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© Davidson Loehr

September 10, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Jack R. Harris-Bonham

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming,

we sit here this morning feeling solid and permanent, and yet, a nagging voice in all of us admits and possibly celebrates the fact that life is transient.

The most important things in life are simply invisible. We can’t see the love that exists between all of us, but it’s there.

It’s there in our helloes, and our asking, “How are you today?”

It’s there in our answers, even when we’re just being polite and say, “We’re fine,” regardless of our feelings.

Gathered together there is created between and among us something greater than the sum of individual parts. This is called community and in this case a covenant community.

Covenant means we’ve made a solemn compact to maintain our faith and discipline. In our case we have no dogma, and no sacred, holy book so our covenant is different.

Our solemn compact is to maintain our faith in each other. This is a loving and giving faith. We give each other the benefit of the doubt because we have an abundance of doubt.

The Buddhists say great faith and great doubt are the hallmarks of discernment.

When we UU’s read character we bring to that reading an abundance of faith in humankind, and an abundance of doubt in the idea that any god can save us. We put our invisible faith in one another and with that belief we promise to serve not because we will be served, but because a sacred command to serve the other and to see the other in ourselves has been given.

We serve ourselves by serving others.

Today we rejoice in things that seem contradictory.

We expand and contract stretching who we thought we were, admitting when we are wrong, taking back things said, asking forgiveness for acts unbecoming a friend and existing together as less than perfect human beings; loving as best we can, living better than we could have imagined, and laughing at ourselves all the while.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen

SERMON: Coming and Going

I’m starting the first half of my sabbatical tomorrow. Jack will be the minister for the next three months. Then I’ll be back for three months, then gone between mid-March and mid-June.

With all the coming and going, it’s a good time to ask what’s at the core of this place, and of liberal religion. What stays here? If you took a picture of this place once a day for fifty years, then ran all those pictures at 32 frames per second like a movie, everything but the building would be a blur. But you don’t come just to see the building; that isn’t the attraction. What makes this place worth having is invisible, but more important than all the visible parts.

What is at the center of liberal religion? If it isn’t the minister and we don’t have one book we call Holy, like the Bible or the Koran, then what’s the center – or is there one? Is it just a bunch of people who can believe anything they like and expect others to respect it just because they believe it?

No. That would be a group of narcissisms, each writing the others blank moral checks, as though it didn’t matter what we believe. But it does matter. Some beliefs are awful, or narrow or willfully ignorant, destructive, or just too silly.

But if it matters, why? By what authority? What must we believe, and how can you say it in a religion without a creed or a Holy book? You may see the pink poster in the hall with the Seven Banalities on it. And if you’re from an orthodox religion, you may assume that’s the creed here, the beliefs required or assumed of all members. But it isn’t. It even says so. It’s a behavioral agreement between church, not of individuals. As St. Paul said in one of his greatest lines, we must all work out our own salvation “in fear and trembling.”

That’s what I want to talk about this morning – what liberal religion, or any honest religion, is about, and why it’s a good thing for you, for our country, even for the world.

In some ways, it’s implied in the Invocation I use to begin each service:

It is a sacred place, this:

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

That’s not an orthodox Invocation. Orthodoxy poses answers more profound than questions. Turning it around the way we do means we have the ability and the duty to question all received answers: religious, social, or political.

And some of the core of liberal religion is in the Benediction I use each week, which is a very liberal benediction:

For those who seek God, may your God go with you;

And the courage to take it: step by step by step.

Honest religion is about asking the kind of questions that can inform and deepen our appreciation and acceptance of ourselves and others, our love of life, and our passion to try and make a positive difference in the world around us, as the rent we pay for living.

There are a lot of ways of saying this. The theologian Howard Thurman put it this way: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” You need something to connect the passions of your soul with the needs of your world.

Another way of putting it, a little scarier, is told in an old Buddhist story.

A seeker reported to the local guru.

“What do you want?” asked the teacher.

“To know the truth!” said the student.

“Very risky,” said the older man. “Do you know what is demanded of you in this quest?”

“Oh yes,” said the student: “A passionate desire for Truth.”

“No,” said the guru, “a never-ending ability to admit that you are wrong.”.

It is a mixture, perhaps, of arrogance and humility that’s required here. The arrogance comes with the willingness to question things we may never have questioned, that maybe even our family never questioned. Very risky. And the humility comes from knowing that life is so much bigger than we are, and that all our arrogance is both unwarranted and a little silly.

There are two wonderful stories from the Hindu tradition that picture both the arrogance and the humility. Part of what we’re about here is borrowing from any religious, philosophical or other tradition that offers us healthy spiritual nourishment. If it helps us to a wiser and more responsible path, it is equally valid, whether it comes from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or all the other religious and non-religious traditions reflecting on life.

Before telling you the first story, I’ll tell you how I learned the story, which is an interesting story in itself. A few years ago there was an Indian Hindu woman who used to attend here, always arriving late and leaving early. For months, I wondered who she was and why she came in late and left early. Then one Sunday we had some special music, and I snuck out to the foyer and caught her. “Aha! I’ve caught you!” I said. She said she knew she’d be caught sooner or later, and we laughed.

I asked her why she came late and left early. Well, she explained that she had to drive her son to Barsana Dham (perhaps a 35-40 minute drive from here) then had to drive back to pick him up after the service. “Why don’t you bring him here?” I asked.

“No!” she said quite forcefully. “Why not?” “Because he was bored here.” “Why?” She wagged a finger at me, and said, “Because you have no good stories here!”

Now I’m not about to go toe-to-toe with a Hindu over the quantity and quality of stories! But I was curious. “They have better stories for him there?” “Hah! They have hundreds of better stories!”

“Tell me one.” “One? I could tell you a hundred!” “Just one.” Very well, she said she would tell me the story he had heard last week, which they had been discussing at dinner every night because he wanted to talk about it.

It is a lovely story about the favorite Hindu god Krishna, as a boy. Krishna, if you don’t know, was a bit of a brat, so kids especially like those stories. The teacher saw him chewing in class one day and asked what he was chewing – they all knew that chewing gum was forbidden in the classroom. “Nothing,” he replied, and kept chewing. “Liar!” she said, and she walked to his desk. “Stand up,” she commanded, and Krishna stood up. “Now open your mouth and let me look inside!” Krishna opened his mouth. She looked in, and inside of his mouth she saw – a thousand million galaxies. That’s the kind of potential we have inside of us: a thousand million galaxies. Possibilities beyond measure, beyond imagining. You could get pretty arrogant believing only that!

The second Hindu story is one I heard from the great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell. It’s about Indra, who is sort of the king of all the gods, the #1 god. In this story, Indra had a big head. After all, he was chief among the gods, and it hardly gets better than that. So a wise man took Indra, said there was something he needed to show him. In Hinduism, as you know, there is a belief in reincarnation: that we keep coming back in one form of life or another. So the wise man pointed down to the ground, and there, in formation, were thousands upon thousands of ants marching along. “Ants!” bellowed Indra. “What are ants to me? What are they?” “Ah,” said the wise man, “They are all former Indras. Thousands upon thousands of former Indras.” Today, king of the gods; tomorrow just another ant. Great story!

How do we realize some of our infinite potential? How do we do it? Well, imperfectly, to be sure. The goal isn’t to be perfect; it’s to become more whole. How do we do that? There are clues from nature, from the world around us.

If you’ve lived in Texas for long, you’ve heard of mesquite trees, and probably seen some. Around here, they’re usually scruffy and small, seldom even a foot in diameter. But if you drive a couple hours west, you can find mesquite trees, growing by rivers, that are up to six feet or more in diameter. Same species of tree. Without enough nourishment, it will stay small; put it by a nice river, and it can grow huge.

Or think of the fish called Koi, those fish in the carp family that are so prized by many Asians, and found in pools at a lot of Asian restaurants. One of the most amazing things about koi is that how big they get is determined by the size of the pond they’re in. Put them in a fish bowl and they’ll stay very small. Put them in a bigger tank, they grow bigger. Put them in a very big pond, they will grow to lengths of a foot and more. Same fish. It’s potential can’t be unlocked without giving it the right amount of the right kind of nourishment. And neither can our potential be realized without the right kind of nourishment and an environment of large scope.

Sometimes, the vast potential we may feel inside is too big to cope with, and we go back to our smaller selves and cling to them because they’re all we know. And sometimes, we can grow from small to large in vision very quickly.

Just a few weeks ago, I saw an example of how this works in real life and real-time. I was in Colorado, near Aspen, to spend a week studying with a very good British woodturner named Ray Key. As some of you may know, woodturning is my hobby, my therapy and sometimes my obsession. I like to study with Masters, because it’s like swimming in a very big pond or growing near a big river. These guys have been woodturners for forty years or more, are better at it than I’ll ever dream of being, so there’s a lot to learn from them – as long as you can leave your ego at the door. I get a little better each time, though I may never be more than a fervent amateur.

