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© Davidson Loehr

February 19, 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 be willing to listen to our hearts when we are in pain. Not our anger, not our complaints, not our fear or the litany of life’s failings, but the still, small voices of our hearts.

Sometimes, it is the wishes of our hearts that cause our pain, when we expect the world to grant those wishes.

Let us not go through it alone unless we have to. Let us find a safe place, a safe person, and ask them to listen, as we try to listen, to the cries of our hurts and of our hearts.

Whether things around us can be changed, or we’ll have to change our demands and expectations, it often starts with the painful honesty that can say, “This is not what I expected in my life.”

Some times the wisdom we need is just what we don’t want to hear, but what we need to hear – not from others wagging their self-righteous fingers at us, but from ourselves, in our own voice.

Religious miracles aren’t about changing the world around us. Those are social or political endeavors. Religious miracles are about changing our hearts, our expectations, changing what we are willing to accept.

They are among life’s hardest miracles, and they seldom happen alone. When we are in pain, when we need someone just to listen, let us try to find them.

The heart does have reasons that reason does not know. And sometimes, if we will listen carefully, we can hear them. Let us learn to listen.

Amen.

TESTIMONIALS

This service about “listening to the heart” used our own Listening Ministry as an example of church members who have been through nearly six months of training as listeners, and church members who have used these services. For this posting, I’ve removed the last names of our members, but included their comments.

Mike – A Listening Minister:

1. What was the best thing about the listening ministry program?

One of the best things about the Listening Ministry program for me is the training. In the beginning it’s a frustrating and unnatural process, but it gets you thinking. You think about listening, which is unnatural, because most of us listen in order to respond with answers or anecdotes. As a listening minister you learn to respond with questions, to clarify, or by paraphrasing, to comprehend.

The training by itself is good enough. I’d do it again just for that. But, I joined this church for many reasons. One reason is for community, another is for personal salvation. By salvation I mean that I want to live a healthy life in the moment. For me, the two are joined.

A perfect illustration of this for me started in the New UU Covenant group. Everyone in the group gave a talk that summed up their personal spiritual journey. Well, I grew up fairly un-churched. Our family suited-up for Easter or Christmas Eve services at a mild Presbyterian church. I couldn’t tell you anything about it really-other than feeling awkward and stiff in church clothes. So, for this covenant group, I wrote about my life-the emotional ups and downs, the demons, the struggle to forgive myself and others. Before I spilled all of this out in the covenant group, I confessed that I’d written a rather long piece on my spiritual journey. The leader of the group, Nancy G., said quite seriously something to the effect: Take as long as you need, we’re here for you.

We all start coming to church for one reason or the other, but I personally returned to this church for the gentle inclusiveness found in Nancy’s words and in that group’s willingness to listen to my story. This to me embodies one of the listening ministry principles. Bearing witness. Everyone needs a witness to the ups and downs in their lives. At times, friends, family, and co-workers cannot fulfill this role. Sometimes you just need a neutral person to listen respectfully with compassion to your story. You need a witness. I believe that being heard, no matter what you’re suffering, can help with the healing process.

Dana – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

Having someone listen without judgment or “helpful” comments. Simply allowing the words from my pain resonate in the room and echo back to my ears. This echo came back to me with acknowledgement, affirmation and confirmation of my feelings. The listening minister likewise, reiterated my feelings, and somehow my feelings were annotated and enlarged, no longer being fuzzy thoughts are hurts… But a solid that could be seen and managed.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

That managing pain alone is a choice, but not the most effective and beneficial. Sharing pain as in sharing joy, a good meal, a good laugh, brings an expanded dimension and allows space for healing….That being heard by someone who can hear, is sensitive and supportive is the very best to bring about resolution.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

The ease, simplicity, of someone accommodating my time schedule, being available to me, to be with me, and support me in finding positive resolution to my issues.

Caroline – A Listening Minister

I signed up for the LM training soon after joining the church. The training required introspection, openness and sharing among other trainees. This continues throughout one’s participation in the program. Serving as a LM has helped me understand why I respond to situations as I do, what I’m feeling and why, and how to better put it into words – not a forte of mine. So I have learned both from my listenees and my fellow LM”s. Another benefit, I have also come to know quite well a caring, open, diverse group of church members whom I care about greatly. Six of the trainees from my group still get together on a monthly basis. I cherish these get-togethers.

For someone who is hesitant to request a LM, I would say think of it as your time, a time when you give yourself permission to talk about what is on your mind without worrying about whether you are imposing on the listener. The old saying “get it off your chest” works: talking something through in your head is harder. Situations are clarified, emotions may not have the same grip once they are spoken. New perspectives and insights emerge.

The LM is a real win-win situation as far as I’m concerned. I have gained as much from my listenees and the program as they I hope have.

Rebecca – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

I liked that my listener had some experience with my specific issue. It made me feel like she would understand my problems from the start.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

I found it to be very effective one on one counseling for a time that was difficult. My listener gave support that I was not able to find in friends or family.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

How helpful it was. She just listened to me spew out all of my stuff. She never really gave advice or guidance. She just accepted me in the place I was in. It’s a world full of judgments but it’s a very powerful thing to just be accepted.

SERMON:

When I looked for a training program for a listening ministry program after I arrived here in 2000, I chose the one we’re using for two reasons. First, it was the hardest and demanded the most training, and I thought both our members and our volunteers deserve that kind of first-class treatment.

And second, I liked the philosophy of this training, which saw our role not as curing, not as solving, but as listening, in the faith that the wisdom most of us need is the wisdom of our own best selves, and that can happen – sometimes almost magically – just by being able to tell our story. Listening is work, always, and it’s hard work. But when one person can be honest and the other can be attentive, sometimes miracles occur.

I first saw this magic performed twenty-four years ago, and to the end of my days it will remain one of the most miraculous things I have ever witnessed.

I was taking a ten-week chaplaincy training program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, learning how to be a chaplain, which I finally realized meant learning how to listen. I had signed on for the leukemia ward. As soon as I found the ward and told them I was the new chaplain intern, three nurses jumped on me and said “Wonderful! It’s your turn! Go see the woman in room 19!” I asked what this was about, and they said “We have all had all we can take of her. It’s your turn!”

I went in to meet this woman, and a nurse closed the door behind me. The patient was 29, married with two children, dying of leukemia, and furious. I heard her whole story: very loud, punctuated with furious profanity, along with being told that the fact that I dared to be a chaplain was a cheap abomination, because in case I hadn’t heard, there was no God, there was no justice, and there was no love!

I have never been around anyone as deeply furious, or loud, profane and vulgar as this woman, and I had no idea how to help her. I listened to her story. She and her husband had had a stormy beginning to their marriage, with some painful fights and threats of divorce going both ways. Then one day they decided to begin talking through their angers and their differences. They worked hard at it for a year, she said. They were vulnerable, honest, and serious. They were willing to be heard, and willing to listen.

And finally, as they could hear each other’s pain and anger, they began to understand where the resentments were, how the angers had arisen and how they had each nursed them in the dark, where they gained strength until they had nearly destroyed their relationship.

