I was surrounded by people who shared a belief that there was a clearly articulated plan for human existence. I knew that I did not share their basic worldview but I did believe that our beliefs are fundamental to what we are and what we can become and so I was curious and eager to be among them, to try to understand their worldview and to see how it affected them. And this openness to learning I had was described by folks at the seminary, spiritually, as “seeking.”

My academic advisor had me ask Jesus to come into my heart. I wasn’t sure what that would do but the idea of the importance of our willingness to do good and be aligned with the good in no uncertain terms made sense to me. In similar ways, I came to believe in many new spiritual possibilities at seminary. I came to believe in the power of prayer to give voice to our heart’s yearnings and to give ear to the hearts’ yearnings of others. I came to believe in the power of confession and absolution, that it is within us to be witness to the frailty and brokenness in one another and to become an agent of healing in the process, not by what we do as much as by our mere presence and the truth we treasure. I came to believe in grace, not that the Creator God answered our individual needs but that sometimes, through no effort of our own, our needs are met in the unfolding of the cosmos. I chose to focus on the universalism which emerged out of the Baptist tradition in America, understanding that however mysterious a God-force might be, surely it flowed throughout the Creation. I never believed in the ideas of a chosen people or the damned but I resonated with the idea of living in right relationship to everything else. This was the possibility I was committed to, this is still what I am seeking after.

Davidson questioned me about what I thought my religious center was. He wanted to know what ministry meant for me. Why I would do it. These particular questions came five days after our conversations began and they are still alive between us in our relationship and I hope they always will be.

Being unable to answer what my religious centre is definitively, I have at least come to a better appreciation of what Davidson means by such a term. It is about “the most authentic center of your being where your head and your heart connect.” Liberal religion is all about allowing that center to be different for each of us. The liberal religious path then is one that does not take its direction from the doctrines put forth by one branch of a church or another, but it takes its path from our seeking to understand ourselves and our connection to everything else and to live out of that, striving to express our real values in ways that serve the good.

Now, I came here this year with a whole lot of learning goals about parish ministry, about pastoral leadership and about preaching. I did not list among them ‘getting religion.’ But as I reflect back on the time here and the struggles I have had in seeking out a worthy message to each sermon I have written, I realize that the responsibility which comes with being a religious liberal is none other than the responsibility to be challenged and to develop positive, constructive and grounded (and with Davidson, defendable) understandings of what you really believe and how your beliefs can help make you a better person and the world a better place. It was this same challenge Davidson posed to me when he offered me the chance to learn here with him and all of you. And it is a challenge for everyone of us.

So, picture this, I have spent the last ten months rushing into Davidson’s office breathlessly giving voice to what I have figured must be my religious core only to have him sit back and consider my discovery for a moment and ask some pointed questions that busted my bubble every time. It has been a discouraging and disappointing process for the two of us at times. And I have struggled with what motivates me to write a sermon. But I do have some strong beliefs and whether they articulate my religious core adequately or not I will just have to see.

I believe that empathy is the highest of human capacities and that loving kindness is the highest calling. I value human ingenuity and original thinking, especially when they serve to better the world. I believe in the path of non-violence and that we can learn ways to resolve conflicts without resorting to coercion or excluding the interests of minorities or the unrepresented. I believe living things are sacred, and worthy of my care and time and protection if need be and I feel called to give voice to that sacredness in the way I live and in the opportunities I am given to minister to others.

Davidson has converted me in many respects to his thinking about the Unitarian Universalist principles, namely that they are not religious affirmations but social and political values. And I stand by them as social and political values – I am willing to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of people, the democratic model, equity in relations, the interdependent web. I don’t find it too hard to turn them into religious values either, for instance I believe in the inherent worth of all living beings, and that we gain dignity or nobility in acknowledging and serving that inherent worth in all living beings. I believe there is an interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part and that this is nowhere more true than on the surface of our planet and that every time I ignore this connectedness, and the potential impact of the lifestyle choices I make, I not only diminish myself and the significance of my beliefs, but I also commit the sin of willfully adding to the forces which threaten the continuation of the web of life.

These religious beliefs transcend the interests and needs of my own being but reflect my unique being. They call me to live according to self-transcending interests and that is why I am glad that they help me to join with a wider religious community of people like you. So, thank you. Thank you for having me here, for offering your corporate self up as a teacher. And thank you Davidson. Thank you for sticking with me. I have learned a lot about the parish ministry and my own capacities for the ministry these last ten months. In the end, as at the beginning, I am committed to serve liberal religious communities like this one where the causes of life, truth, peace and pluralism enliven and unite us, one to another.

HOMILY: Behind the Scenes
Davidson Loehr

There are so many ways to approach the question of what liberal religion is about, I wasn’t sure whether to start with the Bible, the ancient Greeks, or Batman. So I’ll start with Batman. I saw the new movie “Batman Begins” this week, and liked it. 95% of it was fast-paced techno-geek stuff, and I would have been as happy if they had left all that out. But what there was of a story was pretty good. And the movie even had a message, which they repeated three or four times so you’d be sure to get it. The message of this movie is, “It’s not who you are deep down; it’s what you do that defines you.”

That message could be the message of liberal religion, too. It isn’t about creeds, and the center of religion isn’t just thinking. It’s finally what you do that defines you.

There’s a passage in the Bible that says the same thing in fewer words: “Faith without works is dead,” it says.

And the ancient Greeks, who I like even better than Batman and the Bible, had a famous saying that broadens the picture. It’s been one of my central beliefs for over thirty years. Google lists this as coming from Confucius, though I think I first read it in Aristotle (not sure):

Plant a thought, reap a deed.
Plant a deed, reap a habit
Plant a habit, reap a character.
Plant a character, reap a destiny.

Thinking right, believing the right things, mattered a lot to the Greeks, because they saw that if you had bad or unhealthy beliefs, you would logically be led to bad or unhealthy actions, habits, character, and destiny. I believe that too. Just as – children really do what we do, not what we say. Just as – if you want to know what someone believes, you don’t have to ask them – just watch them.

Beliefs and actions and character are woven together so fine I don’t think they can be separated. That’s why I think the idea of the priesthood of all believers that we talked about last week is so important in religion. Our lives will be run by something, and if we don’t know what we believe, they will be run by things we’re not aware of. That’s one meaning of saying someone is demon-possessed. It isn’t supernatural. That kind of a demon is a deep, maybe primitive, psychological script that can run your life for years without your even being aware that you are dangling like a puppet.

I have a story about this from about fifteen years ago, when I was the theme speaker at a summer camp for about six hundred adults. I didn’t know anyone there, but since I was the most visible “official minister” type, people were coming up all week sharing all kinds of personal stories and confessions.

In mid-week, a woman in her mid-forties came up – looking quite desperate and pained, I thought – and asked if I had a few minutes. We walked over to a bench beneath a large tree and sat. She was just seething with anger, hatred, and bile. It was about her husband who had dumped her. She must have talked for five full minutes, with hateful and painful invectives you seldom hear all strung together like that. She was so raw she almost bled when she talked. When she finished, I wasn’t sure what to say, so asked “When did this happen?” “Ten years ago,” she said. That’s a demon-possession!

The goal – and this is where most Western religions have got it dead wrong, I think – is not to be pure or perfect. – God knows, we can’t do that! It’s to be integrated and authentic. To integrate your fears, shadows and demons into your personality. You may not be able to get rid of them, but if you’re aware of them it can make all the difference. So much psychotherapy is based on this idea, as is a lot of Eastern religion – especially Buddhism.

Another image I use for our religious task comes again from the Greeks. You know of the old Olympian gods: Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Artemis, Ares, Apollo, Hermes and the rest of them. They were all very different, and taken alone some of them could be very destructive. But they’re gods, meaning they’re enduring parts of who we seem to be, so you can’t wish them away. However, you can combine their energies into an integrated personality. That was Zeus’s job: to negotiate the conflicting demands of the gods and try to make the best kind of harmony. That’s our job, too.

I hate to keep quoting cartoons for authority, but this was also the point of the Batman movie. Bruce Wayne was absolutely terrified of bats, because as a boy he had fallen down a shaft and had a million bats fly around him trying to get out. All his life he was terrified of bats. In one sense, that fear led to the death of his parents. And the lesson he had to learn – from a Darth Vader kind of character played wonderfully by Liam Nieson – was not only to face his fears, but to incorporate them, to use their power instead of being abused by it.

I think this is one of the most important teachings of existential psychology and good religion, too. If we can learn what we believe, what we fear, what we love, and integrate all of those forces into a character focused on high moral and ethical aspirations, we have access to nearly all of our power.

Many years ago I read a book by Karl Menninger, founder of the Menninger Clinic, which has remained one of the most important books of my life. The title was Love Against Hate, and the message that I remember seeing as a revelation when I was 21 was that love and hate are the same energy. In love, the energy is directed outward creatively. In hate, it is turned inward destructively. That woman at the summer camp – the love for her husband had turned to hate. But the hate didn’t hurt him at all. It just ate out her own insides, and ran her life like a demonic puppeteer.

And all of this is involved in what I think religion is about here. So an internship, I believe, should be tough. Psychotherapists need to go through psychotherapy themselves so they can be aware of their own driving forces.

Chaplains who work with dying patients need to do the personal work of dealing with their own fears of death and integrating them, or they will communicate that fear to the people with whom they’re working.

And ministerial interns need to do more and harder work at trying to understand what they believe, what spirits and demons really drive them, than those who will one day trust them to have done this work.

Behind the scenes of Roman Catholicism, priests learn the sacraments, the rituals, the meaning and use of the costumes in that religion of such rich ritual traditions.

Behind the scenes in a fundamentalist church, ministers must master the creeds and particular bible passages their tradition uses. They learn many ways of saying that we are born sinful, that we can’t be trusted, that we must learn to be obedient in order to be saved, and that we can only be saved by Jesus. There was a hint of this in the story Vicki told of her seminary professor saying she should ask Jesus to come into her heart.

But behind the scenes in a Unitarian church we do a different kind of work. I think it’s harder, and a lot more empowering. It’s taking the priesthood and prophethood of all believers as seriously as we know how to take it.

And you can’t do it in your head. Real religion isn’t intellectual. It’s much more. As a wise voice coming from a very weird costume said recently, “It’s not who you are deep down; it’s what you do that defines you.”

That’s good, but there was an even wiser voice, from the German poet Rilke, who said that the spirit that calls us forward blesses us, even if we do not reach it. The spirit that calls us forward blesses us, even if we do not reach it. Think about it: that’s even better than Batman.

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© Victoria Shepherd Rao
Cuileann McKenzie
29 May 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:
From Singing the Living Tradition, #496

From arrogance, pompousness, and from thinking ourselves more important than we are, may some saving sense of humor liberate us. For allowing ourselves to ridicule the faith of others, may we be forgiven.

From making war and calling it peace, special privilege and calling it justice, indifference and calling it tolerance, pollution and calling it progress, may we be cured.

For telling ourselves and others that evil is inevitable while good is impossible, may we stand corrected.

God of our mixed up, tragic, aspiring, doubting, and insurgent lives, help us to be as good as in our hearts we have always wanted to be. Amen. — Harry Meserve

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Cuileann McKenzie, Worship Associate

While considering Sally’s idea that knowing your nugget, your core values, is helpful to navigate the freedoms and choices that face us, I was struck by the paradox that in my life, it often has been facing choices that has helped me discover and define my nugget. Indeed it seems that choices and values are somewhat interdependent. Choices push us to contemplate values as well as the other way around.

I got my B.A. in a program titled “Rhetoric and Professional Writing” – rhetoric being given the classical definition of the “art of persuasion” rather than the contemporary, popular meaning of someone seeming to deceive. The program’s courses provided a broad foundation for a writing career in any number of areas, from writing those wonderful software manuals, to political speech writing, to advertising copywriting, and so on. However, we all were reminded, particularly in our introductory courses, that once we accepted a job, our focus would be on helping our employer get their message across convincingly, whether we agreed with the ideas or not. It all seemed too mercenary for me – like we were just “communication guns for hire.” I discovered that at my core, it was important to have personal meaning in my work – to help others and to foster independence in thinking.

With this nugget in mind, I chose to go into teaching. It was when I was completing my Bachelor of Education, that the notion of having integrity when teaching was introduced by my professors. At that point in time, preparing to teach high school nine years ago in Canada, teachers were given quite a bit of freedom and trust in developing their own teaching style and evaluation methods. We were encouraged to be creative and thoughtful, giving students many choices to suit their individual strengths, as we developed lessons and assignments. But as we all know, knowing your nugget and then consistently living by it are two different things, and there’s the rub. In the “real world” of full time teaching, it seemed that many of us, at least some of the time, followed along well-worn traditional paths simply out of default rather than thoughtful choice. It’s hard to find the energy to be creative, when you’re buried in essays that need marked and with exams coming up soon.

Now I’m writing a novel, and knowing my nugget is becoming even more important to me, as a book invites a world of criticism and comments. Along with (hopefully) some people who will like my book, I know there will be some people who won’t. In my mind, I can already hear some of the comments, and I have thought about how I’ll respond to them. My nugget seems pretty clear to me. In writing my novel, it’s been a priority to create characters who are complex and conflicts that are complicated. In short, I’m aiming for the book to reflect real life. No character is wholly good or wholly bad and everything isn’t cheerily wrapped up in a completely happy ending. Real life is messy, real people are messy, and our complicated world is something to be both examined and celebrated – that’s the nugget of truth that has guided me in writing my novel.

In the upcoming revising process, I recognize as well that working within your nugget does not mean rejecting all criticism; rather, knowing your nugget can guide you in recognizing the constructive suggestions that will strengthen what you’re putting into the world. When I start working with an agent and editor, I anticipate doing re-writes, adding or deleting sections, and I’ll make these changes eagerly as long as the writing is made stronger and the nugget of the story remains intact.

To me, at this point in my life, knowing my nugget means writing with integrity. In my life overall, I’m thankful for the role that choices and freedoms have played in helping me discover, and live by, my core values, my nugget. Likewise, I appreciate the guidance that these values will give me as I make important decisions in the future. I’m sure as my life moves on, my values and choices will continue to influence each other. As time passes, we grow, we evolve, so my nugget ten years from now might be different. Hopefully, over time it will swell with wisdom, and glow with guidance.

SERMON: Knowing Your Nugget
Victoria Shepherd Rao, Intern Minister

What does this cutesy sermon title mean? Knowing Your Nugget? When this worship topic was suggested at the winter meeting of the Worship Associates program here at this church, it was expressed as “survival skills.” This topic is one of the very few which were suggested by one member of the Worship Associates group and taken on as a writing assignment by another member in the group. Sally Dennis, a young woman who teaches for the Austin School District on the eastern side of town suggested the topic. She wanted the issues of taking on roles and responsibilities, something we all do as functioning adults living in families and working in the community, to be examined including how hard it can be to find a core self there in us, somewhere underneath all the roles. I think it is a concern many of us can relate to. Knowing our religious center is something Davidson repeats over and over again to everyone who is listening, like a mantra. The core of our being or the nugget of truth of our own unique, individual, authentic being . Is there such a thing? Is it always there waiting for us to notice? Can we recognize it, quiet down and relax enough to sense it? Or does it speak to us regularly? Is it the guiding light of your life, the key to your priorities and the source of your motivation?

You have heard Cuileann’s reflections on the possibilities which come from knowing your nugget, and I want to share a story too. It is the story about how I came to know my last dog, Shef. I first saw Shef one day as I walked along the sidewalk of the industrial neighborhood where I worked in downtown Toronto. I worked in a fancy artsy animation studio in a large renovated warehouse, but across the street from the studio there was the gated yard of a stone mason. It looked pretty rough from across the street. Corrugated steel walls, barbed wire atop. Rundown. The gate was a standard frost fence. Off to the side there was a steel shed. There was a mountain of peat moss in big square bags off to the rear, large ground moving equipment parked haphazardly. I would never have noticed any of this except one day I happened to look over and saw Shef.