There were eight of us in the class, covering the spectrum. One man I’ll call Bob had turned very few pieces before coming to this class advertised as being for intermediate to advanced students. So Ray, the teacher, suggested he focus on just one form, one bowl shape he really liked, and learn how to do that well this week. He showed Ray some magazine photos of bowls he liked, and Ray helped set him up to turn that shape. By the end of the week, he had made eight or ten bowls in this shape, and two or three of them were very nice. He had created small works of beauty, done with skills he learned that week. The ocean is very big. Just take the sips you can handle. Don’t worry about containing a thousand million bowls – just start with one small bowl you can handle.

We learn life and religion this way, too: step by step by step.

Another man I’ll call Tom had spent $5,000 on his lathe – you learned this within about thirty seconds – a couple thousand on tools, and seemed to need to be seen as good, though the truth is that he wasn’t very good. He kept exploding his bowls on the lathe, pieces flying everywhere as he made the cut wrong on a bowl spinning at over 1,000 rpm. And he simply couldn’t see the difference between a really nice form and an awkward one.

Ray was as blunt as any Buddhist guru. Once when Tom called Ray to look at a bowl he was doing to ask for suggestions, I heard Ray say, “Well, there is nothing you can do to save this form – it’s a disaster!” Very risky studying with masters, if you can’t leave your ego at the door!

But Tom couldn’t let go of his ego enough to open up and find a new way of looking at forms. He couldn’t really admit that he had a heck of a lot to learn, or that he had picked up a lot of bad habits. Day after day, he kept doing what he did at home, wanting it praised, it seemed, and day after day he exploded bowls and made graceless shapes.

At the end of the week, we had a three-hour class critique. We were each to show what we thought was our best work, and our worst work. Even more, we were to paint our worst work black, with blackboard paint. This ruined the piece, but made it very easy to see what was right and wrong with its form.

When Tom’s turn came, some of us were surprised with the piece he painted black, because it looked pretty good. The one he held out as his best work looked mediocre. Ray said, “No, you don’t have anything better than the black piece” – the one he’d just ruined by painting it. He couldn’t tell the difference, even after a week with one of the best in the world.

This reminded me of so many stories from religion and life. The title of this week-long wood-turning workshop was “Pure Form,” taught by a master wood turner whose stunning pieces are in some of the world’s best museums, art galleries and private collections. Form is what he had an exceptional eye for. He would be bothered by a little swelling in a curve that couldn’t have stuck out more than 1/100th of an inch. To him, it was glaring and grotesque. And once he pointed it out, you couldn’t forget it either, and had to try and recut it. And this man Tom, since he wouldn’t let go of the smaller vision he came in with, seemed to learn nothing.

The stories of these two men are like the difference between one who goes on a spiritual journey, and Rip van Winkle. The first returns transformed; the second spends the same amount of time away, but has only a beard to show for the time passed.

Life and religion are a lot like this. While there is more than one form – for a bowl or for a life – there is still a difference between good form and poor form, and it’s a difference we’re trying to learn: in life, and here in this church.

We have a duty to bring ourselves to our own kind of fullness. For some, that fullness will be more intellectual, or more athletic, or assertive, or nurturing, or mystical or artistic. We’re different people, and one path doesn’t fit all, in religion, politics or life.

And there is a responsibility – I think it’s a sacred responsibility – connected with serving high ideals. Ray did it as well as any Buddhist teacher, both in bringing his art down to the level of a serious beginner, and in being flat-out honest with a pretender. If he had flattered mediocre work, he would have betrayed his art. And if he had just wanted to show us his own work, he would have betrayed his duty to serve us that week.

Serving high ideals is like picking up a Stradivarius violin: they take the measure of you, and demand a high quality of service from you. This is true in every area, certainly including public service and religion. When I get angry at politicians – from this or any other administration – it’s usually because they forget their job is to serve the majority of us, rather than the special interests that butter their bread. That’s a betrayal of trust, and of their office.

And when ministers serve lower ends, they are committing the same kind of betrayal. When Pat Robertson says we should murder Hugh Chavez, he has betrayed every high teaching in the religion he claims to serve. When Jerry Falwell says we should blow away terrorists in the name of the Lord, he cannot in the same breath pretend to give a damn about the teachings of Jesus. Likewise when Rev. Hagee in San Antonio urges the president to launch a nuclear attack on Iran and start World War III – this is a betrayal of a high calling, of high ideals, and it is unforgivable. It is serious business, and we must take it seriously. As a theologian I’ve sometimes liked once said to a group of young preachers, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I hope that coming here can offer you the chance to find some of the galaxies you contain, some of the arrogance needed to break away from a vision that may be too small for you, and enough of a challenge to keep you humble. For vulnerability, humility, really can be more powerful than strength. Remember that an ocean is bigger than a river, yet it is big because it’s lower than rivers. That’s why their waters flow into the ocean. Its humility gives it strength.

A final story to make a final point about what liberal religion and this church are about, and what stays here through all the comings and goings of ministers and members. It’s from twenty-five years ago, when I was in graduate school studying with other kinds of masters. David taught “Arts of the Ministry,” and was one of the most gifted preachers I’ve known, with a sure grasp on what this religion business is about, on both sides. There were about fifteen of us in the class, covering many different religions. We met on Monday afternoon, and one Monday, before the seminar began, about four or five of the Lutheran students were complaining about the service at their church the day before. They went on about how awful it was, how inept the preacher was, how amateurish the liturgist was, how cheesy the music, and the rest of it. Then one of them said, “I didn’t get one damned thing from that service!” That’s when David finally spoke up from across the room, from where he had been eavesdropping on us. What he said was, “How hard did you try?”

I sometimes hear people say that life sucks, or they don’t see what there is to give thanks for, and I want to say, “How hard did you try? How much of yourself have you invested in it?” That’s the other part of liberal religion. You don’t get canned, pre-packaged answers or paths here. We can’t give you a slogan that will save you, just some imaginative building materials and a safe place to try your hand at building. It’s a do-it-yourself kit, in an atmosphere where everyone who’s trying is doing it themselves, with the material they get from sermons, from discussions after church, and from interacting with and being around one another.

It matters what we believe. You’ll always hear, I hope, that it matters how we live: that life is a gift, but we owe something in return for the gift of life. We owe the world our best efforts to bring ourselves to fullness, then to offer something back, to try and make a positive difference in the world around us. How close to the river have we managed to live? How big a pond have we tried swimming in? When there are things to learn, can we let go of our smaller selves and admit we need to learn? We need to go where nourishment is, and stay away from people and places where there is no nourishment. And then, before we can throw a fit about how unsatisfied we are with life, there is that question always hanging in the air: “How hard did you try?”

Inside of us are a thousand million possibilities. There is also a clock, ticking, reminding us that we move every day toward that time when we shall not move at all, and that it is our move. And we learn these things here in this pretty big pond, this large river of people moving through life, touching each other as we pass. In all of life, there are so very few places like this. That’s why I wanted to remind you, on this canvass Sunday, just why this marvelous church is worth supporting, as generously as you can.

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© Davidson Loehr

June 25, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for inspiration of the higher sort. Too often, we act inspired by motives too low to be proud of: selfishness, greed, using other people as things to serve our own ends, rather than ends in themselves.

We move so easily into attitudes of taking or entitlement, looking out for #1, as though the other people around us should be assigned numbers rather than respect.

Yet we do this against a background of high ideals, high teachings, high expectations that are continually trying to get our attention, trying to help us become the solution to the human predicament rather than one of its symptoms.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best when he prayed that we listen to the “higher angels of our nature” rather than the lower kind.

It is about who we shall become, and in the service of what ideals. Let us pray for inspiration from the higher sort, and develop the ear that listens only for the better angels of our nature.

Amen.

SERMON: Selves & Souls

The general theme for this sermon came from Stephan Windsor, the man who bought the right to negotiate the sermon theme at last fall’s services auction. He offered several ideas on which he had done a lot of work, and I chose to address the notion of the Self. I wasn’t sure how I would keep it from being just an academic lecture.

What it means, or what I think it means, is that each of us has this distinctive style of being, a distinctive character that our parents saw the seeds of when we were still babies, and that people who’ve known us all our life say has always been who we are. It seems to come, somehow, as part of our genetic package. Some are shy, some are outgoing; some are aggressive, some avoid confrontation; some analyze, others feel, and so on. That core style helps us choose the teachings, philosophies, theologies and values we find most natural.

This core personality, this fundamental style of being who we are, with all our gifts and strengths and weaknesses: I think of this as our Self.

I don’t need to belabor this; you all have a feel for what I mean. The question is whether that’s enough. Can’t we just follow our intuition through life, follow our own gifts and style? After all, it’s what we largely do. Isn’t it enough? What would or could you add to it? Specifically, what on earth do religion or philosophy or ethics really think they have to add to us that we would care or need to care about? Every person seems to have this core, this Self, that’s apparent not long after birth, still identifiable when they become very old. If we need more than that, why do we need it, and what is it?

You can see how easily this could become so abstract you’d need to doze off.

As I thought about this, I wondered what it might look like if serving that core character got seriously out of bounds. For nobody really wants to defend our total freedom to act however we want. As someone has said, my freedom to swing my fists has to stop at your nose, and eventually my self-serving wishes will run up against your self-serving wishes. And then what? Then does the strongest, the greediest, or the one with the most guns win? Or should there be something else to us?

