© Davidson Loehr

October 21, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING:

Let us make a bargain with our souls. Let us not trade integrity for approval or trade authenticity for anything at all. Let us learn to ask for what we need in work, in relationships, from our friends and from our religion.

A wise man once said, “Knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.” We need help in believing this for, though it is true, it seems terribly unlikely. And so we often seek too little and let ourselves be treated badly, even like dirt.

If we let ourselves be treated like dirt for too long, it can begin to feel natural. We’re not dirt; we’re stardust. We’re the stuff of which the universe is made. Let us honor that.

Let us seek relationships where we are cherished and not settle for less. Let us never make bargains where we lose our souls, our authenticity, for that’s no bargain at all. And it’s a terrible price to pay for the pretense that everything is still together.

We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves until we know how to love ourselves. Yet how many times have we sold out for something so much less than we are. How many times have we treated or allowed ourselves to be treated, not as people, but as things. Let us not settle for less.

Let us make a bargain with our souls and remember that within each of us is a seed of God, a spark of the divine, and the hope of the world. It is so important. Let us take these few quiet moments to get in touch with our true centers.

SERMON:

We’re in the middle of an extended series of sermons that are talking about the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed in her 1969 book on stages of death and dying. There are five stages that we tend to go through when we are grieving the loss of anything important.

Her has been used mostly in hospice work and hospital care, but I first began to realize how broad the is when I was invited to a three day business conference in Chicago ten or twelve years ago. One of the key speakers was going to be Mortimer Adler. I had read some of his books and attended his university and wanted to hear him. So I went in mostly to hear this 90-something year old man (who was still sharp as a tack).

During this business conference, one junior executive from the Bose Company that makes those great little speakers did a presentation on how his company struggled going through what you could call a paradigm shift in understanding the sound business and their future in it. He went through graphs, charts and pictures. I realized what he was doing was going through the five stages of grief that had been used to deal with death and dying. And that’s when I realized that these are the stages that we go through to grieve the death of anything that’s been important to us, to resist having to change.

The first thing we do when significant change comes is to resort to the “ostrich school”, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and we look silly only to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, then we get mad. If you were here last week, you got to see the full-blown tantrum that I got to throw at the beginning of the sermon. And we try to use anger to control people, to frighten people or the universe or God back into line. We’re saying, “Look, I really mean it!”

When that can’t work, we come to the third stage, which is called bargaining. In some ways, it’s the funniest of the stages. It is certainly the most creative. Bargaining is where we ask our brain to trick us. We’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by charlatans somewhere or other. But in bargaining, we contrive with ourselves to pull the wool over our own eyes. It’s really quite a trick. Many of the bargains we make are dramatic and very funny. You can think of examples in your personal life and relationships and your job, from all over the place.

I brought you just three from religion because I’m trying to focus on how we change or try to avoid changing dealing with religious beliefs that may have served us once but that have died a long time ago and we just don’t know what to do with them or how to replace them.

The first example is the longest but probably the most fun. When I was in graduate school, there was another doctoral student who was a couple of years ahead of me. I’ve told this story before and I’ve always protected his name. But I figure it’s been twenty years, he’s past it and he could certainly deal with it anyway. It was Steven Post. He was the grandson of Emily Post. And though his family was pretty well off, Steven was a very bright young man and was on, I think, a full ride scholarship at the University of Chicago. He also had a wicked sense of humor and he loved tormenting people.

We were sitting at a Wednesday luncheon one week. This university really didn’t have much of a sense of community. You mostly sat at home in your apartment or you sat in the library and you read and that was called Life. But they tried to fake community by subsidizing a Wednesday luncheon once a week. And we would have a very nice lunch with wine and guest speakers, sometimes world famous speakers. I went to all of them that I could.

Students and faculty would sit together at tables and have a chance to talk. I was sitting across from Steven at this table and we were sitting next to a professor who had been the dean of the school for fifteen years. I knew Steven slightly because after the Wednesday luncheon, he and I were in a very intense, advanced seminar that met from 1:30 to 4:30 every Wednesday afternoon and we were always the two who showed up about twenty minutes early after the luncheon and took notes or read or chatted a little bit. But I didn’t know much about him.

During the luncheon, somehow we began talking about cults and Steven said, “Well, you know “cults” is just what we call other people’s religions.” The professor said, “It’s sounds like you’ve studied this.” Now this is a man already in denial. And Steven said, “No.” He said, “I’ve lived it. I’m a Moonie.” Now that’ll stop a discussion! The professor, still clinging to denial, said, “Oh you were?” “No,” said Steven, “I am.”

This went on for awhile and then Steven said he was also the second person kidnapped by the de-programmers. His family had him kidnapped and taken to the de-programmers because he was an embarrassment to their blue blood. This wonderful professor said, “So, then that ended it?” Steven said, “No.” He said, “I saw through them from the start.” And that really did end the discussion.

After lunch, for no reason I can be proud of, I didn’t want to go to that room with Steven. I didn’t want to be trapped there with him for twenty minutes. I just didn’t. So as I left the room, I turned left and I made it two or three steps before Steven grabbed my arm. He said, “Oh, no you don’t. We’re going up there! – He said, – You’re going to play.” I said, – Steven, I am not going to play!” He said, “You’ll play.” I said, “I won’t play!” He said, “You’ll play.” You’re too curious not to play.” I said, “I’ll go up there, but I won’t play!” He said, “See, you’re almost playing already.”

So we went up to the room and he said, “Come on, this is your chance of a lifetime. You’ve got a Moonie in front of you. You’ve got to be curious.” I said, “I’m not going to play.” He said, “What do you want to know?”

I said, “Alright, I’ll play. What I don’t understand, Steven, is how you keep what you learn here in the same head where you keep the stuff you learn there without being schizophrenic. That’s what I want to know.” And he said, “Oh, that.” He said, “That’s easy. You just have to keep what you know and what you believe separate.” And while I was thinking about that, he reached over and poked me: “You know, there’s a lot of that going on!”

There’s a notable historical example of this kind of bargaining, keeping what you know and what you believe separate. Not well known, but it ought to be better known. It comes from the early 18th century, It was Anglican priests in England and it was called latitudinarianism – one of those words for which the inventor should just be shot. These were priests who wanted to say, “Look, look, we know all these stories are myths. We know this isn’t true. I mean, nobody believes in, you know, virgin births and walking on water, and that corpses get up and walk and float up in the sky, We know this isn’t true.” So they said all of this out loud to regain their intellectual integrity. Then they went back to church and repeated all the creeds and all the stories they just said they didn’t believe. That was called latitudinarianism because they took such great latitude with the teachings. It’s also called bargaining, because they kept what they knew and what they believed separate.

A third example is more current and it’s one I’m involved in, though I’m involved in it as a heretic. That’s the Jesus Seminar. This is a wonderful group of scholars, biblical scholars that have been meeting since 1985. Their stated purpose is to say, “Look, just like the latitudinarians, let’s just be honest about this. Let’s get scholars who’ll use their names to come out in public, make real arguments about the difference we have all known for two hundred years exists between myth and history, between symbols and metaphors and facts. Let’s have them say it out loud and put their name to it and invite any other scholar in the world who wants to come and join the argument to come do so on the conditions that they do it in public.”

Now that’s good stuff. That’s brave and remarkable scholarship and I was attracted by it as soon as I heard about it, which was about five years after they started. I called the founder of it, Bob Funk, on the phone and I said, “I read an article in the paper about this Jesus Seminar thing,” And I said, “I don’t know what it is.” He said, “What are your questions?” And I said, “Alright, it’s this.” I said, “This could really be absolutely honest, exciting and candid scholarship, or it could be a bunch of Christ-sating savages trying to destroy a religion. Which are you?” And he said, “Well, you know, you couldn’t trust any answer I give you to that. If I were the latter, I’d lie about it. So the only way you’re going to find out is to come out and spend a few days with us and make up your own mind.”

So I did. And I was stunned. This was some of the most honest religious scholarship I’d ever seen. They were really doing it. However, in the background, they were playing a mental game. Ninety nine percent of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar are Christians, and they are making about the same bargain the latitudinarians did. Once you’ve thrown out the three-story universe, once you’ve said, “We know there isn’t anything living up there above the clouds. We know that God isn’t a being, God is a concept. It’s an idea, not a critter.” Once you’ve said all of this out loud, you can no longer have a God who sees, hears, cares, or loves. Now take your pick, but you can’t have it both ways. And most of them don’t or won’t see that. That’s bargaining. This is bargaining going on by some of the scholars that I respect as much as anybody in the world. So I’m not making fun of people for doing it. I do think it’s disingenuous, but it is a disingenuousness that we all do.

What we’re doing in bargaining is we’re taking a God, to put it that way, that was alive once, maybe not in our lifetime, but was alive once and it’s dead now. And we stuff it and we prop it up on the altar where it used to sit and we bow down before it and we pretend nothing has changed. But it has changed, because it is no longer giving life to us. We’re faking it. That’s why it’s bargaining. Theologians call this idolatry. A god for theologians is a center of allegiance and orientation and if we live around it, it can give us a more authentic sense of life.

That’s what a god is about. It isn’t a critter. This isn’t a creature at Disney World. It’s a center of value, orientation and allegiance. And an idol is something that pretends to be like that, but we find, usually too late, that it got it’s power by sucking the life out of us rather than helping put more worthy life into us. An idol cannot give life. I think of bargaining as a kind of idolatry.

But I have another image from my childhood that I think of too. I grew up in the North where we had oak trees everywhere and acorns all over the ground in the fall. And I used to love acorns. I liked the little things and I would keep some in my room. I never knew why, but I think part of it, looking back on it, was that it always seemed to me that an acorn was a miracle waiting to happen. Somehow that little nut knew how to become an oak tree. That’s amazing to me. Put the thing in the ground and give it water and give it the right conditions and this thing will become something just immense. And I thought it was miraculous.

Later on, when I was older, at an art fair, I saw a truly magnificent acorn about three inches high that had been carved by an artist. Now the part of it that made no sense at all, and that has always bothered me, was that the artist had carved it out of walnut. If you know woods, you know oak is hard to carve. It splinters and walnut is very easy to carve. Still it was cheating and it wasn’t right. But it was a pretty acorn and I bought it and I liked it and it really was a magnificent carving.

I kept it for some years and looking back was surprised to find that after a few years, the fascination wore off. And the fascination wore off because it wasn’t really an acorn. It was a fake acorn. What makes acorns real is their potential: the fact that they know how to become alive and become something big. Bigger than you can handle. That’s the miracle in an acorn.

This thing, this was just an imitation of an acorn carved by an artist. It was dead. It couldn’t come alive, ever. It couldn’t do anything. It was a fake acorn. That’s what bargaining is like. Bargaining is like putting up a fake acorn and pretending it’s a real one when it has no potential to come alive and no potential to give life. It’s only the memory of the yearning for the nostalgic feeling that once maybe this old belief was supposed to give life though it doesn’t anymore. And we do this in religion all the time and we do it in life all the time.

One of my current favorite authors is a physician, a woman named Rachel Naomi Remen who has worked for about twenty years in San Francisco with terminal patients, cancer patients, AIDS patients. And since she’s so gifted at this, she’s also worked with a lot of physicians and done workshops for other physicians.

One of the exercises she has them do is to make two lists. One is a list of the things they really truly value in their personal life; the other is a list of the things they really value and work by in their profession. She said the two lists are never the same and they’re often very, very different. Sometimes someone will put something like kindness number two in their personal life and number fifteen in their professional life. There are so many things more important than kindness. I mean, you have to know your chemistry, you have to know your biology, you have to know your anatomy, you have to be able to do the diagnosis. There’s a whole list of things that count for more than kindness in the practice of medicine. And yet, in their personal life kindness is one of the things that makes them feel real and makes them feel alive. So living by values they don’t really care much about is the bargain they have made with their profession.

What we do in bargaining is to try to protect life in the wrong way. It’s trying to protect life the way you try to protect butterflies when you stick pins through them and put them under glass. It’s the way you try to protect something when you take that magnificent carving of an acorn (out of walnut), and you put it in a glass museum case and you put it on display. It truly is magnificent – but it’s dead. And it can’t ever give real life to anything.

Part of what is so ironic and sad about all of this bargaining is that all of these games we’re playing are being played against the background and within a world where the possibilities are miraculous and are all over the place and we won’t see them. One of Jesus’ famous lines was to tell a story and then say, “If you have eyes to see this and ears to hear this,” and for the most part the people who listened to him didn’t and we don’t either.

To care for life the right way, to use the image of the glass case, would take a different kind of glass case. Instead of a glass museum case, the way you’d care for life would be with a greenhouse. Something big and protective and nourishing that can let little living things grow into big living things. Even bigger living things than we know how to handle.

But it can’t happen until we’re ready for it. Because until we have eyes to see, we couldn’t see it if it were put right in front of us. Naturally, there’s a story about this too. It’s comes from Hinduism. It’s a great story about Shiva, the Lord of the universe in Hinduism and Shakti, his divine consort. They’re sitting up there in their heavenly space sort of watching mortals, and they are filled with compassion for the suffering that they see as a part of life and with respect for the efforts that people make in so many ways and the love that they see and all of the human drama that they see below them.

Shakti is moved particularly by one poor man that she sees, a poor beggar who is wearing sandals so worn through that they’re tied together with string and a coat so thin, it won’t help him if the night gets too cold. And she turns to her husband and she says, “Look, look at this man, this is a good man, I’ve seen into his heart, it’s a good heart. This is a good man and he’s suffering. Can’t you do something for him?” And Shiva looks down for an instant and says, “Nope.” And she says, “What do you mean, nope? You’re the Lord of the universe! You can do anything! What do you mean, you can’t do anything for him? Give him some gold.”

Shiva said, “Wouldn’t matter, I could give him gold and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not ready for it.” So Shakti said, “Give him the gold and let him see if he’s ready for it!” This is apparently how divine husband and wife arguments go. So Shiva drops a bag of gold in the path, in front of this beggar. The poor beggar in the meantime is coming around the corner thinking to himself, “I’m so hungry. Will I be able to beg enough money today to have food or will I go hungry again tonight? Is it going to be too cold? Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to freeze to death? What am I going to do?” And then he sees this thing in the road and says, “Oh my God. Look at that! A rock and I almost kicked it! If I had kicked the rock, I would have torn my sandals apart and now I’d have to go be going barefoot. It’s a good thing for me that I was watching.” And he stepped over the bag of gold and went on his way.

When religious stories talk like this, you know, they’re always using words in imaginative ways. This didn’t mean a bag of gold coins. This meant the bags of “gold” that are lying all over the place all the time. What are bags of gold? They’re the possibility of finding a religion for your head and your heart. They’re a possibility of bringing together what you know and what you believe. A possibility of bringing together what we love and what we do, how we live and who we are. These are the bags of gold that lie in the road around us that we don’t see until we’re ready.

There are miracles that can happen here on the road of life. And sometimes those bags contain things even richer and more miraculous than gold. Sometimes, they contain acorns.

