Centered for the Season

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
September 22, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We are barreling toward the holidays and all the joy, stress, love, grief, community, busyness, beauty, loneliness, and so much more they can entail. And then there is also a major election and its as yet unknown aftermath. How do we begin to find our spiritual center so that we can be better prepared for the heightened intensity of the season to come?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

WE ARE
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We do not become healers.
We came as healers.
We are
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become storytellers.
We came as carriers of the stories
we and our ancestors actually lived.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become artists.
We came as artists.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become writers … dancers … musicians … helpers … peacemakers.
We came as such.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not learn to love in this sense.
We came as Love.
We are Love.
Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

REMEMBER
– Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence
of her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too.
Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Sermon

Happy Holidays!

No, Rev. Chris isn’t losing it.

It’s just, it is September and all of the stores have had Halloween decor out for weeks already.

I was at an HEB the other day, and they already had a whole fall Thanksgiving merchandise display up.

A local news station recently ran a story about a great brouhaha that has erupted on social media over Hobby Lobby already putting out Christmas decorations.

So, like it or not, we already get to start thinking about the impending season of joy.

Or angst, depending upon your perspective.

So, I thought we might start this morning with a little embodied spiritual engagement.

I will ask some questions. If the answer is true for you, and you are here in person, please just raise your hand. Or you can stand up and cry hallelujah if you are so moved. If you’re online, feel free to answer in the comments.

Of courses if you are uncomfortable with any of this, it’s fine to just think about what your answer might be.

OK, first question. How many of you are just jazzed about the upcoming holiday season?

How many of you are already stressed about it and would happily tell Hobby Lobby exactly what they can do with their way too early Christmas decorations?

Any abstentia?

Personally I feel deeply that the display of Thanksgiving and Christmas decor should be banned until the average daily high temperature has fallen to no more 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

And during the middle of all of it, we also have that pesky election coming up.

How many of you are feeling extremely nervous about the election and/or its potential aftermath?

Well if you are having less than joy-filled feelings about the holidays and/or the election, you are not alone.

Surveys have found that 62% of folks feel elevated stress during the holidays. Forty percent don’t want to celebrate at all because of grief and loss. Sixty percent feel lonely at some point during the holidays; 64% of folks with psychological challenges say the the holidays make their conditions worse. Cardiac mortality is highest during the holiday season.

Now, add to that a presidential election year, where three quarters of the population says they are feeling stressed and anxious, over a quarter are in conflict with their family or loved ones, and 40% say they are depressed about it. We have seen that before, right here at this church.

For several weeks after the 2016 election, I remember having to pull chairs out of the fellowship hall and put them in the back of the sanctuary to handle all of the folks coming to our services because they needed community in the face of the fear and trauma they were experiencing.

My therapist told me that therapists were seeking each other out for counseling sessions in the aftermath of that election.

During the 2020 election and its aftermath, our requests for pastoral care went way up, especially after the January 6 attempted coup (and that’s what it was. We were just lucky that it was so incompetently planned).

So, while the holidays can certainly bring joy, community, family, generosity and more, one of our pre-holiday annual rituals has also become trying to prepare ourselves for the potentially not so bright aspects of the season – the sheer intensity of it.

As I was thinking about this, the first thought that occurred to me is that we have to start our preparing by centering ourselves – locating ourselves within that calmest, strongest, truest self – that spark of the divine within each of us.

And that’s how being a part of a faith community like this one can be such a huge support for us moving into the upcoming season.

The second thought that occurred to me though, is that one of the things that makes it more difficult for all of us to find our spiritual center is that we are all carrying at least a certain degree of collective trauma and grief from the events of the past several years. And we have to recognize that in order to move past it.

So, I want to spend some time this morning talking about everyone’s favorite holiday topics – trauma and grief.

First though, I do want to let you that you don’t have to take my word for any of this – I ran it by my therapist, and she said it was spot on. Of course, I am paying her to make me feel better.

So first, collective trauma and grief are much like our individual experiences of them, only they occur when entire communities experience them all at once.

Communities that have gone through natural disasters, war and genocide, our country after the terrorists attacks of 9/11/2001, the world community after the Covid pandemic are a few examples.

My therapist pointed out that it was only a few years ago that we were all witnessing images of refrigerator trucks parked outside of our hospitals because so many people had died of Covid that the morgues were all full.

So, she commented, it would be a far stretch to say we are past having collective trauma and grief that may be hampering our ability to engage our spiritual center.

Now, quickly, trauma and grief are not the same.

Trauma is the emotional and psychological response to deeply disturbing or distressing events whether or not they involve a permanent loss, while grief is a collection of strong, often painful feelings that follow a loss or that happen in anticipation of a loss.