Slowly, painfully, they found each other again, and they found the love they had lost. They fell in love all over again, with each other, with their marriage and their new baby. They recommitted themselves to one another for the rest of their lives, and soon their second child was on the way.

The past three years, she said, had been the happiest either of them had ever imagined. They had worked for it, they had earned it, they deserved it. There was a justice about it – this was a very important phrase for her.

And now, she said, her voice rising again, she was going to die. She was going to die, leaving behind the husband she loved, the two young children they both loved and had so looked forward to spending the rest of their lives raising and loving and watching grow up.

Within seconds, the profanity and vulgarity were back, screamed almost as loud as she could scream from her desperate, hopeless pain. I had absolutely no idea what to do. After she finished, she told me that I was to return at the same time the next day. I asked why. She screamed that I would hear this story every damned day until she died, that’s why, and if I wasn’t there she would have me paged.

I had failed miserably with the very first patient to whom I’d been assigned. I felt awful, and I was in that room at that time for five full days, feeling worse for her and worse for myself every day.

I was depressed all that weekend, and partly because I knew Monday was coming and I’d have to go back into that room again. So Monday morning, in the group when the ten chaplain students met with our supervisor, I confessed. I told the story, said I had completely failed at this, and didn’t know what to do.

Our supervisor was a Lutheran minister named John Serkland – good people deserve to have their names told with their stories. John listened to my miserable story, and said “Do you want me to save you?” I said “Do you honestly think you can?” He said Yes, he thought he probably could. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know what that could mean. I said “John, this woman is going to die, she’s furious and I don’t blame her. What on earth can you possibly do?” He said that tomorrow he would go with me to visit her.

So that day, Monday, I spent another painful and miserable fifteen minutes in her room, hearing the same story, with more volume, more profanity, more vulgarity, more hopeless fury, and that night I didn’t sleep well.

The next day, John wore his chaplain costume, with the Lutheran backward collar. I thought, Man, she’s going to throw the bedstand at you in that costume! That afternoon, we walked into her room. She took one quick look at us, and sized the situation up immediately. “Oh I see,” she yelled, “the little moron is stumped, so he brings the big fat moron!” Her actual words were far more colorful,

John sat down in the chair by the head of her bed. He said, “My name is John. May I hear your story?” That’s all he said for the next ten minutes. She laid into him. She called him names, told him what an abomination his costume was, then told him her story, the story I had already heard six times. It seemed even more angry, more desperate, more hopeless. When she finished, John said just three words. He looked at her and simply said, “You expected more.”

She was prepared to throw whatever he said right back in his face, and she formed her mouth for a response, but nothing came out. She mustered more energy, more anger, and again tried to say something, but again nothing came out. Then tears ran down both her cheeks; she looked at John and simply said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” he repeated. She reached her hand out, and he clasped it for a few seconds, then said “I would like to come back tomorrow.” She nodded. We left.

The next day, we returned, and the spell had been broken. She apologized for her behavior, her anger, her language, and John said she had nothing to apologize for. “I expected more,” she said, “I expected more than this. But there isn’t more. There’s just this. Just 29 years. Just this. I was just so angry! I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right. There was no justice in it. I wanted more. But there isn’t more. There is just this.” She thanked John, then said “You don’t have to come back.” She nodded toward me and said, “He’ll do.” We laughed, and left.

John and I went to the hospital cafeteria for some coffee and conversation. I said “How did you know what to do?” He said, “I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was assigned to a patient much like her, in the same condition, and she was also furious. Each day she would scream at me, call me names, tell me chaplains were a disgrace, and the rest of it. I had no idea what to do. I kept wanting to help her, to solve her problem, and I couldn’t solve her problem because she was right: she was dying, and it wasn’t fair. She died, angry to the end, and I knew I had failed her. I thought about it for years. A couple years ago, after I’d had a lot more experience, I finally realized that I hadn’t needed to fix her, I’d just needed to hear her. I wondered if I would ever get another chance to do it right. This time, it was your turn. And because you failed as I once had, I got the chance to say those three words I wish I had said ten years ago.”

All John did was listen to her heart. It was all she needed. Most of the time, it’s all any of us need. It’s our own wisdom that we need, but we can’t hear it because our fear, our desperation and our fury keep us from hearing ourselves. Sometimes, it just takes someone else. Not someone to fix us, not someone to give us wise answers like dishing out pills. Not someone to listen to our symptoms and diagnose a medication. Just someone to listen to our heart. Just that.

And what a gift it is. That young woman died a few weeks later. During those weeks, she spent every minute she could loving her husband, her children, expressing her appreciation for all that others had been able to do. She had found a peace I didn’t think possible. It was certainly a peace I couldn’t have led her to. But she didn’t need to be led; she just needed to be heard – and to listen to herself.

Of all the thoughts I’ve had about that experience, two stand out.

The first was realizing that virtually all of our frustrations, angers and disappointments in life result from the fact that we expected more. Our friendships or relationships aren’t as satisfying as we want: we expected more. Our parents, our families, frustrate us with their scripts, their expectations, their badgering. We expected more from our family. Our job drives us nuts: we expected more from that! We’re not attractive enough, not successful enough, not happy enough: we expected more.

Sometimes, of course, there can be more. Every social action, every political action effort in history has been the demand that our society be more. The American colonists expected more representation for their taxes, demanded it, fought for it, and got it. A century ago, women expected more of a voice in elections. They fought for it, and got it. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam era anti-war movement, the movement to remove President Nixon from office, and hundreds of other movements came precisely from the fact that we expected more, worked for more, and got more. So this isn’t about urging a spineless passivity. Some things can be changed.

But not everything can be changed. Some things must finally be accepted. Then it’s time to look for spiritual miracles. Those miracles don’t change the world around us; they change the world within us. That’s what religious miracles are about: not walking on water, but learning to walk on the earth for as long as we”ve been given: awake, aware, and grateful.

The second lesson I learned is that it usually won’t happen unless we can listen and hear. Not only chaplains, ministers and listening ministers need to listen and hear, but those telling their stories need to listen and hear, too. I don’t know how many times that woman shouted her story, but she never heard what her heart was saying, and she put others off so much that they didn’t even want to listen. If both she and John had not been willing to listen to her heart, I think she would have died in that same painful fury.

When we can get our hearts and our heads together and listen, sometimes miracles happen. They really happen every day, all around us, in quiet conversations and quiet reflections going on everywhere. Life can have profound disappointments, but it also has its miracles. Indeed, miracles abound. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.

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© Davidson Loehr

18 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us learn how to open our gifts. Christmas is coming, wrapped presents are everywhere, and we still struggle to know how to open our gifts, even to recognize them.

The pure gift of just being here – what’s that worth? And being with people we love, and who love us – what’s that selling for on the Dow or the Nasdaq? And our health – whatever degree of health we have, it’s better than having a lot less health. It makes a big difference. What’s that worth?

So many gifts and so many of us who have not learned how to see them. Let us become aware of those simple gifts of being here, loving and being loved, the gifts of our health. Those gifts are the real treasures of this holiday season, and we don’t have to wait until Christmas to open them. In fact, it’s best that we don’t wait. Let us open our gifts of life, love and spirit, and spread them all around our lives, sitting there right in the middle of them. That will help us prepare for Christmas by reminding ourselves that we already have the really important gifts, while on Christmas morning we can open our gaily-wrapped trinkets and toys.