As I free-associated on this, my mind wandered far from the human species, as I remembered some drama that took place a year and a half ago in the attic above my bedroom, involving raccoons. These are some of the cleverest animals around, and it took many months and finally calling out a roofer to discover that they had torn the heavy screen off from around my hot air escape vent on the roof, crawled in and dropped down to the attic. We never figured out how they got out, though they got in by climbing trees and dropping onto my roof.

But during what passes for “winter” here, one raccoon entered my attic, and the noise she made sounded like she was making a nest. Before long, the noises made me believe she had given birth to a couple little raccoons. So instead of thinking they were invading my space, I started thinking of my attic as a kind of homeless shelter for single raccoon mothers. When her babies were old enough and it got a little warmer at nights, I figured she would take them out into the real world, and I could close my raccoon homeless shelter.

But a few months later on a cold night, I heard a heavier thump on my roof, then in my attic. Soon there was much noise and scrambling, and I heard the two young raccoons squeal and scream, as the intruder killed them.

I knew what had happened, as you can probably guess too. A male raccoon had entered to claim the space and – like males of many species do – had killed the young ones because they weren’t his, weren’t extensions of his own genetic line, had no connection to his raccoon Self.

Now when people do such things – and sometimes they do – we call it murder, and we prosecute them. We don’t hold other animals to those higher standards – I doubt that you thought the raccoon had “murdered” the two young raccoons – because we don’t think they recognize those standards. But we do.

Those raccoons may seem an odd introduction to a sermon about Selves & Souls. But in humans, it can point us to the difference between those acting out of self-interest and those acting out of an allegiance to much higher standards. See if you find it useful as I try and flesh it out.

These nasty raccoon behaviors are things we see in so-called “higher” animal behavior, especially in politics, in our treatment of others around us.

A few months ago, I read an interesting book in the field of ethology, or comparative animal behavior, a field I’ve liked reading in for thirty years. The book was called Our Inner Ape, written by one of the world’s foremost primatologists, a man named Frans de Waal. Among other things, he studied human political behavior by studying chimpanzee political behavior, finding them nearly identical. Both species seek power and privileges over the others through combinations of strength, shrewdness, and carefully chosen political alliances.

He talked especially about a very shrewd old male chimp. In his early years, he had been the strongest and fiercest, so he was the alpha male, with all its privileges of power and access to females. As he got older and weaker, he got more clever, and began forming alliances with a strong younger male who lacked his political savvy. He would help the young male become the alpha male, in return for keeping his privileges and power.

Like human politics, chimpanzee politics can be vicious, bloody business. De Waal described a time when the old chimp got even with a male who had twice defeated him many months earlier, by waiting until night when the human guards went home, then setting up an ambush, in which he and the young alpha male attacked his old rival and killed him. Like the raccoons, these male chimps were only interested in what was theirs, what they could gain for themselves, and no amount of violence seemed too much.

It’s easy for us to see patterns in chimp behavior, to reflect on them and judge them in ways chimps cannot do. That ability to see actions against a background of higher expectations is one of the key abilities that distinguishes us from what we like to call “lower animals.”

That’s a funny, and telling, thing to call them: “lower” animals. It sure isn’t a comment on our relative strength! There’s probably nobody in this room that could win a one-on-one unarmed fight with an adult male chimpanzee, or baboon, leopard, elephant, or a few hundred other so-called “lower” animal species.

We mean something else when we boast that we are “higher” animals. And it has everything to do with this difference between Selves and Souls.

So let’s move from chimpanzees to humans.

First, a few words about souls. Scholars have shown that very ancient Egyptian religions, from which our biblical religions got their message and many of their stories, celebrated a divine presence within us thousands of years ago. The Greeks brought it down to earth about 2500 years ago, when they evolved the concept of Psyche, which is the source of our word “soul.” It was tied to character, to what is most essential about a human, though for the Greeks there was no afterlife; it was all about what happened here and now, and our Psyche referred to what was highest or noblest about us.

They had a visual image of the person rising to their full humanity. It was a set of nested concentric circles. The smallest circle in the center represented what you could call our undeveloped Self: just us. The next larger circle was of our relationships with lovers, friends and family – the relationships that make us bigger people, that begin to call us to higher values than the raccoons and chimps showed.

What the Greeks were doing with those concentric circles – and what Christian theologians followed them in doing – was saying that, since we have the ability to see our actions against a background of the highest ideals and expectations, we have a duty to do this. Living in accordance with the highest ideals, rather than just those that serve our private selves, is what we must do to realize our true nature. That’s what can raise us above the so-called lower animals: our greater capacity for understanding and compassion. In humans, we expect these higher ideals to trump the “Selfishness’ that’s also a part of us.

Ethologists like Frans de Waal argue that much or most of this also comes with our animal heritage: that altruism, a caring for others like us, is as much a part of us. You’ve probably read about the mother gorilla who saved a young boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at a zoo a few years back, and returned him to his mother. Or stories of how dolphins have saved drowning humans, carrying them into shallow water. And Jack Harris-Bonham has a great personal story about being saved from circling sharks by a school of dolphins that he can tell you. Altruism, even across species lines, is demonstrably a part of our evolutionary heritage.

And every religion, philosophy, culture and system of law expects this of us. Though, like the raccoons and chimpanzees, we have those lower and more self-centered tendencies in us too, of course. We can see the contrast between serving our selves and a need for higher aspirations by looking at our own behavior, even better than by looking at raccoons and chimps.

So let’s move from chimps to people.

I recently had dinner with the District Executive of another Unitarian district out in the East. We were talking about churches with living spirits versus churches with dead spirits, and he said some of the churches in his district seemed to have dead or moribund spirits.

He told me about an old church with only fifteen members. The church itself was old, 250-300 years, begun as a Congregational church in the 18th century, before the members rejected two-thirds of the Trinity and became Unitarians in the mid-19th century. All the members are over seventy now. But once it had many members, and enough money to buy the land and build the church that was now much larger than they needed. And many members over the centuries donated a lot of money to build quite a healthy endowment.

But that was long ago. Now there are just the fifteen members, with no interest in attracting any more, especially young ones. They are content with just themselves, and will use the remainder of the endowment to cover operating expenses, and the cost of burying the remaining members. When they are all dead, the endowment will be gone if they plan it right, the church can slip into past history, and they are all quite comfortable with this.

They’re taking care of themselves, and it looks like it’s hard to criticize them. After all, they’re the only members, they”ve probably all been there for a long time, they can even vote unanimously to spend the endowment on their funerals at a duly called congregational meeting, so it’s perfectly democratic.

They act like there are only the few of them to consider, taking care of themselves with free money for which they owe no one an explanation.

But is it really just them?

For over 250 years, a few thousand people have belonged to that church. They gave their money, their time, energy and spirit to that church, and established the endowment, in the hopes that Something would continue to live into the future.

What is that “Something”? It was certainly not the hope that all this money, all these hopes and dreams, would be buried in the ground, never to be used for serving life again. When we serve only ourselves, we lose access to that higher level of visions and inspirations. We lose the inspiration of that whole Grand Reservoir of our human and animal heritage, and I think we need that Grand heritage to help us rise to our full human (and animal) height.

Well, you see the patterns I’m trying to sketch here, I’m sure. And now that you can see these patterns, and know what I’m trying to get at, let’s move from churches to some of the political behaviors we all see around us, and which are defining us as “Americans” to much of the rest of the world.

As many critics have written, our present administration and lawmakers have effected a huge transfer of wealth, greater than at any time in at least the last eighty years, if not in our nation’s history, and a host of other money-transferring schemes that look for all the world like a vicious kind of greed that the chimpanzees would recognize immediately: looting our society the way Alpha males and females feel entitled to do.

And where to start in our illegal invasion of Iraq? I’m sure most of you have read, as I also have, that the desire to invade Iraq was discussed in January 2001, the week President Bush’s administration moved into power. Greg Palast – who spoke to an audience of over 350 in this room last Sunday – has written that as early as March of 2001 – six months before 9-11 – Dick Cheney met with oil company executives to review oil maps of Iraq. And by October of that year, Paul Wolfowitz had drafted an elaborate plan detailing the “sale of all state enterprises’ in Iraq – that is, most of the nation’s assets, “especially in the oil and supporting industries.”

(See http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html, or Google terms like “Iraq Timeline,” “9-11 Timeline,” etc.)

We were led into the illegal invasion through outright deceptions about weapons of mass destruction to serve motives that look completely selfish, and far more vicious than chimps could ever imagine – estimates of how many innocent Iraqi people we have killed since invading their country run to 250,000 or more, in addition to the more than 2,500 of our own soldiers whose lives were lost not defending “freedom and democracy,” but defending what looks to many people like little more than the looting of Iraq by some of our greediest and most well-connected corporations.

We could go on to a dozen other activities and events of the past five years that all paint the same pattern of chimpanzee-style US geopolitical behaviors. In this country, when you kill people in order to steal from them, it’s called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, that’s a capital offense. If chimpanzees were observing us, they might say that we kill those people in Iraq because they’re not ours, not like us, because they’re in the way of our greedy ambitions, since we declared ourselves the Alpha Nation. Both the raccoons and the chimps would recognize the behavior, though I think they”d be shocked at the scale of our greed and our wantonness.