© Davidson Loehr

October 14, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

OPENING WORDS

From our many private lives and as many individual worlds we gather here for a hundred different reasons. There are people who are mostly curious or who could use some new friends, people with the vague feeling that there could be more to life than there has been, and those with the very strong feeling there could be more. Some who bring hungry minds and want questions and answers, and others who bring hungry hearts and want comfort.

Some here are young, hoping for direction for the life which lies mostly ahead. Others are closer to the end of their journey and do not want to be ignored just because they are old.

There are parents missing children, students missing home, lovers, ex-lovers, and those who would be lovers. There are those in whom life is bubbling up and others over whom dark shadows may have crept, who wonder how to go on.

We’re here for all the obvious reasons and for some secret reasons known only to ourselves. Everyone who has come here hopes for something from this morning. And perhaps we shall find it, for this is a good and a safe place to be. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad to be here again with you, for

it is a sacred time, this,

and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this.

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING

There’s a story about two Buddhist monks, an old master and his young student. There had been a heavy rain the night before, and what had been a tiny creek had become by morning a raging torrent of water more than a foot deep.

Standing by the edge of the new river was a young woman. She clearly wanted to cross the river, but she was very frail, and was unlikely to survive the swift current.

The young student looked away from her because this order of monks had sworn strict vows against ever talking to a woman, let alone touching one. The young monk had learned his lesson well, so he ignored her. The older monk, however, walked over to the young woman and asked if she would like help crossing the river. The astonished woman nodded yes, surprised that he would even acknowledge her. “Then, please, climb onto my shoulders,” said the monk, “and I will carry you.” She did as he asked and he carried her across the river. On the other side, he set her down, bowed silently to her, and went on his way.

The young monk followed along behind his master in angry silence for several hours, but the farther they walked the angrier he became. At last he couldn’t control himself, and he confronted his teacher with his bottled fury. “How could you? How could you touch her? What about your holy vows? How could you touch that woman?”

The old man looked into the angry face of his student, and at last he said quietly, “My young friend, I set that woman down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”

This is, among other things, a time to set down loads we’ve been carrying too long. Angers, resentments, grudges, accusations, and a whole host of furies that can both possess and cripple us. If we cannot let go of them, they will not let go of us. We’re all carrying loads, small or large, that have outlived whatever usefulness they may ever have had. It would be a shame for us to leave here with the same heavy loads we came in with.

What are you still carrying that you ought to set down?

Think of those things, name them to yourself, and you may be halfway to setting them down. Let us become more aware of those angers and fears we have carried too long. In these quiet moments I invite you to turn them into prayers or turn them into flames in the candles of memory and hope.

SERMON

(The following was a kind of loud and angry dramatic tantrum. It was shouted, screamed, accompanied by a furious expression and the violence of hitting chairs, pulpit, and walls – hard – with a rolled-up magazine).

“NO! By God, no son of mine is going to do anything that stupid!” 

“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do it my way. Aagh!”

“You may be my daughter, but you’re an idiot!”

“Son, no real man would have been such a wimp.”

“And, , you wouldn’t behave that way if you were a bit more feminine! Aagh!”

(flinging the rolled-up magazine across the stage, then sitting on the stool, holding the microphone.)

Recognize that?

Everyone here knows that voice. And that face. We’ve done it or had it done to us. We’ve seen and felt it. We seem to be hard-wired for it.

Years ago I read a study done with some monkeys, juvenile monkeys that had never seen an male monkey of their species. They’d been raised by their mothers. When they were several months old, they were shown a movie of an male monkey doing his anger face, his fear face, with his screaming and gesturing just about like I just did. All of the young monkeys who had never seen an male monkey before in their lives shrieked and ran terrified to hide behind their mothers.

We seem to be programmed to know how to control others through anger, and how to be controlled through it. It seems to be absolutely natural. Being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Revenge and greed are also natural. And I have read that revenge and greed are the two emotions that produce the most stress in our lives. Anger is full brother to both revenge and greed. Like them, it’s concerned with keeping things our way, inside ourboundaries, ourcomfort levels and our beliefs. It’s absolutely natural.

So it’s no wonder that anger turns up in a list like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ list of the five stages that humans tend to go through in grieving the loss of something. She wrote the book in 1969 about terminal patients who had to come to terms with the one fact that they didn’t want to come to terms with at all – the fact that they were going to die. But since then many others have realized that this is a that works in a tremendous number of cases. These are stages we recognize in going through the loss of a religion, of a belief system, of a world view, of a relationship, of anything we once trusted and believed was the way things should be and which we have to come to terms with losing.

The first stage we go through is avoidance or denial. This is the “ostrich” school, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and look silly to everyone but ourselves – trying to pretend that nothing’s really changed. Everything’s the way it was. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to worry about this.

When that doesn’t work, the next thing many of us try is anger. And the anger is used to say, “Look, I really mean it! Get back in line! Stay the way it’s supposed to be! Don’t make me change my world!”

We use anger when a person, or a belief system, or a world, or a god, has become bigger than we know how to be comfortable with it being and bigger than we are willing to permit it to be. It’s immensely powerful, this anger stuff.

Now, there is legitimate anger. There’s anger that can be a very healthy sign. There are many kinds of anger. Those would all be different sermons. Today I only want to talk about anger that’s used to control people, and how anger controls us.

It seems to happen at two levels, in two ways. First it happens as the “fear face” and the shouting and the threats help to control us by creating fear. There is a threat of violence. Someone that angry could do God-knows-what to you. And if they’re bigger and stronger than you, you should be afraid. But some of the fear that anger can create will stay with you forever. It’s awful.

And that’s the second way that it works. It works first through creating fear, and it works secondly through infection. We get infected with anger, and we carry it with us, sometimes, for the rest of our lives, unwilling and unable to let loose of it, like the young Buddhist monk in the story.

I know people, you know people, who went through this in religion. They had a religious experience in their past, in their youth, whenever. Some idiot taught them about an angry, hateful God, and taught them only that. Someone told them about a religion or a God that wouldn’t allow them to be who they really were and needed to be, whoever that was. The religion wouldn’t respect their questions, and it wouldn’t respect their souls, and it wouldn’t respect them, and they are angry as hell – still. I have met people sixty years old who are still angry over something they heard in church with force when they were ten. If anger infects us, it can last an entire lifetime.

One of the most famous sermons – not the best, but one of the most famous sermons in American history – is still, from about 250 years ago, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. This was an amazing man. He enrolled at Yale University when he was thirteen years old. This was one of the most brilliant minds in American history. Some have called him America’s most original theologian. He’s influenced a tremendous number of horrible religions. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, and the sermon that’s so famous – and I’ve read it, and it’s terrifying to read – is called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and if you ever are tired of watching “Halloween, Part Thirteen,” find that sermon and read it, it’s amazing.

He draws pictures of how hateful we are to God. He says, “Imagine, we’re more hateful to God than a spider. This was apparently not a man who loved arachnids, either. Imagine, he said, God is holding us between his fingertips like He would hold a hateful spider by a thin silken line, over the flaming pits of hell. There’s nothing about us that’s attractive or lovable, and the only thing that keeps him from dropping us into hell is the fact that he’s God.

You can get infected with that notion of a hateful God in ways that can keep you infected forever. It’s absolutely powerful stuff. And it doesn’t only happen in religion, as you know.

About ten or twelve years ago I was the theme speaker for a week-long Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s about 500 s and 300 kids and teenagers who were there for a week, and the theme speaker does a sermon each morning, so you can develop a theme over the five programs.

I didn’t know many people there. They come from all over the country to this camp. But since I was the most visible person there that week, I got hunted down a lot and was surprised at the number of people who wanted to confess something that week. I listened to a fair number – five or six – confessions that people just needed to make, things they needed to feel that they had somewhere safe to talk about.

The most memorable was a woman, one of the angrier people I’ve seen, who was talking about her ex-husband – who, if he had a soul, it was evil. She went on for ten minutes in detail so rich, so vivid, almost so bloody, it was clear that this wound was absolutely fresh and dripping. It was horrible to hear. I don’t know what any outsider might have really thought of the relationship if they’d seen it, but it was clear how it affected her, and she hated it and was still furious. And finally I said, “When was this over? When did this happen?”

“Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she’s still so infected by anger she cannot live. Ten years. It’s astonishing.

And it can be worse than that. It can be cosmic. There are, if you think about it, a lot of things to be angry about. Life isn’t fair.

On September 11th a whole new generation learned that life cannot be made safe. Friends desert you. Governments murder and lie. Partners, lovers, wound up being who they were instead of who your needed them to be. And you won’t forgive them for it. It can happen anywhere, and you can hate an entire world for it.

The most classic version of this story, still one of the best to read, is the story of Job. It’s a little boring to read; you just kind of have to read through it fast and then tell the story to yourself in less time, and it gets better. Now, since I suspect some of you have not been reading your bible this week, or this year, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version:

Job is a righteous man, a good man. He’s never done anything wrong. Probably even his butler loved him. He has a wife and children and land and money and everything. And God and Satan are up there? whoever wrote this story have God and Satan sitting up on a cloud somewhere looking down watching this, and they can see it pretty clearly. And God is saying, “Look how faithful Job is.” Why he loves me with all his heart.

And Satan says, “Of course he does. You’ve been good to him. He’s got everything. Of course he loves you. Start taking stuff away. See if he still loves you then.”

God said, “Oh no, his faith is pure.”

Satan said, “All right. Tell you what. You let me mess with him, and we’ll see how long he keeps loving you.”

So God says, “All right.”

Satan starts messing with him. And the man loses everything. He loses his land and his children, his family. They die. He loses everything. And throughout this, his faith is certainly tested. And it comes to the point, which for some people is the most famous line in the story. I know that in the seventies I heard some feminists say it was the only character in the story worthy of respect. Job’s wife’s line is, “Curse God and die!”

Now, let’s take this out of mythic language. Otherwise we’ll have this cartoon picture of someone yelling at a cloud and some lightning bolts making him dead and so on and so forth, and whoever wrote the story didn’t think that’s the way the world worked. “Curse God and die? is something that today we would say differently. We might say, “When life is unjust, curse life, curse it to its core.” And if you do that, you will find, something inside of you dies. Something in your spirit will die. Something in your ability to greet life with joy will die. Curse life and die. That’s one option.

Job took the other route. He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Now, you can make that sound like Job was just a pious wimp. But take that out of mythic language too, to understand what that sounds like when you say it in real life. This is someone saying, “Life is hard. It is a mess. It is a mixed bag. It’s been just awful. I’ve lost everyone I loved. I’ve lost everything I thought I had. I’ve lost all the things that I thought were the real blessing of life.” That’s the package life comes in, and you don’t just take it or leave it. If you just take it, like a rotten deal but the only deal you’ve got, you lose your verve and your joy. You become cynical. You don’t just take the gift of life, you bless it. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Not “I’ll put up with him because he’s the only god whose name I know.”

You don’t just accept this miserable, rotten life. That’s the gift that’s offered. That’s the package the miracles come in. It also hurts. You bless it. The miracle in the story of Job that’s not commented on often enough is that what Job succeeded in doing was in transforming anger into gratitude, and gratitude is the antidote for anger.

The studies that say that greed and revenge are the most stress-producing emotions we have also say that gratitude is the most stress-reducing emotion we have. The only durable escape from anger is gratitude, and it is one of the hardest transitions we are ever asked to make. After every great loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and it’s hard.

I saw the Job story played out, actually played out in reverse. In Job everyone died but him. I saw this story nineteen years ago. It’s one I’ve never used in a sermon before.

I was doing my chaplaincy training in the summer of 1982 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, and I chose the leukemia ward for my assignment. I wanted heavy work. I wanted real work. And when I got on the ward the first day and went to the staff meeting to introduce myself, the nurses said, “Oh, so you’re the new student chaplain.”

“Yes.”

“Good! You go see the woman in Room 11.”

“Why?”

“Cause it’s your turn. We can’t stand any more of her. You go see her. Oh, and welcome to the ward.”

This didn’t sound like the introduction to something pleasant, and it wasn’t.

I went into Room 11 and saw the angriest human I have ever been around, with one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a 29-year-old woman who was dying of leukemia. When I came in the room, she said “What are you?”

I told her I was a chaplain. I can’t repeat a single word that she said. The fact that I was a chaplain was such a vile, vulgar betrayal of any notion that there could possibly be a God, that she spent ten minutes telling me what a vile, miserable, slime-ball (these are the kind words) I was. I remember thinking during that ten minutes. She has used every profane and vulgar word I’ve ever heard, and she’s even used them in some creative new combinations I’d never thought of. It wasn’t pleasant. I also thought, I have no idea how to respond to this woman. I agree with everything she’s saying.

It is a miserable story. She’s 29. She and her husband had had some rough years, but then they worked it out, and for the last half dozen years they’d had a wonderful marriage. They had two young children who were delights. Life had finally settled in to being absolutely idyllic. And then four months ago she’d been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive kind of leukemia. And she was dying, and there was nothing that could be done. And she was so furious. There weren’t enough things in the world to absorb the hate that she had. I listened for ten minutes, looking for some way to get out of the room and finally found it, and I got up to leave and she said, “You’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll page you. You’ll be here every day ’til I die, and you’ll listen to this story every day until I die.”

God, No!

She paged me the next day and the day after and the day after and every day the story got angrier and louder. The nurses closed the door as soon as I went in the room. It was very painful. I never knew what to do. It was my very first assignment as a student chaplain, and it was clear that I had failed absolutely, completely at every part of it.

I thought about it over the weekend and on Monday I took it to our chaplains’ group and I confessed. I told the story I’ll admit it was fun using all those words. And I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back there again.” John Serkland was the chaplain who taught this – he’d been a chaplain 25 years; he was really quite gifted at it – John said, “Do you want me to save you?”

And I said, “Save me? Hell yes, John! I have no shame left. You save me and I’ll bow at your feet. I’ll worship you. I’ll put up an idol of you at home in a little shrine. Anything you want.”

And he said, “All right.”

I said, “Do you honestly think you can do something here?”

“Yes.”

Part of me wanted to see him fail. Part wondered what “succeeding” might look like, and whether he or anyone could really do it in Room 11.

John went with me the next day. He said he had to get in costume. He wore his chaplain collar, so there’d be no mistaking what he was. We walked into the room together the next day, and this woman spotted immediately what was going on. How I wish I could tell you the words she really used. But the gist of it was, “Well, this young fool has failed, so he’s brought the old fat fool.”

I closed the door. John sat in a chair near the head of the bed, and she let him have it. For ten minutes, the same story, which had become much more polished, much more violent, much more vulgar, even much more angry than it had been the week before when I’d heard five performances of it. And at the end of the story, John sat there – he had never taken his eyes off her – and he said just three words: “You expected more.”

She tried to answer. She’d form words and grit her teeth and go through six emotions, and words wouldn’t come out, and she’d form more words. The words wouldn’t come out.” And finally tears ran down both of her cheeks.” She looked at John and quietly said, “Yes.”

And he reached over for the first time and took her hand and said, “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I think that’s the most magical moment I’ve ever seen. Those three words broke the spell. There wasn’t anything to add. There was no need to insult the woman’s intelligence by saying there isn’t more. Any idiot could tell that. That’s what was so frustrating and infuriating. She expected more. Of course she expected more. She’s 29 years old. She’s got a marriage that had just become healthy and good in the past couple years, and she expected to grow old and wise together with this man she loved. She’s got two little kids she expected to watch grow up and have kids of their own. Of course she expected more. There wasn’t more. There’s just that. Die in anger or find a way to pull off a miracle.