Amen.

SERMON: Love Stories

Some of you may be thinking “All right, this is a church and it’s Christmas time, so tell me a story, take me in, make me believe things that I know aren’t so, just for a week. Do the Christmas thing – if you pretend it could be true, I’ll pretend I believe you, and we’ll fake it through another holiday season. Just tell me a story and take me in.” Even if you wouldn’t say it that way, you recognize the sentiment, and many of you may identify with it.

But others come to church a week before Christmas and think, “All right now, it’s that season when all preachers lie because they think they can get away with it. But don’t lie to me. Don’t insult my mind or my spirit by feeding me hokum. Now more than at any other time of the year, I need the one thing churches almost never offer: I need truth. So don’t you dare lie to me!”

And others are in between, wondering and hoping that there could be truth that’s still magical, and magic that’s true.

Really, this is the range of expectations people bring to religion all the time, everywhere. We know religions always teach using stories, and a lot of people think you only use stories when you don’t have facts, the way Plato defined myths as lies 2400 years ago – though Plato was one of the great mythmakers of Western history.

But you can’t escape stories. You can just hope to tell the difference between stories that serve us and stories that enslave us. Even sciences give their facts a human meaning by embedding them in stories. We might doze off in a talk about Chlorofluorocarbon emissions, but we understand the story of global warming, and the picture of melting ice caps that can raise the sea level and flood some of the world’s major cities.

We can understand that those species of plants and animals that fit the demands of their surroundings would do well, but it’s easier to remember the phrase “survival of the fittest” because it implies all kinds of stories, including a lot of cowboy Westerns.

But even things presented in the media as facts – are usually parts of stories, whether we realize it or not. Right now, for instance, we are told repeatedly that we are at war with Iraq. Well, that one word “war” calls up all kinds of stories of heroic sacrifice made in the name of high and noble ideals, usually against evil enemies.

But the truth is that we aren’t in a war with Iraq. We invaded their country, illegally and against all international law. Our administration lied to our own people to do it, in order to control Iraq’s money, their oil, and occupy their strategic position. What our media call Iraqi “insurgents” aren’t insurgents; they’re fighting and dying to repel a foreign invader that has stolen their money and murdered over 100,000 of their people. That’s a very different story. If the media called it an illegal invasion, called the theft of their money and oil robbery or piracy, and called the deaths of Iraqi citizens murders, then we would have a very different story, and one the country would not support for long. It matters what you call it, because what you call it calls up images and stories that either sanction or condemn what we are doing.

All stories are trying to take us in. But with good stories, we want to be taken in. We love fiction that feeds our spirits, and don’t care a bit whether it’s true. In fact, we prefer stories to facts. This is a religious lesson, but I first learned it from a diaper commercial.

Some years ago, when Pampers came on the market, they were the first good disposable diaper. The advertisers could truthfully say they were the best in the world, because – well, they were the only disposable diaper in the world. So they decided to try an advertising campaign grounded in truth rather than the kinds of images and stories that advertisers prefer. They chose Texas as the test market for this campaign, and just told people the facts, and that Pampers were the best diapers you could buy. Nobody bought them. Apparently that wasn’t what parents were looking for.

So the ad agency decided, Well, we’ll just do it the old way. And they came up with the second ad. This ad said that a Pampers baby is a happy baby. And the rest is history. A happy baby – there’s a whole story tucked in those two words. A happy baby means a happy marriage, a happy family, and young parents who must be doing a good job of parenting. And those are things parents do want to hear: it’s worth the price of a box of diapers any day. And if the diapers are good – well, that’s a bonus.

We prefer stories to facts. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s true.

If you doubt it, just remember the last time you watched “The Nutcracker,” and were perfectly happy seeing dancing mice and a wooden nutcracker who came to life. Not a bit of it actually, historically, happened, you know. But you don’t care a bit, because it’s such a wonderful story.

If you haven’t seen “The Nutcracker,” and still think we prefer truth to fiction, I have one word for you: movies. The documentaries seldom move us. But show us a story that we can imagine ourselves in or connected to, and the tears will flow, our hearts will be touched, and our spirits will be opened and fed.

The best religious stories can do this, too. Some are educational, like the Good Samaritan, or a lot of Buddhist stories. Some are challenging stories, like the stories of the prophets saying God doesn’t care what we believe, only how we behave toward the weakest among us.

And the best of them, those that come from a deep love of life that makes us fall in love with some of the deeper parts of life – those are love stories.

This is the kind of love story that’s the best thing about religions: stories that can make us fall in love with life at deeper levels. They’re everywhere, and I’ve brought you three short ones, from three different religions today.

The first story has a story of its own attending it. A couple years ago, we had an Indian woman who often attended here. She always came late and left early. But one Sunday she came a little early and I saw her, so I went up to her, welcomed her, and asked why she usually came late and left early.

She explained that she had to drive her teen-aged son to Barsana Dahm, the wonderful Hindu temple south of town, then had to drive here, and then had to drive the 30 minutes south again to pick her son up. I said that was two hours of driving, and asked why she didn’t just bring her son here.

“Ah no,” she said, “because you have no good stories!” She said her son needed stories that stirred his mind and his heart, stories he would want to discuss at home during the week. Hinduism, she informed me, had many good stories. “Tell me one,” I asked. “Ah!” she said, “I could tell you a hundred!” “Just one.” “Very well, I’ll tell you the story he learned last week, and which our family has discussed over dinner all this week.”

It was a story about Krishna, probably Hinduism’s favorite picture of God. Krishna was a wonderful god, but as a boy he misbehaved – you could even call him a brat at times. So naturally, kids love him.

Krishna was chewing something in school, and the teacher saw him. He knew he was not supposed to chew gum. “Krishna,” she said, “What are you chewing?” “Nothing,” he replied, still chewing. “Krishna!” she said louder, “that is not true! You are chewing gum, aren’t you?” “No,” he said. She walked over to his desk, told him to stand up, and said “Now open your mouth. I want to look inside!”

So Krishna opened his mouth. The teacher bent down, looked inside his mouth, and saw – a hundred million galaxies. Inside that child were eternity and infinity, just as they are inside all children. That’s a love story! And this woman’s son spent a whole week discussing this story with his parents, and what it might mean to have an infinite and eternal identity inside of him: what it might mean for who he was and how he should live.

A second story isn’t so much a story as it is one sentence that, like Krishna’s mouth, contains a wonderful infinity of possibilities. It comes from Judaism, and is the simple statement where the writer has God say to the Hebrew people “I will be your father, and you will be my people.” God’s people: children of God: everyone! That’s pretty close to containing something infinite and eternal, like the Krishna story, isn’t it? It’s another love story.