You can say we’re acting in our best interests, but without noble ideals it’s just the lowest kind of selfish behavior, serving Selves too low and mean to defend.

Yet there is something in our government’s deceptions about Iraq that is, in an ironic way, encouraging. Something deep in our leaders knew they needed to wrap their actions in noble talk about freedom and democracy because their real motives were so low that all decent people would have been ashamed and would have stopped them.

It’s that same noble part of us that I’m appealing to.

Some of our major cultural institutions today are being used to drag us down to the lowest and most self-serving of ideals. Just listen to Jerry Falwell praying that we blow away people in the name of the Lord, or that awful Baptist church that has taken to protesting the funerals of our soldiers, pretending that God is really killing them because he hates homosexuality – and not realizing that any god worthy of the name would hate their own bigoted and hateful actions far more. Or listen to almost anything from Ann Coulter. These people speak as Christians, so very well: they’re Christians. It is not the religion of Jesus – I think he would have detested what they are doing. But today these people are the best-known spokespeople for Christianity. This means that Christianity and its God have, through people like them, become so vile that they can no longer hope to offer adequate moral guidance for our nation. These people who loudly proclaim that they are Christians have become agents of a terrible selfishness that really is lower than the behavior of my attic raccoon or the wiley old male chimpanzee.

We come back where we begin, creatures with high and low possibilities, always needing to be called to the higher ones.

Yet, at home and abroad, in small or large actions of self-aggrandizement, there is an important way in which we are like those fifteen members of that dying little church: we are not on this stage alone. For millennia behind us, humans have worked, sacrificed, loved and cared about those higher allegiances and more tender mercies that help us become the best that we can be.

They have left these high commands to us, buried within every human institution. The warrior code of our soldiers is marked by some of the highest of human ideals, expressed in speeches like General Douglas MacArthur’s farewill address to West Point in 1962, in which he reminded them that those three words “Duty, Honor, Country” called them to their highest humanity, their most selfless devotion, their most courageous actions, made them heroes not just of war, but of our battle for higher humanity.

Religions at their best – no matter how seldom they seem to be at their best today – also call us toward our tender mercies, reminding us that whatever we do to the least among us we do to our own souls. And secular civic laws say we may not kill people in order to steal from them, and that lying is usually a bad thing.

So here we are. We have the better angels of our nature on one shoulder, and the lower and more selfish angels of our nature on the other. The lower angels say to take what we can, get away with what we can, and to the victor goes the spoils and to hell with the rest. The higher angel says we were meant to be formed in the image of God, not something less – but it’s up to us. The higher angel says when we act selfishly, to take what suits us no matter the harm it does to other humans, animals, and our environment, then we have disgraced ourselves, our race, and our calling – but it’s up to us.

We have selves, and can all act quite selfishly, and at times we all do. We also have souls. Souls are those repositories of all the highest hopes those before us had for what we might yet become, still beckoning to us, calling to us today with voices from ancient ages long past. But it’s up to us.

We have selves and we have souls, and if human history has shown us anything, it is that we can serve either level of ideals we choose, becoming either a low or a high model of what it can mean to come to our full humanity in this time and place.

Now it’s up to us. And the Good News is that we know, we really do know, exactly what we should do, don’t we?

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© Davidson Loehr

June 18, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We give thanks for fathers. For those men who have had the character and courage to grow through the tough transition from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks.

For our own fathers, whether or not we think they were the best fathers or not, we give thanks. We would not be here without them. And at their time, in their shoes, they almost certainly did the best they could.

We give thanks for fathers who have never met their offspring but have not forgotten them. And for those men who wanted to be fathers but could not.

We open our hearts to fathers who have lost children – to chance events, disease, accidents, to war. We open our hearts.

For all the many ways in which men grow from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks for fathers on this Fathers’ Day.

Amen.

SERMON: Father-Functions

When I was preparing to do the Mother’s Day sermon last month, I posted an invitation on the parents’ list for mothers to join me for lunch. All together I met with or talked to about fifteen women who were eager to share their thoughts, frustrations and suggestions on motherhood. Men are different. I posted the same invitation, but only three men responded, so we had lunch together, then I checked the Internet for articles and tips on fatherhood. If you Google the word “fatherhood,” you can turn up over six million sites.

The talks with the men were very different from those with the women. The women were often concerned with losing their Self, as motherhood defined them in a job without pay, without promotions, and without much recognition from society, or from other mothers.

The men talked about duties, tasks, functions. They still worked, and still had their professional Self, so were focusing on adding to it whatever new duties were involved in fatherhood. We even discussed, and agreed, that it’s about learning new functions.

This sounds radically different from what mothers want, but it isn’t. It’s just the way men approach the subject. All, I found – and almost all the books, written advice and tips I found – are after the same thing. They all stress how hard it is, how it has to be learned, nobody will master parenting, everyone must allow themselves to fail, to feel their way through, and to forgive themselves for not being perfect. All stress the need for more and better communication between the parents, so they can grow through this transition together.

But men seem to think more in terms of tips, how-to guides, and functions. That doesn’t mean they’re unfeeling. When I asked what the best thing about fatherhood was, every father talked about the amazing relationship with his child, and every father teared up while speaking about it, as I still do when talking about my step-daughters.

The transition from manhood to fatherhood is one of the hardest men will ever face, and not all couples can make it through the tough times ahead. One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 227) That’s also one of the several reasons that 39% of children in the US now live apart from their father. It’s hard.

And men don’t often get much credit for being good fathers, just as mothers don’t get much support from others. But for men there’s sometimes the added edge – or insult – that somehow being fathers is an optional activity. One mother told me a story about her husband, who is a devoted father, and looks forward to the days when he can take their daughter to the store to shop. What irritates him – and I suspect hurts him – is when women come up to him at the store, as they often do, saying “Looks like you got stuck baby-sitting!” When it’s your own child, it isn’t baby-sitting: it’s fathering.

But since men approach this differently, I want to frame it differently this morning. I want to talk in terms of tasks, tests, functions, and tips for fathers. And I want to say that this transformation from manhood to fatherhood is a kind of modern hero’s quest, and it fits the structure of mythic hero’s quests in almost every detail.

You’re in a wilderness, a strange new land, and you need help. You need more than the tools of a bachelor or a newlywed. And there is a fear that you can’t do this, won’t know how to slay the dragons that men must slay in their hero quests.

In mythic hero quests, heroes get help from gods, guides, mentors, and the wise people who are always a part of the stories. In the Star Wars movies, this was the role played by Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobe. In the Lord of the Rings, it was Gandalf and the elves. You need to know you’re not alone, and that you can do this. In the real world of learning to become fathers, the costumes aren’t as colorful, but there are still some special helpers and wise people. It may be your own parents, or special mentors you’ve known.

But in the Internet age, you can also pull up about six million websites just by Googling the word “fatherhood.” Almost all of the sites on fathering I checked are written by men, for men. Therapists, counselors, speakers bureaus, even a Christian man who homeschools his own seven children and speaks to your group for $1500 plus expenses, providing Bible citations as he goes.

There are sites with tips, how-to advice, one with Ten Tips for Fathers that even sells T-shirts with the tips on them. There’s a site of Tool Box Tips, and the Army has websites with tips for fathers, taken from some of the tool-box sites, telling them to take care of themselves, work with their wife to redefine their relationship as parents, to forgive themselves for not being natural or perfect at this, assuring them that they can learn everything they need to know, it’s within their reach..

Not all those who give advice are wise, just as great myths are dotted with tricksters and demons. But many of them are. And I was struck by the fact that men talk about this hero’s quest in very different ways than women authors write for mothers.

Men are being helped to “build” a new persona, one with increased communication, creating a new relationship with their partners, in a functional, step-by-step way. They want tips on what to do: tools.

And one advisor, a pediatrician who calls himself Dr. Bill, adds this very male bit of advice: “Watching a man nurture a baby really turns on a woman.” This sounds just like men talking, doesn’t it? But when I talked with the mothers, they said one of the sexiest things their husband could do was help with the baby or do the dishes. Same message, different style.

The notion of a hero’s quest came from Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure as a larger, more deeply authentic man. (Hero, p. 30)

This comes through the hero’s trials and tests, including the important trial of slaying dragons. What are dragons? They’re symbols of his fears, his past, his present world that must be transcended in order to grow into his deeper, more heroic stature: to grow from manhood into fatherhood.

The dragons to slay are tough dragons, as we’ll see. And scary.

But he doesn’t have to do it alone. As in classic myths, there are these helpers and guides, if he’ll look for them. There are the modern Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobes, elves and Gandalfs all around. By the way, there are over nine million sites if you Google “Gandalf,” and almost fifteen million for Yoda, the wise master of the Force and teacher of Jedi knights. I’m betting the overwhelming majority of the people who visit those sites are men.

Nearly all of the modern Gandalfs, Yodas and elves I read wrote in man-talk. Tips, how-to advice, what to do next, with constant reminders that they don’t have to be perfect, or even in charge. I don’t know that a man could make it through this transition without the help of some modern Merlins.