He was sitting at the gate. Sitting quietly and watching the street. He was a pup, maybe four months old. He looked like a German Shepherd with a big solid body, huge upright ears, a dark face and muzzle and light brown eyes. He didn’t notice me any more than anyone else on the street but from that first moment I could not forget about him. The next day I went up to the gate to meet him. He was happy for the attention. He was chained to the shed with a bare wire, sharp ends jutting out, attaching his collar to the chain. I felt concerned for him. I started to wonder about his owner or caretaker, was it the owner of the yard?

The studio had a cafeteria at the front of the building on the second floor, overlooking the yard opposite. It was a somewhat bleak foreground view but with quite a spectacular city scape view with the CN Tower in the background. It provided me with a great vantage and I began to spy on the operation across the street. It did not take me long to learn a crew of men arrived early in the morning, parked their vehicles on the street, prepared loads and took one or two trucks out all day, returning around six o’clock. The pup was acknowledged in a minimal way. It was fed in the evening. Open a can of dog food, push back the lid, throw it over to the dog. I could not see any sign that the dog was cruelly treated and he expressed no fear when I visited with him through the gate.

Now I was working those days. I was a production coordinator for one of the preproduction departments at the animation studio. I managed the storyboards for all projects going through the studio. I had to stay “on top” of a lot of revisions but I certainly had time to watch the yard, visit with the pup, and obsess over whether I should try to improve his lot. It was clear that he was set in place to become a guard dog, alone and largely neglected for his whole life. Yet it was equally clear that he was, by nature, neither fearful nor mean. I felt my concern for him grow to enormous proportions in my life. Should I call the Humane Society? I wondered if I should try to steal the dog? Should I try to make friends with the owner and take care of the dog?

It wasn’t long before I was trespassing. I found a way in, climbing over a rear gate one afternoon, and I approached the pup from the inside of the yard. He was happy to see me, clearly excited by the prospect of some company. I sat down on the gravel and dirt beside the shed and pet him. He drank it in. I pulled out an apple and offered him a few pieces of it. He gently explored the bite-sized pieces with his nose and ate them all up. Then he lay down right beside me, and laid his head in my lap and fell asleep. This experience for me was akin to epiphany, the experience of seeing God. Webster’s defines epiphany as “a sudden, intuitive perception of reality or the essential meaning of something, often initiated by some simple commonplace occurrence.” The feeling I had was joy and at the presence of this pure being of love who had just laid himself down on me with a perfect trust. It was a perception of bliss. Unexpected, but unmistakable. I sat there and let him rest on me for a while and then I had to go. I did not want to get caught. It was painful to separate from Shef. From that first time our being together was so palpably life-giving, as if we physically nourished one another. Back in the office, the implications were confusing and they became more urgent. I asked everyone what I should do about this wonderful pup: my parents, my sisters, my friends, my coworkers. Mostly people had a hard time understanding why it mattered so much, why I was so impassioned. I could not rest until I responded to the nugget of truth which I witnessed in this creature. It reminds me of the feeling St. Augustine expressed about finally finding rest in his connection to God. I had to respond to this dog. Should I call the Humane Society and subject him to the impersonal safety of an institutional cage? Should I try to make friends with the owner and take care of the dog with his permission?

To make a long and involved story short, that is what I did. I made friends with Manual de Costa, a gentle Portuguese man who owned the yard, the trucks and the dog and I asked if I could help to take care of the dog. I am not sure what he thought about me but he agreed and gave me a key to his yard. I visited Shef before work, on my breaks, after work and on weekends. I replaced the wire with proper hardware. I fed him his dinner and started taking him out for walks. I encouraged my dog-loving coworkers who watched all of this while they were drinking their coffees and eating their lunches, to take their turn in walking Shef, buying him treats, donating old towels, etc. I kept the leash in my desk and folks from all over the studio dropped by to pick it up and take Shef out. Shef became a social butterfly and I got to know many new people at the studio. When winter came on, my father (bless his sweet soul) made Shef a wonderful two chambered, insulated doghouse. On the coldest mornings, I would take Shef cooked rolled oats and hot consume each morning. After work, we would play in the yard and walk the whole neighborhood together until my feet would be so frozen that I would could stand the pain no more. But those were very happy times. Shef and I wandered everywhere, old warehouses, parking lots the meadow hills above the rail tracks and yards. We went into the deserted exposition grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition and from there across to the parklands along the shoreline of Lake Ontario. For hours every day, we explored. I felt safe with Shef. He was eighty-five pounds full grown with an alert, intense gaze. Parting each day was still terrible. Shef knew the routine and that I would be back the next morning, but he would always bark his protest until I was out of earshot. The seasons of a full year passed with this lifestyle.

Once, Shef de Costa escaped the yard by climbing up the peat moss mountain and jumping down the ten foot wall to an adjoining parking lot. I remember a frightening search around the warehouses and on the tracks, finding him, and then beginning a slow project of convincing Manual to neuter him to curb his wondering instincts. I was amazed when he agreed. It was the beginning of Manual understanding that Shef had become my dog and when he finally gave Shef to me, he came home to stay. And that is where I’ll end my Shef story for now. I wanted to tell it to you this morning as an example of how natural and unpredictable and radical it can be to follow our bliss or the core of our truth- ‘knowing our nugget.’ The truth for me was the fact that the little pup sitting at that gate was a stellar canine, good as gold. The truth was that I could get as involved with him as I was willing to, no holds barred. The truth was that I could take care of his needs from across the street and that my heart was as thirsty as his to drink in the simple joy of reliable, trusting companionship. There was nothing better, nothing more humanizing, nothing more soul-satisfying for me to do.

Now, to switch gears, let us identify and distinguish between core values of a religious kind versus those of a social or political kind. Davidson has much to say in this area as well. He figures many Unitarian Universalists, including myself, are pretty confused about the nature of their core values. So, let’s take a look at a value we likely all share, that all people be treated with kindness and respect regardless of the religious ideas they hold. In terms of the purposes and principles this value touches on the first principle that affirms the worth and dignity of all persons, and the second principle that upholds equity and compassion in human relations, the third principle of the practice of acceptance of one another, and the fourth principle which upholds individual, free and responsible searches for truth and meaning. Now, how can we tell whether that is a religious value or a social or political value?

Let’s take a clearly religious idea to see if we can clarify the nature of our core values. Let’s say I believed the purpose of my life at the time I met Shef was to devote myself to this dog. If I was to meet you after church and reveal this to you, chances are you would not share this same orientation, you wouldn’t all of a sudden decide to follow me, but you, as a good UU, are still willing to worship with me because you want to have the freedom to hold unconventional beliefs too. We both value this freedom, maybe even more than we value the religious ideas about purpose and meaning themselves. We value the basic assumptions: that you and I can both handle experiments in thinking; that we can be trusted with trying on different worldviews; that we will not lose our grip on life; that we will not be damned to hell through our inquiry; that we will not hurt others with our thinking, but indeed, hope to make a positive difference in the world with the doing which flows out of our thinking.

The UU principles can be understood as a kind of infrastructure of affirmations to ensure that we have support from our communities regardless of the conventionality of our religious values. We make a commitment to equity and acceptance in relations with each other to pave the way for personal freedom to wonder about life. I take a path of communion with a befriended guard dog, and that is the core truth I bring to the table. You witness another religious idea that you do not necessarily buy, but you stay committed to equity and acceptance. That does start to sound like social and political values social in the concern for the well-being of all, political in the implied sharing of power by all But why? Is it because we believe the individual search for truth and meaning will result in people finding their core religious value and living it? How did Davidson say it last week, What do we serve with our time? What Gods or what high ideals do we dedicate ourselves to? What truths about life do our lives amplify? Life is good, healing is possible, prayer is transformative, love is surprising and expanding. My adventures with Shef revealed other nuggets of truth too, that people are trustworthy, that we can do a lot with small efforts, that love never faileth. Liberal religious values are served by our commitments to socially and politically empowering relationships but we also need wisdom to recognize our core religious values. We all need a North star to orient us and help us to navigate through life according to the most fundamental truths of our being. This has been the role of religion through the ages, the function of religious values.

Now I want to return to my story about Shef and take a look at the guidance I received at the time from a source of human wisdom, the I Ching. The I Ching or The Book of Changes is one of the most ancient texts of China. It is a complex book which likely emerged out of centuries of divination and oral tradition, with legendary authors, and layers of commentary revealing Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian worldviews. It was said that Confucius himself wore out three copies of the I Ching in his lifetime. I was introduced to the I Ching by a coworker friend, an older woman who was a free thinker, a martial artist, a dramatic person who understood life as a stage. She gave me The I Ching Workbook by R.L. Wing and a set of color-coded beads with which she taught me to use the book as an oracle. I did not ask her for these things, it was not for a birthday present. It was a case of pure grace. She herself used the I Ching for guidance through confusion and difficulty and I learned from her how to consult the text and how to frame questions in making an inquiry. I began to use the I Ching in the spring of 1987, not long before I started to work at the animation studio. It was that following October that I asked the question: What is the best approach to take to Shef? How much of my time do I give to him?

Now by that time I had already decided to get involved in his life, but I felt I needed guidance in determining how he should rate in terms of my priorities. Without going into a technical explanation of how answers are found in the I Ching, I want to share the answers I got to this particular question. The first was the answer the oracle gave was concerning the idea of Subordination. Subordination is a necessary condition for many people in many situations, whenever they are subject to conditions over which they have no control. Often the roles we play in family and organizations require our subordination. The time of subordination is one where it is wise for us to be content with fulfilling our role. Our capacities to plan and execute our plans must wait until circumstances change. The guidance I took from this was to continue with the role I had taken on as Shef’s caretaker within the limitations of his continuing role as guard dog for the stone mason, Manual de Costa.

The second answer the oracle gave concerned Great Power. When the oracle offers a second idea to consider, it is understood as an indicator of future developments on the subject of inquiry, so the notion of Great Power following subordination held promise. Great power is understood to be a true test of a person’s character. Wisdom dictates that the possession of great power can lead to progress and enlightenment or to chaos and evil, therefore it is important to have honorable motives and demonstrate correct behavior at such a time, always considering the demands of propriety and goodness. The promise of great power is that by bringing progress to others, you strengthen your own sense of well-being. The guidance I took here was to proceed naturally in the relationship with Shef with care and to trust the process of our growing friendship, and accepting whatever flowed from it with discernment.

As you can see, the nature of the answers and the guidance given by the I Ching is open to interpretation and is very much oriented to contemplation. Over the years, I have found that very helpful. When I get to a place which feels stuck or when I have to face a situation that confuses me, I have found consulting the I Ching, the process of retreat and ritual required, the reflection required to articulate the central question and the contemplation required to ingest the answers, to be a very comforting and reliable source of guidance. And that may be because it is in the tough personal work of framing our own questions that we have the chance to recognize our own deepest yearnings and highest calling.

More than any other ancient text, the I Ching has provided for me a sage perspective to the small troubles of my life. Like the wisdom traditions of all the world’s religions, it offers the observations and intelligence of countless generations. But the I Ching expresses some far eastern cosmologies which I want to highlight for you because they have provided for me useful variations on the western religious worldview which has a separate creator god showing up to make and control everything. There is still a divine realm, the realm of the invisible to which humanity is connected. There is the earthly realm as well where we dwell. Humanity itself becomes the connection between the two realms, complete with all the impulses and instincts of our nature, as well as the limitations and fates of our individual lives. Cosmic Order is a real possibility in this worldview. It is a matter of the harmony possible when the development of the individual matches the needs of the cosmos, or the condition of heaven and earth immediately around him or her. The Source of such cosmic order is envisioned as a well: deep, inexhaustible, a source of nourishment. The town can be moved but not the well. No, it must be returned to. The source contains and is born of the collective truth of humanity. It receives from the individual’s experience and gives to the individual’s nature. Penetrating the source of human meaning can be seen as the major theme of Chinese philosophy just as loving God can be seen as the major theme of the biblical religions. (I Ching)

Just listen to the bittersweet sentiment of a Rabbi who knows his nugget:

While I was young, when I burned with the love of God, I thought I would convert the whole world to God. But soon I realized that it would be more than enough to convert the people who lived in my town, and I made an effort for a long time, but was not successful. Then I realized that my agenda was still too ambitious, and I focused on the people in my household. But I could not convert them either. Finally, I realized: I must work on myself, if I’m really going to have something to offer God. But I didn’t even accomplish this. (From The Sun Magazine, Sunbeams, pg 48, March 2005)

In this one sad cry we hear the core religious value of love of God and the core religious value of always cleaving to the truth of the self in relation to God or to the cosmos. And religions are expressions and servants of the human quest to reach out beyond the horizon of self and self interest, no matter how badly they fail or we do. Knowing your nugget might not be easy or straightforward or even possible at times, but if we can become acquainted with the truths which connect us, as quirky individuals, to the whole enterprise of living and dying, and follow them amidst the whole mixed bag of life, and if we can keep connected, always returning to the truth, we will find guidance as we negotiate the freedoms, roles and responsibilities life presents us all with.

What is it you have to offer to God, or how is it you might serve your highest ideals, or the truth of your own authentic being? What are the epiphanies of your life? Are you ready to know your nugget? I will end with the popular mystic poet of Islam, Rumi’s advice when it comes to recognizing the religious values at the core of our being. He said:

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.

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High School Seniors Bridging Ceremony

Victoria Shepherd Rao
Delivered by Don Smith
08 May 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Earth mother, star mother,
You who are called by a thousand names,
May all remember
we are cells in your body
and dance together.

You are the grain and the loaf
that sustains us each day,
And as you are patient
with our struggles to learn

So shall we be patient
with ourselves and each other.
We are radiant light
and sacred dark -the balance-

You are: the embrace that heartens,
and the freedom beyond fear.
Within you we are born,
we grow, live and die-

You bring us around the circle to rebirth,
Within us you dance forever.

Amen.

SLT #524 Starhawk

High School Seniors Bridging Ceremony

We are now going to have one of the rare rituals our Unitarian Universalist tradition has for us. This is a Bridging Ceremony, an initiation ritual in which we will ask our High School Seniors to come up and cross over from their youth and as YRUU community members here the church and into a new territory as Young Adult Unitarian Universalists about to set the world on fire outside the confines of this particular congregation. We have a member of the Young Adult Religious Network, Lisa Fredin, to welcome them.

The Young Adult Religious Network is a long standing group of young adults, from all over the city, that meets every week here with the leadership of the Rev’d. Kathleen Ellis of Live Oak UU Church. It is part of a larger network of Young Adult Unitarian Universalist groups which meet in towns all over the continent.

This bridging is a symbolic act to re-enact a very real transition in the lives of these young people. They are moving from home and home town and taking on new identities independent of families and church communities. It is a very exciting and significant transition. As we watch them bridge, let us commit ourselves to support them, their parents and families as they test their wings. As the hymn says, wings set us free but the roots, they hold us. That support becomes especially important when new territory and identity is explored. They will each light a candle from our chalice to symbolize their new being within our wider Unitarian Universalist community.

Before we get into the bridging ritual, we will hear from our graduating seniors as they tell us about their plans for next year. And then Lisa Fredin will say a few words to introduce the Young Adult Program and extend an invitation to any interested newcomers out there.

Coming of Age Presentation

This is a special service. It is the time for giving the five eighth graders who have been participating in this years’ Coming of Age Program a chance to share their Credo Statements. The Credo Statements are statements of faith. A tough assignment for people of any age. We have asked these thirteen year olds to articulate what it is they believe about life and the way of the world, and what it is they value most in living, The understanding is that these statements are snapshots, the thinking of a moment in time. We have asked that they be honest and promised them that what they say will not be held against them. They are not committing themselves to life-long agreement, in fact, we hope the benefit of doing these statements will be largely realized in the future as the participants will read them and be able to reflect back on their earlier selves. In our liberal religious tradition, it is okay to explore ideas and ways of interpreting life and our own place in the grand scheme of it.

The Coming of Age program has been a year-long event. This has been the second year running. I have helped Carrie Evans, the Youth Assistant in preparing and sharing the once a month Sunday morning sessions where topics have ranged from values identification, liberal religion, and life choices. The program asked the youth to interview church leaders of their choice, visit another UU congregation in town and attend the worship service here. They have been asked to help with church events, to provide some service to the church, to help with a worship event, and to get involved in a social action project in the community. All the youth participated in the Christmas pageant. It is a lot of effort to ask of young people and these individuals you will now hear have shown a determination to see it through. I have appreciated their honesty and I hope you will too.