And then there is the Christian story, the birth of the baby Jesus. The story is good, both for what it says and for what it does not say. Jesus wasn’t born in a castle, not even in a Holiday Inn, or the story would be saying that only the wealthy have that capacity for bearing the sacred. He wasn’t born to royalty, or it would be saying that only the powerful are really significant. No, in this story, the incarnation of God was born to common people, not rich ones. When God walked among us, he walked as one of us. In fact, it’s the only way he ever walks among us. And we could be incarnations of that spirit rightfully called Holy. For we are children of God and the hope of the world, if only we will be.

Told as history, it isn’t true. It didn’t happen. Told as science, it isn’t true. Humans aren’t conceived without chromosomes from two parents, and that’s done by actual sex, not just an idea. But as a love story, it’s wonderful. If you think about it, it is the Christian version of the story the Hindus tell in that wonderful story of Krishna containing the whole universe in him, or the Jews tell simply by having their God say “I will be your father and you will be my people.” If you’re looking for a story that comes from the depths – not of gods but of humans – then this season has some wonderful love stories for you.

And these love stories aren’t just about giving us a cradle, a manger to make us feel loved, though they can do that. They’re also about nurturing us, empowering us, to grow into our highest selves. They’re stories saying “You, you there: you have within you infinite possibilities. You’re a child of God. You are even, if you will be, an incarnation of God. Now. Go act like it!”

The best love stories give us a love that doesn’t stop until it overflows us, and we reach out to feed a hungry world with the overflow. That’s part of the meaning of reminding ourselves during this season that ” it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Because when we give, we are becoming the incarnation of those forces in the world, in the universe, that are only happy when they are giving unto others: giving life, love, hope, a healing touch, a caring presence. Presence. Spelled with a “c” rather than a “t” – a healing presence, a loving presence. Those are the greatest presents we can give one another, at Christmas or any other time.

It gives a whole new meaning to the words “Christmas presence.” The Christmas story has become mostly a merchants’ story about buying yourself into debt to impress your family and friends with gadgets and toys that will be forgotten in weeks or months. The emphasis is on how many presents you can get, or what they’re worth, or whether they’re cool or impressive enough. And that’s all wrong. There’s nothing there but greed, envy, and a one-upmanship that never ends until you have maxed out your credit cards.

But from the treasuries of the human imagination kept alive for us in the great love stories of religion, another possibility emerges. It is the possibility not of Christmas presents, but of a presence. A presence of love, of awareness, of knowing that within us are infinite possibilities. Within us is the spirit of a son or daughter of God, children of Life’s longing for itself. For we, if only we would realize it, are incarnations of God, needing to claim our sacred heritage, and live it.

These, of course, are stories. Are they true? Yes, these are true, even more true than mere facts. For these are love stories. And it doesn’t get much more true than that!

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

11 December 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We spend so much time looking for magic in the wrong places. We think it must be a hard thing to get, this magic, and we go through the motions of all the incantations, prayers, lucky charms and tricks we can find, trying to trick some magic into entering our souls.

This is the season when we will be charged a lot of money for seeking magic in the wrong places. And no matter how much we spend, toys aren’t likely to deliver the kind of magic for which we really yearn.

It’s the season when we chase after the spirit called Holy, and wish we could be caught by it.

It’s an important chase, but we don’t need to bring our credit cards. For the spirit of life and love and everything really worth the chase – not only is that spirit free, but it is also inside of us, waiting to be awakened, and noticed, so that it might do its work.

This season, let us conspire with the holy spirit to transform our hearts from stone to flesh, to reawaken our gratitude for this miracle of life, and our love for those who help feather our heart’s nest.

There is a glow, and a warmth that comes from looking for magic in the right places, and it can’t be begged, borrowed, stolen or bought. But it can be brought forth, from its home in the manger of our heart, and it can bless us. That blessing, that warmth, that connection, that feeling – that’s the magic that’s really worth seeking.

These holidays, let us seek for the magic of the season, but let us seek it in all the right places.

Amen.

SERMON: Magic

I began thinking about the idea of magic when I was talking with a colleague who is doing an interim ministry at an unhappy church. “I’m getting ready for the Christmas services,” she said, “but I don’t feel the magic.” Christmas is such a magical holiday that without that magic, it isn’t really Christmas.

I’ve been reading a book about magic, a book called Not in Kansas Anymore (Christine Wicker). The author used to be a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News, and brings a lot of skepticism to this subject of magic. But she spent a couple years looking for it among some very colorful people. She spent time with witches, vampires, werewolves and elves, and a host of others in all the costumes you could imagine, and some you couldn’t imagine.

This wasn’t about party tricks, or producing a quarter from behind someone’s ear. It’s what the communities she studied call “High magic.” It’s about transforming yourself. Magic is a search for a power of life by people who are missing it and want it. Magic is the effort to create a feeling that we’re somehow connected to larger powers, and that connection can bring us a feeling of being more alive.

Of the groups she studied, the most fascinating to me were the psychic vampires, because I’ve known a few. They told her they could drain energy from others just by being around them, and she said she sometimes felt drained after they left. These psychic vampires divided the world into two kinds of people: vampires and victims. Those who steal life, and those from whom they steal it.

While all these alternative magic-seekers are usually people for whom traditional religion can’t give them this power or satisfy this need, you don’t need religion to explain where they would get this view of our world as those who take and those who are taken from. They could get it from our economy, which serves the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest. Or they could see it in our imperialism: the notion that since we have the military might, we have the right to invade and rob any country with assets or strategic location we desire. Both our economy and our foreign policy operate a lot like vampires and victims: those with brute power feed on the life energy of those whose powers are more vulnerable, more easily stolen from them.

It’s about trying to take, steal, or buy something from others that can give us a kind of life feeling we don’t have. The whole notion is wrong: that we can steal or buy a worthwhile life. And once you think a quality life can be stolen or bought, we’re at the mercy of the advertising agencies who have made a multi-billion-dollar art of convincing us that their product can give us the magic we need.

So I’ve been thinking about the Christmas season in terms of magic this week. As some of you have heard, it’s the same week in which a bunch of evangelical Christian megachurches announced that they’ll be closed on Sunday the 25th of December. That tiresome crank, Jerry Falwell, has denounced them, as he has denounced the White House for sending “Holiday Greetings” cards, insisting that Christmas is a completely Christian holiday.

But Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday. As even a conservative New York Times op-ed writer reported yesterday (John Tierney, 10 December 2005), it is a winter solstice festival, and has been so for thousands of years. In the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was the date of the winter solstice. As such, it was automatically the birth day of all solar deities, including the Roman god Mithras. December 25th wasn’t adopted as Jesus’ birthday until the fourth century, the same time that Sunday was adopted as the Christian holy day. But Sunday is the day of the Sun: the holy day of solar deities. So nothing about this season, or Sunday, has anything to do with the man Jesus.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday; it’s a merchants’ holiday, the day they finally close their stores after the Christmas selling orgy that produces about a third of their annual sales. The truth is, Christmas is a secular holiday. If you doubt this, just look at the gifts that are given. Bibles make up an infinitesimally small percentage of Christmas gifts. What we buy has nothing to do with religion. But what we are trying to buy is magic: the magic of the season. And how odd, that we are told that we must buy it!