But the effect, the change, isn’t just functional. It is building a bigger character and a bigger man; it really is a hero’s quest, and it is transformative.

So I want to take you on this adventure, a hero’s quest, through the first twelve months of fatherhood. (Much of the following is taken or adapted from www.fathersforum.com, by Dr. Bruce Linton). There are functions to learn, and also a few dragons to slay along the way.

One of our Gandalf therapists begins by telling us that when the woman becomes pregnant with their first child, “There is good news and bad news. The bad news is the relationship can never go back to the way it used to be. The good news is with time and patience your relationships as a couple can become more intimate and satisfying.”

Men don’t like to ask for directions in fathering much more than they do in driving, because we”ve all been raised to believe that we’re supposed to be in charge, and that weakness is unmanly and unsexy. We’re afraid we won’t be able to do this. But there is research that shows that whichever parent spends the most time with the baby will become more sensitive to the baby’s needs. So it’s something we can learn. And men will need to learn some of it from their wife, which means scheduling times to talk this strange new world over with their wife, so they can go through this together. That’s like talking about feelings and intimate things. Ask any man: that’s a dragon to slay, and a tough one! It’s almost never the dinner conversation we would choose.

An Obi Wan Kenobe says, “We need to know we can’t be expected to know how to do everything. Allow yourself to work as a team with your partner on this adventure as parents. Teamwork is the key to getting through this first year.” I think all the women authors on mothering would agree.

Then right off the bat in the first month, dear little Yoda says “Do not, by what you don’t know, embarrassed be.” And Obi Wan Kenobe translates it as “Give yourselves permission not to know everything.” This advice often takes the place of swordsmanship lessons in medieval hero myths. These are the tools and functions we need to hone for these tasks.

Others say during the first month, learn how to comfortably hold your baby. See that you have a comfortable rocking chair for your wife to nurse the baby in – there’s a real “guy” thing to do! Also, says Gandalf, you can help your wife by cooking suppers. And don’t be embarrassed by what you don’t know.

In the second month, continue to hold your baby as much as possible. Find time when you can be with your baby without distractions. And with your wife, the two of you together give your baby a bath. Talk about what your baby seems to need to make him comfortable getting washed. Tell your wife what you appreciate about her “mothering.” Find time when you can take the baby and she can take time just for herself.

And try to find other new dads to talk with about the transition to parenthood.

During the third month, Yoda says, “Exhausted are you. Normal it is.” New dads need to recognize how emotionally weary they have become making all the adjustments to their new life style.

“I remember,” a therapist-father confesses, “feeling when we went out as a family; it was my wife, our baby and their pack animal, me…carrying all the stuff we now needed to take with us.”

What can you do during the third month? Take a walk together as a family. See if you can have the baby in a “front pack” that is on you. And talk with your wife about each of you getting twenty minutes to yourselves in the evening. Find time to walk with the baby by yourself. Use this time to appreciate how by caring for your baby you are making a very important contribution to her life. And see if you can leave work ten or fifteen minutes early and have a cup of coffee or tea by yourself. Take care of yourself.

During the fourth month, says Obi Wan Kenobe, you start to notice that there is a change in your sexual relationship with your wife. It is very normal for this to happen. So, if your wife feels sexually withdrawn but too concerned about your baby…things are going well!

Maybe it’s easier to hear Yoda talk about this: “Intimacy must more than sex be,” he says. “For many new dads the early months of fatherhood provide a challenge to expand their feelings about intimacy. Many new dads find it difficult to talk about sexuality with their wives. “I encourage you,” says Obi Wan Kenobe, “to talk about the sexuality in your relationship with your wife. As you go through life as a parent and adult there may be many conversations you have with your wife about the changing sexuality in your relationship.”

Now in case you hadn’t noticed, this is a huge Dragon! Redefining intimacy to expand it beyond the fireworks of courtship and early marriage is one of the hardest and most mature things for men to learn. It is hard for men to talk about. It will take a platoon of Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobe”s, Gandalfs and elves, because it’s not easy. It is probably the biggest dragon out there.

And then take time to get a message and sauna, say the elves. Take a walk with a friend and let him know what you have discovered about being a father.

Another fact to know is that during the first year of parenthood it is usual for a new father to reflect on how he was raised by his own father. Sometimes this is enjoyable; sometimes, it brings up other old dragons to wrestle with.

In the fifth month, Gandalf says, “Find 5 minutes a day to talk about how the day went for your wife and you. And you might plan a video “film festival.” You might enjoy comedies about family life, right about this time.”

In the sixth month, talk with your wife about the different “styles” of parenting you experienced as children. Conclude your discussion with a commitment to work out the way you will work as a team, together, in the family you have started. Or as Yoda puts it, “Better than one are two.”

Ask your wife to talk with you about what she loves and hates about being a mother for the first six months. Share the positive and negatives you have learned about fatherhood. More talking. This often seems unnatural, growing into a new and different role.

Then the elves say to make sure you are eating well and exercising. It is important to take care of your health and exercising will reduce stress. Stay active in your baby’s care; give him a bath, put him to sleep, Notice how you feel after you have done these.

The seventh month begins with this advice from Yoda: “To yourself kind be. Forget this not!”

The therapist says to find a Sunday morning to go out to breakfast and have a leisurely time together. Then come here to church. OK, I added that last part.

Find a baby sitter so you can be alone for at least two hours a week. Make sure that both you and your wife are getting time alone. You each need time to recharge.

At eight months, Obi Wan Kenobe says, you recognize how time consuming it is to have a baby. If you’re really quick, you may have noticed this earlier. Talk with your partner about what you feel are the biggest adjustments you each have to make as parents. See what you’re doing here? You’re learning to make this new role, the fatherhood role, learn to talk and relate to your partner in her new role as mother.

And take care of yourself. Are there one or two friends that you haven’t talked with in a while? Call them up and let them know how having a young baby makes “free” time or “hanging-out” very difficult. Reassure them that you are still their friend and ask them to understand that being a father is a big adjustment.

In the ninth month, the elves say to take a look at your body in the mirror. Are you taking care of yourself?

This is a dragon to slay, too: not to lose yourself in your role as father.

A tenth month tip is to take turns “sleeping-in” to try and keep up on your rest.

During the eleventh month, you are preparing for the conclusion of the hero’s quest, when you have redefined yourself as a father, and you and your wife have redefined your relationship as both parents and lovers. You may need to make time to see if you and your wife can quit being parents for a few hours each week and be a couple again, and get the habit started.

Moving back into a “couples relationship,” is the task of the eleventh month of fatherhood. You have defined yourselves around your child’s needs and now it is important to begin to look at your relationships not just as parents but as partners too. See if you can take the lead and ask your partner how she wants the two of you to grow as a couple as you approach your first year of parenting.

See if you and your wife can find a weekly activity to do together. Something that you can continue over time and that you both look forward to.

Begin to think about you baby’s first birthday and what friends you want to be there for you!

As the twelfth month begins, plan the first birthday party, and see that your baby’s first birthday is as much a celebration for you and your wife as for him. Gandalf says the first year of fatherhood is the most profound change you have gone through as a man. There have been many changes, you, your wife, and baby have gone through over the last year.

At the end of the hero’s quest, I want to go back to Joseph Campbell. “Wherever a hero has been born,” he writes, “the place is marked and sanctified. A temple is erected there”.” For this is the place where a man became a hero by slaying the dragons of his smaller self and helped give birth to a larger soul: a soul big enough to hold the new functions, and the new love. (Hero With a Thousand Faces, p.43)

What does becoming a hero mean? It’s the task, as Campbell put it, “of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life.” (Hero, p. 388)

The birth of a baby floods a mother and father with many new tasks, sometimes overwhelming them. The role of fatherhood seldom comes easily for a man. He must learn these new functions, build a bigger Self, learn to build a bigger kind of relationship with his partner.

But it isn’t about mechanics. It’s about building a bigger home for the spirit of life. It’s about building a soul big enough to hold the new love that grows with the birth of a child – the love that moves men to tears, even trying to talk about it.

A bachelor, a regular young married guy, couldn’t do it. Only a man who’s slain the required dragons can do this. He has become the kind of a man who can help save a new life, save a marriage, and transform our world, one father at a time.

Joseph Campbell says temples, markers are erected to mark the spot where a hero was born. And they’re present here, too. A baby just learning to walk, the mard miracle of a husband and wife who are beginning to reclaim their own relationship as lovers and partners – these are some of the markers. And people around you can feel this transformation. Like ripples in a pond, it carries the message, “Here something whole and courageous took place. Here, a father was born.”

You’re more than just men, guys; you’re heroes. Happy Father’s Day.

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© Davidson Loehr

May 21, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it.

We pretend, to our own amusement, that we’re not afraid of anything, that we’re certainly not afraid of anything that’s true, and that we want to build our lives on the foundations of those truths.

In some non-threatening ways, that’s true; in others, it is not, and we find a hundred ways silently to let other people determine what we should hear and know and do.

But we can live with second-hand truths and second-order visions for so long that we live second-hand and second-order lives. And nobody wants that.

And so. Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it. Here, now, today, tomorrow, always.

Amen.

SERMON: Where do we go from here?