She died about two weeks later. But from that afternoon, from that Tuesday afternoon on, she was a different person. At least she was a different person for me. Her husband and kids said that she was the person they’d always known. She was loving, she was caring, she was kind. It became terribly important to her, in her last few days, to tell the people she loved how much she loved them.

I had a short talk with her three days before she died. She was getting weaker, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be long. I said, “How do you sum it up now? I know how you summed it up two weeks ago. How do you sum it up now?”

She thought about it, then smiled and finally said, “With gratitude. Compared to infinite, she said, this wasn’t much. Compared to the 85 years I thought I’d have, it wasn’t very much. But this is what there was. The gift was for 29 years, with some trouble, some pain, a lousy ending way too soon, a lot of love, two amazing children, and more miracles, more miracles than anybody could deserve. I am so grateful for the chance, for the gift.” We held hands and cried together – not in anger, but in gratitude.

Blessed be.

© Davidson Loehr

30 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

This morning will be the first of a series of five sermons that will end with the Thanksgiving service. These are taken from a model of dealing with change and grief developed about 32 years ago by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross whose book on death and dying came out in 1969. She was dealing with terminal patients and what they were trying to come to terms with was the fact of their own death.

But many people have seen that this is a model with many applications outside of chaplaincy where I used it when I worked with terminal patients for a year. It’s a model that deals with the death of any belief system or any worldview. It deals with the death of our comfortable way of seeing things and the stages we tend to go through when trying to find a new way to do it. After September 11th, models like this seem to have an immediate and obvious application as we’re all going to be dealing, individually and as a society, with some stages in trying to come to terms with having to look at life and safety very differently than we did two weeks ago.

What I want to focus on in this sermon series, though, is much much narrower. I want to focus on the death of beliefs, of faiths, of religions that many people have experienced sometimes many years ago and the stages they go through or the troubles they have going through stages to get past it and to find a new kind of faith and trust. It’s surprising to me how many people still talk about faith experiences they had 25 years ago as though they had happened yesterday. They’re still so vivid and the people still feel so angry and so burned about it.

I remember a discussion I had with a fundamentalist friend, probably 15 years ago, a man who had grown up until he was 25 or 26 as a fundamentalist. And then the world cracked and it fell apart for him and this was now 20 years later and he was still furious. I said what are you angry at? You are out of it now. He said “I’m angry because I was betrayed.” He said, “I’m angry because people I trusted lied to me.” He said, “I’m angry because I once had a picture of life that was so whole and so complete, that I had no worries and no questions. And I’ll never have a picture that simple again.” Powerful stuff.

What happens to many people – and it happened to this man too even though he was a professor of religion – is that when they have a bad experience with religion they decide the whole field of religion is no damn good. I tried it once, it stunk, I’m never trying it again.

I can understand the pain but I cannot understand the plan. The plan sounds to me like someone who went to a restaurant and once got a bad case of food poisoning so swore off eating. What they needed was healthy food, not no food. And the same is true with religion.

But this distrust and distaste for religion is part of the reason that the word “religion” is a bad word now in popular speech, and “spirituality” is a good word. Somehow that’s lighter and a little easier and it’s sort of about feeling good, whereas religion is something deep and dark and evil and awful with which we want to have nothing to do. Now if we stay there, if we follow that, we can easily become the character of the eagle from the story of the eagle and the chickens. The eagle didn’t belong there. It wasn’t a chicken and the things the eagle needed to learn the chicken couldn’t teach it, because it needed to learn how to fly and chickens can’t fly.

There are a lot of stories like this and if we pervert them, they give us the same picture. That story I told the kids this morning is a perversion of another version of the story where the eagle does finally realize it’s an eagle and it flies and joins the eagles and protects that little hen house forever and everyone lives happily ever after. That movie’s probably done by Disney. But you can take popular fairy tales and change one item in them and come up with the same perverse plot. This is the story of Cinderella who never went to the ball, who never escaped from the house where she was hated and the kitchen where she was misused and abused. It’s the story of Rapunzel, who never let her hair down and never escaped from the tower that she’d been put into because of her mother’s fears. It’s the story of denial and I think denial is a bad thing, after the first few minutes or days.

Now I’m taking this a little differently than Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did. There are two sides to denial. One is the fact that we are denying that we are carrying with us something that isn’t serving us and doesn’t work anymore. And if you’re stuck in an old religion that has you under its control- whether you love it or whether you hate it, it doesn’t matter, you have to get past it.

It reminds me, since my mind works this way; of a standup comic I saw 10 or 15 years ago, a Canadian comic. He never made it very big but he had one joke I’ve always loved. He’s a master at playing the audience and he played the audience with 3 or 4 very funny jokes in a row. Very quick punch lines, and had the whole audience rolling and then he set them up by telling a joke so bad, so stupid, that they booed. And he’d been waiting for it. He said, “That’s all right, whether you clap or whether you boo, you are under my control!”

That’s true with a religious past too, you know. Whether we love it or whether we hate it, we’re in orbit around it. And denial is a form of faithlessness. It’s just about as faithless as it gets. Because the other half of denial is the fact that we are not seeing that after every significant loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and that it is always worth finding a way to do that. Furthermore, we’re playing the game of denial against a background of life and of the world that, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, is overwhelmingly positive, life- affirming, and trustworthy.

For instance, 2 weeks ago here in addition to the regular offering that we took, we took, as we are today, a special collection for disaster relief. From our 3 Sunday services we collected over $9,400 to send to New York and Washington for disaster relief. From the 270 people in the 1st service we collected about $3,000. From the 480 people at the 2nd service, we collected just under $6,000, and from the 135 people who were at the evening service we collected $480. $9,400 collected to be sent to people we didn’t know, for uses we’ll never see, simply because they are humans and we are too, and we knew we owed it and we wanted to do it.

You could look on television 2 weeks ago and I don’t know why no one remarked on this. You see all these New Yorkers. Now these are the New Yorkers who have been made the butt of jokes in many churches for decades because they are so secular, so completely secular that the only thing sacred to New Yorkers are work, bagels, coffee and New York City. Here were these secular New Yorkers–firemen and policemen– sacrificing their lives for strangers. Walking up 60 flights of stairs in a burning building and sacrificing their lives for people they didn’t know. If you want to go to another extreme, for an example, I read this week about a prison in Louisiana, called Angola, a horrible prison for serious criminals that deserves a sermon of its own. The lifers in Angola have virtually no benefits. Any money, anything they want for television, for books, for any kind of benefits, they have to earn the money for themselves. And they do it in the Angola prison through only one fund-raiser; they have an annual rodeo that’s become fairly well known.

This year that rodeo raised $30,000. And these lifers, many in there for violent crimes and murder, donated all $30,000 to disaster relief. Now that’s the background against which we are playing games of denial and it should make us feel silly. The message of it is that goodness does not come from religion, goodness comes from our humanity. It’s inside of us. And what we need from religion isn’t an infusion of goodness into people who are originally sinful. That just isn’t true. We need help from religions in recognizing and nourishing the goodness that’s already in us. There’s a creation story from the Kabala, the medieval, mystical Judaism, that talked about how in the beginning there was the great light Ein Sof, and that at the beginning the great light was broken into millions and millions of little sparks of God, and inside of every living thing was a spark of God. And the job of every living thing was to recognize that spark of God and to nourish it, so that it too may burst into a flame to illuminate a dark world.

It’s a wonderful story. It is true; there are religions that don’t do that. We’ve seen a couple of varieties of them, right now, the last few weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. There are religions of narrowness of exclusion and of hate. There are bad religions. The Taliban was one. The Taliban has a list of people it hates and whom it assumes Allah hates. They speak for Allah and say that Allah hates liberated women–women outside of the veil. There are women who have had acid thrown in their face for being unveiled over there. It is a religion of hatred that preaches that. It’s not true to anything about Muslim religion. Not true to anything in it. It’s a perversion of it. They hate homosexuals and hate anyone whose sexual orientation and lifestyle isn’t like they think theirs is. Not counting all of the things they are repressing to say that. They hate foreigners, they hate non-believers, they hate anyone whose truth is bigger or much different from theirs.

That’s a religion of exclusion and narrowness and hate, and that’s a bad religion. It can’t nourish life. And we’ve seen exactly the same religions spring up in this country through that amazingly unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they created exactly the same hateful list of people they thought responsible for the slaughter of over 6000 innocents. There are religions that are hateful and narrow and cannot feed life and should not be supported. It is simply not the case that whatever anyone believes is fine. We believe all kinds of things that are hurtful and hateful. But that isn’t all. We don’t need no religion, like we don’t need no food after we get food poisoning. We need healthy religion and we need honest religion for head and heart that can recognize the Godspark inside of us and help us. Nourish it, so that it too grows into a flame. God knows the world needs more light. And that positive and hopeful religion is all around us too. It is in the poem we used for Centering this morning. I want to read you that poem again:

“The man whispered, God, speak to me, and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled, God, speak to me, and the thunder and lightening rolled across the sky but the man didn’t listen. The man looked around and said, God, let me see you, and the stars shined brightly but he wasn’t watching. Then the man shouted, God, show me a miracle and a life was born, but he was looking elsewhere. So the man cried out in despair, touch me God and let me know you are here, whereupon God reached down and touched the man but he brushed the butterfly away and walked on. He cried God, I need your help, and an e-mail arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement from someone who loved him. But he deleted it and continued crying. He’s crying still.”

Jesus used to talk about people needing the eyes to see and the ears to hear the simple truths in his stories. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear that we live in a world of blessedness. We have a Godspark inside of us that is the most important thing about us that we need to find and nourish and help burst into flame. And that plot seems to be the most popular plot we have in all of our stories. Religious stories, fairy tales. You can talk about the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel by the river Jabbok. Jacob, this scummy, scurrilous little man who, for the first time in his life, did something that showed some character and courage. He wrestled with this demon angel messenger of god at the river, and he wrestled all night and would not let go until it blessed him. And it blessed him with a new name and this Jacob; this horrible scurrilous little man then became Israel, the father of the twelve tribes of Judaism. This is a wonderful story. All the heroes we need are made out of very common stock. Just like us. We just need to take a moment to recognize a spark inside of us and wrestle with it and hold on until we are blessed by our struggle.

You find this plot in fairy tales. It is the story of Cinderella without the perversion. There is something holy in Cinderella that she believed in and held onto until birth was given to it. It’s the story of Rapunzel who does let down her hair. It’s the story of sleeping beauty. It’s the story of beauty and the beast. It’s the story of so many. And if we stay in denial about this we’re going to miss one of the most important simple truths there is. That’s the realization that “human being” is a verb, not a noun. “Human being” is a verb. It takes a healthy religion to become really human religiously. It isn’t for lazy people. It isn’t just a feeling of feeling good and groovy about yourself. It takes work and it takes focus to become human.

And now I wonder on all these stories, if we’ve read them right yet. Can it really be that in the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel and all the rest of them, only the main character is meant to become human? I don’t think so. All the other characters – the stepsisters, the stepmother, all the wicked people in the stories – are in denial. They are in denial of the fact that they too have a Godspark that’s so covered over with neglect and dirt and dust that its little flame is on the verge of going out.

What about the story of the eagle and the chickens? What if the chickens are also really supposed to be eagles and what if the story of the eagle and the chickens and all of the rest of these stories aren’t really about eagles and chickens and Cinderella and Rapunzel at all. What if they’re really stories about us? They are, you know. Now what?

© Davidson Loehr

23 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave.

Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING: “The Dance of Life”

It was the great Dance of Life: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing over the fields.” They often didn’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they danced on in that great human circle, as they had been doing since before time counted.” Occasionally, parts of the circle would pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers would be lost.” But immediately, the loose hands sought each other out, the circle was closed, and the dance went on.” After each loss, the dancers would recite their special stories:” stories to explain why they had been spared.” “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.”” For others, it was a kind of cosmic energy that safeguarded the enterprise.” Others had their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots.” There were disagreements over just what it was that kept the dancers safe ” they seldom spoke of those who were lost from time to time.” And there was no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents.” Still, each time the circle was broken it seemed to heal itself, and the dance went on.” Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe?” In what, if anything, should they put their faith?

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

SERMON: More Aftermath from September 11, 2001

Every generation, it seems, has its defining moment, the watershed event when we suddenly realize that the world isn’t as we thought, we’re not as safe as we thought, perhaps not as innocent as we thought. In that moment, a new generation is rudely and painfully taken forever out of a world of innocence and naive trust.

There aren’t many of these moments. They stand out in history as dates we’ll never forget:

December 7, 1941, “the day that lived in infamy” was such a moment and the world never felt quite as safe to those who lived through it again.

November 22, 1963 was a moment for people who grew up when I did. We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas. The world never seemed quiet as safe again.

Another moment took me by surprise when I was in graduate school. I was stunned to see how powerfully the events of December 8, 1980 affected people in their 20’s the day that John Lennon was murdered. And I remember how many of them cried, held each other, and talked about not feeling safe anymore.

And now September 11, 2001 has joined the list of world-shattering moments. They almost seem to come in 20-year intervals. For many people it was the first significant time that the world didn’t feel safe. And I can assure you from having been through a couple of such moments, you will never feel as safe again. There’s a loss of innocence and a loss of naive trust in the world that happens at these powerful moments, and it tears us from feeling that life is completely trustworthy and sacred and nourishing.

That’s something we all went through twelve days ago. What comes next is something that many here have not been through and something that many others here have been through and that’s the threat, the noise and probably the reality of war. As one who’s been through a war and been in a war, all of the feelings coming over the airwaves and coming from speeches of leaders are suddenly very familiar. I feel like I know what we’re getting into and what’s next.

When people are threatened, they band together within a common identity, and war offers one of the oldest and deepest and absolutely most powerful senses of reconnection that we can find. You can unite a country of 280 million people with a war against a common enemy, even an invisible enemy without a country, without a religion, without boundaries. Just the idea of a common enemy is enough to unite 280 million of us as one people, with one voice, one God, and one purpose. It is seductive as hell. War makes everything simple and it comes at a time when the complexity of things overwhelmed all of us.

War makes everything simple. It gives us very simple, black and white pictures of everything and it’s so easy to fall into them. A war for infinite justice to end all evil in a world so simple that all countries are either for us or against us. Never mind the fact that British and European newspapers for years have been writing that our country has created the economic and military conditions that foster the hatred. Never mind that in other parts of the world this story has been written only in nuances and grays. It is black and white. It’s cowboy logic. You are for us or against us. It is very simple-minded and seductive. There are, of course, no problems in the real world that are as simple as such solutions.

I thought of this when I began watching the interviews: the people who are carefully chosen to have their interviews aired on the screen. The news is managed and the news is selected for the effect it will have on the viewing audience. And the effect that’s desired on the viewing audience is that it unites us as one people, with one voice, and one God behind one goal, without necessary nuances or quarrelsome questions. “A people” becomes much like “a herd” – if they ever differed at all.