Here at church, I’ve been getting spammed with e-mails telling me what the hottest toys of this season are, presuming I might want to run out and buy them so I can feel the magic. It’s a confusing array. And somehow, each manufacturer has their own idea of the season’s hottest toy. I’ve read that the season’s hottest toy is the Microsoft X-Box 360, selling for $399. The company says they expect to sell over three million of them. They’re hot.

But there are so many hottest toys of the year! One e-mail says the hottest toy is the Remote control Hovercraft; another says no, it’s the Remote Control UFO that’s the hottest toy of the year. Then there’s the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio with Twinkle Twirl Pony and Accessories. That’s hot. There’s the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set, which is more than I want to know about that. Or the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. That doesn’t do a lot for me, but I’ll bet some of you have daughters who hope they get one. There’s even the Room Moodz 6″ Rotating Disco Ball Light for $14.99. I hope disco balls aren’t making a comeback!

The magic of the Christmas season is for sale in stores, through catalogs and online, delivered to your door to transform your Christmas into the magical sort of thing you think you want. These gifts are promising to make your holiday season, to connect it with that larger power that you don’t have. It’s the power of being really cool, excited, keeping up with or staying ahead of your friends. You know, you can’t buy just any Sewer Lair Play Set. It won’t be the right brand. It won’t have the kind of magic that only the Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Play Set has. And you can’t just go down to the Dollar Store and buy some scruffy old unicorn. It won’t have the magic of the Barbie Swan Lake Unicorn, with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken. Just ask your kids. We’re not buying toys; we’re buying holiday magic. And we’ll spend an average of $700 to $1,000 buying it because we aren’t being told that we have the magic within us. This reminds me a lot of those psychic vampires. And think about all these hot toys, and what we do with them. We use them alone. We go off alone, absorbed in our X-Box 360, or the Twinkle Twirl Dance Studio or those sewer turtles. This magic we’re spending so much money for takes us away from contact with almost all the real human beings around us.

But you know this can’t be right. Even saying it out loud sounds silly. We’ve been convinced that holiday magic is something we have to buy, that we don’t have it and can’t call it forth on our own; we have to buy it. And it’s a strange and transient kind of magic, at that. Because the magic of this year’s hottest toys won’t even last a year. Next year these toys won’t have the magic any more. It never ends. Can real magic expire in just a year? Can it be as easy as charging it on a credit card? Is that really what we’re after? I know psychic vampires have to hunt continually for new life to steal, but is that the best we can do?

This is where I want to bring in a different way of looking at the magic we’re looking for. It’s a lens borrowed from Christianity, though one we seldom think about. It’s what the choir sang about this morning. They sang selections from Vivaldi’s Magnificat. Some of you will know where that word “Magnificat” comes from, and some of you won’t. It comes from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1 verse 46, from the Christian myth of the birth of Jesus. This gospel was written about eight years after the man Jesus was born, half a century after he died, so it’s imaginative religious storytelling, not history. We really don’t know a thing about just where or when the man Jesus was born. Still, it’s a lovely story. Mary’s friend Elizabeth tells her that her baby will be the Messiah. For centuries, Jewish women hoped, at least at some level, that their baby might be the long-awaited Messiah, and Mary has just been told, in this story written more than eighty years after Jesus’ birth, that her baby will be the one. That’s when she said the line that has launched a thousand concerts: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” That’s what the Latin word “magnificat” means: magnifies. My soul magnifies the Lord. Mary was saying “I carry within me magic of the highest order, the magic of God himself, placed in my womb to be born into the world. My soul magnifies the Lord!”

Sure, this is wrapped in that archaic language of a first-century myth; but you have a feeling for what it means. It’s about real magic! Not bought, not something that will wear thin by next season, but a gift of life, a visitation of all that is most holy, growing right there inside of your body. Every mother knows the feeling; every father can relate to it. Today, we get a set of plastic Barbie and Ken dolls, or some sewer turtles. And what does that magnify? The power of advertising to convince us that we want things we don’t really need? Is that what our souls magnify at Christmastime today? The power and the glory of advertisers taking advantage of our gullibility by tapping into our yearning for some high magic?

Mary’s magic was free. And really, in Jewish teachings, all people are the sons and daughters of God, who was their heavenly Father. It was magic, and it was free. Today, we get Barbie and Ken, and we buy them because we’ve been taught that we don’t have the magic in us any more. It’s a lie, but as long as we believe it, it’s true.

Think back this week on your very favorite, your most magical, Christmases, and see what made them so magical. I can remember some from my childhood. And I can’t remember a single present that I got at any of those best Christmases. It was other things: the feeling of our family being together, being happy, the wonderful smells of pine needles, and of cookies and bread baking, the magic of Santa Claus. We put out milk and cookies for Santa every Christmas Eve, and knew for a fact that there was a Santa because every Christmas morning, they were gone. Our father helped us choose the right kind of cookies; he seemed to know just what Santa liked. Then there was that warm glow of the multi-colored tree lights, and the glow in all the windows up and down the street. It was all magic. Nothing Christian about it, but it was magic. And what did our souls magnify? I think it was as simple as the joy of being together, being in a safe place where love lived and we lived, and where we mingled with love and called the place Home. I don’t mean I didn’t often hope for certain presents, but I can’t remember what any of them were.

What about you? When you think back on your best holidays, what did your soul magnify? What spirit were you channeling? What kind of powers or gods were you serving? I’ll bet they were happy ones, warm ones that cherished you and cherished those around you. Your soul magnified the power of love, and gratitude, and that magnification transformed the holidays into something special, something magical. But it was home-grown magic that accomplished the miracle: not store-bought magic.

We pay a fortune for gifts each year, gifts that will be out of fashion within a few months, because we have forgotten that the real magic of the season is all around us. But the center of this season is all about what we are magnifying with our souls. If Mary had said “My soul magnifies the fads of the season,” nobody would have cared. If she had rejoiced in stealing life from God, who was her newest victim, nobody would even have written it down, because you can’t get it more wrong than that.

Our souls are going to magnify something this season. Maybe just Microsoft’s profits and the stock portfolios of those who own a lot of Microsoft stock. Maybe just the fads of the season, new hot toys that start losing their heat within weeks. And in some ways, we spend all the money because, like psychic vampires, we think we’re missing something that can only be taken or bought from others. It never ends, because it’s looking for magic in all the wrong places.

I hope we can magnify more important things this holiday season. Like the warmth of a mutual relationship with another live human being. Like learning that it isn’t the love we buy or steal that saves us; it’s the love we share. This is the season of infinite dreams, when we dream even of finding, and magnifying, things like love, life, tenderness, compassion, the Holy Spirit – the spirit of the God of Love. Let our souls magnify all that is truly holy and life-giving this season. The very best magic is free; it’s still the only enduring miracle of this or any other season.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

27 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us not make life any harder than it is, by pretending that its meaning lies hidden in some faraway secret place, or that life’s secrets are heavily guarded, and we can’t know how to live without them.

Nothing is hidden. The fact that love is better than hate is not a secret; nor that people of good character are called, commanded, to follow a loving path.

And the fact that we are as precious as the next person, means the next person is as precious as us. This simple fact has implications for how we must treat one another and how we must live.