Three weeks ago, I was the keynote speaker for the annual district meeting of the Ballou-Channing District in Southeast Massachusetts, and was asked to talk about where we go from here. It was a one-hour speech, on where liberal religion and liberal culture are today and how they got there, some critiques of the UUA – and I’m not sure many of you would be interested in hearing all that. If you are interested, you can read the whole speech on our website. But for this morning, I want to focus on some things that might be more useful.

The reason for asking questions like where we go from here is because, like all mainline religious denominations, ours has been losing members steadily for the past half-century. Though, since we’re much smaller, we’re more vulnerable. How small are we? Well, a recent Gallup poll showed that over fifteen times as many Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens than believe they are Unitarians. That’s small – though there may be some overlap in those figures. We might want to get a task force to study those aliens’ methods.

As to where we go from here, this has answers – very different answers – at three levels.

First, we can consider the largest, broadest context, and ask “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” Second, we can ask, more locally, “Where do we go from here as our local church in Austin?” And third, we can ask, “Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?”

A. First, where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?

One answer must be, “perhaps nowhere.” Everything seems to point to a commitment to denial and a contentment with just dwindling away, not with a bang but a whimper. It’s a very real possibility.

More than half the churches in the Unitarian Universalist Association now have fewer than 100 members, so couldn’t pay a full-time salary to a minister. Yet new ministers are graduating from seminary with an average of $40,000 in educational loan debt from just the three-year seminary education, and need fulltime employment. I spent seven years in graduate school to get a Ph.D., and graduated owing only $17,500. But times and economics have changed. Today, a Ph.D. could cost students between $80,000 and $100,000. The ministry doesn’t pay well enough to cover such debts and have a decent standard of living, so very few students are likely to get PhD’s rather than just the 3-year seminary educations.

Last year, men and women were preparing for the UU ministry in 75 different institutions. That means that virtually all of our future ministers will simply be educated in Christian seminaries, learning the metaphors, symbols, and thought games of that religion rather than preparing for the post-Christian, pluralistic world we’re living in. That doesn’t look promising. Without having educational institutions that actually educate our ministers, we have no means of teaching a unique perspective, even if we could articulate one. I don’t see any way past this. How long do you think Roman Catholicism would last if 95% of their priests were educated in Buddhist schools?

Even the quarterly publication called the UU Voice – easily the most candid and self-critical of all our publications – may have to stop publishing, after forty years, because it costs $6,500 a year to publish it, and subscriptions aren’t covering it.

For these reasons and more, I think one serious answer to “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” is, “Nowhere. From here, we just continue to fade away.”

B. Where do we go from here as a local church?

This is more hopeful. People who study churches say that, as money gets tighter, the most vulnerable churches are the mid-sized churches. Large churches that have learned to operate as well-run businesses usually have big enough budgets, not only to weather storms, but also to hire the necessary help (as staff or consultants) to react pro-actively. Small churches of under 150 that exist as “family” churches can have the “familial” cohesion to stick together, with or without a minister. But mid-sized churches no longer have the simpler “single-family” cohesion, and lack the budget of larger churches. We are at the very low edge of what’s considered the “large church” category, needing about 200 more members and $200,000 more in our budget to be in a safer place.

Another answer at the “church demographics” level is that white-haired congregations are visibly grounded in the past, as churches with younger hair colors are more likely to be invested in the future. There is much talk within the UUA of a “commitment to growth,” and all seem to mean by this a desire to attract more younger people. But younger church cultures are very different. Young people have different priorities than older people: spiritually, socially, and economically.

I think it’s fair to say that a church structured for the future will be more comfortable for people in their 30s and 40s than it will be for people in their 60s to 80s. Small churches operate a lot like social organizations, in which The Guardians define the boundaries of both thought and behavior to fit their own comfort zones. Unless they can grow past that, they’ll never be very good or very stable large churches. This is one of our challenges in this church.

C. Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?

Here, the picture can be as intelligent, informed and optimistic as the individual seekers are.

The search for a religious center doesn’t have to start from scratch. Even a cursory study of the world’s great traditions shows us that religion does have an enduring subject matter. Its insights measure the quality of our lives and our worlds, for better and worse, whether we “believe in them” or not. Most of these truths do not seem to have changed much in recorded history. They seem to be species-specific traits and norms that most peoples of most times have recognized as inviolable, and which we also recognize as inviolable – though we seldom articulate these facts:

— Religion is a human enterprise, and a human invention. It is one of the ways in which we try to learn and practice ideals that can help us become more fully human. We can do it in god-talk or without using God-talk.

— The Way we seek is older than the gods, as Lao-tzu said.

— We want to learn how to relish the transient pleasures of life without becoming limited and defined by them, and how to nurture our life-giving circles of friends – as the Epicureans taught 2400 years ago.

— We know that neither we nor any supernatural agencies can control what life brings our way, so we should learn how to control our responses to life – as the Stoics taught.

— Most of us believe in “salvation through understanding,” as the Buddhists have taught. This is another way of saying we don’t want to check our brains outside the church door. We don’t want to check our hearts there, either.

— We need to be reminded – in the Roman Seneca’s magnificent phrase – that we are all limbs on the body of humanity, and we must learn to act accordingly.

— We know, but want to be reminded, that if only we could treat all others as our equals, our brothers and sisters, as “children of God,” that we could transform this world into a paradise – as Jesus taught in his concept of the “kingdom of God.”

All this requires boundaries a lot bigger than anyone’s comfort zone. It isn’t easy. It takes personal work. And world religions all think it’s hard – that there are hard demands, and that few are ever willing to do the work:

— Islam teaches the path as the razor edge of a sword stretched across an abyss.

— Jesus talked about the narrow way that few entered.

— Hinduism also speaks of the path as razor-edged, and has so many stories about how many lives you”d have to live, in order to get it right.

— Buddhists teach how hard it is just to wake up, to outgrow the comforting illusions of “our kind of people.” It’s at least as hard today, especially when the illusions of our kind of people provide the only clear “home” for most in liberal camps.

— And for Jews, the notion of being God’s “chosen people” meant God demanded more of them than others, not that they were special.

That personal hard work is how those traditions raise our sights to see and hear what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

Salvation by Character

Another answer to “where do we go from here?” comes from understanding religion as the search for a healthy kind of wholeness, to become a blessing to a world not made in our image. And from the start, the salvation story of most of the best prophets and sages has been the story of salvation by character. We are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens, and believe that doing so will make life more worth living, for ourselves and those we love. We are trying to get reconnected with a healthy kind of wholeness. This is about personal authenticity, the kind of authenticity that rejuvenates the world.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” or “Darwin” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the personal work. The gifts of all the world’s great prophets and sages are free, but they aren’t cheap. They can cost us our artificially small identities, and the comfort that comes with them.

We have never looked back with pride on religious liberals who didn’t go forward into new and uncharted territory during a crisis of religious expression. We don’t remember the names of the vast majority of Unitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists who stuck with “the old ways,” or got lost in their era’s religious fads. Those in the future will look back to assess us in the same way.

I consulted with some colleagues in preparing these notes, but didn’t get many promising visions from them. However, I did get a comment from the Rev. David Bumbaugh, who is Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, and it’s worth sharing:

“I believe we are confronted by three essential and inescapable questions: What do we profess? In whose behalf do we act? To whom or to what are we responsible? The first question requires that I continually seek to be as clear as I can be about the fundamental convictions that drive my actions and not settle for platitudes–either traditional responses or the seven principles. The second question drives me to broaden the scope of my concerns beyond the horizons of my comfort zone to include the lost, the marginalized, those who are least like me. If ministry is to be anything more than chaplaincy to those who can afford me, the answer to the second question – “In whose behalf do we act?” – must continually expand.”

David’s third question is the theological question, of what we are serving that transcends our own wishes, our own kind of people, our own time and place, and how we are to speak of it. Three hundred years ago, the reflexive answer would have been, “Well, religion is about God, of course!” But the world has changed. Now we are charged with trying to serve the spirit of life by once more looking not to the past but to the future, and offering a structure or style of religion that can build bridges to a bigger future rather than walls around old comfort zones.

Some have compared our times to living in The Wasteland, and that’s an interesting term. In the Middle Ages, when the Arthurian Grail Legend was born, they also described their times as the Wasteland. And what they meant by living in the Wasteland was living an inauthentic life, a second-hand life with hand-me-down beliefs and not enough information to know or even seek the truths we need. Their church and their ruler decided what information they could receive, which is one way to keep people powerless.

This is why heresy and courage are so important today. There can’t be any questions or inquiries that are forbidden.

I had breakfast and spent the morning with Norman Lear this past Friday. It was a treat because he’s been an idol of mine ever since he wrote and produced the “All in the Family” TV series 35 years ago. We talked about religion, and his concern that religion is failing us as a society. “So many devastating things are going on,” he would say, “why are all the pulpits so silent about it? Why are they all so afraid?” Bill Moyers and Bishop John Shelby Spong have all asked the same questions, and we don’t hear much from religious voices, unless you count Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

But it’s not enough to indict preachers. Not many people trust the media to tell us the truths we need to hear, either. And even fewer trust politicians or preachers to tell us unpopular truths.