Each participant has been mentored by an adult from the congregation whom you’ll now meet as they step up to introduce themselves and their mentees in turn.

The following are the unedited credo statements from the bridging participants.

Credo Statement:
Thomas McLaren

Religion plays a somewhat small part in my life, but what I do believe in, as I have learned, is somewhat hard to define. This is a summary of my beliefs.

I believe that there is a higher power in the world. I think of this power as God. God, in my opinion, does not interfere with human life very often. I think that God is probably understanding of all religions and faiths.

Out of all the beliefs and religions of the world that I know of I think Buddhism makes the most sense. That you cannot just do good deeds and be accepted into heaven for all of eternity. You have to make yourself ready to be removed from the cycle first. To do this you have to truly be a good person, you can’t just do good deeds and not really mean it you must truly want to help people out. You have as much time as you need to do so also.

I believe in karma too. For me karma is a sort of reward system. If you do good deeds in this life then in the next one you will be rewarded. If you act badly you will be punished accordingly. Karma helps me live my life with regards to others.

I also believe that there is a negative force. This force isn’t purely negative, it just distracts from reaching your goal. This force is one of the main reasons people take so long to attain nirvana, which is the ultimate reward. There isn’t a specific name for this force it is just all the bad things in the world put together.

I do not pray, even though I believe that there is a “God”. I do not think God is active enough in human life to help out very much with my personal problems.

All in all I believe the basic structure of Buddhism but with a few sort of “twists” of my own. I believe in nirvana as I mentioned earlier and I believe in reincarnation also. I believe in the ways to attain nirvana, but I also believe in a higher power like god or something. Together this makes up the religious part of my life.

Credo Statement:
Robbie Loomis-Norris

I see life logically. What I mean by this is that I believe what I see and hear and touch and taste and smell. I rely on what I can understand it true. Even though, I also believe what people tell me if it seems like it is logical. This leads me to say that I do not believe in any kind of god or goddess or higher being. Because, like I said before, I can not see, hear, feel, taste, or smell it

I think that the “purpose of life”, is to have as much fun as you can while you can. By that I don’t mean that you should always just blow off things that are more important, but say, if you were inside and it was a wonderful day, and all you are doing is watching TV or something, then you should get outside and have fun. But when there is something that you need to do or say or some kind of responsibility that you need to fulfill, then you need to get it over with so that you can go have fun. Basically, I say that I live life to the fullest unless there is something more important to do. By “important”, I mean something that would have a bad effect to you or someone close to you. Such as a very large English paper to write before the end of the school year, If you didn’t do that then it would completely mess up your grade and it would go on your permanent record.

People are a big part of my life, that’s not very unique, but it’s true. I think one of the most needed things for humans is friends, because they help you through everything that you need help with. Well, most things anyway. They help you when you need help with big things, like family problems, and also with small things like, “hey, which page were the questions for English on?” Anything that a person would need, most of the time they will look to friends for help. Of course, that’s not all friends are good for, they have fun with you, which is why people have friends in my opinion. My friends and I have fun because, like I said earlier, fun is the basis of life. Friends are friends because they like each other and because they can have fun and laugh together. Everybody knows that things aren’t nearly as fun if there’s no one to share the fun with.

People are not originally corrupt, in my opinion, but the things that they want or have, persuade them to do things that they wouldn’t do normally. Such things like stealing from people and killing and other inhumane things like that. People do those things so that they can look good or have things that they want. Some people steal things just for the sake of having them, like money. People steal money because they want it. I think money actually controls people, because it can get them anything they want, which means that money = the world. That might be so, but still, money can of course be used for good things too, such as something to give to other people that don’t have any so that they can get things that they need to live.

LIFE, it is what everyone is “here” for. Even though I do not believe in any kind of life after death, I still think that we have a reason for being here. And my reason is that we need to live life up. We need to keep our lives, because that is all we really have.

I don’t always follow these things that I believe in, but I try to most of the time. No one knows what they really believe I think, but they can dig deep enough to live by, and this is what I dug up from inside of myself.

Credo Statement:
Edward Balaguer

I have been asked many times what I believe in. After being asked this a couple hundred times, you decide to make time to think about it. (Having to think about it for coming of age also helps you make time for it) So, after thinking about what I believe in I have come up with a rough outline of what I believe. To answer the question that has always been asked is there such thing as God? No, there is no “God” No there isn’t a person or some being who sits up in the sky deciding who gets to go to “Heaven” and who goes to “Hell”, in my belief, there is some power out there that flows among everyone and everything it is present in everything and it manifests itself differently to everyone. This Power isn’t the same for everyone. There is no book that says what’s right and what’s wrong. There is no one person who can tell you that is wrong and this other thing is right. It is the power that dictates the unexplainable, and helps explain those things that we don’t know about or those things that should never happen. Such as “miracles” a miracle is something that goes against the normal course of nature or what should happen. If you looked at something like a miracle with a scientific, or logical state of mind, you would say that those things can happen their perfectly okay but then the chances of a “miracle” occurring are very little. But besides all the odds they still happen.

I came to this conclusion by examining other religions. In the past, in my opinion, religion was a way to explain the unexplainable. To help explain the world around them, such as if lightning hits a field of food and sets it on fire, it is because you did something to anger the gods or your god. But now, after science has explained most of the things in our modern lives, there are still those very few things which we cannot explain. How something should happen but it doesn’t, how a person can get lost at sea and somehow survive, how someone with a malignant brain tumor survives for 20 years without an operation, how someone is shot in the head but makes a full recovery, how things that are thought to be impossible happen. It gives people something to believe in besides pure science, and probability, because Science alone is just cold hard numbers that have no feeling. But on the other side, religion alone is too much feeling without any fact. Science alone or Religion alone can only take you so far. You need to mix science and religion to get the best . The knowledge and fact from science, but the feeling from religion. The best of two worlds, or in the words of Albert Einstein, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Credo Statement:
James Borden

When it comes to what I believe about the Universe and God, basically I believe in Darwinism, the Big Bang Theory and a kind of natural order to the Universe. It’s hard for me to believe that an entity decided to give this little gas ball (Earth) trees, water, and life. The traditional Christian view is that God created everything-but if he’s the creator, then who created him? While many people find the idea of God a source of strength and hope in their lives, I believe that God is functioning for them in the way an imaginary friend can give strength and comfort. While this is important and powerful for them, I find the same strength and comfort not in an imaginary God (“G-O-D”) but in a very real dog (“D-O-G”) Riley, who I can talk to and find strength, reflection and comfort.

I don’t believe that there is a set purpose to life. Instead I think that each person has to figure out for themselves what they want to do, how they want to live and how they will relate to others. Basically, there is no “God-given” rule about right and wrong that we can rely on to know what to do or how to live. However, humans have evolved a social system that helps us live happier, more productive lives with rules that are sometimes spelled out in laws and sometimes expressed through our culture. While the laws are available for anyone to read, the cultural ideas of right and wrong are a little harder to pin down, but they are just as important for the community. These include things like helping others in need, and telling the truth when it is helpful. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is another helpful expression of this kind of cultural rule that helps society function effectively.

So fundamentally I believe that laws of nature govern the Universe, of which we are a part, and therefore govern the cultural and written laws that we humans create and the society in which we live.

Credo Statement:
Kelley Donoghue
Statement removed at the request of the author. 1/10/2009

HOMILY: First Essays in the Art of Living
by Victoria Shepherd Rao, Intern Minister

I wanted to offer some reflections on some of what we have heard from Tom, Robbie, Edward, James, and Kelley.

There are familiar refrains in what they have chosen to talk about.

Edward has sought to find some kind of rational, comfortable balance between scientific or empirical knowledge and unexplainable revelation. Many in our congregations struggle to do the same.

James sees in life an opportunity to grow, perceiving enough of a natural orderliness in the world to trust the cultural framework we have inherited. And this is where we all live isn’t it, with hope?

Kelley gives voice to what many of us have experienced as a loss of faith in institutionalized religion. She questions any teaching that can lead to oppressive rather than liberating attitudes and ways.

Tom reveals a liberal approach to religion. He has tried on various interpretations of the human experience and decided that for him Buddhism makes the most sense. He exhibits the unselfconscious assimilation of centuries of liberalism in this, the Emersonian ideal of the individual persons capacity and God-given right to trust his own perceptions of the world as a reliable standard upon which to judge the convents of truth.

And Robbie speaks of values which many of us can relate easily to: the importance of people in our lives – family and friends, the truth that fun or enjoyment rests somewhere close to the center of life’s mysterious purpose. He shows no small insight when he identifies life as all that we can really know we have, each day, each sunny day we remember to get out to simply enjoy ourselves. This is an affirmation that is both deeply existential and spiritual.

All these statements express one of the unique spiritual gifts of our religious tradition. That is religion without the fear. No fear of institutional or eternal punishment for asking questions or having doubts. The down side of such freedom we all know is the possibility of confusion.

Here is a little story about a fish swimming along. He is burdened with a big question on his mind. But then he comes across a big fish.

“Excuse me,” said the little fish. “You are older than I, so can you tell me where to find the ocean?”

“The ocean,” said the other fish, “is the thing you are in now.”

“Oh, this? But this is water. What I am seeking is the ocean, ” said the little fish. Disappointed, he swam away to search elsewhere.

(Anthony De Mello, The Song of the Bird, pg.12-13)

This parable gives some indication of how confusing it can be to ask ourselves religious questions. And it has been difficult for these young people to tackle this credo writing assignment. But I hope they are not going to swim away disappointed. Because they may or may not recognize the significance of some very important positive things they have said to us this morning about the way the world seems to work. And so I want to briefly highlight them.

Edward has said that he believes that there is some power that flows in and among all things. This power explains the miraculous and can contain human feeling. Kelley also spoke about a force that flows through everything which everyone can feel and no one can describe. It connects everything. Holding this belief, she says, brings order to her life and eases confusion. Helps the world seem a bit less crazy.

Tom talked about some Buddhist beliefs that he has found useful. He is in the minority in this group, choosing to name the nameless, “God.” He ventures beyond the certainties of this life and takes comfort in the idea of reincarnation, the idea that we all have as much time as we need, as many lifetimes as we need, to learn the lessons we need about love and kindness. Tom says this way of understanding life, with a final goal of reaching enlightenment, helps him live his life “with regard to others.” How to live “with regard to others.” We all need to learn these lessons on living “with regard to others.” This is universal teaching.

As Robbie said, you have to dig deep into your self to come up with this stuff and these articulations show a great sensitivity to the paradox or contradiction inherent in religious ideas. They are beyond human words and understanding. Words may be used to speak of such things but they cannot contain or completely describe the ultimate truth.

But still, we know we can experience the coherence of ultimate reality and most of us do. James has said, in earlier versions of his credo anyway, that he talks to his dog, Riley, and that he has found comfort and real relationship with his dog. And such is the experience of babes in the arms of their new parents. It is the feeling of an unconditional love, a wordless embrace, a word-transcending feeling of acceptance. Such experiences are the foundation of love of God or life, the stuff of faith.

Robbie talked about the importance of his close connections to his friends, how his relationships with others enhance the experience of fun. It is something about sharing that makes it real. It reminds me of Mother Teresa’s words about love, that love can have no meaning if it remains by itself. It has got to be something which connects us to others, something which is expressed in action which connects us to others or else it is meaningless.

Words fail to signify the depth and power of such experiences of love and relatedness. But the fortunate truth is we are experiencing creatures and we don’t need words and ideas to draw the vital spiritual sustenance available to us through relationships with others. It is there, in the eyes, in the face let us always take the time to look into one another’s eyes and faces and see there communion.

But these young people have gone on a word chase and they have worked hard to find the words which express their views at this time. It is hard to call out from the wilderness between the vast expanses of childhood and adulthood, where they are now – hard to know what you think and believe, and to find the courage to share it with others, to say it out loud. I want to commend Kelley and Tom and Robbie and James and Edward. It has been a great learning challenge for all of us. Carrie and I want to thank you for sticking with it and we want to thank the mentors and all the parents for supporting us all the way.

Mark Morrison-Reed, one of the ministers at Toronto’s First Unitarian Church, and one of the first preachers of this movement to inspire me, has said that “the task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all[that there is] a connectednessdiscovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others.” This morning you have all been called to witness to such particularities in the lives of a handful of families of this community. May the sharing of the milestones of our personal lives build the strength of the bonds of our communal life. Morrison-Reed asserts that the religious community is essential because, “Together, our vision is widened and our strength is renewed.” He was speaking about the potentiality of the religious community to act for justice in the world and that is a very important calling on the church, but what he says is also true on a personal level, for meeting the challenges of changes and transitions in our lives, in all their particular dimensions.

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Victoria Shepherd Rao
Marsha Sharp, Worship Associate
17 April 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Excerpted from Manitongquat’s Prayer,
 in Honoring Earth: A Seventh Principle Project Worship Resource

O Humankind, are we not all brothers and sisters,
 are we not the grandchildren of the Great Mystery?
 Do we not all want to love and be loved,
 to work and to play,
 to sing and dance together?

But we live with fear.
Fear that is hate, fear that is mistrust, envy, greed, vanity.
Fear that is ambition, competition, aggression.
Fear that is loneliness, anger, bitterness, cruelty

And yet, fear is only twisted love,
love turned back on itself,
love that was denied, love that was rejected.

And love.
Love is life – creation, seed and leaf
and blossom and fruit and seed.

Love is growth and search and reach and touch and dance.
Love is life believing in itself.
And life life is the Sacred Mystery singing to itself,
dancing to its drum, telling stories, improvising, playing.
And we are all that Spirit,

Our stories tell but one cosmic story that we are love indeed.
That perfect love in me seeks the love in you.
And if our eyes could ever meet without fear
we would recognize each other and rejoice,
for love is life believing in itself. 
So may it be.

Manitongquat is a medicine man of the Wampanoag Nation. He delivered this prayer at the First Rainbow Gathering in 1971.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: “Wealth”
Marsha Sharp

What is the first thing that pops into your head when I say the word WEALTH? I’ll bet it had something to do with money. In our U.S. culture, when one speaks of wealth, most of us are trained to think in terms of monetary values.

The “wealth” I’m speaking about today includes not only money, but also health (both physical and mental), natural resources, friends, family-our relatively high quality of life.

As a nation, we crab about the cost of gasoline, but look at how many cars are on the road and how many cars are parked in one driveway. We grouse about the cost of health care and the lack of health care. We support one colossal weight-loss industry and yet we are probably the fattest nation in the world. Even many of our poor, when compared to the world’s poor, are wealthy.

I recently finished a fascinating book by Jared Diamond called “Collapse.” In it he relates how ancient and modern societies succeeded or collapsed. What happens when a society strips its natural resources such as forests and minerals? What happens when populations explode beyond what the society is able to support? What happens when non-native species are introduced into an eco-system that has developed over millennia? How do people survive who are so wedded to their native cultures and customs that they are unable to adopt survival skills in order to survive in a foreign land? In all of these situations, cultures and populations live on the brink and then finally fail. What all of these situations have in common are the issues of survival and quality of life.

Every day we interact with people who grew up in other cultures and are striving to have better lives than the ones they left behind. The world is truly global. All those Third World nations now have televisions and the internet and are discovering what they’ve been missing out on all these years. The world’s resources can only go so far. In order for everyone-and I mean EVERYONE-to have the standards we have, we will have to lower our First World standards in order to even begin leveling the playing field. Are we willing to do that? What are we willing to give up in order to have equity in the world? To find equity just in our own country?

I will be the first to admit I love my creature comforts. I like having a car, a warm, secure home to live in, indoor toilets, running hot and cold water IN my house, plenty of food, nice clothes, a job. What am I willing to give up? I never lived as my grandparents did as children-growing everything they ate, living hand to mouth, no retirement, outdoor plumbing, well water, making everything they wore. They, and my parents, strived to make things better for their progeny and they succeeded. Our generation strives to do the same.