I saw the interview of the blonde wife of that brave man on the fourth plane. The man who was part of a crew who fought with the hijackers and succeeded in crashing the plane into the ground killing all aboard rather than letting them fly the plane into another building — perhaps the capital, perhaps the White House. The man and all aboard were absolutely heroes with no qualification of any kind.

But there were lots of relatives and friend of heroes who wouldn’t have said that what got them through it was their faith in God and their knowledge that their husband was in heaven where they’d see him again. It was that combination of someone with the right religious message, the right picture and the right words to support the speeches that had just been heard in the capital that were chosen to be aired. The “news” was carefully selected to present the picture needed to hunker us masses into a herd.

Every bit of news we see is going to have been chosen for us and carefully selected. There is another way of saying this. The other way of saying this is that there are nuances and there are stories and there are facts and details that will not be printed and will not be aired and which we may not find out about for a year, if ever.

I don’t know what they’ll be in the new war, but I do know what some of carefully avoided facts and stories were in our last war. So I’ll take the Gulf War as an example. That’s emotionally less loaded than the unknown territory that we are getting into now. You could also go back to the Vietnam War and mention the Pentagon Papers, which brought about a tremendous amount of disillusionment in people who discovered how intricate the scheming had been to deceive the American people. But from the Gulf War there are 2 stories I’ll tell you. And I wonder if you knew either of them. If you didn’t know either of them, you need to be very worried.

The first appeared in a one-paragraph story in the inside of the December 3rd, 1990 issue of Newsweek. The Gulf War was declared January 15, 1991. Six weeks earlier in Newsweek there was this little story under the heading “Where Are the Troops?” This followed several months of our being told that the reason that we had to send troops to Kuwait was because several hundred thousand Iraqi troops had crossed over the border into Kuwait and it was a desperate situation that demanded a strong and large military force.

This story said that some independent investigators had bought satellite photos and had hired retired CIA people to interpret them. They were satellite photos taken of the Iraq – Kuwait area in, I think, mid August and in mid November — during the time that several hundred thousand troops were said to have passed on the highway into Kuwait. The photograph in mid August showed the lone highway leading from Iraq to Kuwait. At one point a large sand dune had blown over about two-thirds of the highway, making it barely passable. The photograph in mid November showed the same highway and showed that by now the sand dune had blown all the way across the highway. It was covered completely between August and November. No troops had been driven down that highway.

The satellite photo that was so precise that it showed the make of the aircraft, showed no troop formation or locations anywhere in Kuwait. We think that about 2000 members of the Republican Guard of the elite Iraqi troops were in Kuwait, and that’s a large force. But it’s not 200 to 300 thousand. Where were the troops? Those photographs were published on the front page of the St. Petersburg Florida paper on January 6, 1991. Once war was declared nine days later, to the best of my knowledge, they were not published in any newspaper in the United States for the rest of 1991. At the end of 1991, the Columbia Journalism Review, which does this sort of thing every year as a watchdog, listed that story as one of the 10 most underreported stories of 1991. Can you say “understatement”?

The second story concerns what happened shortly before the vote was taken to declare war on Iraq and to send troops into Kuwait. Some of you will remember it was a very close vote. We voted for war by only five votes. The voting followed not long after some terribly poignant testimony by a young, 15-year-old girl named Naiyira.

Naiyira testified that she had been in the nurseries in the hospitals in Kuwait when the Iraqi soldiers came in and bayoneted babies, threw babies onto the floor and murdered them. It was a repulsive, gut-wrenching, story. After the vote, at least six of our congressmen said publicly that they had changed their vote on the war. All six were going to vote against the war until they heart Naiyira’s testimony, then all six changed to vote for the war. Just in those six votes was the difference in going to war and not going to war.

But the story that Naiyira told was a complete fiction. She was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United States. The Kuwaitis had hired Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in America, to help them prepare a story that would convince America to send our soldiers (almost as mercenaries) to protect their (and, of course, our) oil interests.

The story was completely concocted by Hill & Knowlton, and rehearsed with Naiyira, who had not been anywhere near Kuwait at the time. Now if you didn’t know this, at least know that this story is a measure of how completely and how effectively stories and important facts can be kept from us during the atmosphere of war, because it will certainly happen again. I don’t know what facts or stories will be invented or buried this time, but it will happen again. Because the only way to mobilize people for war is to keep it simple. Make it one people with one voice and one mind against one common enemy. We’ll be pulled in this direction.

The same thing happens in religion that happens in politics. The theology of war is a very different theology from the theology of peace in any religion. The theology of peace — whether it’s Christian, Muslim, or any other — is a theology with a very big God but no army. In a theology of peace we sing hymns and read poems about how we are all brothers and sisters, all the children of the same God. We speak of how there are no significant distinctions between races, nations, sexes or anything else – we are all children of the same God. It’s a very big God. And in the theology of peace there’s no mention of weapons.

The theology of war is the reverse. Churches are expected to, and do, provide a theology for war — or theology for imperialism, however you want to put it. And now it’s a very small God and a very big army. If you want to read the theology of war, there are two places you can read it right now. It’s the same theology in two different religions. One is to read Statements from the Taliban. You’ll read what a theology of war sounds like. Here are people who have taken a noble, broad, powerful, compassionate religion of Islam and found instead only things to hate. They hate liberated women. They hate women whose hair is uncovered. During Khomeni’s regime in 1979 they had some fundamentalist Muslim scholars writing that – this is hard to say with a straight face, because I remember reading it and I couldn’t read it with a straight face – saying that scientific discoveries had proven that there are emanations from a woman’s hair that drive men mad so their hair must be covered.

They hate anything outside of a very straight and narrow path on which you find only people who look just like them. They hate Westerners. They hate American culture. They hate our television; they hate the sexuality of our culture. They hate the range of sexuality in our culture. They hate the range of sexual orientation in that it finds a welcome in America but cannot find a welcome there. This is the theology of war. It’s a very tiny God who’s very angry and willing and eager to strike out against the evil in the world. It’s frightening stuff.

Now if you can’t read Arabic and don’t want to read the Taliban anymore, you can read the same theology of war from the interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Look at the list of things they hate: it’s the same list. The women’s liberation movement is responsible for the attack, gays and lesbians are responsible for the attack, women who had abortions because they don’t think breeding is a high calling for our species are responsible for the attack.

This is the same list of hate objects that you find in the Taliban. And it’s one of the most important things to understand about the theology of war. All religions are reduced to the same theology in the theology of war. It’s a list of a very tiny in-group and a very large out-group and it’s focused to be able to direct anger and hatred and weaponry against the source of evil. This reminds me of a story from Native America that I just heard this week:

A young boy went to see his grandfather because he was angry. He was angry because one of his friends had committed a terrible injustice against him and he wanted revenge and he wanted his grandfather’s advice on how to get revenge. His grandfather sat him down and said “I know these feelings. I’ve had them myself.” I too have had the feelings of hatred and anger and lust for blood and a lust for revenge. It’s as though there were two wolves inside of me fighting to control my soul. One is a good wolf who takes care of its pups and who is a peaceful wolf that only fights when it’s necessary and only as far as it’s necessary. And the other wolf is an angry, angry, angry wolf that strikes out in all directions whenever it’s given a chance. And these two wolves, the grandfather said, “are inside of me all the time fighting to dominate my soul.” The grandson thought about it for a second and he said, “I don’t get it grandfather, which wolf wins?” And the grandfather said, “The one that I feed.”

We have those two wolves now fighting for control of our soul as a nation and fighting for control or our individual souls. And the wolf that wins will be the wolf that we feed. I can’t resolve this problem this morning. But we need to say it out loud. We’re in a time of great pain and hurting. More than six thousand people have been killed. We have no idea of how many people on what will now be called “the other side” will be killed. We may wonder what to do about our hurt and about our deep sense of disconnection.

There’s another story for us here, about a woman who was sad to the core of her soul because she had lost her son. She went to see a wise man and she said, “I’m hurting so much I cannot go on with life because of the sorrow I feel for the loss of my son. There must be some magic potion or spell or something you can do to make all the hurt go away.” The wise man said “You’re very lucky that you came to me.” There is such a magic to make the hurt and the sorrow go away. All you have to do is bring me a mustard seed, a tiny mustard seed, from the home of someone who has never known sorrow.”

So she went around. She went first of course to the palaces, because certainly rich people don’t know any sorrow. And she found at every palace and every castle story after story of people who had lost a daughter, lost a son, people who had been visited by horrible tragedies, by diseases, by all of the woes of humankind. And each time she heard one of these stories from one of these families, she’d stop and stay with them for awhile to help them, because she knew what it was like to feel sorrow and she knew how to help them.

And after six or eight of these visits to families and people who had known sorrow and stopping to help them, the woman finally realized that the sage she consulted had been right. That magical mustard seed was the seed within her that made her reach out her own hand to take the hand of others who suffered. In our days and weeks and perhaps months ahead, I hope that we can find ways to reach out our hands to help those others that are suffering, here and abroad. And if when we reach our hands and take theirs we find that we don’t know how to stop the suffering, then let us hold hands and try to remember together the Dance of Life.

© Davidson Loehr

9 September 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.

What is truth? Usually when we ask the question, we’re asking it like a grand inquisitor, standing outside of it and treating it as an intellectual thing. We want to know what it is so we can judge it and tell you whether it is right or wrong. When we let it get inside of us, to quote one of America’s current philosophers, Chef Emeril Legasse, “we really kick it up a notch.”

When we let the question “What is truth?” get inside of us it is a whole different kind of question and it’s a lot scarier. Now its like looking at the “mirror mirror on the wall” and asking who really is the fairest of us all, and we might not like the answer we get.

We talk a lot about truth as though it were a dangerous thing to be near. I think a lot of truths are things we try to avoid more than we try to seek. Sometimes we avoid them because the truth that’s offered to us is just too small to qualify as “true.”

There’s an example of that going around the University Baptist Church down on the UT campus right now, where some bigots from Topeka, Kansas have come here to picket outside the church because UBC welcomes gays and lesbians just as Jesus might have. They carry signs with a couple sound bytes from hateful parts of the Bible – you can read it all on their web site, which is – believe this or not – www.godhatesfags.org.

Anything that is so small that it separates life and divides it into little pieces and pits the pieces against each other isn’t truth in the sense that we’re looking for in religion. It’s only a tormented fractured piece that can’t find its way home to the whole. When I hear the salvation story from Christian fundamentalism I’m struck this way. This will be two-sided in a second – I don’t like to throw stones unless I throw them up in the air so that some of them land on us too. But when I hear that least imaginative version of the Christian salvation story, a story primarily of obeying until you die, and then going to heaven, I think this just isn’t an interesting story. It’s too small. I can’t fit into it the parts of me that I have to fit into it if I’m ever going to be whole. The story can’t make me whole. It would just put me in a little compartment. So it won’t do for me.

I had a friend a dozen years ago in the ministry who was a fundamentalist minister, a wonderful man, absolutely as caring a person as I’ve ever met. And I asked him when he became a fundamentalist and he said he used to be mostly a secular humanist and when he was in college he took a biology course.

He talked to his biology professor one day about this notion that we have a special place in the world, that there was something precious about us because we had somehow been created by some loving intelligence. And his biology professor said he was an idiot for thinking like that. There was no God. Nothing had been created. There wasn’t anything special about us at all. We just evolved like slugs and slime mold does. The only rule of evolution is that whatever fits the environment best survives no matter how sleazy or crummy it is. That’s the end of it, his professor told him. Get used to it.

He said you know, my response to that story of indifferent mechanical evolution is about the same as your response to my story of special creation. And I thought you’re right, there is nothing in the story of evolution that gives people a home, gives anyone a special place to be. I think there’s another story that can, a story of which indifferent mechanical evolution is an intrinsic part. But explaining that would take a lot longer, and he’s already found something that gives his heart someplace to live and has helped him be a loving person. It sounds like he’s got the right religion for now. So sometimes we reject the truths that are offered because they are too little for us.

We can take it down another level though and say sometimes we reject the truths because we’re afraid the truth will be bad. And we’ll stay in any kind of denial offered to us rather than moving into a truth that we think will be bad. The place you find this happening most often – you find it everyday, we’ve found it in most all of our lives – is when people have a terminal illness. And you find that in early stages of dealing with their prognosis and the jargon for it is that the prognosis is negative. In ordinary language it means you’re going to die. And almost no one wants to accept this right off.

The truth is bad. Of course they don’t want to accept it. And yet there’s an ironic lesson that comes from working with terminal patients. I spent a year doing this in Chicago while I was writing my dissertation in graduate school. I worked the afternoon and evening shifts in a 900-bed hospital in downtown Chicago. And I worked almost exclusively with terminal patients because that’s where the serious work was to be done.

What you find when you work with people who are dying, and it is quite ironic, is that when they find peace — and everyone I worked with found peace before they died, partly because I was such an activist in this — when people find peace they only find it after accepting the truth that terrified them the first time they heard it. They only find it when they accept the fact that they are going to die. And there’s something about being able to get in harmony with that kind of truth that lets them forgive life, forgive God, forgive the universe, make peace with the people they’ve loved and find peace in their own hearts.

Watching that transformation was not only one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. It was one of the most uplifting because it gives you faith in the fact that we can make a home in the truth if we work at it, and that it pays to do so. I think there’s a third reason that we sometimes choose not to tell the truth or not recognize it. And that’s that even though we know it’s true and we know it’s right, we don’t know how to live in it.

The most famous story of this, my favorite, comes from the ancient Hebrew scriptures. It’s the story of Moses leading his people from slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land and freedom. And my favorite part of the story is the part that says the people didn’t want to go! They wanted to go back to Egypt. It’s true there was suffering there, but they knew how to suffer. They’d done it all their lives. But they didn’t know how to be free. And they’ll pick the familiarity of being in their rut over a freedom they have no idea how to live in.

We’ve seen little pictures of this in some of the communist countries that have flirted with democracy, when all of them seem to be going back toward a form of totalitarianism. It’s what they knew. It’s what they’re comfortable with. So sometimes we don’t choose the truth because we do not know how to live in it.

There’s a five-line poem by Stephen Crane. It’s one of my favorite poems, and it puts all of this more succinctly than any story I know. He wrote:

I was in the darkness.

I could not see my words

nor the wishes of my heart.

Suddenly, there was a great light.

Let me back into the darkness again!

Suddenly, there was a great light and it showed me a world so big, so free, so unconstrained, so open with possibility and hope that I was terrified all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Because I’ve never lived like that once. Let me back into the darkness again. I don’t know how to be free! This poem outlines a tragedy. But it’s a human story to which every one of us can relate in some ways from some times of our life.

So where do you find the courage to tell the truth? While I think we each find our own path to it I’ll tell you part of my path and how I found it and how I still think of it. Maybe some of it will be useful.

When I was in graduate school I read a lot of theologians. That’s what you get when your Ph.D. is in theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. You read a lot of philosophers and scientists and theologians.