We live in a time of fearful truths. Global warming, peak oil, our illegal invasion of Iraq built on stories we now know to have been lies, the reduction of our civil liberties, stories of our government eavesdropping on our phone calls, important questions about what happened on 9-11 and who was really behind it, stories about how fragile our economy is, how we are no longer respected by many of our longtime friends in the world: on and on. This web of unexamined truths is the Wasteland in which we live now, and it takes uncommon courage actually to want to hear some of these truths.

Yet the only hope we have for moving forward from here is having unrestricted access to all questions, all inquiries, and the courage to hear and deal with hard truths.

I don’t mean to point fingers, or to imply that we, of course, are all courageous and don’t fear anything. That isn’t true. We each have lines past which we simply become uncomfortable. And sometimes, we wish we could keep from hearing fearful truths. This is true for every one of us.

The religious myths of Western civilization are crumbling, and though scholars have written about it for over a century, it’s uncomfortable for many people to understand that the symbol God may not be useful or even coherent any more. Or that there’s no heaven, no afterlife, no supernatural magic as we were almost all taught as children. Don’t some of these things make you uncomfortable?

Maybe the Da Vinci Code doesn’t bother you when it suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married – and, as one scholar I know adds, that they had two children before they divorced and Jesus remarried.

But other stories can make you uncomfortable. This week, for instance, a respected member of this church sent me a news story about Morgan Reynolds. Reynolds was President Bush’s Labor Department Chief Economist and the former director of the Criminal Justice Center. He gave a speech to a standing-room-only audience of over 1,000 at the University of Wisconsin two weeks ago (6 March). He’s Emeritus professor of economics from Texas A&M, and doesn’t sound like a left-wing nut case. But he said that 9-11 was an inside job, and fingered Bush, Cheney and others for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9-11, as part of their plan to transform America to a command-and-control government, restrict civil rights, wage their imperialistic war in the Middle East, and the rest of it. (A reference link to milwaukee.indymedia.org was included here, but this linked page is no longer in existence (PR 1/19/2013.)

He said he believes some government insiders will come forward soon to tell their stories, that the information had been kept so compartmentalized that few had any idea of the scope of this administration’s plans for 9-11. If this proves to be true, it might be the most fearful truth in US history, and I think it would make every single American very uncomfortable and frightened. Though we may not find out whether it is true in our lifetimes.

Do you really want to know? Or would you rather be protected from these truths, if they do turn out to be true? Who would you trust to limit your access to this knowledge? The politicians? The media? Your neighbor? Anyone?

It was only five years ago that enough old government documents became declassified, including military communications from 1940 and 1941, to show pretty conclusively that Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack, that FDR wanted it to happen and helped it happen, sacrificing 2400 soldiers in Pearl Harbor, in order to rouse our country to enter World War II. That has made me very uncomfortable, and I can understand why the government and the media have not wanted to spread this story widely. (Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor [Free Press, 2001]).

But without these truths, we have no chance of understanding what is going on and how the strings are being pulled that move our world. Who would you trust to decide what you can’t hear, can’t know, can’t discuss? Anyone?

I hope not. Because where we go from here, as individuals, as churches, and as a society, can only have a hopeful future if we have the courage to hear fearful truths, and then together to figure out how to respond to them.

We really have a proud heritage, both as Americans and as religious liberals. We stand on the shoulders of giants who have pushed people to deal with truths they didn’t want to know, to cross over past their comfort zones when they didn’t want to. We look back to them with gratitude for the courage they showed when it was their turn.

Now it’s our turn. Where we go from here will depend on the quality of our understanding and our courage. As we move into the future, we need to spend less time worshiping history and more time making it.

Now see, you came here hoping to hear a safe talk about where other people might need to go from here. And now you find out that it was about you, all along. Welcome to our church!

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© Davidson Loehr

May 7, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. Mothers’ Day is next Sunday, when we have our annual Coming-of-Age and Bridging Services with our youth. And so today we are anticipating Mothers’ Day.

Let us join in an attitude of prayer:

We give thanks for mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;

For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;

And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

In anticipation of Mothers’ Day, let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

Amen

SERMON

This sermon came about because one of the mothers of young children in our church asked for it. At her suggestion, I arranged for a series of three lunches with a total of twelve mothers of young children, read one book I was assigned, and a long chapter in another book. Both the books and the live women brought up almost exactly the same subjects. Much of it was new to me, and some of it was almost painful to hear and read. (The books were Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner, 2005; and Naomi Wolf’s 2001 book Misconceptions, from which I read only the chapter “Calling it Fair.”)

Still, my sample – the live mothers as well as the book-mothers – is very limited. It’s only dealing with women married to men, even though there are many more kinds of motherhood. So this is a small start on a big and important subject. I’ll be mixing together the stories from live mothers and from book-mothers, which were all pretty similar, though the books went into more detail.

One of the most positive things in all the discussions was that there was almost no man-bashing. These women were grateful for their husbands’ love, care, and help. They all spoke of them as very good fathers.

One woman who couldn’t attend a lunch sent her comments by e-mail. “Having my first child,” she wrote, “filled me with a love I had never even imagined before, and it made me big enough to feel all that love. It opened me up to the whole world. And that big love is still with me. It didn’t disappear with the bottles and diapers. Many years later, it dawned on me that my own mother must feel that same love for me. (I still find comfort in this revelation.) I don’t think you have to have kids to get this “big love.” I’d like to think I would have gotten there on my own. But I do think having kids got me there a lot sooner.” The live mothers all shared this mother’s love for their children, the sense of expanded love it brought in them and a new appreciation for their own mothers.

Both the live mothers and the mothers reported on in the two books were mostly women born in the 60s and 70s. Some of them said one of the great things about growing up in an age of women’s rights with men who were sympathetic to the goals of feminism was that when they married, they felt that they married their best friends. It was an egalitarian marriage, where they were able to negotiate in a wider range of areas, both personal and professional, than their mothers or grandmothers had.

They developed a sense of Self, both in school and in their careers, that had been out of reach for most women before them.

Then the baby comes, and everything changes

One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Wolf, 227)

One woman said she could remember reading in all those books how some mothers in the first six weeks never got dressed and forgot to eat. She wondered what kind of women these were? How could anyone forget to eat, not find the time to take a shower or get dressed? It sounded as if these were some slovenly, preposterous women. “Then,” she said, “I had my first child and was completely overwhelmed by it, and didn’t find the time to eat or take a shower or get dressed.” (Wolf, p. 240)

Another said, “I always imagined that I would earn a graduate degree in early childhood education and begin teaching college or open my own day care after having my own family. In reality, I quit working a few months before my daughter was born. And I have never reentered the workforce on a full-time basis since that time. I found that earning enough to pay for day care was impossible.” (Warner, 50)

Many of the live- and book-mothers reported this sense that they might lose the dreams the feminism of their youth had given them. But the notion that motherhood can undermine personal ambitions isn’t new. I have a story of it from my own family – from my namesakes.

My grandparents, Grace Davidson and Clement Loehr, met as college students at the University of Iowa, around 1905. Clement was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry, but it was unusual to find many women in college a century ago. Growing up, Grace’s siblings (who were our favorite great-uncles and great-aunts) allowed as how, while both Grace and Clement were bright and good people, Grace had the quicker mind, the richer intellect, and was more ambitious.

My younger half-sister Grace once spent a year or so researching the life of her namesake, who died when Grace was a child. She found that after the birth of Grandma Gracie’s fourth child, she had a nervous breakdown. She realized that she would never be able to pursue her own ambitions: that she was simply going to be a mother, and a minister’s wife. She had seven children in all, pretty much ran the family, and – in her 60s by the time I remember her – a hard edge. At the time, I didn’t like her. Looking back, I see her hard edge as having been honed by spending all her adult life suppressing the anger – or fury – of losing the dreams that first drove her to graduate from college, and my heart goes out to her.

Author Naomi Wolf put it this way: “The baby’s arrival acted as a crack, then a fissure, then an earthquake, that wrenched open the shiny patina of egalitarianism in the marriages of virtually every couple I knew.” (Wolf, 226)

When the husband of one of Naomi Wolf’s friends’ started taking Fridays off to help with the baby, the women celebrated him as a demi-god. To the other husbands, she began to realize, the fact that he could afford to take Fridays off meant his job wasn’t that important. To the men – these egalitarian, pro-feminist men – he was a loser. (Wolf, 227)

The mothers all said it was a 24/7 job that at times just seemed overwhelming. They had no time for themselves; they lost themselves. Nursing an average of every two hours made them sleep-deprived. They had no idea it would be this all-consuming.

I thought of this last weekend while driving through New Hampshire, following a black SUV with a personalized license plate that said KIDLIMO, and a single bumper sticker that read, “Every Mother is a Working Mother.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising to find that “Mother’s little helpers,” by a few years ago, had become drugs, especially methamphetamine, or crystal meth, which in 2002 was named the drug of choice for supermoms. (129) Nobody can do it alone – it’s hard enough for a couple. Generations ago, many people lived within extended families, where grandparents lived nearby and were available when the parents needed some parenting, comfort, or reliable babysitting. What a blessing it could have been to have some people around who loved you, had been through all this themselves, and were able and eager to help out!