But in light of all the desires and needs of the rest of the world, what will happen? Will the next two generations after ours strive to lower the standards for their offspring in order for the entire world to survive? Have we already begun to train our children not to expect more? Or have they, like us, become well-trained to indeed expect more?

And what is that “more?” Is it just monetary? I hope it includes taking care of oneself to reduce preventable health problemsincludes healthy relationships with family and friendsincludes using our resources prudentlyincludes limiting our populations. I believe it makes a difference what that “more” is.

Now, what is the first thing that pops into your head when I say the word WEALTH?

SERMON

Happy Earth Day and congratulations on your Green Sanctuary certification. Cathy has told you about the Green Sanctuary Program of the Seventh Principle Project, an affiliated organization of the UUA dedicated to helping UUs walk the talk of the association’s seventh principle, the one that calls on us to “respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

There is something about the phrasing of this principle that seems belabored. I like the way it is expressed for the kids better: “We care for Earth’s lifeboat.” Now that arouses some vivid imagery. Like we are all in a giant Noah’s Ark, drifting around the vast universe together. It presses the point that we are all completely dependent on our little blue green vessel. That is the truth of our existential nature that we dwell on the surface of this amazing biosphere. It is strong and steady with an amazing capacity to recycle natural materials and renew itself. The variety of life forms and the adaptability of them to their environments it is not just Darwin’s evolutionary idea, it is a profound source of human joy and awe.

One of my favorite bible lines is from the gospel of Mark. Jesus is teaching about the realm of God, or the source of all creation. He said, “The [realm] of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The Earth produces of itself.” (Mk.4:26-28 NRSV). I love the admission of the limit to human understanding. We do not know how life comes into being (though fantastic progress has been made in understanding the mechanics of life with DNA and genome research) and we sure do not know why. When we ask these basic questions, we have to confront the limits of our human condition and the mystery which is at the center of earthly existence. Whether you believe in Creation or evolution, it is impossible to avoid mystery. In the face of the unknowable we more easily turn to a deep sense of gratitude for life, thankful for the gift of it, conscious of the grace by which we live and are sustained in this world.

Yet we hear it in the news daily, it is all bad news when it comes to the environment. Pollution is killing the life in the oceans. Scientists don’t expect the coral reefs to last past 2050. The pollution from gas emissions is warming the atmosphere and the planet, melting the glaciers, melting the polar ice caps, causing violent weather changes, including hurricanes and flooding. Wilderness is sacrificed to development. Species are losing their habitats, becoming extinct and upsetting whole ecosystems. The human population is pressing the supportive capacity of Earth. The nuclear waste from reactors is vulnerable to terrorist attacks and could poison whole regions rendering them uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. Global free enterprise and corporate interests are given access to national markets and the rights to profitable business enterprise trump the human rights of workers to a basic living wage, growing the gap between the richest and the poorest in every nation and part of the world. Scientists can measure how and make projections on the rates at which humanity is destroying this biosphere. They have been calling out warnings for decades. Environmentalists have joined in the chorus to remind us that there is nowhere else to go. We know it even if we often deny it or ignore it.

There is no way to bail out and if we want to live, we are stuck here, together, on Earth. The nineteenth century’s most influential theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, had a definition of religion which aptly develops the lifeboat imagery, he said religion was about having “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent.” It is the kind of uncomfortable consciousness which would come quite easily if you were indeed cast adrift in a lifeboat on the ocean, your ship sunk, the horizon wide, no land in sight. That’d be kind of a sickening feeling, wouldn’t it? You can see yourself: trying not to panic, trying to think clearly, taking stock of your situation, the available resources, utilizing them rationally, making plans and taking steps to increase your chances of survival, and doing it all because of an indwelling hope that you will be rescued, you will be saved.

It is much more difficult to imagine the Earth as a lifeboat but this morning I want to try to do that so that we can get to a more religious perspective of our home planet, a religious perspective which includes not only a sickening, panicky feeling of total dependence on what might well be a sinking ship, but one that also includes clear thinking, and taking stock, utilizing resources rationally and making plans to take steps which will increase our chances of survival, and all because of an indwelling hope in a future for our children on Earth. We must claim this hope and we must express it in the way we live whether we are optimistic about environmental issues or not.

So happy Earth Day?! It’s sort of like turning the birthdays of middle age. Happy 43rd Birthday! Happy 57th! Happy 66th!! Well, yes it is a birthday, but happy? Earth Day is another one of those more recent holidays you may not know too much about. It always falls on April 22nd. It was founded by a US senator, Gaylord Nelson, in 1970 after almost a decade of effort. He was also a governor of Wisconsin and he wanted to somehow bring the issues of pollution and environmental degradation into the field of national politics. He envisioned a special annual day dedicated to education and agitation for environmental causes in the style of the teach-ins which occurred on college campuses to protest the Vietnam War. The first Earth Day involved some 20 million Americans across the nation. He had definitely hit onto something that mattered to people. Twenty years later some 200 million people were observing Earth Day in 141 countries and it is the most celebrated environmental event world-wide. And as our world becomes more endangered more people join in. In 2004, 500 million in 180 countries.

The awareness raising effect of Earth Day led to important legislation being passed in the US including the Environmental Protection Act, The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. It helped established the idea that we need as a nation to protect the resources upon which we depend. Now the problems of environmental damage clearly transcend national borders and the whole world needs to act together to deal effectively with our lifeboat.

The First UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on climate change and species extinction called together heads of state to forge this global approach. The Kyoto Protocol to limit CO2 emissions is an example of such international cooperation for the sake of the planet’s health. Rejecting the Kyoto Protocol was one of the first signs of President Bush’s unwillingness to put the well being of the biosphere ahead of the interests of the Unites Sates. He said limiting emissions would limit the economic growth of the nation and that was that.

But is economic growth so vitally important? Let’s pick up on a few of Marsha’s points.

First, what is the true nature of wealth? A lot of people are asking themselves this question, in fact it is a whole societal subculture asking. In Europe, in North America, in the UK, people all over the industrialized West in fact, are taking this question to heart, What truly enriches my life? The answer is simplicity, or the Simplicity Movement. This movement is made up of people like you and me who have disposable income which we are free to spend. Simplifying is a matter of consciously questioning our assumptions about how to spend that income. Do we want more and more stuff? Do we derive satisfaction from our consumption? What is enough? What is the personal cost of working a sixty hour week? Do we need to work so long and hard for the endless gadgets, toys, fashions, and trends? The objective of simplifying is not to just stop consuming but to consume only that which brings you enjoyment and satisfaction. For many people it is taking a step off the bandwagon where the basic assumption that more is better – more income, more property, more stuff. The people who choose to simplify have decided that more time to enjoy with family and friends leads to much greater satisfaction than more income.

Enough is not a concept we relate to all that well but in a world of limited resources, it is an idea whose time has come. North American culture is much more attuned to the notion that enough is not really enough. We don’t want just enough, we want more than enough. Didn’t Jackie Kennedy say you could never be rich enough or thin enough?

I started to notice how the understanding of enough worked in India. We had some Muslims neighbors and when they were over and I was offering them refreshments, I noticed that when I would offer them more, they would not say, “No thank you,” they would say, “Enough.” I thought about this and discovered the subtle difference of perspective behind the manners. There is something beyond a sense of individual entitlement in the determination of enough, there is a consideration of the possibility of sharing with others. If this is enough for me, then I am satisfied. If there is more to be had, let it be for the satisfaction of others.

I think we need to learn what may be some new and strange skills. We need to become aware of the levels and degrees of our own satisfaction, to identify what in our lives truly has the capacity to satisfy us, and how to measure our satisfaction, to get an idea of what is enough. Think of eating dinner. How many of us keep our awareness on when exactly we feel our appetite is satisfied and how many of us allow that sufficiency to end our meal? Now you may be thinking, “If I have paid for this buffet, I am going to eat all I can!” But we all know how that can work out. We eat too much, get uncomfortably stuffed, have to take a nap. Years of this kind of overeating lead to weight problems and it is not good for our health. Now, if we eat too much at a buffet it does not deprive anyone else from eating we think. But as a principle applied to all aspects of our lifestyle, consider: recognizing sufficiency can guide us to some sense of our fair share.

Marsha talked about how her grandparents provided for themselves by growing their own food and sewing their own clothes. Not only did they meet their basic needs but in the process of doing so they became wealthy in their sense of their own capacity to produce and rely on themselves. They exercised their ingenuity and developed their skills. They depended on the land and each other. That seems to describe a lifestyle much richer in the potential for finding satisfaction and relationship than the familiar pattern of commuting, working at a job for eight or ten hours a day, going shopping and keeping up with the bills. Granted, our lifestyle is less physically demanding and more comfortable but is ease a true standard by which to judge the quality of life? I think our lives are enriched with realness in relationships and in personal challenges.

William Ellery Channing wrote these words which speak well to these issues of what adds to our quality of life:

To live content with small means,
 to seek elegance rather than luxury,
 and refinement rather than fashion,
 to be worthy, not respectable, wealthy, not rich,
 to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly,
 to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart,
 to bear all cheerfully,
 do all bravely,
 await occasions,
 hurry never-
 in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
 grow up through the common.
 This is to be my symphony.

This brings us back to the common. Our world, Earth. A beautiful, finite biosphere. Marsha wondered what we would be willing to give up in order to have equity in the world, so that everyone could hope to have their basic needs met. She asked what we in the First World [sic] would be willing to give up? The US uses 25% of the world’s fuel and is the least willing, as a nation, to give up economic growth for the sake of Earth’s continued health. “Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War Against Terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life.” (Arundhati Roy, “Come September” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, pg. 239) But will the world be persuaded to live with greater hardship and scarcity for this land of plenty? I guess that’s one of the reason why this nation is spending more than twenty percent of its wealth on its military might. But might does not make right. And we know that it is immoral to continue in the lifestyle of overconsumption and waste. There is a world beyond America.

Let us be very proud of the Green Sanctuary certification of this church. May this be the beginning of a continuing trend among us to seek out ways of life that are both enriching and sustainable. It is true that the environmentalism of our day is apocalyptic and there is not too much in the news to feed our optimism that things will get much better very soon however, please remember that there is a difference between optimism and hope. “Hope is an active, determined conviction that is rooted in the spirit, chosen by the heart, and guided by the mind.” Journalist Mark Hertsgaard reminds us that: “Hope has triumphed numerous times in recent human history – think of the falls of apartheid and the Soviet Empire – and it is indispensable to humanity’s chances of creating an environmentally sustainable future.” (“The Green Dream” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb, pg. 254)

So, claim hope. Try to develop your sense of what really gives you satisfaction in your lifestyle and try to discern how much is enough for you. Go on with your recycling and adopt a new green practice at regular intervals. If you do not recycle and want to begin to reduce the imprint of your lifestyle on the environment, check out the Earth’s Ten Commandments printed on the insert of your order of services to get some ideas. Support the work for a sustainable future and teach your children to worship our mother, Earth. She is beautiful, precious, fragile, mysterious in her ways, in her origin and in her destiny.

Amen.

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© Victoria Shepherd Rao
Clare Tilson, Worship Assistant
06 March 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

From the Qur’an, Umm Salamah’s verses (Surah 33:35):

“Lo! Men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender,
and men who believe and women who believe,
and men who obey and women who obey,
and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth,
and men who persevere, and women who persevere,
and men who are humble and women who are humble,
and men who give alms, and women who give alms,
and men who fast and women who fast,
and men who guard their modesty,
and women who guard their modesty,
and men who remember God much and women who remember -
God has prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.”

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Women’s Work
Clare Tilson

I was watching TV with my grandfather while my grandmother scooted around cleaning. I asked him if he ever helped her and he said that THAT was Women’s Work. He didn’t just mean that being traditional was his way of life. He meant to convey that he was superior to that sort of work. Yow. This was the first time I’d heard the term, Women’s Work. Since then, the term has been redefined for me.

As a graduate student of Animal Behavior, a professor asked if I thought the traditional parenting roles taken on by men and women were influenced more by nature or nurture. I gave an answer that Gloria Steinum would have been pleased with. In short, such behavior was mostly learned. But he politely disagreed; that there must be quite a bit of hard wiring to such a behavioral pattern since it was so prevalent among animals. I chaffed at the way his logic bound me to a certain life. Ha! Now, I am immersed in the reproductive part of life where men’s and women’s roles tend to polarize. I have to say that this women’s work feels pretty hard-wired, and is the most perfect fit for who I am of anything I have ever done. And, contrary to what my grandfather thinks, life as a stay-at-home mommy is far from inferior, menial work. In fact, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I bet he couldn’t do it.

But, there were other times in my life where I have done women’s work or witnessed the benefit of women’s work and wisdom.

Davidson sent me a New York Times article about cutting-edge scientists examining personality in animals. He sent the article to me because I had once told him about the personalities I had come to admire in my study animals when I was a master’s student. My study animals weren’t cats or dogs or something charismatic like that. They were moths. Big moths that I had to hold and hand-feed every day. Some were more fearful, some were gutsy fighters, and some were quicker at learning the routine. I still remember one moth in particular. She had long outlived her experimental usefulness, but I continued to feed her every day because I had grown fond of her. She was exceptionally sweet-tempered. I remember telling my advisor about my observations. He was incredulous and condescending. Whatever. I was right. Now, studying animal personalities is cutting edge.

And there are plenty of other female scientists influencing science. I remember hearing a seminar on befuddling bird hierarchies. They couldn’t figure out why one male was top bird one week and then dirt the next. Until, that is, a female researcher looked at the same data and said, the hierarchy you seek is among the female birds. Male status was a function of which female the male associated with.

So science is evolving under the influence of women’s work and wisdom.

But what about business and politics and religion? I think women have even more room to do their work in these fields. And when they do, it’ll be amazing. Won’t you just love it when business is less about greed and more about making sure that one’s success is not at the expense of our children’s world? Won’t you just love it when there are no more wars, and the most aggressive thing that happens among nations is an occasional catty remark shot across the desks at the United Nations? And won’t you just love it when God is no longer used as a tool to justify violence and intolerance, and instead used to exemplify the nurturing, accepting, forgiving way we all could live?

SERMON: Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Work

International Women’s Day – March 8th

Today I want to tip the hat to International Women’s Day, and celebrate women’s work and the contribution women’s work makes to our quality of life. Now Women’s Day is technically March 8th, this Tuesday, although for the purposes of the marches, protests, conferences, forums, art shows, performances and gatherings which typically mark the day all over the world, any convenient day in the beginning of March is acceptable. Typical of women’s ways, the actual day is less important than the fact that it suits the participants.

Let me ask some questions of you now. I have been surprised at how many folks are not familiar with the International Women’s Day. How many of you, and I am asking both men and women, have celebrated, at some time in your life, International Women’s Day? How many have never heard of it?

For myself, I was always drawn into its observance by my first cousin, who was more like my sister as I was growing up. She would always march in the Women’s Day parade in Toronto and then get together with all her close women friends for a shared meal. It was, as far as I could tell, not as much about fighting the good fight for gender equity and woman’s equality as a simple celebration of our own womanhood. Joining together to support one another as women.

Now I have spoken to the young adult group here, and not one of them had ever heard of Women’s Day. I have also spoken to two women from among the congregation. One has had a history of gathering together with an international group of women to celebrate the day and the other had spent a recent women’s day dressed in white and dancing for peace. She hadn’t the heart to celebrate this year since the invasion of Iraq.

And what about you? Work is certainly not something only women do, nor is wisdom limited to the female half of our species. But the tip of the hat is special consideration I want to give this morning to the work which we typically associate with women, no matter the age they lived in or the culture they were born into – and that can be described as the work of homemaking, the provision of food in the form of meals in the homes, and caring for others in the home, whether children, adults or elderly family members. This is not only women’s work. It must be acknowledged that men are also responsible for the provision of this work, at least paying for these services, if not executing or managing them.

But let’s see: Who here, personally, takes care of a home? Who has the responsibility of providing meals in the home? Who is actively engaged in providing care to children, or dependent adults? Is it mostly women’s hands that are raised? One more question: How many of you who have raised your hands to any of these last questions, also work outside the home?

I want observe Women’s Day because it gives us the opportunity to celebrate the worth of the work of women to the quality of life we experience and share.