One of the theologians I read is regarded really as a fairly conservative theologian of the 20th century (Karl Barth). But like my fundamentalist preacher friend of a dozen or more years ago, he was also someone who was so warm, so full, so alive, that I liked fifty percent of what he wrote very much. And fifty percent isn’t bad. One of his best insights came from a short talk that he gave to a group of young ministers who were in school and were preparing to go out into the ministry. They wanted to know what this world-renowned theologian had to say to them that might help them save souls. And what he told them was this. I memorized it because it was so powerful for me as soon as I read it. He said:

“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 think that’s dead right. And it is a thought that comes to me several times a month. Anytime I’m trying to think how do I serve this congregation of people who are actually giving me your attention for twenty or thirty minutes in a week. You deserve something that I think is worth saying, that I think is worth hearing even though your lives are in many ways so different from mine.

I think I have to try to take you more seriously than you may be taking yourself. And I have to trust that it’s what you want and that you won’t forgive me if I fail to do so either.

There’s a story from Buddhism that I like better that most of the stories of western religions. Buddhism doesn’t start from the idea that we are estranged from God, or that we are sinful and need to somehow make amends. Buddhism starts from the idea that every single person can be a Buddha. In every single person they say there’s a Buddha seed. There’s that within us which can be nourished and turned into a flower of awakening and enlightenment in Buddhahood. And our job, they say, is to act from that seed in us and speak to that part of other people.

Now that’s saying the same thing. That’s saying that the mirror mirror on the wall that we’re talking about is the same mirror that we have to be able to look at ourselves in and live with in the morning. And that means that the mirror mirror is on the wall of our soul, not our hallway. It’s that mirror inside of us that we have to be able to live with.

So the courage to tell the truth, I think, comes from knowing that what we owe one another, perhaps more than anything, is to recognize that each one of us has that kind of a Buddha seed, that kind of a God-spark, and that’s the level that we need to communicate with. We have to take others more seriously than they take themselves and we have to take ourselves more seriously than others may take us.

And those parts of us that dwell there can only live in the truth: nowhere else. There’s also a penalty for not doing it right. If we live in fear, if we live by incorporating the fears of others and if we live by the values of others we may find at the end that we have lived their lives. And that nobody lived ours.

There’s only one person in the world who is able to live your life. What a tragedy it would be if that life weren’t lived! And the kind of truth that makes us whole and connects us with each other and with the world is probably the only route there is or has ever been toward living that kind of life. That truth really can set you free. And for the record, that’s the truth.

© Davidson Loehr

17 June 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Last fall, in a silent auction at church, I agreed to offer the right to name a sermon topic. Ian Forslund was the highest bidder, and asked that I reflect on what I think it means for this church to be a “Welcoming Congregation.” Taken narrowly, that refers to the fact that this church is on record as a church that welcomes gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people into fellowship. But how? As tokens? I have overheard the greeter in a UU church (not this one!) tell a visitor “Oh yes, we have lesbians – there’s one over there!” How welcome would that feel? It’s an important topic, I’ll borrow some wisdom from the man Jesus, as we explore it together on this Father’s Day.

STORY: The Welcoming School

Once there was a small school in a small town somewhere in Texas where everybody was alike. They had all been born in Texas, they all had dark hair and brown eyes. They all got along, and it was a quiet and peaceful place. But times change, and they changed in this sleepy little town. People started moving in, from all over the place, and before long people didn’t all look alike. Some actually had blonde hair; they had never seen a real blonde in person before! And some had blue eyes: what an odd color for eyes! And some had actually moved there from other states, or from Mexico. They weren’t all native Texans any more.

The school principal didn’t know what to do, though he knew they needed to find some way to make all these new kids feel welcome. But he didn’t know what to do, so he decided to pass the problem on to the students. He called a school assembly and told them that people were starting to come to the school who were different from them, and they needed to find some way to make sure and notice them and welcome them to the school.

The kids talked and talked about it. They decided they needed a way to identify all these different sorts of people. And before long, they had one to practice on; a girl named Susan came to town with her family. She had been born in Austin. And though she had brown eyes, she had blonde hair!

Well, they were ready for her. “Oh great!” they said as they gathered around her on her first day in school. “We’ve been waiting for somebody to come who had blonde hair, and you’re it! We need a way to mark you so everybody will know you’re here, so they can all make you feel welcome. Here, wear this!” And they put around her neck a special kind of necklace they had made by tying together about thirty jingle bells. “Now whenever you move, you’ll make noise! Then when you come into a room, the first person who hears you will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and then everybody in the room will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and they can gather around you and make you feel welcome!” And that’s what they did.

Within a couple weeks, they had another new student. Stevie moved with his family from Dallas. And his hair was the right color (brown), but he had blue eyes! Amazing!

Again, though, the students were ready. “Here Stevie,” one of them said, “you need to wear this. It’s hard to tell you have blue eyes till we can get up really close to look at your face, so this will make it easier to mark you. Just wear this around your neck.” They gave him a very big capital letter “B” (for “blue”) made out of thick blue paper. “Now whenever you come into a room, the first person who sees the big blue “B” will shout “Woop, woop, woop!” and a signal that you’re here. Then all the other kids will should “Woop, woop, woop!” and gather around you to look at your eyes and make you feel welcome.” And that’s what they did.

Before long, another new family moved to town, and another new kid enrolled in the school. Her name was Maria. She had the right hair and eye color, but she wasn’t from Texas. Her family had just moved up from Mexico.

The kids were ready for this, too. They had learned a new work in their vocabulary-building exercises for people who came from strange places: alien. And here was their chance to use it. So they went up to Maria and explained that they were the welcome team from the school, that they needed to mark her so the other kids would know she was different. But since she had black hair and brown eyes, nobody could tell by looking at her that she was really an alien. So they had made something for her to wear, too. It was a very big capital letter “A” kind of a scarlet color. “Here,” they said, “you need to wear this. Then, whenever you come into a room the first person who sees your big “A” will shout “Alien! Alien!” and then everybody will shout “Alien! Alien!” and we can all gather around to see just what an alien really looks like and make you feel welcome. And that’s what they did.

Well, as more and more new kids moved into town, that became a very noisy school. The kids looked for all the differences they could find in every new kid, and invented new kinds of noises and letters to mark each one with, so the new kids would feel welcome.

But while a few of the new kids just loved all the attention, most did not. And, they told the principal, they didn’t feel one bit welcome there. The principal was stumped. Gosh: what should they do?

SERMON: Welcome!

If you’ve been coming here long, you’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t talk much about Jesus. It’s not that I haven’t heard of him. I’ve studied a fair amount about the man, I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for a decade, so I’m not completely ignorant of the man and his teachings. But for me, he’s never been the most interesting or insightful religious teacher. It’s a personal thing. For me, the teachings of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu were wiser and more useful, and I have quite a few books from quite a few thinkers whose insights seem more relevant and useful. So I’ve just not used Jesus much.

All that is a negative way of saying something positive, which is that this morning I think one of Jesus’s insights is more useful and more on point than others I can think of. That insight was his most important teaching, and the teaching that was also most important to him: his idea of what he called the Kingdom of God.

That phrase “the Kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus, it was used by a lot of people in the first couple centuries. Jews, Christians, Greeks and Romans wrote about the kingdom of God, which they also called the Kingdom of Wisdom. They all used the phrase to mean the ideal world, the kind of world with the best chance of sustaining peace, justice, and love among people who were different. That’s the challenge, of course. It doesn’t take much talent and isn’t much of a victory to get along with people who look, think, and talk like you. That’s more like looking in the mirror and approving of your reflection. The challenge is to do it among people who are not like you. And the ideal world, in which that challenge was met well, was what many called the Kingdom of God.

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not supernatural. It wasn’t something coming, had nothing to do with any sort of end of the world. It was, at least potentially, here and now, within and among us, and his frustration was that we couldn’t see it.

For Jesus, our deepest human failing – you could almost call it our “original sin,” though he never did – is our destructive but abiding habit of defining ourselves in terms too small to do justice to the idea that the whole world is God’s creation, to put it poetically.

The Jews – and of course Jesus was a Jew – often defined themselves by their differences from others. They defined themselves by their customs of animal sacrifices in the Temple, by their language, their dietary restrictions, and a dozen other ways. These differences made them feel special. They thought of themselves as God’s chosen people.

But to the man Jesus, if I understand him correctly, everyone was a child of God. And the exclusive identity of the Jews was too narrow, too small to serve life. He wanted the walls broken down, he wanted small identities sabotaged. This is the meaning behind his telling his disciples – who begged for their food, as he also did – to eat whatever was put before them.

That didn’t mean “eat your broccoli.” Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and they all begged for their food. They lived in a world with Romans, Greeks, Samaritans, and a whole array of other ethnic and religious styles, each of which had different food laws. When Jesus told his followers to eat what was put before them, it meant “When you beg from a Roman and they offer you pork, eat it! Eat shellfish, eat whatever is put before you by the Greek, the Samaritan, and the others from whom you will be begging food.”

He was saying “Don’t allow yourself to be defined by your differences from others. Insist on defining yourselves by your similarities to others: you are all brothers and sisters, all children of God. And when people realize this and act this way, the Kingdom of God will be here.” Amen, end of sermon, end of religion, now go do it! This kind of talk is what makes the lives of prophets nasty, brutish and short. After all, nobody would ever have bothered to kill someone who just told you to love one another and have a nice day! That you can get from cheap greeting cards or bumper stickers. No, the most significant prophets and sages are deeply disturbing, because they are rearranging the foundations of our world.

I think Jesus’s teachings here are profound and disturbing. I believe if we could ever understand and act that way, the world would indeed become something that might as well be called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Wisdom, because I can’t think of a better kind of world, no matter how unlikely it may be.

Now if this were a different kind of church and I were a different kind of preacher, I might get away with saying to you, “There, you’ve heard it, just listen to Jesus and obey, Amen!” Odds are though, it isn’t likely to work here. Most of you wouldn’t care who said it, unless you were persuaded that it was wise and might work. Knowing that I can’t just proclaim to you, but must also try to persuade you, is one of the things I like most about this profession.

So I’ll leave Jesus for awhile, and come at this from a different direction.

Remember: There’s never a problem accepting or welcoming people who are just like us. We know they’re the right kind of people. But how do we accept and welcome people who seem to differ from us in important ways? That’s the test of every personal belief system or religion, I think.

As you may know, the right to name the topic for this morning’s sermon was auctioned off to the highest bidder last fall. It feels a bit odd, being so bought and sold so openly! It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this. Ian Forslund, the lay leader this morning, was the highest bidder, and he asked me to reflect on what I think it should mean for a church to be a “welcoming church” – that is, to welcome into full participation and membership people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

You know all the liberal platitudes here about how, by golly, just everyone is welcome here because we don’t have a prejudiced bone in our collective body. I’m just not going to say those things. I won’t pretend that it’s easy, because it isn’t. I won’t pretend that it always really happens, even here, because it doesn’t. And if there is blame for this, I think it is shared by everyone. To persuade you of this, I’ll come at this from an odd angle, because the point I want to make runs counter to most of the talk I hear among cultural liberals – of any religion.

I want to look at this through the lens of some of our history as a society. Somewhere around 35 years ago, some time during the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War, we began losing our center as a society, and we haven’t got it back yet. We used to consider ourselves Americans. We were black, white, Hispanic, theistic, atheistic, liberal and conservative, but we were all Americans.

Then it started pulling apart. We began identifying ourselves by smaller and smaller identities, splitting ourselves off from one another by our differences. We became, and remain, Afro-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the rest. This was a battle that had already been fought and won in the early decades of the 20th century, when we were taught not to hyphenate our identities – the hyphen was defined as a minus sign – but to define ourselves simply as “Americans.” But 35 years ago, it all began coming undone. Drugged by the narcissism of the 1960s and 1970s, we began defining ourselves by what was local, special, or different about us. Freud wrote about what he called “the narcissism of small differences” over 70 years ago, and we are still living it out.

I see our current “victim culture” in the same way: as definitions of one another isolating us through our differences rather than identifying us through our similarities. It’s almost as though we want others to like us because of the ways that we’re not like them. If there is much that’s more naive than that, I don’t know what it is.

Why? Because I don’t think we ever accept or welcome others based on their differences from us. We feel kinship when we feel related. We feel we all belong to the human family when we identify ourselves as brothers and sisters. And we can only feel related when we define ourselves by our similarities, by those things we share that we value more than those things we do not share.

For example:

If someone saves your life at the risk of their own, how much else do you really need to know about them? How much else do you really care? Or if a teacher finds a way to reach your troubled teenager for the first time, and it turns her life around – how much else do you need to know about that teacher who just saved the soul, maybe the life, of your kid? A young athlete scores the winning touchdown for your school, a young woman kicks the winning soccer goal. They just became local heroes. Nobody’s asking anything else about them.

Maybe it’s easiest to make the point I’m trying to make in sports, so let’s take some sports stories.

In the 1930s, a whole generation before the civil rights movement, the status of black people in this country was far worse than most of us could imagine. There were still a few lynchings in the South. Restaurants, restrooms, even drinking fountains were segregated, marked “whites only” or “colored.” I remember as a young boy living in Tulsa, Oklahoma seeing all of those signs. No one would argue that colored people, the negros, as they were called then, were in any sense full citizens of this country.

Also in the 1930s, our country was building a growing antagonism with Germany. Hitler had come into power, and was teaching the German people that their white race was the Master Race, immeasurably superior to blacks, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others. When Jesse Owens beat the fastest runners in the world – including Germany’s best – to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, held in Germany, he was celebrated back here as an American hero. He was black, and he was a hero. And “hero” trumped “black.”

Joe Louis agreed to fight the great German boxer Max Schmelling around the same time, and we called him “America’s Hope.” He lost to Schmelling the first time and the Germans gloated. When Louis fought Schmelling again, and knocked him out in the first round, he was an American hero.

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were not celebrated because they were black. They were celebrated because they were American, and they were great. The categories of being an American and prizing excellence were categories they shared with about 100 million other Americans. As long as they could be defined by their similarities with us, they were welcomed. When they were defined only by their differences – as they were in other areas of their lives – they were not welcomed.

After World War II, major league baseball – known then as America’s Favorite Pasttime – began to be integrated when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many people, including many baseball fans, hated him at first, because they just saw him as colored. They identified him by his differences, and they hated him.

But before long, they began to see him, instead, as a baseball player, and a very good one. Then they accepted him. Not as a negro, but as a remarkable athlete who made America’s favorite game better.

Today, it’s hard to believe that a half century ago all major professional sports in this country only allowed white players. Today, white players are a distinct minority in baseball, basketball and football. It has been a big change in the right direction.

Thirty years ago, as some of you will remember, the most famous person in the world, the man recognized by more people than anyone else on the planet, was Muhammed Ali, the loudmouth boxer. He changed his name from Cassius Clay – which he called his “slave name.” He refused to go into the Army to fight in Vietnam, and he converted to become a follower of Elijah Mohammed, the white-hating leader of the Black Muslims. If you’re out after three strikes, that’s at least four. Ali was attacked, reviled, his boxing championship was stripped, and he was forbidden to fight for about three years. But during this time, as he spoke at college campuses and everywhere else, people began to realize that he had a strong sense of integrity and authenticity. When he returned to the ring, he demonstrated both great boxing and great character, and became the best-recognized and one of the most admired people on earth.