I’m talking about them together today though, because they so often occur together and can be strongly interwoven.

For instance, an unaddressed trauma response can often lead to what is sometimes called complicated grief – where we either delay our grief because we are unable to fully engage with it, or we kind of get stuck in continuous, profound and often disabling grief because of the trauma.

All of this is especially common with collective forms of trauma and grief. Now, of course, when we are part of these collective experiences we also experience it as individuals, and it doesn’t change that we may at the same time also experience traumatic events or loss in our own individual lives too.

Before I talk about how we might move though collective trauma and grief, many of you know that I am grieving the recent loss of my spouse Wayne.

So, it would feel disingenuous for me not to talk a little bit about individual trauma and grief.

I will ask your understanding that it is too soon for me to able to talk more than just a little bit about it. And, again, I don’t pretend to be an expert on all this. I am reading a good book about it though, because I am a good Unitarian Universalist.

Here are a few things I can say.

- Messages of love and support matter. Thank you to all of you have sent such messages to me.

- For me, physical affection helps a lot too. Hugs are welcome. For other folks though, please do ask first whether physical expressions of affection would be helpful or not.

Asking how I am doing is not particularly helpful.

Most of the time, the honest answer would be “I have no idea. I cry a lot.” And that’s OK, my book says that’s part of grieving.

Still, I might not especially feel like talking about it just then and how I am doing seems to change every few minutes anyway.

Having said that, know that I forget and ask folks that because I genuinely am concerned about how they’re doing.

Know we all sometimes struggle with knowing what to say, and that when our heart is in the right place, that will be clear, even if we don’t know what the right words might be.

As Parker Palmer put it,

“It’s not about what you say … I took comfort and strength from the people who neither fled from me nor tried to save me but were simply present to me.”

We can more support those who are grieving by offering compassion, understanding and tenderness.

So, please understand I find I tire easily, which my book says is also very common, so I am not at 100% and will have to pace my church schedule for a while.

I also have absolutely no memory. So please forgive me if I forget things, or something never makes it to my to-do list. Feel free to send an email follow up so it’s more likely to get on that list and to check back later with a gentle reminder if it seems like maybe it didn’t.

Finally, a couple of related items – grief doesn’t just happen because of losing someone we love like I am experiencing – and sometimes we can get all judgy about trauma and grief, and that can make folks who are grieving the loss of a job, or a dream, or a pet, or a marriage or relationship and so on, afraid to share what they are feeling.

So, related to that, we often don’t know who is coping with trauma and grief, and as I’ve said, and my therapist verified, we are all dealing with some degree of collective trauma and grief, so we might do well to just always approach one another with that compassion, understandings and tenderness I mentioned earlier.

OK, now, how do we help each other move through collective trauma and grief so that each of us is better able to spiritually center ourselves as we move into this election and holiday season?

Remember after 9-11, when we are told to just go shopping? That’s not it. Perhaps not surprisingly, what it does involve is many of the same ways we center ourselves individually, only for collective experiences we also heal together communally.

One of the best examples of this I have read is the story of the grieving parents, as well as the children who survived the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting.

It is hard to believe the children who survived are now young adults. Together, as a community, the folks from Sandy Hook:

- created opportunities for public mourning and embodied rituals

- offered the children therapy involving theatre type play

- engaged in community art projects reflecting upon their losses

- made lists within their community of folks whom they would check in on and who would check in on them

- volunteered to help other people through the trauma of the seemingly endless stream of continuing mass shooting events

organized to advocate changes to this country’s abominable gun laws.

Those last two kind of remind me of the saying by author E.B. White

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

I think we too often forget that in our efforts to save the world, we are also, so often, saving ourselves.

As we approach this holiday season and this election, as a religious community, we can do all of the things they did to help each other work though our fears and any pain we may carry so that we can, as we heard in our call to worship earlier, catch up to the love we truly are.

Certainly, depending upon how the election and its aftermath go, we will offer rituals and other opportunities for processing it communally.

If you are feeling like you might like some support moving into the holidays, please feel free to contact caring@austinuu.org.

Together, we can help each other remember – remember our profound interconnectedness, as so beautifully illustrated by our reading today.

Together, we can help each remember – remember to offer one another compassion, understanding, and tenderness throughout the season.

Remember that we, as a community are faith-FULL. Remember that we already have strong hearts. Remember that we already are true hearts. Remember.

Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

Now let us go out into the world centered in the love we already are.
Now let us remember that the universe is within us and we are the universe.
Now let us know that our fears and sorrows can open us to even more joy and even more love.
Now let us find peace in building the Beloved Community.

May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed be.”
Go in peace.

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