International Women’s Day got its start in this country in 1908 with a march of Socialist women in NYC. They were demonstrating to call for the vote and the political and economic rights of women. Two years later at a meeting of The Socialist International in Copenhagen, the international nature of Women’s Day was established to honor the move towards women’s rights including the right to vote. In 1911 more than a million women demonstrated in European nations, not only for voting rights but for the right to hold public office, the right to vocational training, the right to work outside the home, and the right to be treated as equal workers. Now the Industrial Revolution was a fact of life, so was child labor and these demonstrations underlined the need for all workers outside the home to be treated fairly. In the same year, shortly after Women’s Day, there was a terrible fire in NYC in which 140 working girls, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, were killed while on the job. The timing of this tragedy so soon after the IWD highlighting of the need for including women workers’ interests, had significant impact on labor legislation in the US.

Since those early days, IWD has become a day of global celebration for the economic, political, and social achievements of women, and the societies they live in. It is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by women and men who have played extraordinary roles in the history of women’s rights. And in keeping with this, today I want to tell you the stories of two women who have uniquely expressed the synthesis between traditional women’s work, the home-making and the procurement of food, and the hard-won power which comes from breaking free of traditional women’s work enough to become educated, articulate, free-thinking problem-solvers and leaders. I offer these portraits to you as examples of the incorporation of women’s wisdom into domains far beyond the reaches of the household, into the affairs of whole peoples and states.

First, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai. I am sure most of you have read about her. I had, though I hadn’t bothered to pronounce her name until now, I realize. She is a Kenyan woman, born in 1940. Educated. Went to school in the West. Became a Zoology professor. She married and had three children. She divorced her husband in the 1980’s. Her former husband described her as “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.” Right on. Seems to me that’s just what my cousin and I celebrated on women’s day. It is interesting to note that no one would ever think of describing men as too any of these things. We admire men who are too educated, strong, successful, stubborn and hard to control.

Wangari Maathai started the work that was to lead her to Nobel recognition in the 1980’s when she became concerned with the then government of Kenya’s policy of deforestation and the negative impact it had on the soil, and the lives of women. The traditional work of women in Kenya was and is to make the meals, and keep the fires burning under the pots. But because of the deforestation, women were having to hunt farther and farther afield for their firewood. This took them away from home for longer and longer periods, leaving children and homes unattended. So Wangari Maathai not only protested the government policies, she also came up with the idea of planting trees. If the Kenyan women could plant trees close to home in their villages, they could start cultivating and harvesting their own firewood. Thus in control of their fuel, such women would not remain powerless even with autocratic husbands and village chiefs, even with ruthless presidents.

Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement. She organized women in villages to plant trees. It was found that to plant trees in groups of one thousand not only produced sustainable wood for cooking, it effectively combated soil erosion, as well as enabling women to work close to home, where their responsibilities lay. Now there are six thousand tree nurseries in Kenya, and it is estimated that the village women in the Green Belt Movement have planted between twenty to thirty million trees in Kenya. The treeplanting confronts big problems: it has slowed the desertification of the land, it preserves the habitats for wildlife, it provides sources for fuel and building materials, and with fruit trees, food for future generations. It shifts power from policy makers and enforcers to the women who want to take care of their homes and families.

Wangari Maathai, like many leaders, made huge personal sacrifices for the work she has undertaken. She was jailed for fighting the single-party state and protesting for its end. When Kenya allowed new political parties to form, she established the Mazingira Green Party. She has been beaten for her efforts. Yet when Kenyans finally did get a choice for their government in 2002, she was elected with a huge majority for her region’s seat in government and there was dancing in the street when she was appointed Deputy Minister of the Environment.

Her insight led her beyond the concerns of the traditional work of women to the larger and more complex issues of food security in the era of global free trade, with its pressures to export food as commodity and as dept repayment to the international money lending interests. Such concerns are national in scope but they reach into every home and village. And it is there that the wisdom of women leads them clearly in the priority of their work. The tee-shirts of the Kenyan Green Belt ladies reads, “as for me, I have made a choice” and that choice, once made available through the work of this leader, is about taking control of their living environment, cultivating, planting and managing trees, re-establishing kitchen gardens and indigenous crops using organic methods, wherever and whenever they can. Such are the choices of an empowered Kenyan woman, an empowered citizen.

Wangari Maathai likes to retell the old seven-day Creation story this way: If God created humans on the Tuesday instead of on the Saturday of the first week, the humans would have been dead on Wednesday because there were not all the essential survival elements in place yet. So, just to explain that abit, on the third day of creation there would have been light and sky already made and that’s it not yet the land, not yet the seas, not yet the plants or animals, none of the things without which we could not live on this Earth. Human life needs the land, the water and the plant life to survive.

The Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. With this award the Nobel Prize committee reveals a new understanding of how peace is constituted. Instead of trying to end armed conflict, they are acknowledging that peace on Earth now depends as much on our ability to secure our living environment so it may, in turn, sustain our lives. Wangari Maathai has a neat way to say the same thing of her work, she says, “We plant the seeds of peace.” We all do. She did it by organizing ordinary women into undertaking homemaking on a new, broader scale, not confined to the hut or house, but with a view to the common good. We cannot all be Nobel Peace prize winners but we can appreciate in her leadership how her non-traditional education and public service is intimately connected to the more traditional forms of women’s work and wisdom. Too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control for what?

Another woman I want to tell you about is Vandana Shiva. She is an Indian woman, born in 1953, in the Himalayas of North India, in a fertile valley where she grew up on the family farm. Her father was a forest conservator and her mother was a former government official. Vandana Shiva remembers that her mother taught her that there was nothing beyond the reach of a woman, and that education by itself did not make you a better human being. Vandana Shiva always loved and yearned to know more about nature. Albert Einstein was her hero and so she studied physics “to figure out a little better the patterns of nature’s laws.” Like Wangari, Vandana was privileged with an extended education. Also with studies in the West. I was surprised to learn that she studied at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada. In her work as a nuclear physicist she learned first hand about the practice of what she calls “one-eyed science”, science that looks only at the benefits or profitability of its discoveries and not at the costs.

In the early eighties, Vandana became involved with a grass roots Indian women’s initiative which succeeded in stopping commercial logging in the Himalayas. Then the Indian government asked her to do an impact analysis on mining in her home valley and her work became instrumental in shutting down mines and other polluting industries there. So, in 1982, she founded an organization in her hometown with the goal of working with local communities and social movements to promote sustainable agriculture and combat genetic engineering, water privatization, and factory farming. The independent Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology would work with such communities and movements by providing the scientific research and technological understandings needed to mount their challenges effectively in business meeting rooms and legal chambers, the places where men have traditionally made the decisions.

In 1991 she stated Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially seeds. In the late nineties she initiated the international movement Diverse Women for Diversity which acknowledges the role of Third World women as seed conservators and as experts in the use of medicinal plants.

Vanadana Shiva has written many books on agri-business, the dangers of industrialized farming, and biotechnology. She is a leader in the social-justice and ecology movements. Here is a quote:

“I care deeply for people’s right to food. I devote my life to ensuring that we have sustainable agriculture . and the efficient use of scarce resources. Biotech, or genetically modified seeds, fails the sustainability test because the intellectual-property-rights system perversely treats plants and seeds as corporate inventions. What is supposed to be the farmers’ highest duty – saving seed and exchanging it with neighbors – has become a crime If enough people practice alternative forms of political organizing and present a different political message, it can add up to a sound loud enough for the deaf to hear. And the more we start taking power into our own hands, the more we shrink the power of lifeless capital to destroy life on the planet.”

Shiva still lives on her family’s farm. She is not living in a traditional family structure. She lives with her brother, sister and her grown son. When she is not flying all over the world giving lectures, she is there farming and writing. Traditional women’s work dedicated to the procurement of food but supplemented with the non-traditional work of thinking, researching, writing and problem solving.

If it is women’s wisdom and women’s work to focus on the provision of food, on the preservation of forests and soils, and the integrity of the living environment around us to sustain our lives and homes, and if it is men’s wisdom and men’s work to consider the science, and the possible use of technology, to make the decisions, and to make the rules, then Vandana Shiva’s work is an example of the way women can add the world of women’s wisdom to the playing field of “a man’s world.”

Now, you may have a garden, and I know that there are some members here who take gardening and growing food very seriously, but we are not concerned for the most part with seed conserving or planting or harvesting. We shop at HEB, or at Wheatsville coop. Our lives as women are as far removed from the productive soil as the men folk among us. Women’s work here is about getting up and getting everybody else up, dressing, feeding, dropping off, working our jobs ’til we pick up at daycare. Come home, maybe shop on the way, get dinner, deal with the homework situation, limit TV, manage the bath and bedtimes, clean up dinner, tidy up house, do laundry, make calls, attend to necessary arrangements, get ready for the next day, get to bed. It is busy and sometimes it is crazy busy. But we have managed to get ourselves here this morning for rest and worship and a meaningful message. So, what has the work of these two foreign, accomplished ladies have to say to us?

Here are my answers: Our world is made better by the work you do as homemaker and meal-maker. The quality of the lives of your partners, children, parents, is enhanced every time you knock yourself out to make things nice: good food, clean clothes, paid bills. Thank you for doing this women’s work, whether you are a woman or a man. I wanted to highlight these two ladies to inspire you.

Their work is grounded in the concerns of all women and men, the common needs we all have for food security, and the shelter of a livable environment, whether that means accessible firewood, or a functionally de-cluttered car interior.

Their work also exemplifies the wisdom of women, to work with what you’ve got, to understand the limits you labor under, to work with others building relationships which are as sustaining as food and land, and more precious in the end. In Kenya and in India women with much less social mobility and much less economic power than any of us can imagine are working together to protect and restore their lands. They are not all landowners but they know they are stakeholders just as we do. They know also that they cannot and will not turn away from their work as women, wives, mothers, daughters. And in that can anyone, can any woman be too educated, too strong, too successful, stubborn or hard to control? I don’t think so. These are good traits for the ladies, and too much of a good thing is a better thing. Much better.

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Victoria Shepherd Rao
Hillary Hutchinson
23 January 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Psalm 139 (NRSV) Excerpts: verses 1-10, 13-14, 19-24

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol [Hell], you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who ride up against you?

I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Amen.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Hillary Hutchinson

Good morning. My name is Hillary Hutchinson, and most of you know that I have been a member of this church for a very long time. June 1987 to be exact. Some of you may also know that I was raised along with my three siblings as a Unitarian. This does not mean that I find being a member of a liberal religious denomination easy, or the practice of faith automatic. I think in some ways, it has actually made it more difficult for me, as I have struggled to be a conscious human being – conscious of both my own limits and abilities, conscious of my impact on those around me, and even conscious of how my life, and my own life style choices, can impact those on the other side of the world that I do not know personally.

Today’s sermon topic is “Beyond Tolerance.” Tolerance is a word I feel is used entirely too loosely by Unitarian Universalists. What does it really mean to “tolerate” something? Are we pronouncing our acceptance of differing views? Or are we merely “putting up” with difficult, irritating, unpleasant people and situations until we can get away from them? As in, something we all recently experienced, “I’ll just have to tolerate all these weather related traffic delays since I cannot do anything about them.”

On a personal level, what do we tolerate in ourselves? Are we willing to really look hard at our own dark sides, the part of us that is racist because it is in fact a natural human reaction to people that are different from us? Can we look at ourselves directly and acknowledge our own capacity to commit evil? In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as she prepares to kill one of her mortal enemies, he stops her cold by asking, “Does not your power come from the dark side: without vampires, there would be no need of a vampire slayer.” The vamp has a point, I think. Fear and anger provide tremendous assistance for survival. All these parts, good and bad, co-exist in us and need to be balanced.

The psychoanalyst Robert Johnson refers to this dilemma as needing to own the shadow side. Johnson’s simple definition of the dark side is socially unacceptable feelings and/or behaviors. For instance, a child makes you angry, so you hit her. It could be that her statement, “You are so stupid, Mom” actually touched a very raw nerve, and lashing out was actually a response to an internal feeling of inadequacy. In my own case, I have a tremendous fear of failure. The message tape that plays in my brain is: “You are not good enough. You will never be good enough.” I can trace this message back at least four generations in my family, to a fire and brimstone Baptist preacher forebear, whose given name ironically was, “Reasoner.” By returning to school to pursue a PhD, I am challenging myself in a way that I never have before, and am terribly afraid I will be found wanting. As if I am playing bridge, and bluffing by attempting to show more suit strength than I actually have; or think of poker, where you keep betting though you are actually holding nothing worthwhile. I am terrified that the bluff will be discovered, and I will be found wanting when the time comes to lay my cards on the table.

Given this level of insecurity, how do you think I react when someone challenges me in an academic setting? Being scared, I am as likely to be rude as to answer graciously. Or end up exploding inappropriately. Or worst of all, freezing into myself, unable to muster any defense at all, only to explode later at the grocery store checker for nothing at all related.

I want to suggest that worship, which Davidson has told us come from the old English and means, ‘worth shaping,’ can be a path for integrating the shadow side. Think again about the way a card player holds his cards close. The rules of the game can literally allow space for holding our dark idiosyncratic ways within safely prescribed boundaries. To play the cards well, a strategy invoking secrecy may be necessary. The conscious symbolic exercise, or exorcize if you will, of our own dark side, can help us manage all these aspects of our being.

Dr. Johnson suggests small, ritualized behaviors to get rid of the shadow, such as writing down a some personal bad behavior and burning it. Lighting our candles of hope and memory can be a personal ritual of purification. Lighting and then extinguishing the chalice provides a frame for the dark and the light within the context of our services. We can also use Sunday morning sermons to shape our character, giving voice to anger, resentments, fear, and frustration in a manner that increases our compassion, instead of diminishing it. By going beyond mere acknowledgement to actual integration of our dark side, we can expand and extend our compassion for both ourselves and others. The conscious creation of a whole, or healed character, be a strategy allowing the play of dark in our life but within a rational and relational set of priorities. We can choose our reactions, if not what actually happens. Or as my own grandmother would say, “It’s not the cards you’re dealt, it’s how you play them.” So, here I am, telling you once again that we are all in this game of being human together. We all have our own shadow and our own light. And that, at least, is very comforting.

SERMON: Finding Our Way Through The Dark

What are the parts of us that we would rather not see? The lazy parts, the selfish parts, the sad parts, the angry parts, the defeated parts, the weak parts, the fearful, the needy, the hurt parts. They are there but we try hard, don’t we, to hide away, so they wont bother anyone too much. I bet we could all do a little inventory and identify those antisocial and uncivilized parts as well as a natural resistance to go there. Or maybe we have lost sight of our own capacities to be wild, or undependable, or unpredictable or violent, or vindictive and doubt or deny that we are anything but well-intentioned. We might not go so far as to say we are pure goodness, but haven’t we convinced ourselves of the saintliness of someone who loved us well? It is comforting to dwell on our capacities for giving, for being enthusiastic and positive and seeing the best in others, but does this tendency serve any purpose beyond ourselves?

If others knew how lazy, angry, sullen or despondent we can be they might not want to work with us or live with us or be our friends. So we do our best to contain these difficult or ugly aspects of our being, we put them in the closet and hide them in the shadows. It is a common human experience. We all do this and we do it to get along and function the best way we can as members of families, religious communities, as members of staffs or teams or professions, as members and citizens of our society.

This morning I want to speak to these dark sides of our being and crack the closet door open and see what happens if we go ahead and look at the parts of us we would rather not see, or have lost sight of altogether. Because we might discover that it is not only the foibles of our characters that have got shoved into the shadows over the years but some great parts too which were hidden just because they were inconvenient or unwanted or threatening to others.

The wholeness of our weird and wonderful beings is something we come into the world with and which we spend a good portion of our life carving up to suit our life circumstances only to slowly reclaim as we are able and as the demands of this life ebb and free us from the constraints which we have allowed to define us. It is the older and wiser among us who have the most insight into this process. And they are the ones who are the most likely to see the paradox inherent in being human. The ones who have learned that there is a time to speak and a time to remain silent, that it is good and right to have goals and dreams to strive for and that it is also good and right to sacrifice those same goals and dreams and to let them go.