Being accepted in all these other and larger categories made his race nearly irrelevant. He is still one of the most admired people alive. When he appeared as the mystery person chosen to light the Olympic torch a few years back, there was hardly a dry eye to be found. Sure he was still black, still a Muslim, still a loudmouth. But he was also a man of great integrity, a man of principle, a man with a great sense of humor, and a champion. And for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, those are far more important facts than the color of his skin.

Today, though we don’t mention it nearly enough, heroes and role models can be any sex, any race, and any sexual orientation. Five years ago the most famous man on the planet, and one of the most admired, was Michael Jordan. His Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, number 23, outsold all other team jersey numbers combined. You saw them on kids of all colors, because color didn’t matter any more. Everybody wanted “to be like Mike.”

If anyone had simply said “love him because he’s black,” we wouldn’t remember his name now. But we were saying we loved or admired him because we had learned to define him in much larger categories. He embodied values we respected but could not demonstrate as dramatically as he did. Jordan was fiercely competitive, he played fair, he was the best player the game had ever seen, he seemed almost to will his Chicago Bulls to six world championships – defeating at least two teams that were better.

And whether you saw him in press conferences, commercials, or funny and satirical comedy skits on “Saturday Night Live,” you saw a quality of character you couldn’t help but admire – and, probably, envy. Michael Jordan, like Muhammed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, embodied the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., who hoped we would someday be able to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Slowly but surely, we are making progress in this, the most heterogeneous society on earth. Thirty years ago, interracial marriages were hardly ever seen. Today, 10% of the marriages in this country are between different races or ethnicities. And as it is with race, it is also becoming with sexual orientation, though we have farther to go there.

But Elton John was king of the world as an entertainer, and nobody cared that he was homosexual, and about as garish and flaming as you can get. Today there are many entertainers and actors who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual, and who draw crowds because, more importantly, they’re talented, and we love talent.

Martina Navratilova was hated by some because she was a lesbian, but she was admired and applauded by far more, because for about a decade she was the greatest women’s tennis player in the world. The bigger categories trumped the smaller ones. She excelled in things we really cared about, and her differences from the sexual norms of the country became secondary, if they were even that important.

The social norms are changing for the better, and I think it is clear how they are changing and what the secret is, the secret of expanding our boundaries and welcoming people who differ from the social norms. We do have work to do, of course.

For one thing, we have to learn to accept a wider range of behaviors and life styles as parts of the social norm. We’re used to seeing couples holding hands. And the more couples we see holding hands who happen to be of the same sex, the more we’ll come to see it is natural that while most love is heterosexual, some love is homosexual, and what is important is that it is love. The more families we see where both parents are of the same sex, the easier it will be to understand that what we really value are loving parents. And if they’re loving parents and loving partners, we’ll be glad those kids have them, and glad those two people found each other.

It happens gradually, the way the rate of interracial marriage moved from almost zero to around ten percent.

But do you see what’s happening here, how and why it works? What’s happening is that when we begin to stop identifying ourselves by small or exclusive identities, it gets easier to feel related to one another. I think it is a self-defeating mistake for blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians – or for that matter religious liberals – to define themselves, or allow themselves to be defined, by the things that make them different from others. We should all want, instead, to be known by the content of our characters and the courage and compassion of our deeds.

So: how do we become welcoming people? The same way we become welcome people: by identifying ourselves and others only under the most important values and categories, the traits we all admire, the traits that can unite rather than divide us.

What are those? There’s no mystery here. We value people of integrity and courage, people of character. We value people who try to love, and try to offer their love out into the world in ways that give the world a blessing as they pass through it. We need and admire people who want to be in committed relationships, whether those relationships are with another person or with the larger human community. We admire and need good parents in our society, honest citizens, good workers and fair employers.

You know this list. You can finish it as well as I can. We admire and welcome people who act like they really are children of God, people with a little spark of divinity in them, folks who try to become better people, partners, parents and citizens: people who make our world better because they are in it. And the more we can identify ourselves and others by those standards rather than by lesser ones, the better our world will be. I do not believe that gay people want to be accepted merely as gay people, or that black people only want to be welcomed as our token blacks. I think they want what we all want: to be recognized and welcomed as our brothers and sisters, as children of a God of love. That’s the better world we need to create together.

How good can it get? Well, Jesus once taught that such a world, where we simply see ourselves as brothers, sisters and children of God, would be a world so perfect it could only be called the Kingdom of God. I can’t improve on that, so I’ll say “Thank you Jesus” – and Amen.

© Davidson Loehr

10 June 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

PUPPET SHOW:

By Julie Irwin, Davidson Loehr, and the creative spirits of the No-Strings Puppetteers.

Characters – Whiney and Eeyore, Ted and Jessie. It’s a wide stage, the hand-puppets appear on center stage (Stage A) or the sides (Stage B).

SCENE I, STAGE A

(Whiney and Eeyore enter together. Whiny talks in a very high and whiny voice, and Eeyore talks very slowly and negatively like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.)

Whiney: People are so STUPID!

Eeyore: Yes, tell me about it. Just like you’d expect in this stupid world.

Whiney: And most people just aren’t that cool, do you know what I mean? We never get to meet any cool people!

Eeyore: Yeah, it just figures.

Whiney: Where are the other cool people? People who are in a good mood and everything and fun.

Eeyore: Maybe they all just DIED. That’s just what you’d expect with all this air pollution and crime and everything.

(Ted and Jessie enter separately, one at each side of the stage. They’re happy, seem friendly. Very different body language than the first two. Looser, more fun somehow. Whiney and Eeyore are together in the center of the stage. One at a time, in turns, they see and approach Whiney and Eeyore)

Ted: Hi! Who are you? What are you doing?

Whiny: I’m just sitting here waiting for some cool people. There are no cool people around here or anything. This place is BORING!

Ted: Well, I don’t know if I’m cool or anything, but do you want to play this game with me? It’s the new Playstation 3.

Whiny: No. I don’t want to just play with anyone who just comes along and asks me. Do you know any cooler people to play with? We never get those here.

Ted: There is that guy way over there, sitting on the Harley Davidson and singing a rap song. I think that’s Jennifer Lopez on the back of his bike. He looks cool.

Whiny: Yeah, but he hates me. He’s never nice to me.

Ted (aside, to the audience): I wonder why!

(long pause while Whiny looks out longingly toward the phantom cool guy, maybe in the church audience)

Whiny: I wish he would want to play with me, instead of you. (pause)

Ted: Ok, well, sorry to bother you. (leaves)

SCENE II, Stage B

Jessie: Hi! What are you doing?

Eeyore: What do you think I’m doing? Sitting here by myself, alone, lonely in the dark.

Jessie: Well, seems pretty bright to me. But do you want me to turn on the light?

Eeyore: What would be the point of that? Just wastes electricity (sigh).

Jessie: Well, we could talk and stuff, or maybe I could tell you a story.

Eeyore: I doubt it would be a funny story. What’s the point?

Jessie: You haven’t even heard it! Let me tell you: Once upon a time, there was a

Eeyore: You know, I need to leave my time free in case anything really fun comes along, even though it’s probably not going to.

(pause while Eeyore mopes)

Jessie: Ok, I guess I’ll go then. (leaves)

Eeyore: I knew it. Everyone always leaves. Why do I even bother?

SCENE III, STAGE A

Ted. Are you with THEM? (pointing down to where Whiny and Eeyore exited)

Jessie. Heck no! Who ARE they?

Ted. I don’t know. I think they moved into the green house last week.

Jessie. Oh. We were on vacation, we just got back last night. I’m Jessie. (extends his hand)

Ted: (Extends his hand) Hi Jessie, it’s nice to finally MEET somebody! I’m Ted, we just moved here from New Jersey. Listen Jessie, I have this new Play Station, and the snowboarder game is for two people. Would you like to play it with me?

Jessie. Cool! I’ve heard about the game, but I’ve never played it. Afterwards, would you like to come over to our house? I just got a copy of the movie Spy Puppets (Ted’gasp, Spy puppets) that I wanted to watch with somebody. I haven’t seen it yet, maybe we could watch it and microwave some popcorn?

Ted: That’s so great! I never saw Spy Puppets when it was in the theaters.

Jessie: It would be so neat if we could be friends, Ted!

Ted. It sure would, Jessie! I miss my friends from New Jersey, and I really want to make some new friends. I’ll show you how to play the game.

Jessie: Then let’s go watch Spy Puppets.

Ted: Great let’s go!

They exit together.

SCENE IV

Eeyore and Whiny enter again, slowly and still in a bad mood.

Whiny: We still don’t have any friends to hang out with!

Eeyore: Yeah, no one ever comes around here.

Shaking their heads, they exit.

SERMON: Walking on Water

What is the power behind miracles? Is it weird science? supernatural deities with nothing better to do than poke around in our lives? Or is the power where Jesus said the Kingdom of God is: within and among us? And even if this mysterious power is within and among us, what on earth does that mean, and what kind of “miracles” are we talking about?

This isn’t a scientific question. It’s more of a poetic or biographical question. It’s about how our attitudes and our courage create our world, whether friendly or unfriendly, and our possibilities, whether pinched or expansive, as in the puppet show.

There must be a hundred different ways to preach on this, and some of the challenge is finding one you haven’t thought of before. So I’ll weave together two stories, one factual and one mythical.

For those of you who don’t know the story of walking on water, it is a Christian story about Jesus walking across the water to his disciples, who are in a boat. The only minister I’ve ever discussed this with was my friend Todd Driskill, about fifteen years ago. Todd was a minister in the Disciples of Christ church – which is much more liberal up north than it is here in Texas. It made him crazy when his parishioners took biblical stories literally, whether it was walking on water or rising from the dead. For Todd, Jesus “rose from the dead” only in the minds of his disciples; and “walking on water” was an imaginative way of saying that Jesus could go places and do things his disciples couldn’t, because he had a faith that they lacked.

A century ago, there was an Austrian writer named Karl Kraus who is among my favorites, and one of his aphorisms reminds me of this kind of power. “I hear noises which others do not hear,” he wrote, “and they reveal to me the music of the spheres – which others don’t hear either.” Something in that is true, I think: “I hear noises which reveal to me the music of the spheres.” Jesus used to tell his parables, then complain that his disciples didn’t have “the eyes to see or the ears to hear” what they were really about. Jesus heard noises others didn’t hear, and he heard a harmony in life that others seldom hear either. So did the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and so many others. They walked on water. They went places few others go because they were sustained by a kind of faith in the basic goodness and the positive possibilities of life.

In the stories about these and other great sages, you almost always read that they went through hard personal tests and struggles to gain that faith, to be able to hear those noises. Fifteen years ago one of the hottest religion scholars in this country was Joseph Campbell. His six-part television series with Bill Moyers on “The Power of Myth” was seen by hundreds of millions of people. Over 2,000 study groups sprang up spontaneously in this country alone, for people to meet and discuss Campbell’s ideas.

And Campbell’s central idea was that one of the most transformative opportunities in life is the chance to go on what he called the Hero’s Quest. This is the three-step process by which both mythic heroes and exceptional people gained the authenticity, the personal power, that let them become the kind of people we want to keep telling stories about.

But back to my friend Todd.

He was a good minister and a good preacher, but biblical literalism really drove him nuts. His Christianity was too important to him to become something radical like a Unitarian, but he had been a minister about twelve years, and he wasn’t happy. He felt, as many ministers do, that his people wanted him to say he believed these stories literally, and – again like most ministers – he didn’t. Todd didn’t think he could tell the truth and keep his job, and if he couldn’t say what he believed, he thought he would lose his integrity. I can still hear him saying that if only people would read the Bible intelligently, it had enough in it to ground and guide a good life. But now, Todd needed to leave the only world he had ever really lived in – the world of orthodox Christianity – and find some place that could be a home for his spirit. Joseph Campbell used to call this the quest for “the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul,” and it’s certainly what Todd yearned for.

In the Hero’s Quest, this is the first stage, known as The Call. You are called to be something or somewhere else, and it feels like your identity, your authenticity, is at stake. If you answer the call, you will have to leave the comfort of the familiar and risk a great deal.

But this is scary. Most of us can probably remember at least one time that we took a risk, spoke up when we had been afraid to, and did something we’re still proud of. We all have heroic quests, small and large. The great myths explode these experiences into grand stories of heroes slaying dragons or wrestling with God, of Buddha sitting under the Bo Tree and resisting irresistible temptations, Jesus resisting temptations of the Devil.

In the Middle Ages, when most of the world had not yet been explored by Europeans, sailors were afraid if you went too far you’d sail off the edge of the world. And mapmakers would mark unexplored waters with the warning “There be monsters here!” Psychologically, that’s still true. There be monsters in unexplored areas. There are dangers leaving the familiar, even when it doesn’t feel like a home any more. And it takes a lot of energy! Thirty years ago, when we were sending men to the moon, I remember reading that it took more fuel to get the space ship out of the earth’s gravitational pull than it took to go the half million miles from there to the moon and back. It takes a lot of energy to escape the gravitational pull of the familiar.

In 1991, Todd finally sailed into the waters where monsters lived. He resigned from his church and he, Marsha and their son Tyler moved to Summit, New Jersey, where he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Drew University. He studied the bible, theology and philosophy. We had a lot of long and intense conversations about these things, by telephone and e-mail. He really wanted to teach churches, and ministers, how to read the bible in more intelligent ways. But he knew there wasn’t a paying job with that description anywhere, so he hoped to go into teaching at a seminary.

His faith was challenged in graduate school. He lost the rest of his naivete, and six years later his beliefs were much deeper, better informed, and far less orthodox. He came alive in a way I had never seen him. Marsha said he had found faith and hope again, and life had become an exciting possibility.

This is the second stage of the Hero’s Quest: leaving your familiar world, trading security for adventure and risk. This is the stage when storytellers say the hero slays dragons. The dragons, of course, are not really big scaly lizards; they are internal demons, ancient and primitive fire-breathing voices inside us that shout “No!” and want to scare us back into our old ways. Marsha could allow Todd to grow far beyond the boundaries of any kind of Christianity she had ever known. But they both came from big families, and Todd lost big parts of both families when his beliefs no longer seemed to overlap with theirs. Dragons. Monsters. Forces begging you, threatening you, to go back where you were before. These are hard struggles, as many of you know from your own lives.

The final stage of the Hero’s Quest is what Joseph Campbell called The Return. It isn’t just about going off to school or meditating in a cave and getting a private revelation, feeling groovy and being finished. The full spiritual quest can not be played out only within the stage of your mind. It must open out to the world, and find its own gifted way to play there, where it counts for more. There is a necessity, a command, to bring it back to the world and share it. Campbell used to say that “an authentic person rejuvenates the world.” I think it is true. And what the Hero’s Quest is about is gaining a deeper kind of authenticity, and confidence, and power.

Few people would claim, as Karl Kraus did, to be able to hear “the music of the spheres.” But you do hear some new noises, and you do hear some music. The music is the sense of a kind of harmony about life, a kind of safety, a feeling that there really weren’t monsters there, that the dragons can be slain, and a feeling that this news must be shared with others. I felt this way after graduate school. I still do. And so did Todd.