One woman said an image that kept coming into her mind was of a teapot, tipped over, with the last drop hanging from its lip: “Tip me over and pour me out”. Other times she imagined herself to be a little generator with another tiny appliance plugged into her, sucking energy. And yet her own power source had been disconnected. (Wolf, 247)

Both in the books and at the three lunches, women said they had little hands all over their body all day, and by night many found they were “all touched out” and just wanted their body left alone. “Being touched related to being needed, and I was giving all I had to give to the baby. There was nothing left for Daddy.” (Judith Warner, p. 127) All of this is often a very unpleasant surprise for their husbands. It redefined sexiness in unexpected ways.

For instance, one sociological study found that “Women find men’s willingness to do their share of the housework erotic.” (Wolf, 243) When I mentioned this at one of our lunches, the response was “You bet! You want some loving? Do the dishes! Do the dishes, put away the clothes I washed, and I’ll be all over you!” For men, this is a whole new, and strange, definition of foreplay!

When I asked our mothers here what kind of gifts they wanted for Mothers’ Day, the question didn’t get an immediate response. Then one woman said, “Time! Eight hours alone! Even four hours alone!” Another said the greatest gift she received in the first year after the birth of her child came from an older woman friend, who gave her permission to stop breastfeeding, and use formula!

Another mother had given a gift to herself. When she returned to work, she reclaimed the Self she had had before motherhood, as an attractive, competent, professional woman. She kept a pair of high-heeled shoes in her car, and when she left home for work, put them on, to help enter her other persona. At night, driving home, she’d change back into her low-heel Mommy Shoes.

And you can’t talk about mothering today without mentioning the word “guilt.” All the women spoke of feeling guilty, and of “competitive mothering,” of being judged by other mothers, other women. They were expected to be perfect, and they often felt that they were struggling just to be adequate.

And some of the books on child-rearing just add to the guilt, without empowering the mothers. There are books with terrible advice in any field, but it was a little shocking to be introduced to some of the “experts” in the field of child-rearing, where the “scientific” fads change with every generation.

T. Berry Brazelton, one of the country’s leading authorities on how to care for infants over the past thirty or forty years, wrote of mothers in the highlands of Mexico, who breastfeed up to 70 to 90 times a day. He added, “That’s being “there” for the baby!” And none of this – none of the going and cooing and crawling and bonding and talking and singing and Popsicle-stick-gluing – would work, would mean a thing, he and others wrote, if it was not done with absolute joy, with “great delight and pleasure,” at each and every moment in the day.” (Warner, 71)

Is it any wonder that 70 percent of mothers surveyed in 2000 said they found motherhood “incredibly stressful”? (Warner, 71)

Earlier, Perhaps Saner, Child-rearing Models

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, never before in America – not even in the much-maligned 1950s – has motherhood been conceived in this totalizing, self-annihilating, utterly ridiculous way. (Warner, 71)

The experts of the 1960s held that mothers should set limits on their children’s behavior and on their own level of maternal enmeshment. (79)

The experts (in the 1970s) agreed that unhappy mothers produced unhappy children. (Warner, 84)

The majority opinion in the 1970s was that the key to maternal self-fulfillment was work outside the home. Some experts even opined that working mothers were better mothers than stay-at-home moms. Child psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim, for one, said that the enforced selflessness of stay-at-home motherhood was ill-suited for educated women – or their children. (Warner, 85-86)

In the 1970s and 1980s, many mainstream baby boomer women prided themselves on breaking with the sacrificial roles that they saw their mothers having played. (Warner, 83) The 1980s were about “self-actualizing, self-fulfilled motherhood.” (Warner, 88) By 1986, a majority of all women with children under age three were in the workforce. (Warner, 89)

By the mid-1980s, mainstream women’s magazines were citing studies showing that working moms were happier, healthier, and less stressed than nonworking mothers. And then, somehow, everything changed. (Warner, 90)

Suddenly, as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the word “guilt” was everywhere in the magazine stories on motherhood. It was guilt about working, guilt about not being there enough for the children. Working mothers were no longer heroines. They were called villains, selfish and “unnatural.” (Warner, 91)

One woman writing in a 1994 book even compared leaving a baby in a daycare center to the trauma of a child whose mother had died! (Penelope Leach, Children First) (Warner, 99) Against the long history of child-rearing ideologies in our society, this reads – to me, at least — like irresponsible, hysterical, drivel.

Though leaving children in a daycare center is a far more expensive option than most couples can afford, and getting high quality childcare workers is even harder.

And that’s because the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230) The Family Leave Act we have lets women take off three months, but without pay. Not many families can afford to do that. You can’t talk about the pressures on parents without talking about the anti-life priorities of our economy.

And daycare is only the tip of an ugly iceberg. The women who provide daycare often do so by putting their own children in even cheaper, less adequate daycare – or leaving them behind, thousands of miles away. As Naomi Wolf put it:

Meanwhile, the children of the army of private and day care caregivers are watched by worse-paid baby-sitters, or by grandmothers, or by relatives in countries far away – in Ecuador and India, in the Caribbean and Central America and the Phillipines. (Wolf, p. 257)

I learned that if I sat in the park with our baby and chatted with an immigrant nanny who was wiping the drool of a white baby, or teaching a white toddler to share, within minutes she would show a photograph of her own children far away, whom she may not have seen for years. And her eyes would fill with tears. (Wolf, p. 258)

When it came to who would take care of the kids, capitalism happened to the women’s movement, and a real gender revolution did not. (Wolf, p. 260)

Last week, USA Today carried an article called “Till Debt Do Us Part,” about how the tensions created by debt may be the biggest single reason many marriages end. (USA Today, 29 April 2006)

And yesterday’s New York Times had a story that talked about a 38 percent increase nationally in home foreclosures in the first quarter of this year over the same period in 2005. Florida had the second-largest number of foreclosures in the nation during that period – 29,636 – behind Texas, which had 40,236. We’re Number One. (From NY Times 6 May 06, “Statistics Aside, Many Feel Pinch of Daily Costs,” by Jennifer Steinhauer.)

Once again, to repeat the quote we can’t hear enough times, the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230)

Maybe you think we”ve just never cared about families, or that figuring out how to support them is too hard. But in fact, we did all this during World War II. And we did it quickly – almost intuitively, it seems – and well.

In order to help women join the workforce, the government provided “services – from shopping to laundry, cleaning facilities, a catering kitchen, and child care centers – in each neighborhood clustered as close together as possible and supplemented by family health and recreation facilities.” There was even a mending service for the kids’ torn clothing; and on the way home, the tired mother could pick up a nourishing hot meal, prepared and packed for her at the center, to bring home along with her children! (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 232)

After the war, the men needed their jobs back” and this elaborate, smoothly-operating and highly successful solution to the work-family problem was simply shut down. Not even a memory remained in most history books to give women a blueprint with which to agitate for a comparable solution, nor to remind all of us that such a thing could be done. (Wolf, 232)

But we don’t have to wait sixty years to forget important facts. The current often hysterical crop of child-rearing gurus seem to have forgotten that there’s no proof that children suffered in the past because their mothers put them in playpens. There’s no proof that children suffer today because their mothers work. None of the studies conducted on the children of working mothers – in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – have ever shown that a mother’s work outside of home per se has any impact upon her child’s well-being. (The quality of care a child receives while the mother’s away, on the other hand, has a major impact on that child’s well-being, but that’s a whole other story.)

Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for themselves, their children, and their husbands. All of this research has been around for decades. (Warner, 133) So has research suggesting that women are happier and healthier when they follow their own needs, whether to work or to be at-home mothers. The message seems to be, if you feel that you should be a stay-at-home mother, then you probably should be. If you feel that you need to return to work, whether full or part-time, then you probably should.

It’s like the instructions in airplanes. When the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own mask first, then help others. Children need happy mothers, not obsessive ones. So do the mothers, and so do the husbands.

And so it’s the Sunday before Mothers’ Day, and we have a week to anticipate the actual day. What can we say, what can I say, to the mothers of young children in the church and elsewhere?

First, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Motherhood is harder than I knew, harder than many of us know, and because we live in the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy, the weight of raising children falls on parents, and especially on mothers. So thank you.

And about the guilt. The guilt that follows you like a buzzard because there’s too much to do, and you can’t do it perfectly, the guilt that’s always with you, either in the foreground or the back of your mind – my God, you’re forgiven! You’re forgiven! Don’t accept that guilt. Every mother I know is doing about all she knows how to do, and that’s enough! You are being treated like the scapegoats of a society that will not put its money where its mouth is, a society whose behavior and economic priorities show how brutally and completely it ignores the services needed to support a healthy and happy family life in our country. And so all the failings are often dumped on you, and they can drive you crazy. Don’t let them. You’re doing the best you can, and that’s enough. You’re forgiven.

Now we have one week in which to anticipate this year’s Mothers’ Day, a week to consider the high human costs of living in “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.”

And a week to consider what gifts we might want to offer – to our mothers, our wives, our friends with children, and to the economic priorities of our greedy country.

So much to think about. So many mothers who could use a gift. So much time. In the meantime and in anticipation of that time – Happy Mothers’ Day.