When Hillary suggested the topic of Owning Your Own Shadow in the Worship Associates meeting way back last September, I was unfamiliar with the little book she was making reference to by Robert A. Johnson. He wrote the book in 1991 with the full title, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche. He is a great synthetic thinker who combines sociology and comparative religion in his psychological interpretations of the human condition. How many of you have read his books? He is a Jungian analyst and he works with the notion that we all operate from both conscious and subconscious impulses and that all human beings are co-inheritors of the collective unconscious, deeply embedded symbols which speak to the human condition. Hillary wanted to share his basic message that we can maintain better control of our natural human tendencies towards violence, aggression and bigotry by acknowledging the wholeness of our individual natures, including all the nasty qualities we’ve tried to disown and giving them symbolic expression through religious ritual.

I was drawn to the topic because I have come to believe that evil, or the human capacity to do harm to others or ourselves, is inherent, as natural to our being human as the capacity to nurture and to love. And I hoped that there would be something to be gained by our recognition of this potential, if I could persuade you of its truth, whether it be a greater vigilance in the way we examine our motives, or a greater awareness of the import of every decision we make in the way we lead our lives. It seemed to me, and it still does, that we are less likely to fear evil if we can recognize it as something so close at hand. That we would be less likely to see it as the fault of another if we could see it as a possibility for ourselves.

And reading Johnson partly affirmed this hunch. Let me briefly outline the progression of his book. First, he says that the process of disowning those parts of ourselves is natural. A baby learns not to bite. A child learns slowly to control her temper. In school, kids learn to reign in their energy and sit still. Exuberant free play gets shaped into focused attention as the skills and rules of sports are acquired. The capacities of the child to bite, to lose her temper, to play wildly are still there, but they are contained. Later in life, the socially acceptable ways of behaving as a lady or a gentleman are adopted as the adolescent strives towards recognition as an adult. Then the demands and the constraints of a job identify which character traits are to be given fuller expression. In most fields and professions for instance, it is much more important to be reliable than spontaneous. It is more desirable to be careful and competent than daring and experimental. As with the child, the underlying nature of the person remains intact and complete. They have just abandoned some of their qualities in favor of others in order to participate in their culture. Johnson calls it an inexorable law that all aspects of the individual’s character endure. It is just a matter of cultivating the qualities which help us function in our world and hiding the ones which don’t.

Johnson then identifies the problems that can creep up. For instance if we try to ignore the shadowy parts of ourselves and pretend they do not exist we will resent being reminded of them and might well despise the same qualities in others, projecting onto others aspects of our own unwanted being. Johnson says that this can happen collectively and whole societies can be similarly driven by such subconscious rejection of their disowned qualities. We must believe we are freedom-loving and dedicated to the ideals of democracy so we condemn or attack societies that we accuse of tyranny and feel it is somehow righteous to impose our chosen form of governance on them. We must believe we are peaceful and peace-loving and we fail to recognize the expression of our own rejected nature in the constant stream of horror films, violent television shows, and digital war games. Can we continue to accept the lie that fighting wars is necessary to achieve the peace we love so well? What would happen if the skeleton in the nation’s closet was to be revealed? Maybe the aggression and the will to dominate could energize the rebuilding of this society?

Finally Johnson points to the healing mechanism of religious ritual to re-unify the different parts of ourselves and restore a wholeness to our being. It can do that he says by giving symbolic representation to the darker aspects of life in a context which allows for both the expression and the containment of the destructive as well as the constructive aspects of our nature. Johnson talks about the gory imagery of the Christian mass or communion ritual. The participants celebrate the eating of their savior’s flesh and the drinking of his blood. The image of the tortured man hanging on the cross is glorified as the means of their salvation. The paradox of a persecuted, dying man having the power to save all who would confess his name contains healing. Johnson says any mechanism by which two separate and divergent forces are joined together can heal. He says the joining of two people whether in a glance or in sexual union can be so healing.

Christianity is not the only religion that incorporates images of destruction to serve the purpose of integrating the dark parts of human nature. In Hinduism’s godhead, Shiva is understood to be the God of destruction in counterbalance to Brahma, the God of creation and Vishnu, the God of preservation. In this arrangement there is a full acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of existence. There are creative, sustaining and destructive forces, and they each are honored and recognized. And all the worshipers can then acknowledge such divergent forces in their own being. This is one of the reasons I have valued the Hindu Goddess Kali. She is a truly frightening warrior Goddess, depicted with severed human arms strung around her waist and severed human heads hanging from her neck. She holds a bloody knife and wags a long obnoxious tongue in the air. Yet she is worshiped as a mother, loved and supplicated by her devotees. They expect her to be as giving and loyal to them as they are to her, though they know she can be dangerous. Now, that is a depiction of integration. Loving mother and wild woman. Kali does not give license to her devotees to follow her example but she does offer them a paradox which they can use to try to find a balance between the dispirit qualities of light and dark they experience in life and in themselves.

We need to be encouraged towards integration and wholeness. As religious liberals we need to bring together the parts of our being which we may have lost connection with. But we don’t take communion, and we don’t go to confession. But confession is probably closer to our religious tendencies than worshiping gods and goddesses. And this is where we turn to the therapeutic effects of talking. Not so much in dialogue with another but out loud with the sense that we are being heard. Talking out whatever is burdening us, honestly we can come to a place of greater self understanding and hope to reclaim those parts of ourselves that have been to wretched, depressed, enraged, or frightening to own up to. We do not need a priest to mediate this confession but we do need a safe and contained place to begin to sort out the wholeness of our being.

Here is a story told by Rachel Naomi Ramen about the power of her grandfather’s blessings. When she was a little girl she went to have tea with her orthodox Jewish grandfather every week. These are her words:

After we had finished our tea my grandfather would set two candles on the table and light them. Then he would have a word with God in Hebrew. Sometimes he would speak out loud, but often he would close his eyes and be quiet. I knew then that he was talking to God in his heart. I would sit and wait patiently because the best part of the week was coming.

When Grandpa finished talking to God, he would turn towards me and say, “Come.” Then I would stand in front of him and he would rest his hands lightly on the top of my head. He would begin by thanking God for me and for making him my Grandpa. He would specifically mention my struggles during that week and tell God something about me that was true. Each week I would wait to find out what it was. If I had made mistakes during the week, he would mention my honesty in telling the truth. If I had failed, he would appreciate how hard I had tried.

These few moments were the only time in my week when I felt completely safe and at rest (pg. 23, My Grandfather’s Blessings).

I love how well this story expresses the power of acknowledging our weaknesses and connecting them to our struggles to be good. It is healing to be known in the fullness of our being and deeply reassuring to realize that our wholeness can encompass our foibles without leaving us beyond the hope of another’s love and care.

We Unitarian Universalists do not enter so fully into the language of ritual. We come together to worship and light a chalice. And the flame does reveal both the power of light and the power of transformative forces but it does not speak powerfully of the dark in our lives and I think we might need more to help us come to terms with the darkness in our world and in ourselves.

There is a symbol which could speak to the paradox of the different and opposing parts of our nature. I am sure many of you are familiar with the Chinese Yin and Yang symbol. Here it is. The circle represents the whole of existence, the cosmos. Within the cosmos, there is a duality that can be seen in all “the ten thousand things” in the world and in the forces of nature.

This duality is represented by the equal sections of black and white. These forces are opposite in nature but contain within themselves the seeds of the other as represented by these two dots (the black dot in the middle of the white field and the white dot in the middle of the black field. There is a dynamic quality to these dual forces. They both seem to be moving into the other and this is a representation of the constancy of change in the world. In this symbol there is an acknowledgement of the profound relatedness of all apparent opposites. It suggests that integration is the nature of all things and there is less need to draw together the good and bad, the active and passive, the creative and the destructive, and more need to become aware how all qualities of being find their complete expression through their relationship to their opposite, how all states are impermanent and will move, change and even completely transform with time.

I want to finish this morning with another story from Rachel Naomi Ramen. This one is about an emergency room physician named Harry and how he was surprised into recognizing a greater wholeness to his being. Like all medical and other professionals, Harry was trained to be competent and expert and was used to putting his emotions in the shadows where they could not reveal his hopes, fears and vulnerabilities to his patients.

One night he was on shift and a woman was brought in by ambulance, a very pregnant about to give birth woman. He examined her and called her OBGYN but it was just a

courtesy call. He knew it was likely too late, that he’d be delivering the baby. So the woman’s husband was brought into the emergency room and the nurses prepared quickly for the birth. Harry was pleased as he liked delivering babies. This baby came very quickly with no complications at all. Harry was then holding the newborn along his arm with her little head in his hand, and as he was using a suction bulb to remove the mucus from her mouth and nose, suddenly the little girl opened her eyes and looked right into his eyes. Harry had a moment of discovery. He realized that he was the first human being that this little girl had ever seen. He felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere and tears came to his eyes. Later, as he reflected on this, he realized that although he had delivered hundreds of babies in his career, he had never let himself experience the meaning of what he was doing until that one birth. In a sense he felt that that was the first baby he had really delivered as both a physician and as a human being.

I want to leave you with a reassurance that life can surprise us with unanticipated opportunities to grow in the fuller expression of our own being and that far from endangering those around us with the possibility of our shadow sides, we can reveal more powerfully the depths and the truths of our shared humanity. We need to be careful and intentional in inviting the shadow parts into the light of day, but we can also trust, that to the degree that we dare to bring the wholeness of our being into the circle of light, into the company we keep, and into the consciousness with which we make our choices, to that degree we can hope to make a difference.

Embodying the paradox that light and dark coexist in us and all around us and demonstrating the power in the human capacity for honesty. As religious liberals we mostly reject the idea that humans inherit original sin but can we deny that evil is inherent to our being? Let us commit ourselves to living up to our assertion of the worth and dignity of every person with an understanding that it is by the decisions we make that we are ennobled or debased. We are all like the child in today’s story (Nicolai’s Questions, adapted from Tolstoy), asking how to be a good person. We want to be a good person but we don’t always know the best way to do that. But like the story said, if we can remember that the most important moment is now, and the most important person is the one you are with, and the most important thing to do is to do whatever you can for the one by your side, then we will be alright, regardless of the shadows and in despite the dark.

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© Victoria Shepherd Rao
Sloan McLain
09 January 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
 Sloan McLain

I know that my connection to the divine, resting in the source of all that is loving, peaceful, and mindful, is what ultimately makes life worth living. Having a daily practice that connects me to the source of my spirit – be it meditating, praying, or practicing yoga – wakes me up to life’s purpose.

So, if having a daily practice is so important to me, I have to question: Why don’t I prioritize those spiritual rituals that open my heart and give me insight into the purpose of life and my place in it?

Several years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I tasted life with a daily practice. I did yoga every morning and meditated with prayer each evening. My life was troubled at times, but through my practice, I had the peace of mind to ride with ease the ups and downs. My practice gave me faith in the cycles of life and death and opened my heart to live mindfully. I experienced the fruits of a faithful practice, and so naturally I assumed I’d keep it up.

But in the past few years, days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realize I’ve forgotten to meditate, my yoga mat’s been sitting still, and praying hasn’t crossed my mind. Why is that? Why don’t I take more time for my spiritual practice when I’ve experienced what it can manifest, when it means so much to me? How is it that my practice falls to the bottom of my to-do lists again and again?

I have an alter in my living room where my Buddha sits on my grandmother’s Bible, my yoga mat perched nearby; and another alter in the bedroom where a box of daily intentions is surrounded by pictures, statues, rocks and writings that have helped me grow into the person I am today.

The “stuff” to assist my practice is ready and waiting, my heart wants to connect to the God I believe in, but still, my practice is inconsistent. If I’m willing and ready, what’s stopping me? Does this happen to you, too?

The reality is I’m solo-parenting my 3-year-old son while working full-time as a first-year AISD teacher to kids in poverty on top of attending school at night and on the weekends. I barely have time to eat, so where’s the time to meditate, pray, or do yoga for an hour a day? But how can I afford not to have time for what I believe is the single most important reason for my existence: to connect with the God I believe in?

I wanted to share this with you because I suspect many of you have this same struggle: you want to feed your spirit but it’s hard to find the time, and maybe it feels better to know you’re not alone. I also hope that by confessing all this to you, I’ll motivate myself to practice, even if its just 10 minutes a day. As I said earlier, I know that my connection to the divine is what ultimately gives my life purpose. If that’s my truth, and I know my spiritual practice opens this connection, I have to center myself and make time.

PRAYER:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

By Marianne Williamson, From: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

SERMON: On Spiritual Practices

There was once a beggar who sat on a box by the roadside, waiting for alms from the passersby. Year after year he sat there on his box until one day, a wise man came by. The beggar asked for some coins and the wise man looked at the beggar carefully for a long minute. Finally, the wise man asked the beggar what was inside the box. The beggar had never considered what the box he had been sitting on for so long might contain. Curious, he got up and had a look. Much to his amazement he found the rough box contained a treasure trove of gold.

I think spiritual practice is a lot like the wise man coming along and urging the old beggar to look inside. It is a way to seek out what we have always possessed.

Now, spiritual practice is nothing new to any of us.

Does anyone here pray?
Who here was taught to pray as a child?
Who has taught their children to pray in turn?

Does anyone here have an alter at home?
Who has some embarrassment with these questions?

Traditional spiritual practice is not something many of us try to make time for, though I am sure there are many here who have experimented with a few forms like yoga, chanting, or walking the labyrinth.

How many of us have learned a couple of different ways to meditate?
And how many of us actually do meditate? Any daily meditators?

As Sloan has said, it takes time to enter into a spiritual practice. And perhaps more problematical than finding the time for a daily discipline, it takes some faith. Faith that there is a connection between us and whatever is ultimate, that there is something to be gained by time spent in repose. You need to believe in the treasure hidden in the box.

But I want to propose that we do undertake spiritual practices and even incorporate them into our daily lives though maybe without fully realizing it.

Before I go any further I want to clarify what I mean by spiritual here. It is one of those nebulous words, almost automatically gets your guard up. The difference between walking down the street and seeing a sign posted, “dog found” and feeling sure you know the situation described, and seeing another sign posted saying, “God found” and having to wonder who found what.

Not to get too theological about it, when I use the word spirit, I want you to think about a horse, in the way it seems designed to run, or a child, in the way it is given to play. The quality each of these express in their being is the quality I am talking about when I say spiritual. It is a cluster of characteristics: vital energy, flowing single-minded focus, which is not forced but free in following whatever attracts, and avoiding whatever unnerves or frightens. It is the quality of being alert and alive.

So when I refer to spiritual practice I mean any practice which inspires and arouses in us this quality of vitality and sensitivity.

You can probably think of someone you know, or have known in your life who expressed this kind of natural vitality, who demonstrates exuberance, who laughs at every chance, who cries without shame, who is caring, unafraid, available to help out, never too distracted to listen. I hope you have known someone like this, someone who can give witness to the invisible forces which connect them, and all of us, to life, and to the enterprise of living it fully.

Now different people will be drawn to different practices according to their beliefs and culture, and the presence of people such as I have just described. Sometimes we need to feel our way into life-giving practices. Sometimes it can be very surprising just how sacred everyday tasks can be. For me, dog-walking was like that. It takes time every day. You have to just stop whatever you are doing and out you go. The first great gift is the break, the punctuation you have just experienced in your day. It is a kind of spaciousness from which you can gain a new perspective. Outside, you immediately reconnect with the way things are in the neighborhood: the feel of the air; the quality of the daylight; the colors of the trees. You walk, you think, you reflect, you watch the dog, delight in the dog play, in the pleasure he experiences in a good sniffing around, you greet the passersby, sometimes you talk and strangers become acquaintances. And all of this is beside the real spiritual treasure of having a dog companion who provides you constantly with a simple demonstration of unconditional love. Oh, the true spirit of a dog on his daily walk – natural, flowing, fun-loving, aimless, eager to share any pleasure. To me its like spiritual treasure on the end of a leash, dragging me along.

Yet we have to make a distinction between the connection to life or God which is both the beginning and end of all spiritual practice and the practice itself.