He was teaching in small colleges as an adjunct professor, sorry that the perfect job didn’t exist. I was sorry he couldn’t be in the ministry, because he was so good at it. Then in November of 1997, he got a phone call. It was from the Society for Biblical Literacy, a worldwide organization run by the Disciples of Christ churches. Their longtime director had died, and they had been advertising for a new one. One of Todd’s former district supervisors saw the ad and called them to say he knew the man for whom this job was created. They were already at the third interview stage with two candidates, but they phoned Todd to say they would be willing to fly him to Atlanta for an interview. At the end of that interview, they offered him the job and he accepted.

If this story were being written in a Bible, it would be called a miracle. And perhaps it was. Todd called me with the news, more excited than I had ever heard him. It was the job he had been born to do, but he would never have found it if he hadn’t taken the risks he took six years earlier, because the job required a Ph.D. in theology with a solid grounding in biblical studies.

I was both happy for him and proud of him. “How does it feel?” I asked. And my friend said “It feels like I’m walking on water – and it really is a miracle!” Ten years ago, Todd wasn’t happy. The world didn’t seem friendly, he couldn’t find a home in it, his spirit was starved. He was staying within the boundaries of his family and his friends, and he was losing his soul. Four years ago, the world was a friendly place. Todd was in love with life; he saw a world filled with possibilities and felt empowered in it. Now he heard noises that most others did not hear, and those noises told him of some of the music of the spheres, which most others didn’t hear either.

How can you write about transformations like this without resorting to mythical, magical language? If you leave out the feeling of miracle, you leave out the point of the story. Knowing people who have gone on the Hero’s Quest, having done some bits of it myself, makes it much easier to read the stories in the bible or in fairy tales or other myths and understand the kind of thing the writer was struggling to express. It’s also called being “born again,” being “born of the Holy Spirit.” It happens. I’ve seen it.

I need to tell you the end of Todd’s story. In December 1997, he was preparing to move with Marsha to Atlanta. Tyler was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, so just the two of them were moving, leaving the next day. Todd lifted an air conditioner into the rented truck, fell forward and died of a heart attack. He was 46. Three days later, I delivered the eulogy at his funeral, in the church he had grown up in. He died at the same age his father had died, and is buried next to him.

It wasn’t fair. But I wonder if any of you are tempted to think that Todd lost, after all. Don’t be. He didn’t lose, and he would have been the first to say so. We all die. We win by living with integrity and courage while we’re here. He spent the last six years of his life doing what he needed to do to become authentic the way he needed to. Marsha is remarried, Tyler begins law school this fall, and they both remember Todd as a brave man who took the road less traveled, and for whom taking that road really did make all the difference – both for him and for them. Tyler isn’t afraid of life, of taking chances, or of going on his own Hero’s Quest when the time comes. He knows it must be done, and he knows it can be done, because he saw his father do it. And Marsha also gained confidence and courage, and remembers those six years as transformative for her too. Todd’s life ended in the midst of a miracle that he didn’t live to see through. Maybe Marsha will. Maybe Tyler will. Maybe you will – for Todd’s story is in you too now, and it’s not one you’re likely to forget soon. So some miracle seeds have been planted here today. Perhaps they will sprout.

We’re born into a world of both fear and hope, refusal and possibility, and are asked which we shall serve. Most of the time, we stay on the paths with everyone else. Once in awhile we hear a call, offering us – if we are willing to work at it – the chance to walk on water. One path is safe and commonplace. The other is risky and uncertain. It’s a call from something that seems to know our true name. If we never answer the call, our story may not be either heroic or even very authentic. It may be like the story of Rip Van Winkle, who just went to sleep for twenty years and had nothing to show for the time but a beard. Sometimes in our lives, we come to a place where two roads diverge in the woods. We can follow the crowd, or we can take the road less traveled. It really does make all the difference.

© Davidson Loehr

27 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

One way we can get to know ourselves more intimately is by understanding what our sacred stories are. These are the plots, the scripts, the “necessary fictions” through which we find ourselves in the most comforting and compelling ways. We’re probably all living out the plots of some stories. We’ll look at some, and leave you the homework of wondering about your own story, how well you’re serving it, and how well it’s serving you.

STORY: The Great Stone Face

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up it was almost always obscured by clouds or fog. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same. But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly – well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’ts for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this just meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of world would they have? After all, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

SERMON: Sacred Stories

There is a wonderful old story about stories; it is the legend of Sheherezade. She was condemned to death by an immature, woman-hating tyrant. To save her life and the lives of others, she began telling the tyrant a story the night before he was going to have her killed, and she ended the story in mid-air, to be finished the next night. He let her live another night because he wanted to hear the ending. But she was no fool, and the story kept going on, for a thousand and one nights, until through her stories she had finally softened his heart, and opened his eyes and ears. She awakened the decent person that was inside of this tyrant. The decent person was waiting like a Sleeping Beauty, for someone who could reach his soul and break the evil spell under which his life was being lived.

I like the Sheherezade legend because it shows some of the power of stories to change our lives. But I also like it because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live. And we tell them, as well, in order to transform both ourselves and others into the people we think we were meant to be.

We live trying to act the way we think we should, trying to conform to some image of who we are supposed to be, how those we care for want or need us to act, some picture of how life is to be. And when you watch how we live, it’s clear that we are giving those pictures, those mostly unspoken stories, immense power. We’re puppets, they’re the strings. And we move and obey as though our stories were sacred – which, to us, they usually are.

And there’s the rub! If only all our stories were sacred! But they’re not. We all live by some stories that aren’t worthy of us, that don’t cherish us or even affirm our basic worth or honor our spirit, our energy, the things we really love. The more a story can do that, the more sacred it is, and the more it serves life. The less a story does that, the more profane and unworthy it is.

I’ll give you an example of someone living out a very powerful – and famous – story without even being aware of it. About ten years ago I was the theme speaker at the weeklong Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about 600 adults and 400 kids there, from ten or twenty states, so none of us knew many of the people. But since I was more visible than the other ministers there, a lot of folks cornered me during the week to tell me their stories. I spoke with one woman who told me her problem was that she just couldn’t seem to do enough. She was working hard at everything, sacrificing herself to her husband, her children, and nearly anyone else who asked. But her life felt empty, she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, didn’t seem to be getting anything back from all this giving she was doing. I recognized her story, and asked her if she thought she was supposed to be getting something out of it. She got a little indignant and said yes, it’s supposed to work that way: you give and you give, but eventually, you get back, too, and that’s what makes it all worth it.

That’s what I mean by a script, a guiding fiction, a myth to live by. There is a story being lived out not only by that woman, but by millions of women and men – though that one is mostly a women’s story. But there is no way to help this woman do well enough to get what she wants, because she is living out a story that is not likely to have a happy ending unless she can change the4 behavior of the other characters in her life. She is living out the story of Cinderella, who works and slaves for others, and whose only hope is that somehow a fairy Godmother will see her pure heart, reward her with a handsome prince, and usher in a kind of Judgement Day, when all who have wronged her will be punished. Probably, the only way she can win is to get out of this story and find a different kind of role to play, because in real life – as you have noticed by now – there is a serious shortage of fairy godmothers.

Cinderella is only a fairy tale. But the best fairy tales have plots that have been told many times in many other ways. This Cinderella script, for example, has been compared to the ancient Greek story of Persephone, the obedient daughter. It’s also a lot like a traditional script for women found in many religions, that says you spend your whole life giving to men, to children, and to all others who ask, you spend your life as a Suffering Servant, and you’ll get your reward in heaven.

To be fair, you have to say that this role is not always, or even necessarily, bad. It depends on the other characters in the story, and what roles they are playing. This is often a very rewarding role for women, because their husband, children, and friends do appreciate and love them not in heaven but here and now for their hard work and their good heart.

Nor do you have to be a woman to find yourself in this story. College students living on no money in crummy apartments can identify with Cinderella too, where the role of the fairy godmother will be played by their eventual employer who makes all of this sacrifice worth it. And that usually happens. So it is not necessarily a bad story. But sometimes, a story like that Cinderella story, that “pay now, fly later” script – sometimes it only makes people perpetual victims. And then the only way out of it is to get out of the story, and find a better myth to live by – a more sacred story that treats you like a more sacred person.

Bad stories enslave us to visions that are profane because they are too small to hold our spirits and serve our destinies. Most Cinderellas are perpetual victims. Little visions demean and degrade us; expansive visions ennoble and honor us, and call us toward greater things. That’s what I mean by looking for and changing to a sacred story.

Changing from a small story to a bigger one can make a huge difference. I had a very simple revelation of this sort just yesterday morning. It isn’t dramatic, but it’s the kind of “Aha!” experience you have had before too. I was riding my new bicycle on the Hike & Bike trail that runs along both sides of Town Lake downtown. As some of you know, that’s about a ten-mile loop, going along the north side of the river, then crossing over several bridges and running back along the south side.

The trail, as the name says, is for both bicycles and people who are walking or running. It isn’t all that wide a trail though, and as I got more exhausted and dehydrated, I noticed that those walkers seemed to think they owned the whole path! They’d just spread out, two or three across, so they could talk, forgetting there were bicyclists trying to get by! While I’m riding the bike, I start thinking to myself “Well, get out of the way, will you? It’s supposed to be a bike path!” Then while I had stopped to rest (and work on this sermon), I saw a bicycle brush by some walkers pretty closely. I knew just how she felt! After she had passed them, one of the walkers turned to the others and said “Damned bicycles!”

I began fantasizing about all the bicyclists getting together, hiring a lawyer, and filing some kind of a class action suit against all the walkers, to establish bikers’ rights. Then I imagined that all the walkers and runners would do the same thing, and sue to have the bicyclists removed from the path. After just a short while I stopped that, because it began feeling too much like the world we’re already living in.

Finally, somewhere around the 6th or 7th mile, I backed off, drank a lot of water, and thought about it again. That’s when the minor revelation came, and I said “Oh wait, I get it; it’s not like a clash of bikers’ rights versus walkers’ rights. It’s supposed to be like a kind of dance, and we’re all supposed to help choreograph it so we can move together.” Suddenly, the bike ride was a lot different, and a lot more fun. I was more aware of the whole pattern of movements of bikers, runners and walkers going both ways, and of trying to blend my movements in among theirs so the dance went more gracefully.

When my story got bigger, my life got better. A bigger and more inclusive story is closer to a sacred story than a smaller one. And it pulls you into a bigger and more positive picture of life with its affirmations, rather than shutting you out with its self-centered walls, the way battles of individual rights and entitlements can. I’ll take my bike back there tonight for another round of dancing.

I’m trying to plant the idea that we have the power to change from a small story to a bigger one, and that change makes a huge difference in the quality of our life and our joy in living it.

Let me give you some more examples, from the field of psychology. I don’t think of psychology the way most psychologists do. Our fields overlap, because the word “psychology” means the structure and understanding of the soul – “psyche” is the Greek word for “sou.” I don’t think psychology is a science. I think that psychology, like religion, is an imaginative art. There are many different kinds of psychology, of course, and each school of psychology adopts a basic story, a basic set of assumptions about people, and use that to interpret the lives of their clients – or even to force life to fit theirstory. I’ll give you two vignettes to let you feel how the same life transition can be seen through several very different stories.

The first is a story about the childhood of Manuel Manoleta. He died in 1947, but many bullfight fans still regard him as the greatest and most courageous bullfighter in Spain’s history. When Manoleta was a child, however, he was neither great nor brave. He was delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He stayed indoors and clung to his mother’s apron so much that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. But when he was eleven, all of this suddenly changed, and for the rest of his life, nothing much mattered to him except the bulls. In his first bullfight, while still a young boy, those who were there said he stood his ground without moving an inch. (from The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, pp. 15-16)

What kind of a story could we use to explain this radical transformation? Psychologists who followed Alfred Adler would recognize this as classic compensation, where his adult bravery was just to make up for feeling inadequate as a boy. Freudians would go even farther, seeing this as sublimation, and would describe his adult bravery in the bull ring as just his childhood fears trying to wear masks to fool people. He remains a damaged and frightened boy all his life in this story. It is not a sacred story. It denies both real courage and a nobility of spirit to Spain’s greatest bullfighter, by reducing him to fit a very mechanical kind of story to which some – though not all – psychologists have become addicted. I’ve always thought of Freudian psychology – and most of traditional psychology – as a kind of cousin to the field of hydraulics. They deal with pressures from one part of life that exert pressures on another part of life until they’re released or resolved. Not all Freudians agree with this interpretation, of course.

The second explanation of Manoleta’s transformation comes from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman sees the boy hiding behind his mother’s apron as a boy called to great acts of courage for which he is not yet ready. He is scared of his calling, scared of the greater dangers he must prepare himself to face. Something in him drives him toward his personal destiny. At age eleven, he was ready. And from that time on, the “apron” behind which he hid was bright red, meant to attract the danger of thousand-pound bulls. In this story, little Manoleta had a great calling, even as a child, and his life’s destiny was to grow into that calling and become Spain’s greatest bullfighter.

The second story grants Manoleta dignity, and gives him credit for his courage, while the first brushes it all off as the false costume worn by a neurotic and frightened child. The second story is ennobling; the first is demeaning. Let’s do another one. A similar pattern occurred in the childhood of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin. When he was only three, he heard a concert violinist play a stunning solo at a concert. He felt from that moment that he was meant to play the violin, and asked his parents if they would buy him a violin for his fourth birthday. They humored him by buying him a toy violin made of metal. He burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it. He wanted a real violin, not a toy one. At that time, he wasn’t ready for a real violin. His hands were too small (Hillman, p. 17).

A Freudian psychologist could explain all his later success as compensation or sublimation to cover his childhood humiliation. I don’t think those are good stories because they can’t see the spirit, the calling that Yehudi Menuhin felt even at that young age. (Or, to put more of a point on it, it’s a psychology that has left out the psyche, the soul.) James Hillman suggests instead that he felt a high and noble calling as a three-year-old, and spent the rest of his distinguished life answering and serving that calling as one of the world’s greatest violinists. Hillman’s story is a sacred story because it affirms life, rather than explaining profound and creative drives away as though they were nothing but the neurotic charades of a damaged young boy.

Hillman calls this his “acorn theory” of psychology. He suggests that we carry within us the awareness of the kind of person we are called to be. We are born with a certain distinct style, and need to develop in certain ways to fulfill that style. We are called toward certain things, but not others, and we need to pursue those things toward which we are called. We are driven to certain experiences and adult paths to fulfill real and healthy callings. We’re not driven by neurotic reaction against childhood injuries, but by the sacred calling that wants to connect us with life. That’s a sacred story.

I agree with James Hillman that “We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives,” (p. 33) Another psychologist I’ve always liked is Rollo May, who once defined psychotherapy as “the search for an adequate personal mythology.” That’s what I’m calling a sacred story: an adequate personal mythology, a myth worth living by.

We are the people living in that valley where we look up to see a vague but important face carved in the rock high above. We know there is something terribly significant about that face. Somehow, it calls us toward a noble, even a sacred, destiny. We are not quite sure what that is, for the face seems to change as you move through life, or as you view it from different perspectives.

