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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The first in a sermon series inspired by the elements of baking. Sometimes transformation takes heat, it takes trouble, agitation or discomfort. We will have just finished two days of talking about our religious education program with an interim facilitator. Telling stories from the past can turn up the heat, but as in baking, the results can be something nourishing.
Chalice Lighting
We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the parts of the world that is within our reach… One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, sends up flares, builds signal fires,…
Sermon
HEAT AND TRANSFORMATION
One of my spiritual practices is baking bread on Fridays or Saturdays. I love the smell of the yeast starting to come alive, the feel of the dough as I knead it and braid it, and the way it makes the house smell when it is baking. Yeast and bread are an upcoming sermon. Today it’s heat. And transformation. We all “feel the heat” sometimes, and it can change us, and we’ve all seen that transformation can be for the better, for the worse, or it’s hard to tell.
In cooking and baking, you are conjuring transformation. A set of ingredients comes together and then, with the application of heat, they become something completely different. The ancient Celts talked about the cauldron of the goddess Ceridwen. When you were in trouble, when you were sick, when you died, you were in Ceridwen’s cauldron, being boiled up into something else. A lot of the time things are going well. You have your job. You have some money. Your body’s working pretty well. Then life throws in some heat. You’re in the cauldron. You’re in the heat, in the stove. How do you hold up?
When you read about stress, the consensus seems to be that people need some stress, we need to rise to a challenge. We sign ourselves up for marathons, or 5k runs. We take classes, we set ourselves songwriting challenges or start new businesses. We take on a big project like dating someone with the goal of changing them. We know that it’s going to be stressful, but we enjoy the challenge.
My dad used to teach at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, casually known as the Better Baby Institute. He learned that making the surfaces babies crawled on too soft didn’t lead to as much development as letting them get scuffed up a little by crawling on burlap. Even babies need challenges. My mother wouldn’t let us have Lysol in the house, because she said that killing germs led to the deterioration of building immunities, and she thought our immune systems needed challenging. She taught second grade, and was not a scientist with any credential whatsoever, and she was not in love with house cleaning. She’d grown up in India playing with dried cow patties in the village, and thought American obsessions with cleanliness were misguided. That was possibly a self-justifying theory!
In England and Europe the new thought is that playgrounds should be slightly dangerous, that children need to learn to navigate risk and danger. If children never have to navigate risk, learn how far it is from the monkey bars to the ground, if we always run up to catch them, they won’t learn some crucial things. Intermittent challenges are called good stress. You rise to it, or you learn something, or you fail. And learn something. Failure throws you into the cauldron, with a chance for transformation.
Sometimes the challenge goes on and on. You are living with someone whose way of doing things is a continuing misery for you, and they can’t or won’t change. You are working for a boss whose way of doing and being makes your life a misery, and they can’t or won’t change. This leads to what they call chronic stress, which transforms people like being left in the oven at 350 for ten hours would affect your dinner. In chronic stress, we get left in the oven too long. Or we leave ourselves in the oven too long. We even say “I’m burned out.” “I’m crispy.”
When the pressure is on, our centeredness becomes crucial. When someone is throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, they try to slap that mound of clay right in the center of the wheel. It takes practice and skill. If the clay isn’t centered, when you put the pressure on, when the spinning starts and you press your hands into the clay and start trying to shape it into a pot, it begins to wobble wildly. You have to scrape it off the wheel and start over. Our spiritual practices, our learning from our experience, our support system are what can center us.
We’ve been talking about spiritual practices. Kelly has articles about them on the Religious Education table. Chris and Lee talked about their personal practices at the end of December. Then we all did the practice of burning the old year in the burning bowl last Sunday. It can be our spiritual practices that help us, when the heat is turned up, to be transformed in a good way rather than transformed in a destructive way.
What makes heat for transformation? Anger is heat, indicating that your boundaries have been violated. How do you work with that heat to transform your situation? Desire is heat, when you want something very much and point yourself in that direction. The need to live authentically can make enough heat to lead people to come out as gay, even though that adds to trouble in their lives, or leads people to transition in their understanding of or presentation of their gender, inviting lots of concern from people around them. The desire to live authentically can lead people out of one career into another, or from one relationship to another.
When we feel the heat, we are in the cauldron. The chance of transformation is here. What do you do? You first say to yourself: I’m feeling the heat. This is a hot situation. What next?
The best thing to do, if you can, is to take yourself away and out of the stress from time to time. That is the way to keep it from being chronic. Learn to relax. As my counseling mentor used to say, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”
Celebrate your victories. Have a birthday party even if the eviction notice is on the door.
Take things day by day. Be grateful for what’s good. Change what you can. Ask for help, not to fix everything, but for someone to sit with you in the heat, the way the wise person does with those in their sweat lodge.
I would want a smooth life for you, with no trouble and no pain. That wouldn’t be the best for you, though. May we find a way to be in the heat and come out on the other side transformed with more compassion, more heart, and more understanding.
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