There was a man who was reputed to be a Zen master. He never had teachings to offer people. His practice was only to carry this large sack on his back from village to village. When he arrived at a place he would put the sack down and open it up and hand sweets out to all the children. Then he would close the sack and lift it back up onto his back and leave. Whenever anyone asked him for a teaching he would just laugh and continue on his way.

One day another Zen master decided to see if this wandering man was indeed a real master. He asked him, “What is Zen?” and the man stopped and put down his load and looked at him, saying nothing. Finally the Zen master asked, “What is the philosophy of Zen?” This time the man looked at him and then picked up his sack again and walked away. He was found to be a master after all for one who has a practice and who can let go of it as easily he can pick it up again is truly free with or without it.

When we were in India, there was an annual day-long ritual that took place in the city of Trivandrum that was for women only. The priests were the only men who attended the day. Basically, every year, each woman, homemakers all, comes out of the house to make sweets as an offering to the Goddess. Each and every woman, and we are talking tens of thousands of them, constructs her own fire and stove, brings her own pots and spoons and in the blazing sun of the midday, makes her treats. The priest come around and accept and bless the offerings on behalf of the deity and the women, after a hot day of cooking and socializing, collect their goodies to give to friends and family as prasad, or “blessed offering.”

The first year I witnessed this event as it was conducted around the temple close to where we lived. We drove by and I saw all the small fires and terra cotta stoves side by side by side. The simultaneous order and chaos of the process was deeply impressive. The second year we were there, the gathering place was around another temple and I only read and saw photographs of the happening in the newspaper. Our housekeeper had arranged to take the day off work to participate and she brought some of the sweets she had made for us the day after. I remember how incredible it seemed to me that these ladies would carry all these bags of supplies, fire wood, stove, pots and the ingredients for their sweets, and cook on open fires in the blazing sun, with humidity high and crowds on all sides. But it was a day apart from all the others, and a special day just for the ladies. When they could break away from the everyday routines of their homelives and do something different. They could chat with friends and feel good that they had made their offering. They believed their faithfulness to the Goddess would be reciprocated by the Goddess’s faithfulness to them and their prayers.

With the heat and the crowds, this spiritual practice would be sheer agony for me, as far from the solitude of a dog walk as is imaginable. But it taught me to give up evaluating the ritual practices of other people on the basis of my own spiritual inclinations.

Of course that is not to say that the practices others devise to suit their own spiritual inclinations cannot work for me or you. If there is an appeal in what someone does, why not try it out? Non-conformist religious liberals tend not to look to conventional forms of spiritual practice but we should not be blind to the ways and means of our coreligionists. I look around at First (UU) Church (of Austin) and I see folks engaged in spiritually sustaining activities of all kinds. There are the hallmarks of the Protestant tradition such as the gathering together for worship each week, listening to poetic words and music, singing and engaging with the sermon or public forum, eating together, working together, seeking together to make manifest a collective vision of spirited service. There are also alternate forms of spiritual practice being undertaken here and in the other UU congregations in the city. At First Church there is yoga, Chi Gong, folkdancing and Kundalini yoga. At Wildflower Church there is a covenant group dedicated to experimentation in spiritual practices. At Live Oak, there is a weekly silent meditation gathering.

And individually, we can witness the spiritual practices of our fellow congregation members: folks who make their bumper stickers a form of ministry; folks who ride bikes because they can and feel they ought; others who drive with nowhere to go just so they can rethink and reframe ideas (that would be Davidson); people who take listening to others as a calling to go deeper into the human condition and because they believe in the power to heal (that would be the Listening Ministry folks at First); and people who write cards to show they care. There are so many varieties of spiritual practices going on, and time is made for them all, somehow.

I had a minister in California who understood recycling to be a spiritual practice. For her, it was a sacred time and a personal discipline. It expressed her valuing of intentional living and responsible consuming. I think recycling is a spiritual practice for a lot of people for the same reasons though I don’t think too many yet understand it as such. Yet consider the amount of time you spend clearing out the paper clutter that appears daily on your desk or table. If you undertake the same chore as a positive act of redirecting resources instead of just collecting the trash, don’t you feel the transformation from time wasted to time well spent?

If we can give ourselves the freedom to feel out what does and does not feed our spirit, our inner connection to this life we all share, then we can give ourselves credit for all that we do already in the course of our daily lives to keep ourselves reminded of that which is vital and real.

Let us become ever more aware of these non-traditional forms of spiritual practice and hold them close. It is true that to adopt many traditional forms of spiritual practice means to devote ourselves and our time to the path of spiritual growth. It is also true that time is limited and we will be constrained to meet the requirements of a demanding spiritual discipline, maybe even driven to justify a pursuit with such intangible rewards as peace of mind or faith in our life’s purpose. However, we are here together now for a reason, and it is the same reason which propels others to cloister themselves in monasteries, or contort their bodies at yoga retreats all over the world where they are able to devote all their time to spiritual practice. Either way, it is about the human inclination to recognize the mysteries which connect all living creatures and to find some way, according to doctrine or not, to express that beautiful mystery authentically in the way we live and the way we love.

Finally, I want to thank Sloan for the courage she has shown in making the affirmation which began our treatment of this topic of spiritual practice and the time we make for it. She said, “I know that my connection to the.source of all that is loving, peaceful, and mindful, is what ultimately makes life worth living the single most important reason for my existence.” It is this faith, this inner knowledge of connection, however gained, which has the power to transform, heal, and provide us with insights to the purposes of our lives and the power to understand what is real and what is illusory. Like the treasure hidden under the beggar’s seat, such faith is waiting to be uncovered in every heart, to enrich every life with the quality of true spirit.

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© Davidson Loehr
19 December 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

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INVOCATION

It is a sacred time, this.
And a sacred place, this:
a place for questions more profound than answers;
vulnerability more powerful than strength;
and a peace that can pass all understanding.
It is a sacred time, this.
Let us begin it together in song.

An Angel Story
Vicki Rao

One day, many years ago now, I was in my mid-twenties, I took my dog out for a walk. We were living in a new part of town. I had rented a house for the summer in an area with many ravines and parks and my dog Shef and I explored new trails every day. This one day though, we were climbing up a steep, wooded hill, cutting between trails. I had no idea exactly where we were but that was okay, we had lots of afternoon left. Shef followed his nose and I followed Shef. He was an easy dog to take on walks or anywhere. He was gentle and not at all inclined to run off. Anyhow, all of a sudden, Shef yelps and sits down on the hillside, and holds up one of his front paws as if to show me. He had cut himself, probably on some glass, and his paw was bleeding, dripping generously. I panicked for a second and then figured that we had to get off the hill. I knew the car was way too far back, so we went ahead. Shef made it to the top and it was a relief to see that the treed area gave out into a grassy shoulder of a road. I guess I took the time to look at his paw, I cannot remember, but I sat him down beside the road and started to wave at the cars passing.

A small car almost immediately stopped for me. The guy opened the door and I told him my dog was cut and bleeding. With no hesitation at all he said he’d take me wherever we needed to go. So I got Shef into the floor of the front passenger seat and gave the man directions for a neighborhood vet. Shef was quiet and shaking and bleeding. I tried to wrap his paw up but he bled right through the cloth in the few minutes it took us to get to the vet’s office. I must have thanked the man many times and I apologized too when we got out and I saw the bloodstain on his car. I think I tried to get his name so I could arrange to fix his car but he just waved me towards the office. I rushed Shef into the office. It was very quiet. No one was waiting. But I called out that my dog was bleeding and people appeared. They took Shef into the operating room immediately and got him rigged up for surgery. Shef was calm and cooperative. When I saw them fix his muzzle onto a metal support, visions of vivisection in combination with relief took my breath away and I collapsed into a chair in the empty waiting room, too dumbfounded to even look to see if the kind man was still there in the street out front.

They stitched Shef up and he was fine after a few weeks of bandgages being dutifully applied and chewed off. I cannot remember how I got down to that park to retrieve my car or even how I got home that day. But I remember how often I gave thanks for that man who stopped on a dime and opened his car up for us, blood and all. I had never learned his name and after the excitement of the hour I regretted being unable to express my thanks. But that is why I offer this story as an angel story. I think of that man as an angel. Like an angel he just appeared, ready and willing to be there for us in our time of need. Like an angel, he became a messenger of an encompassing and unconditional love for me and my dog. It did not matter that we were strangers or that we were bleeding. How many times have I remembered and blessed this man and recognized that when love like this sweeps through your life, you are changed and made new. A new prayer enters your heart that you also may be used one day to help another in such unexpected and holy ways.

PRAYER:
Vicki Rao

O source of life, O mysterious sensitive wonderful unknowable ground of being:

Let us offer praise for the great gifts with which we are blessed in this life – Our families, friends, neighbors, our church community, this weird city in this beautiful land.

And what of the bounty of our lives – the food, homes, education, healthcare, employment, savings, investments, benefits, vacations, and other forms of material wealth? These are great gifts and they are not shared by all. We all know people without jobs, without healthcare, without the means to save money or go on vacation. May we be so bold as to confront the inequities upon which our lifestyles depend.

Let us remember that each day over sixteen thousand children die of hunger throughout the world. Here, in Travis county over forty thousand children experience food insecurity on a daily basis.

Let us become compassionate actors in the human drama. Let us pray for the families in war torn cities, let us pray for the families and souls of all the soldiers of nations and fortunes. Let us pray for our lawmakers – for the emergence of wisdom and humanity in their religious values

Let us truly give thanks for all is given to us, knowing that what is ours is ours by grace as much as by our own design, efforts, and hard work.

May a sense of wonder and graciousness live in our hearts and renew our spirits during these holy days and all days. Amen.

SERMON: The Slaughter of the Innocents

It’s always struck me as odd that religion is supposed to address our ultimate concerns, be prophetic, and search for the truth that can make us free – but church services, like children’s cartoons, are supposed to be rated “G.” Literature and movies sometimes share these high ideals, and use colorful language and even violence in their service. No one would tolerate this in a church service!

We still want the search for truth; and that “prophecy” stuff sounds good. But we want it kept nice and pretty. Church services are mostly theater: polite, genteel theater.

Our favorite holidays are seen that way, too: especially Christmas. The little baby Jesus, mother Mary, the picturesque manger, those nice animals, a special star, people bringing presents. Silent night, holy night; all is calm, all is bright. It’s theater.

The story of Jesus has been called “the greatest story ever told,” but not the story of the special star and the animals. That’s not a great story: that’s theater, and pretty insipid theater at that.

There are two stories in the “Christmas story.” One is historical, the other is mythic. And the irony of the Christmas stories, as of nearly all religious stories, is that the historical story is not true, and the mythic story is profoundly, eternally, dangerously true. The historical talk is theater, like a cartoon. But the myth, that unsettling myth, may be the greatest story ever told.

Good myths contain the kind of truth that can set us free, that can show us the human condition in ways that seem always to be true. We say that’s the kind of truth we want. Every week in church we say it. But I’m reminded of the old adage that “Grace is free; but it is not cheap!” – Or something written by a 2nd century Christian theologian (Tertullian), who said “We daily pray, and daily fear that for which we daily pray.”

The truths of good myths are the kind that set you free after running you through a wringer. We hope for them, but not the trip through the ringer. And some elements of the Christmas story are like that, too. Let me ease into this sideways.

We usually try to “unmask” Christmas by flexing our critical muscles and acknowledging that Christmas is really a “cover” of the more ancient winter solstice festivals: in the ancient calendar, what we know as the 25th of December was four days earlier. It was the winter solstice, the nature festival celebrating the return of the sun. It’s the birthday, by definition, of all solar deities. Haloes were symbols attending solar deities, so you can see even in Christian artwork the earlier myths from which it was taken.

But I don’t want to go too far here, because the Christmas story is very different from a solstice festival. It is ethical and political, all the way down. And nowhere is this more obvious and dramatic than in the story of the slaughter of the innocents.

Historically, it never happened. The historical story is not historically true. There was no such slaughter under King Herod, though by all accounts he was a cruel tyrant. But there was no census-taking or taxing at the time, either. These things were not historical truths, the kind that happen just once and are over. And the star, the birth in the manger, the animals, the wise men bringing gifts – these things never happened either.

The truth is, we don’t know a single thing about the birth or the childhood of the man Jesus. We’re not sure where he was born (but it wasn’t Bethlehem), when he was born (I accept the Jesus Seminar’s guess that it was 6-7 BCE), or who his father was (Joseph? A Roman soldier named Pantera?) The gospel writers made these stories up more than eighty years after he had been born – gospel writers who probably never even knew Jesus. (The gospels were written anonymously. They weren’t given their present names until the second century.) Historically, we know nothing at all about these things. Historically, the stories are not true.

But these stories were myths, and as myths, they contain great and timeless truths. Myths are things that never happened but always are. Mythic truths are both more true and more profound than merely historical truths. They are insights into the human condition in almost all times and places. That’s why the stories live, why people keep telling them, age after age after age: they offer a profound truth we don’t want to be without. They show life measured by a different currency than we are used to measuring it by.

I want to coax you away from the untrue historical story and into the profoundly true mythic Christmas story: especially the part of the story about the slaughter of the innocents.

Myths contain the truths that can make us free. That’s why we tell and retell them. They contain things that never happened but always are. They contain some of the most dangerous and upsetting truths we know, because they show us the nature of the world, including its dark side: our dark side.

Like that business of the slaughter of the innocents. Two weeks ago, Vicki talked about the birth stories of baby Jesus and baby Krishna. Both stories were myths. We don’t know a thing about the birth or even the childhood of Jesus, and the whole Krishna story is told as a myth. Yet in both stories there was a slaughter of the innocents, and both pointed to the same dark and unpleasant truth. Whoever put these stories together felt that a story about the birth of a “son of God” needed a chapter on the slaughter of the innocents: quite a perceptive intuition!

These weren’t real slaughters by real rulers at the time. They were mythic slaughters, telling us about the nature of the power of many rulers contrasted with the power of truth that is symbolized by the birth of a true son of God. Jesus was called a son of God, as Krishna was called an avatar, or incarnation, of the god Vishnu. Both were presented as humans who were true sons of God. And both stories say that the birth of a true son or daughter of God is the greatest of all possible threats to those who hold unjust or cruel power over people.

Why, you wonder? Well, mythically speaking, for the same reason that Superman and Wonder Woman were the mortal enemies of tyrants. Because they serve an uncompromising vision of truth and justice, because they oppose all tyrannies over people, and because they have the courage to act on these high ideals that most of us lack the courage to act on. That’s what makes them such great, great stories.

But this idea of the birth of a true son or daughter of God appearing in our lives isn’t all that appealing to us, either. Imagine suddenly having your whole life compared with these highest ideals, and someone asking you why you have not served them with your life! I mean, come on: we all care about those noble things like truth and justice, but there’s this real world we have to live in, where those things aren’t honored. And, you know, we have to make a living, provide for our families, our retirements. We can’t afford to go around tilting at windmills like Don Quixote. We go along to get along. We don’t make waves. We don’t confront lies even when we see them if it’s really unpopular to do so. Life’s short, we try to accentuate the positive and ignore some of the negative.

And no true son or daughter of God would tolerate that. Superman wouldn’t tolerate it. Neither would Wonder Woman, or even Xena the Warrior Princess. That’s what our superheroes represent: sons and daughters of Truth, Justice, high ideals and the courage to serve them. Do you really want your life compared with that? Do you really want your feet held up to the fire like that?

Grace is free, but it is not cheap. We daily pray, and daily fear that for which we daily pray.

All times hope for the birth of a true son or daughter of God, and all times fear that for which they pray, because it is world-shattering to have your life or your country held up against the highest ideals. And to those who abuse power, the greatest enemies are not “terrorists,” but those who would expose their deceptions as low, selfish and mean.

Another poet who expressed this same fear of what we pray for was Stephen Crane, author best known for his book The Red Badge of Courage. He wrote a little five-line poem that says:

I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light…
Let me back into the darkness again!
– Stephen Crane

“Suddenly there was a great light – let me back into the darkness again!” We daily hope, and daily fear that for which we daily hope, because while grace may be free, it is not cheap. Suddenly there was a great light. But that light would show up our sins, our crimes against others. It would show that we use people as things to serve our ends. And tyrants are the picture of this trait written in capital letters.