It is not a secret that truth must trump deceit, or that justice must play the tune to which all decent people want to learn how to dance.

These things may be rare; they may be hard. But they are not hidden, not secret.

The truth that can set us free is that everything we need is within and around us, hovering between us as a magical force field inviting us to touch its energy, and to be touched and transformed by it.

Life has many real problems we must solve: what to do for a living, how and where to work, what gifts we must offer to make a connection with our world. But the bigger questions of whether we are worthwhile and how we should treat one another – here, nothing is hidden. Here we stand like all others, needing to give and receive love, needing someone to need our gifts, needing to learn how to recognize and cherish the gifts being offered to us from those whose love or affection we cherish.

Here, nothing is hidden; nothing is hidden at all. Let us learn to live in this land without secrets, and let us learn to live with one another. For we are all children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and we need one another.

Amen.

SERMON: Secular Wisdom: Thoughts between Holidays

Most sermons are like treasure hunts. We look through religious writings for the few things worth bringing home: the gold nuggets scattered around in the compost.

Since we can find some golden nuggets in every religious tradition, preachers feel confident that their religion – whichever one it is – is a gold mine. And of course they are right: every religion has served, among other things, as a kind of magnet that draws together some wisdom, and some wise commentary on that wisdom.

But the truth is that you don’t have to go to religious traditions for this wisdom or these nuggets. They are everywhere, if only we’ll look for them. On the one hand, that’s a good thing because nearly 80% of Americans do not go to church regularly. On the other hand, this hunt for gold nuggets still requires that we be serious about the search, and look for the right things.

One of the things you find when you look for religious themes in folk sayings, secular parables and quotations, is that there is a widespread distrust of religion, churches, and ministers! It’s everywhere.

Benjamin Franklin said that “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” A German proverb says that “In the visible church the true Christians are invisible.” A French proverb echoes this when it says “He who is near the church is often far from God.” The French also observe that “Many come to church to air their finery.”

God doesn’t fare well, either. A century and a half ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.” But more than two thousand years before him, the Greek Xenophanes had observed from his travels that black people create black gods, while the gods of red-haired people have red hair, and blond races create their gods in their image, as everyone else does.

If neither churches nor gods fare well in the public arena, neither do preachers. Germans say, “There are many preachers who don’t hear themselves.” That’s almost kind. But a Yiddish proverb takes the gloves off: “It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the world, so he appointed rabbis.”

And religion itself is often seen as a bad thing. Over two thousand years ago, the Roman Lucretius wrote with disgust about the evil deeds that religion could prompt (Lucretius, 96-55 BC, De Rerum Natura). More recently, the New York Times quoted a modern Lucretius saying that, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg (1933 – ), quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999)

And while I spent several years reading many theological books on the way to a degree in theology, I have to love the barbed wit of the American critic of religion H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) when he wrote that, “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing.”

So today, on this day between holidays, I have decided to do something I’ve never done for a sermon before. As you may already have gathered, I won’t be searching through religious scriptures for wisdom today. Instead, I’ve gone treasure-hunting through the non-religious wisdom of the kind of common-sense we find in some of the thousands of sayings and proverbs floating around every culture in every era.

I’m not hunting randomly. I’m not looking for the goofy or the cynical. I’m looking for the same kind of nuggets I look for in religious traditions. I want to see what wisdom there is on the human condition, what the enduring problems are that we seem to face, and prescriptions for what we should do. But even limiting the search in this way, it is a rich field with a lot of gold nuggets.

Here are some sayings I suspect we’d all agree on, from a wide range of times and places:

Each day provides its own gifts (American Proverb). Noble and common blood is of the same color (German Proverb). Good advice is often annoying, bad advice never (French Proverb). And “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand” (Josh Billings).

We would resonate with the Latin proverb, “Live your own life, for you will die your own death.” – Though it isn’t yet clear just how we should live it. But we would agree with Abigail Van Buren – “Dear Abby” when she said “The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.” By Dear Abby’s standard, our country wouldn’t register a very good character now, either at home or abroad.

I read sayings like “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us,” or that “It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living,” and I agree (Oliver Wendell Holmes). And I think we’d all agree with Thomas Jefferson when he writes that, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson can still make us uncomfortable when he writes, “Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves” – but we know he’s right. Surely Abraham Lincoln was right too, when he said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And it’s worth writing down Gandhi’s formula: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Then we read the line, “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” and think Well, that Leonardo de Vinci could think as well as he could draw, paint and sculpt!

We might not agree with American comedian George Burns (1896-1996) when he says that “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” But surely the great Frenchman Victor Hugo nailed it when he said that “Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” (Victor Hugo, 1802 – 1885, Les Miserables, 1862)

And we dearly hope, and usually believe, with the 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing, that “Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.”

And what role does our character play in our happiness? A modern philosopher says “Our character…is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. (George Santayana, 1863 – 1952, “The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis”) And there he echoes the ancient Greek Heraclitus, who 2500 years ago simply said “Character is destiny.” (Heraclitus, 540 BC – 480 BC, On the Universe).

We might not agree with Emerson when he says, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But when he says, “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you,” we want to write it down – unless we prefer 20th Century Rock philosopher Janis Joplin’s shorter version: “Don’t compromise yourself; you are all you’ve got.”

The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But … the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” We read this, and we’re glad he raised the discussion up a level.

But it isn’t enough to sit and admire ourselves or stare at the world all moon-faced for long. We’ll bore everyone to sleep in five minutes. “What [we] actually need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of [us]. What [we] need is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by [us].” (Victor Frankl)

And like Leonardo de Vinci, Albert Einstein also grew beyond his own science when he said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” How do we do that?

Psychotherapist Victor Frankl said,”If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

And the late movie actor Christopher Reeve wrapped it in poetic language when he said, “I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don’t know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.”

So far, we can find as much relevant wisdom from secular sources as from religious ones.

But somewhere around here, fear enters – or as one woman put it, “Now comes a sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?” (Jane Wagner)

You can’t talk about idealistic pictures of life without talking about fear. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that fear of the unknown is the source of all religion. Even if we won’t go that far, we would agree with the Swedish proverb that “Fear gives a small thing a big shadow.” “Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed (Michael Pritchard).”

Fear is costly both on individual and national levels, for as Edward R. Murrow once said, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” Some have said that there are two kinds of people: those who are alive, and those who are afraid (Rachel Naomi Remen). And the truth is, “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live (Dorothy Thompson).”

Henry James, the 19th century novelist, said “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” We want him to be right. The fear usually comes from feeling inferior to the task before us. Then we’re reminded that Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.”

We cannot lose hope. For “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience”) We “must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” (Mohandas K. Gandhi)

But for now I’ll end these thoughts on fear with a wonderful paragraph written by Marianne Williamson – and often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela, who also used it: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What possibilities beckon to us from beyond the walls of fear? One is the possibility of loving – which can itself dispel fear. The comedienne Lucille Ball once said, “I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.” Something about that feels right, doesn’t it?

She’s joined there by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who took it much farther: “Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

Some would just call this a religious awakening. But, “A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.” (Jessamyn West, The Quaker Reader, 1962).

So one answer that lies beyond fear, and can lead us beyond fear, is love. And many have found it the secret of a worthwhile life. For others, it is not just love, but love turned into service, that is the secret to a life we will be proud to have lived.

They say, “Service is what life is all about,” that “Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.” (Marian Wright Edelman), and that “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” (Albert Einstein).

Albert Schweitzer said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

And while Helen Keller wanted to accomplish great and noble tasks, she thought it was her “chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along,” she said, “not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Somewhere along here, even though I’m using secular writers, we come to the question of faith, of what we shall or should believe. The psychotherapist Carl Jung once famously wrote, “Among all my patients in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” But these aren’t priests talking. They don’t need to defend religion, gods or orthodoxy, and they don’t.

The French writer Anais Nin says “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.” Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with her, for he said we should “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear,” and that “It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.”

This doesn’t mean their religion was atheism. “Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” (Don Hurschberg) But it does mean that their religion is profoundly liberal, drawing from anywhere they find healthy wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson said to “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.” And Jefferson did make his own bible, by working from Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament to cut out all the supernaturalism, leaving just a book of the ethical teachings of the man Jesus.

And see if you don’t like this short definition of religion: “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” That may sound like Carl Sagan, but it’s actually His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Religion is a fairly simple and straightforward thing for these people. Lincoln said, “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” That sounds like Emerson, who said, “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble”; or Einstein, for whom “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” And these aren’t new ideas. The ancient Roman Marcus Aurelius’s advice for living was short and to the point: “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”

Eventually, all faith must be turned to actions that direct our life, because “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire).” You can put it in one short sentence: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Those aren’t my words: they’re Gandhi’s.

A few of these thoughtful secular people wrote more about the faith that gave their lives meaning, and that are worth sharing here. The socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), an early 20th century champion of workers’ rights:

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

And Bertrand Russell, who was a famous intellectual, atheist, libertarian and anti-war activist, wrote these lines that are almost poetic:

“Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

“Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen in a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

“With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.

“Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth; cries of pain reverberated in my heart: Of children in famine, of victims tortured, and of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

“This has been my life; I found it worth living.” (Adapted)

And two other short comments were too profound not to include, on topics as important as any in the world. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.” And Bill Cosby said that “For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.”

Finally, a few words about the end of it all, and thoughts about death.

First, the author W. Somerset Maugham’s wonderful advice about death: “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”

Then there is this kind of looking back, so musical it almost wants to be sung:

“And now the end is near

And so I face the final curtain,

My friends, I’ll say it clear,

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve travelled each and evr’y highway

And more, much more than this, I did it my way.” (Paul Anka, written for Frank Sinatra)

That’s really not much different than Harriet Beecher Stowe saying “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Perhaps it is true – we hope it is true! – that “The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also (Felix Adler).” It does seem true that “People living deeply have no fear of death (Anais Nin).” And the lovely thought that “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.” (James M. Barrie) We pray this one’s true!

And words from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC demand inclusion: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”

“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.” (Marian Wright Edelman)

Yet this can’t end with guilt or judgment. So I’ll end it with the words of a theologian, though one who spent much of his career trying to present the case for responsible religion in plain language. His name was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was my teacher’s teacher. Here’s what he said:

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. [And] no virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness” – the first really religious word in the sermon. And just in time.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

20 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Let us learn to be grateful for the blessing of life, even though it be a terribly mixed blessing, with enough of sorrow and loss to make us bitter if we let it.

When our vision becomes narrowed and our expectations become inflated, we wonder how we could ever be thankful for something as flawed and often unsatisfying as life can seem to be. Our job is not as we had imagined it would be. Our relationships are not as fulfilling as our fantasies of them had been; our friends are neither as numerous nor as true as we feel we deserve. Our families have problems.

We think, perhaps, that if only life would get better, we would be glad to be thankful for it, but that surely no one would be thankful for this kind of life. Yet it is precisely this life for which we must learn to be thankful. For it is the ability to see life as a blessing rather than as a burden which can lift its burden from our backs and let us sing and dance with the sheer joy of being alive.

This is the season when we are given the opportunity to renew our attitude of gratitude toward life: to recapture the sense of joy and of gratitude for the simple fact that we are here, that today life is ours, and today there is the chance to relish it.

And so let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday like Christmas or the 4th of July, in that the original story always needs to be retold as the background for each year’s remembrances and reflections. Also like Christmas or the 4th of July, Thanksgiving is about a spirit, an attitude that we want to stay with us on all days, not just the holidays.

As the 4th of July celebrates the spirit of Independence, and reminds us of the struggles necessary to earn that independence, and as Christmas reminds us that the birth of the sacred can occur any time, any place, and in the humblest of surroundings, so Thanksgiving reminds us of the attitude, the vision, needed to let life’s sorrows be trumped by life’s joys and blessings.

Thanksgiving isn’t a religious holiday in the sectarian sense; it is a religious holiday in the deepest sense, arising from the hopeful and trusting depths of the human spirit, that place from which all the gods have also been born. It is a holiday especially for people who have lost something and need to know how to go on. If everything in your life is just swell, and it has been just swell for as far back as you want to remember ‘ well, that’s really swell. And then Thanksgiving will just be another swell day, with turkey.

But if you have lost something this year, you need to lay claim to this holiday, because it is for you. I mean hard, painful losses: a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved friend or relative, even a pet you loved. Or the loss of a relationship, a community, even a lost chance. Or a more abstract pain: a loss of innocence, outgrowing a faith too small to cherish you without yet knowing how to replace it. Or the loss of a job, or the loss of confidence, optimism and hope.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the original Thanksgiving story. It was so long ago; it’s hard to imagine it could still be such a big thing. It took place 384 years ago. Bach wouldn’t be born for 64 more years. The founders of the United States ‘ Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington ‘ wouldn’t be born for another century or more. The United States itself wouldn’t exist for another 155 years. Charles Darwin was 200 years in the future, and the new world he would help establish wasn’t even imaginable back in 1621 at the first Thanksgiving.

But one of the most poignant, enduring and life-affirming stories in our history was being lived out back then, in real time.

The year before, 102 Pilgrims had left to make their way to the New World. They started out in two ships, but one wasn’t seaworthy, so they came over in just the one ship, the Mayflower. They left on September 6th; the trip took 66 days, they arrived on November 11, 1620.

They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusetts winter. Of the one hundred and two who left to come here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.

Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.

They had the amazing good luck to land near a village where the famous Indian named Squanto lived. Squanto probably spoke more English than any Indian on the continent, and he helped them survive and plant crops. Without him, they might all have died.

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. I cannot imagine how they might have felt: the combination of life and death, tragedy and joy, famine and feast. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead.

Maybe that’s why the first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and ninety of his people. The menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.

After dinner, legend has it that Chief Massasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popped popcorn, which the Pilgrims had never tasted before.

These are the bare bones of the story of the first Thanksgiving: we don’t know many other details. It was the story of a small group of people who seemed to have both the character and the courage necessary to transform hell into heaven.