It is no mystery why the slaughter of the innocents attends the birth stories of religious savior figures. From Jesus to Krishna, the myths created to cradle these births have been set against a background of the slaughter of the innocents.

If these were merely historical facts – slaughters of innocents that just happened to be going on at the time – they wouldn’t be so important, just coincidences.

But in two widely separated times and places, those who crafted the stories felt that the birth of the sacred needs to be seen against a background of the slaughter of innocents.

And in both cases, the slaughter comes from vicious rulers for whom the birth of the sacred, of a true son of God, was a real threat to their tyranny. The threat is the birth of a spirit that could expose the deceits and tyrannies of rulers who have turned people into things to serve them and their visions. To do this, they must control everything, including our stories.

How ironic that this Christmas, like most Christmases, also comes against a background of the slaughter of the innocents. The Iraq tribunal hearings opened eight days ago (December 11, 2004) in Tokyo. They are a form of war crimes trials. They refer to America’s invasion of Iraq as “unprecedented in the annals of legal history,” and speak of “the deliberate and premeditated death and destruction unleashed against a sovereign nation and people, waged solely to capture its oil resources.” They speak of the deaths of an estimated 48,000 to 260,000 Iraqi citizens, and post-war effects that could take the lives of an additional 200,000 Iraqis. No matter what you think about the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, the liberation of its oil and resources and our plans to establish a permanent military presence there, I think the deaths of 400,000 to 500,000 Iraqi citizens must qualify as a genuine slaughter of the innocents.

Everything I have read leads me to believe that these charges are true. That our country invaded Iraq to take its oil and resources, and to establish a long-term military presence there, while lying to our citizens, our soldiers and the world about our motives, and pretending that Iraq had anything at all to do with the attacks of 9-11. Perhaps I’m wrong. But as I’m sure as I can be that the deaths of Iraqi citizens as we claim their oil and their resources is a bona fide slaughter of the innocents, as are the deaths of their soldiers, and of our own soldiers – no less than in the Vietnam War.

It is uncanny, how well this fits the Christmas story. Truth is the moral enemy of lies, deception, thievery and fraud. The threat of the birth of a true son of God is that – like a Superman – he would have no fear, couldn’t be bought or intimidated, would serve God and truth, and nothing less.

People gather in Christian churches saying they think the birth of the Christ child, the son of God, was a good thing, as though they would really like that to happen in their own lives. And Hindus, I assume, think that Krishna as the most beloved son of God, or avatar of Vishnu, as they would put it, was a good thing, the sort of thing they’d love to see happening in their neighborhood today. I’m not so sure.

We daily pray, and daily fear that for which we daily pray.

This is why prophets are honored only after they are safely dead. They point out that we are living out of values that demean life and need to be changed, and they are uncomfortable to have around.

The birth of a true son of God, the birth of someone who will actually act on behalf of high and noble ideals, is a threat to every tyranny, every deception, every robbery of the weak by the strong, every lie in the service of low aims, every bogus war into which our young soldiers are sent to perish and to cause other young soldiers to perish.

As a background for the Christmas story, it is perfect. For the myths of the slaughter of the innocents attending the births of Jesus and Krishna are telling us that always, in all times and places, the mortal enemy of wars, theft, invasion, subjugation and deceit would be the birth of true sons and daughters of God, who would serve only truth and justice, and would have the courage to face down the tyrants of the day.

And as the two stories from such different cultures and eras show, this is the eternal dream of people everywhere. As they also show, if God is to be present here, it can only be in human form.

That is the kind of birth for which we pray: the birth of true sons and daughters of the very best gods. That’s the Christmas prayer. When it happens – and it can happen any time, any place – it is indeed the greatest story ever told.

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© Victoria Shepherd Rao
05 December 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

As Christmas time approaches, we pray that all flights, drives and trips will be safe and sound. May angels of mercy abound in the midst of any and all mishaps.

As the cold weather sets in, we pray for the homeless. We pray there is enough cheer to go around – enough money and food donated so that all the children of man and God have at least one moment of delight to awaken or confirm the spirit of hope in their lives.

We pray that reunions of families and friends are gentle and filled with sympathetic understanding and coherent conversation. We pray that this be a season of connection for all souls.

And we pray for all the ones who are alone, isolated or neglected, and for those who are away from home and missing it. We pray for everyone who is aching with loss, overburdened with work, and struggling with failure. We pray for everyone who is sick and dying. We pray for everyone who is just now being born.

May we each of us be given the power and courage to befriend strangers amid the busy-ness, and sometimes the loneliness, of the season. It is Christmas let us learn how to let its magic bless us.

Amen

SERMON: Birthing the Sacred

Today is the second Sunday of Advent. In the traditional liturgical year, Advent is the four Sundays previous to December 25th. High church custom lights a candle each week, making a full circle around a wreath – three white candles and a colored one for last. Of course Christianity is not the only religious tradition which lights candles this time of year.

We celebrated Devali last month, the Hindu festival of lights, where rows of candles are lit at the entranceways to homes. This week the Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah will begin on the 8th. It is an eight-day candle lighting ritual. The ninth candle in the center of the holder, or Menorah, is used to light the other candles, lighting them from left to right, one new candle each day.

You may also see Kwanzaa candles later in the month. That is a seven day candle lighting ritual to honor and celebrate indigenous African values such as unity and self determination and cooperative economics. It begins with the lighting of the black candle in the center of the kinara candleholder and then the red and green candles in turn, again one new candle each day until they are all alight.

For the sake of the sacred rituals of humanity, the beauty and the discipline and the mystery of them, I have lit all these candles on our alter today. They are lit symbolically to join us with others in the observance of December 25th – the coming of the winter solstice, the return of the sun to our daily lives, to celebrate that the world keeps on turning, that we are together.

There is a birth story at the center of Christmas, the holiday that marks the birth of Christ. But I thought we’d start off this morning with a birth story you probably don’t know already- the birth story of the Hindu God, Krishna. Now Krishna is one of the most popular and well-loved of the gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. Krishna was born as a human although he was understood to be an incarnation of the more primordial god, Vishnu. As all humans, Krishna had a regular birth and death, though his life was full of extraordinary deeds designed to rid the world of demons and guide humanity to fullness.

Krishna was born to an imprisoned couple. His mother was Devaki and his father Vasudeva. These two had been imprisoned by an evil king named Kamsa. Kamsa was a bad guy. He was shrewd and cruel. He usurped his fathers kingdom and threw his cousin Devaki and her new husband into jail after being warned by a sage that the eighth child of the couple would kill him and put an end to his evil tyranny.

So, Kamsa had guards watching at all times and every time Devaki delivered a newborn, Kamsa personally arrived into their cell to take the child from them and to smash it against the stone walls. Hard to imagine the experience but crazy-making comes to mind. Devaki and Vasudeva begged Kamsa to spare their babies.

They even promised to hand over the eighth but he would not be moved. Finally as the time came for the eighth child to be born, a heavenly voice told Vasudeva that the child Devaki would deliver was a divine being and that he was to take the newborn to a certain neighboring village, where he would find another newborn with which he should make an exchange before returning to the prison cell. The voice faded before Vasudeva could ask, “How?”

Kamsa had doubled the guard knowing that this child was his potential killer. As Devaki went into labor one evening, a terrible storm developed with lightening and loud claps of thunder.

Around midnight, all the prison guards fell into a deep sleep. Not even the crashing of the storm could rouse them. Devaki delivered a beautiful little baby boy at the stroke of midnight and much to the astonishment of the tortured couple, in the next moment all the doors of the prison swung open of their own accord. Vasudeva collapsed unto his knees and praised god and took the babe and ran through the rainstorm to the village where he did find another newborn with which he did make the instructed exchange. This was a newborn baby girl and she smiled knowingly at Vasudeva as he ran back to the dungeons.

Once he arrived back, the doors swung closed again and all the guard awoke. Kamsa was notified that the baby had been born and he arrived to do his thing. Devaki and Vasudeva pleaded for the babe’s life, but Kamsa was again unmoved. He grabbed the baby by her feet and started to dash her against the floor, but she slipped out of his hands and flew up.

The whole place was filled with the scornful laughter of a woman. The babe had turned into the goddess Durga. This fierce warrior goddess addressed Kamsa and told him that the eighth child was safe and that Kamsa would live in terror until the day he would be slain by the child. So saying, the goddess disappeared.

Kamsa lived in torment, always scheming to kill Krishna. Krishna, meanwhile, grew up happily in the village, destroying any demons he encountered effortlessly.

Quite a story. It’s got villains, heroes, and heroines, disembodied voices, and divine appearances. All the supernatural events like the guards falling asleep and the dungeon doors opening on cue, only add to the fascination.

It is the story of the birth of god, incarnate as a human being, just like Jesus. But unlike the biblical stories of the birth of the baby Jesus, Krishna’s is not offered to listeners as historical fact or even as the “real-true” undergirding of their faith. It is another rich story about another beloved god. It is easy for us to hear this story when we can categorize it as clearly “make-believe.” How much harder it is for us when it comes to the gospel stories, in a religions tradition that has always taught the biblical stories as though they were literally true.

The birth story of Jesus is one of the best known and most celebrated of the Christian religion. Even though the biblical accounts are pure fiction – right out of the religious imaginations of the gospel writers – they are LIVING myth, real to people as all good stories are.

So, here’s Matthew’s story about the birth of Jesus. It is not the same as Luke’s story, which we will be retelling in the upcoming pageant on Christmas Eve. Luke has the angel appearing to Mary to let her know what’s in store for her. He has the whole birth story of John the Baptist described. He sets up a journey to Bethlehem for the expected parents – all for good confessional reasons, to present the birth as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, to present Jesus as a messiah.

Matthew’s birth story starts with an elaborate genealogy to connect Jesus to Abraham. Then he gets right to the point.

Matthew 1:18-25, NRSV (ISA 7:14;8:8)

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

I like Matthew’s direct style here. He takes a lot of care to be very clear about the sticky situation around exactly when and how Mary got pregnant. With a marriage custom which had a couple formally betrothed or engaged for a period of time before legitimately lying together as husband and wife, the timing of her condition was awkward. It seemed Joseph needed to be persuaded to keep with Mary. Thank God for that angel speaking up for her. Mary could have been dismissed. Pregnant and dismissed by her almost husband. Sounds bad. But Matthew, or whoever the gospel writer is, didn’t bother himself too much about Mary. Joseph’s honor is not threatened by the Holy Spirit. He comes through with the support Mary needs. And Mary bears him a son, and he named him Jesus.

Now, it is worth noting the very sparse elements of truth which must have been part of the real, true birth of the baby Jesus. His mother was named Mary by all accounts. Who was his father? It may have been Joseph the carpenter, or maybe it was a Roman soldier? Experts, like Davidson, in the area of the historical Jesus, accept either as equally unverifiable. In the gospels, the gospel truth, is that Jesus had siblings. Four brothers and two or more sisters. He may not have been the first born to Mary. Nothing is really known or reliable until Jesus’s ministry began decades later. Hmmm. But then there’s no magic. No away in the manger. No stars guiding the way of the wise men? No.

There was a birth though. There was a woman. Mary. She had seven kids and who knows how many pregnancies and miscarriages. Her son Jesus became a wandering preacher. He must have been a pretty good kid because she did seem to love him as a man even though he was downright rude to her, saying to her that he considered his real family was “whoever did the will of God.” He was crucified. She saw him on the cross.

She bore him into his life and witnessed his death. Whether or not he was conceived by man or holy spirit, Mary gave birth to Jesus. Did Mary have midwives? Sisters? Mothers to help her give birth? Did she have love or respect for the father? What about her mothering?

What about mothering – birthing a newborn, nursing a baby, cradling and cleaning and holding – feeding and watching and teaching and helping and waiting and repeating and showing and listening and hoping and worrying and letting go. Birth is miraculous. It makes many new people beyond the baby. It turns women into mothers, men into fathers, mothers into grandmothers, wise women, fathers into grandfathers, wise men. It turns brothers and sisters into aunts and uncles and best friends into god parents. Many new people with every birth.

So Jesus was born – is it something for us to celebrate, we the demythologized? He had a remarkable following as a wandering preacher who tried to teach everyone about the Kingdom of God. Was he an incarnation of that god? Was he the messiah the prophets of the Old Testament spoke of? Was he the leader of the Jews – to rescue them from the occupying imperial rule of the Romans?

What is he to you? A teacher who tried to wake people up to the immediacy and possibility of God’s love to transform human existence on earth and to show a way to bear our humanity the way a mother bears a baby: it takes submission to mysterious forces that can become overwhelming at times; it takes courage to bear the pain; it takes faith that no matter what happens, it will be well; it takes hope for the new life to emerge and to commit yourself to being there for another’s sake, and for the sanctity of life, or the love of God.

So, we can contemplate the unknowable true story but what should we do with the other story about the babe in the manger under the dazzling star, with the shepherds gathering around and the wise men arriving to give precious gifts and bow down? It is such a pretty picture and it may be an ultimate fiction for us still.

The whole plan to do the Christmas pageant here at First Church has revealed some interesting generational differences where this Christmas story comes in. For instance, if you are somewhere around sixty years or older, chances are you have seen or participated in some form of re-enactment of the traditional birth stories of Jesus. But if you are say, closer to forty, chances are that you’ve had little or no such experience. Is this true? If it is true for you, let me see your hands. This is true for me. Though I was familiar with the whole nativity scene from playing with creche sets, being unchurched, I just never had the exposure to a play about the birth of Jesus. And yet, only two generations before me, it was a common religious thread woven through the fabric of our society.

So doing the Christmas Pageant here at First Church this Christmas Eve will provide different experiences for these two different groups of people. For some it will feel like a returning to earlier days, maybe it will stir memories. That’s always a risky business. For others, especially for the children among us, it will feel like a discovery, a magical story, I hope vividly re-enacted. Whatever it may be for you, it is offered that you may find new insights into the story at the oft-hidden center of what has become such a frenzied season. Because stories are important to this holy day as it has been observed in the generations before us.

Maybe it is too difficult to think of the biblical stories with unfettered appreciation. They are too loaded with baggage – personal and cultural – you’d rather leave behind. So let’s take a look at some other important Christmas time stories that repeat the birth of the sacred theme, not about the birth of gods, but about the emergence of human spirit.

Now, everybody knows about how the Grinch stole Christmas, don’t they? In Dr. Seuss’s story, the Grinch lives way off up the mountain all by himself. He hates all the joy and merrymaking at Christmas and decides he to put an end to the celebrations one year. We find that the problem is that the Grinch’s heart is too small. But then his hard heart gets cracked-open a bit, warmed by a gesture a little Who girl makes which shows him the true human spirit of generosity. Then the Grinch’s heart grows two sizes and he ends up enjoying what he once hated.

And in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, don’t we love to see Scrooge squirm when the ghosts of Christmases Past Present and Future show him what a miserly soul can expect of a lifetime – don’t we delight at the realization that convicts him and transforms him, that life can be as easily packed with love and joy as it can loaded down with bitterness and resentment.

These are beloved Christmas stories. Pieces of fiction. Not true in any literal sense but no less powerful or real than if they were. We love the lessons to be learned from them. We need the lessons. We need generous hearts. We need the cracked-open and growing hearts. We need to be reminded of how surprisingly joy can rush in and grab us, warts and all, any moment in this life. We know too well that tragedy can strike too, that evil exists, that sorrow can linger. To be alive is to risk it all. Birthing the sacred, our better, more alive and compassionate selves, is a wide-eyed life-affirming thing. Something to celebrate.

It is a kind of a test at Christmas. Not a test to see if you can decide whether any of these stories are true. You don’t ask that question when you watch the Grinch stealing Christmas, or Scrooge growing wise after his big night out. No, it’s not that kind of test. It’s a test to see whether you can enter into these stories, and let them inside of you.

The real miracles of Christmas are as open to non-Christians as they are to Christians. Hidden among all the shopping mall Santas, the incessant stars, angels, and wise men, there is a question. The question is: can you let these old stories work their magic on you? If you can, there may be some great gifts for you and for those you touch. For you never know in whom the sacred may be born. It could even be in born in you.