If the Pilgrims had all given up and died of despair, we’d have no First Thanksgiving, and no good story worth telling. It was their victory over the tragedy of life that transformed it into a feast of thanksgiving.

We think of miracles as supernatural things that some foreign power just does or doesn’t do, and we sit as passive recipients, holding a remote control that won’t work. But that’s not true of Thanksgiving. It’s our miracle. We must turn tragedy back toward the attitude of thanksgiving, or it’s not likely to happen. Oh, time helps. Time heals all wounds, we say, and there’s much truth in it. But finally, we must decide to throw the party, to sit at life’s feast, which is always there, though it gets so easily hidden by the tragedies and monotonies of life.

It’s a special kind of vision being celebrated in Thanksgiving. It’s a vision we’ve all had, and most of us lose as we grow older. Thanksgiving is an invitation from life itself to take back that vision and restore both life and ourselves to wholeness.

It’s as though when we are children, still na’ve and prone to seeing magic and miracle everywhere, it is as though we see life as being made of gold. Then as we grow older, as we come upon our share of losses, sorrows and tragedies, we gain that cynicism so often associated with maturity, and we think ‘Well, it was only a very thin gold leaf, that’s all ‘ and very thin gold leaf, at that!’ Then sometimes, if we can come full circle, we return to the childlike awe at the wonder of it all. Life becomes a gift again, and we realize that under the gold leaf are rich deposits of gold. Not pure gold, but enough of it to help us regain a proper sense of awe and gratitude.

Yet the gold is always there. There’s a syrupy poem most of you know that’s sold a billion posters and greeting cards, by the name ‘Footprints in the Sand.’ Published for years as anonymous, it was apparently written by a woman named Mary Stevenson in 1936 when she was a girl. She was finally awarded the copyright for the poem in 1984. I suspect you’ll all remember seeing it somewhere:

Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,

other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed

that during the low periods of my life,

when I was suffering from

anguish, sorrow or defeat,

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,

‘You promised me Lord,

that if I followed you,

you would walk with me always.

But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life

there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.

Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?’

The Lord replied,

‘The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand,

is when I carried you.’

– Mary Stevenson, 1936

This is such a favorite poem of so many people, I don’t want to debunk it, but I do want to clarify what it’s really about. Everyone in the world can identify with this experience of somehow being ‘carried’ even when we felt hopeless and abandoned. Buddhists, Taoists, theists, atheists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, everyone. So calling it ‘God’ is just giving this human experience the familiar name of our local deity. But what carries us, all of us, is the momentum of life itself, and life almost always tilts toward the positive, the healthy, and the good. What carries us is that capacity is the trustworthiness of life and of most of our fellow humans and other animals on the planet. That’s the manger into which we were born, and it’s a trustworthy home. And resting in life, even when we think we don’t know how to go on, can carry us across that chasm of despair, to return to awe, gratitude and thankfulness, in spite of the sorrows and tragedies life brings our way. That’s the kind of victory that Thanksgiving is celebrating.

It reminds me in some ways of a very different kind of story from one of my favorite contemporary storytellers: a physician in San Francisco named Rachel Naomi Remen. She tells a story about how as a girl growing up in Long Island, New York, she would spend many summers on a deserted beach there, gathering shells, digging for little clams, doing child stuff. It was a magical place. Every morning, the sea would wash up new treasures’pieces of wood from sunken boats, bits of glass worn smooth as silk, the occasional jellyfish. Once she even found a pair of glasses with only one lens left in them. Some of her most vivid memories were of beautiful white birds that flew constantly overhead, and when they flew between her and the sun, their wings became transparent like angel wings. Her heart soared with the magical white birds, and she too wanted wings to fly.

Then she wrote these words: ‘Many years later I had the opportunity to walk this same beach. It was a great disappointment. Bits of seaweed and garbage littered the shoreline, and there were seagulls everywhere, screaming raucously, fighting over the garbage and the occasional dead creature the sea had given up.’

‘Disheartened,’ she says, ‘I drove home and was halfway there before I realized that the gulls were the magical white birds of my childhood. The beach had not changed.’ But through the passing years, she had lost the vision, lost the ability to see the ordinary as extraordinary, and the everyday happenings of life as the magic of life itself, unfolding all around her. Yet that grander and more life-giving vision was always there ‘ sometimes like footprints walking beside her, sometimes carrying her. (from Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, pp. 70-71)

We need this ability to return to an attitude of gratitude, an attitude of Thanksgiving amidst the graveyards of lost people, lost hopes and dreams, lost chances, lost magic. This isn’t just about sitting in church on Sunday grooving on a happy-face feeling, like a weekly dose of hallucinogenic drugs. It’s one of the greatest secrets of life.

The historian Will Durant (1885-1981) wrote about this in another way. He was a prolific reader and writer, who over the course of a 96-year life wrote 15,000 or more pages on the whole history of civilization. Then, testing the boundaries of arrogance, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to summarize his life’s work. Following that, he was once pushed even farther into the wilds of arrogance, when an interviewer challenged him to sum up the history of civilization in half an hour. He said he did it in less than a minute. Listen to these few lines; you’ll hear the whole story of Thanksgiving running through it, the message of restoring us to balance and life:

‘Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues.

‘The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.’

Choosing to identify with the banks rather than the river is the act of choosing life, because only from the banks can we regain an honest and appropriate attitude of gratitude. Every great loss demands that we choose life again.

Sometimes we focus so intently on fixing life we lose sight of the fact that it is not broken. It is developing, it is unfolding, it is always incomplete, becoming more complete, but it isn’t broken. Something in us is capable of turning tragedy and suffering back into hope and trust, and joy, because we are being carried by the momentum and the magic of life even when we can’t see it, like the image of those footprints in the sand. It happens through grieving the loss, attending to the hole it has left in the fabric of our lives, and then being handmaidens to the healing passage of time that weaves us once again back into the fabric of this miracle of life. And it happens up on the banks, not in that river rushing by, but up on the banks where life, love, gratitude and hope dwell.

This is what the Thanksgiving story is reminding us of. That river that carries all of life’s awful happenings ran right through the community of the original Pilgrims. The first year in their new land, 47 of them died. By all rights, all 102 of them should have been dead by spring. But they were not dead, and they proved it in a way that still beckons to us by its sheer magnificence of spirit. After the harvest, in the midst of a field dotted with the markers of almost four dozen graves ‘ graves of wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters ‘ in the midst of this field, they threw a party of thanksgiving. They invited over some new friends, had a wonderful feast, probably said some prayers to honor the still-warm memory of those they had lost. And then they did a simple thing so powerful that it freed them from despair, a simple thing so powerful that it can still do the same for us. They gave thanks.

They gave thanks, because they knew that this life – even as it is punctuated with occasional pain, suffering, loss of life and loss of hope – is still pure miracle, mostly gold, the greatest gift we will ever receive.

May we all, this Thanksgiving, find again that more adequate and more honest attitude toward life: that attitude that overwhelms us with the sheer wonder of it all. May we give a rest to our habits of complaining that the gift is not perfect, long enough to recognize that the gift is miraculous, and fleeting. And may we not let it pass us by without stopping to give thanks. Happy Thanksgiving, good people.