Or perhaps this is just a myth. Perhaps there is no face up there in the rocks at all. There may have been long ago, but the image seems to be worn away beyond recognition now, and all we have are the stories. They are not much. Children’s stories, fables, old myths, tales and images from our sacred scriptures – these are about all that we have. And so we tell those stories, as Sheherezade did, in order to live. That is why it is so important to know these guiding fictions that shape our lives and to find better myths to live by: because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live.

What about you? What are your stories? What roles are you playing? What are you serving with your life? And is it worthy of that spark of life inside of you that is only really happy when you are being true to yourself?

What if it is true that your heart, your soul, holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it? Unpacking the image can take a lifetime, because we tend to keep forgetting what we are meant to be. But according to a Jewish legend, the evidence for this forgetting your soul’s calling is pressed right into your upper lip. That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips. That little indentation is all that is left to remind you of the fact that your guiding angel is a part of you, trying to tell you what to do. That is why, they say, when we are trying to recall an insight or a lost thought, our fingers go up to that spot. Could it be true? Well, it is certainly loving, affirming and life-giving. And if it is that loving, affirming and life-giving, if it leads us into a bigger world and a more authentic life, isn’t that precisely the kind of truth for which you yearn?

© Davidson Loehr

20 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

I remember, some years ago, hearing a grand old preacher describe almost all religious literature as “love-talk.” He didn’t elaborate, so it’s been rattling around inside since then. It seems like a way of understanding religious expression that makes it easy to plant fantastic thoughts in a down-to-earth life with integrity.

SERMON: Love Talk

This sermon title comes from an 89-year-old preacher who is a friend of mine. I heard him use it during a sermon on Christmas, in which he spoke of all the miraculous and mythic stuff – the virgin birth, a Son of God, a savior – and said it wasn’t meant to be fact-talk; it was love-talk. That’s all he said about it, but those two words stuck with me. That’s the “key” I want to play this morning’s sermon in: thinking about other kinds of “love-talk,” and how they differ from the way we usually talk. You can find examples everywhere.

I hear a Christian friend say “God has led me in warm and wise paths.” At first, I may think “Well, I’m not sure you were led. You’re looking back on it and finding positive rather than negative patterns according to the stories of your faith.” Then I think, “Well, their words sound a lot more comforting and warm than mine do!” I was talking intellectual talk; they were talking love talk.

Or a young man comes in, wracked with guilt because at 32 he knows he’s a failure. He knows he’s let down everybody he cares about, and that he will never amount to anything. Apparently, there is a story I’m not aware of that says unless you have it all together by 32 you’re worthless. He needs a better story, because that one doesn’t give him many options or any respect. But he doesn’t need scientific data about his “Success Quotient.” He needs a better way of talking to himself, a way that has some warmth and acceptance about it. It can be the difference between saying, “She’s an idiot!” and saying. “She certainly sees things differently than I do!”

It’s easy for 50, 60, or 70-something folks to listen to the wild-eyed scheme of a 30-something, and to think, “Those young people think they can do anything! They haven’t lived long enough to know that life is tough.” A more honest response, though, would usually be something like, “I feel intimidated and old by their optimism and courage, because I remember, years ago, when I had it. I wonder what happened to me? I wonder if I could learn how to trust again if I paid attention to them?”

The first kind of talk is self-centered, exclusive talk that shuts others out because it restricts everyone’s possibilities to the limit of our understanding and trust. The second kind of talk assumes that the other people are our moral equals. Or, to put it poetically, that we are all children of God, all limbs on the body of humanity, that we’re all temporary vehicles of life’s precious gift to itself. There’s a warmth to the second that is not in the first. The first wants to stand on cold hard facts; the second wants to establish warm, living connections. That’s a big difference.

150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a few paragraphs about someone who was led from the first way of talking to the brink of the second. The story has been in my mind since I first read it maybe 15 years ago, though this is the first time I’ve ever used it. But see how it fits here:

“The monk, Friar Bernard, lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind. Rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corrupt [people there]. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with [expensive] sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you? [You’re rich Roman pagans, not even Christians! How can you be good people!”]

“Look at our pictures, and books,” they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers spoke [sadly] on what we could save and give to others in the hard times.” Then the men came in, and they said, “[Greetings, good brother!] Does your monastery want gifts? [Let us share with you.]” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he had brought, saying, “Their way of life is wrong – [they are not even poor, and they are not Christians!] Yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Friar Bernard has a couple choices. He can try to forget what he’s just seen and felt, and return to his comfortable beliefs, or he can realize that his beliefs are too small to hold life, or even to serve it in a way that isn’t a curse to others. What does it take to let go of small certainties and grow toward larger but less certain understandings? How do we learn to trust rather than doubt, to hope rather than fear? Or to put it in terms of another metaphor, how do we shift gears?

I’m thinking about shifting because I just bought a bicycle yesterday, and this thing has 24 gears. Last time I owned a bike, a ten-speed was tops, so 24 sounds like a lot. It means this image of all that gear shifting has become a metaphor that I can’t get out of my mind today. So it’s like shifting gears while bicycling up a hill, and suddenly you’re moving slower but you’re climbing the hill you could never have made it up in your original gear.

For me, that’s a little like changing my way of thinking and talking. When I have moved from an attitude of certainty like the Friar’s, an attitude that shuts out everybody not like me, into a more optimistic and trusting attitude, it’s usually come through something happening that shifts my gears. A couple years ago in Albany, I was impatient and angry with a waitress who wasn’t refilling my coffee, wasn’t around when I needed her, and didn’t pick up the money I left with the bill for five full minutes. So I paid the bill and don’t leave a tip. That felt better. Then as I left I saw her in the hallway back by the kitchen. She was crying, another waitress was holding her, and I learned that her father was dying. I snuck back to the table to leave a tip, with an anonymous note saying, “I overheard you telling the other waitress that your father is dying. I’m so sorry.” The service didn’t get any better after I heard that, but the waitress did. And the tip wasn’t for being a waitress; it was for reminding me that she was a human being.

It seems that stories are the best way to talk about the difference between closed attitudes or open caring, between judgment talk and love talk. Here’s another one:

A preacher is riding the city bus on a Saturday, thinking about his sermon, trying to concentrate. The bus stops in front of a big hospital and several people get on. Among them is a man with two young boys. The man sits down, and the boys begin running up and down the bus, screaming and yelling. The father just sits there, doesn’t even lift a finger to control his bratty kids. The preacher tries to be patient, but my God the kids are brats, their father won’t act like a responsible parent, this is a city bus, the preacher has this sermon to write, and enough is enough! So he walks across the aisle and leans down near the man, then says quietly but with a distinct edge, “Sir, I wish you would control your children!” The man looks up at him, kind of dazed, and says, “Oh yes, yes, I should. My wife, their mother, has just died and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Suddenly, you can hear the sound of about twelve gears shifting at once. The preacher’s first reaction was fair. It was a public space, the kids were out of control, and it is fair to expect parents to teach their children to act respectfully toward others. He wasn’t wrong. But he forgot that in this world sometimes people die and those who loved them don’t know what to do with it. Now he suddenly recognizes that man and his sons as people just like him, who bleed when they’re cut and cry or come unglued when they’re devastated. It can happen as quickly as that, the shift from rejecting to accepting, from judging to empathy and caring. It can happen as quickly as that.

“Love-talk” is a clumsy title for a sermon, I know. I mean by it a warmer and more accepting way of seeing ourselves and others, a way that moves us from being against others to feeling among them, a way that replaces cold hard facts with warm living ones.

To put it in the terms of children’s stories, it’s like shifting from Chicken Little, who lived his life sure that the sky was falling, to The Little Engine That Could, who dissolved his doubt and fear by deciding that he thought he could, he thought he could, and he did.

And the point I am trying to make is that we get caught up in our cold hard factual views so easily and so often that we can completely miss out on the chance to be part of something bigger and warmer. Like Friar Bernard and those noble Romans, or the preacher and the grieving, shattered kids and their dad. It isn’t just that we owe this kinder self to others, it’s that without that genuine regard for others we lose out too.

This reminded me of another story that has been in my head since I read it over a decade ago, but which I had also never seen a way to use in a sermon before. It’s a short piece with a surprise ending, by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. See if it sticks to you the way it’s stuck to me:

In the humid New England summer the small cooling plant ran all day, making a deep, loud noise. Around the throbbing machinery was a frame of coarse wire net. I thought the bird was outside that wire net, then I hoped it was, then I wished it was. It was moving back and forth with the regularity of the trapped: the zoo animal that paces twelve feet east and twelve feet west, hour after hour; the heartbeat of the prisoner in the cell before the torture; the unending recurrence; the silent, steady panic. Back and forth, steadily fluttering between two wooden uprights just above a beam that supported the wire screen: a sparrow, ordinary, dusty, scrappy. I’ve seen sparrows fighting over territory till the feathers fly, and [flocking] cheerfully on telephone wires, and in winter gathering in trees in crowds like dirty little Christmas ornaments and talking all together like noisy children – chirp, chirp, chirp chirp! But this sparrow was alone, trapped in wire and fear. What could I do? There was a door to the wire cage, but it was padlocked. I went on. I tell you I felt that bird beat its wings right here, here under my breastbone in the hollow of my heart. I said in my mind, Is it my fault? Did I build the cage? Just because I happened to see it, is it my sparrow? But my heart was low already, and I knew now that I would be down, down like a bird whose wings won’t bear it up, a starving bird.

Then on the path I saw the man, one of the campus managers. The bird’s fear gave me courage to speak. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m just visiting here at the librarians” conference – we met the other day in the office. I didn’t know what to do, because there’s a bird that got into the cooling plant there, inside the screen, and it can’t get out. The noise of the machinery, I think the noise confuses it, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll have a look,” he said, not smiling, not frowning.

He turned and came with me. He saw the bird beating back and forth, back and forth in silence. He unlocked the padlock. He had the key.

I watched the open door, “I saw the bird fly out and fly away.”

The man and I closed the door. He locked it. “Be getting on,” he said, not smiling, not frowning, and went on his way, a man with a lot on his mind, a hard-working man. But did he have no joy in it? That’s what I think about now. Did he have the key, the power to set free, the will to do it, but no joy in doing it? It is his soul I think about now, if that is the word for it: the spirit: that sparrow. (“The Sparrow” by Ursula K. LeGuin)

That’s a story almost guaranteed to trouble ministers! We try to do what we can to be of service to others. We have to keep checking to make sure that we aren’t doing it mechanically, that it is still giving meaning and joy to us. But of course it isn’t true only for ministers, it’s something we can all fall into. It’s an old commandment; you’ve all heard it, to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” That love needs to go both ways: to the neighbor, and to yourself. Why is that so easy to forget?

At the beginning of all our services, I speak of “questions more profound than answers.” I think that life’s most enduring questions are more profound than answers. They can pry open a door of our awareness, or shift gears for us, so we leave here seeing things a little differently, perhaps asking different questions of ourselves. Today, I’m going to leave you with questions, because I can’t tell you what kind of love-talk you need to hear, what picture of the world you need to live in that brings you life rather than just adding time.

But I do have one more story, to set up the questions. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was trying to respond to someone who thought what was most important was knowing the truth. Wittgenstein gave him this story to think about. Imagine there was this man who lived at a certain time. He was a very religious man, and believed all the teachings of his particular faith. They gave him a sense of living in a blessed world, and through these beliefs, he lived and died at peace, a happy man who loved others and was loved by everyone who met him. Then, just two weeks after he died, one of the sciences suddenly discovered that everything he believed had been false. Very well, his beliefs were false. But could you say his life was false? And if not, then just what is the role of truth in the task of living fully, lovingly and well?

© Davidson Loehr

13 May 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

READING: A Mother’s Day Proclamation

In this country, the Unitarian Julia Ward Howe was the first to try and start a Mother’s Day, back in 1870 – though it would have been a very different kind of Mother’s Day than we now have. She had lived through the Civil War. She even wrote the words for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But she saw some of the worst effects of the war: not only the death and disease, which killed and maimed the soldiers. She worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized the effects of war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war. In 1870, she was distressed at the rise of the Franco-Prussian War, distressed that war seemed to be part of the human condition rather than a one-time slip. So she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted to organize a Mother’s Day for Peace, and for that she wrote the declaration which appears as responsive reading #573 in our hymnals:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet firs, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

CENTERING:

Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. And so it is Mothers’ Day:

– 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.

It is 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.

SERMON: Our War On Drugs: A Mothers’ Day Sermon

When President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day in 1914, it was a very different day than Julia Ward Howe had intended.

Today, Mother’s Day is largely celebrated with trips to a special restaurant, gifts and flowers. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Mothers — and fathers — deserve all the recognition and all the pampering they can get.

But something was lost when we lost the roots of this day in its gutsy opposition to wars that killed the children of mothers. And it is that spirit I want to honor today, by spending a little time on a war that is doing more violence, creating more crime and draining the economy faster than any other war we have going. This is our war on drugs.

On April 25th, I was invited to attend a luncheon for and speech by Judge James Gray, a Superior Court judge from California with over 20 years on the bench, who has been crusading for a fundamental overhaul of our drug laws for the past nine years. I bought his book, and also read a magazine filled with articles from others with long stints in law enforcement who also argue that, in every way imaginable, our war on drugs is even more ill-conceived and harmful than we can imagine.

America’s widespread use of cocaine began at least 115 years ago, when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 to 1900, and Bayer Pharmaceutical Products introduced heroin in 1898, and sold it over the counter for a year before Bayer offered aspirin. Those are just interesting little facts you may not have known.

But our most famous mistakes – before the mistakes we are making in today’s war against drugs — came with the prohibition of alcohol, from 1920 to 1933. During this fourteen-year period, our country saw a huge increase in crime, violence, police and political corruption, and death from poisoned liquor. It also saw a high consumption per capita of stronger beverages like whiskey instead of weaker beverages like beer, in accordance with a cardinal rule of prohibition: there is always more money to be made in pushing the more concentrated substances. It’s cheaper and easier to transport a fifth of whiskey than a case of beer. We spent a lot of money to make strong alcohol more plentiful, more expensive, and more deadly. It wasn’t the last time we would employ this remarkable tactic.

Federal funding for law enforcement efforts against alcohol was increased over five times in the 1920s; the prison population quadrupled, with two-thirds of inmates incarcerated for alcohol and other drug offenses. However, the national murder rate increased steadily throughout alcohol prohibition. Then it decreased for eleven consecutive years after Prohibition was ended. The only phase of Prohibition that worked was when we ended it, took the federal government out of it, and let each state decide how to handle its local problems.

Marijuana was our next failure, in the 1930s. We treated it in exactly the same way, with exactly the same results, only more devastating.

We now know that one lasting effect of prohibiting marijuana was the growth of drug cartels in countries like Colombia to process and distribute not marijuana but cocaine in this country. The reason was the same as selling whiskey rather than beer: the more concentrated form was easier to conceal and transport, and far more profitable.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon formally declared that America was at war against drugs. A 1984 law increased bail and lengths of sentences for drug offenders, and also increased federal power.

In 1986 we added mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of drugs. The Crime Bill of 1994 provided for capital punishment for some types of drug selling and for mandatory sentences of 20 years to life.

Every time we have tightened up our drug laws with all of this “get tough” stuff, the harms inflicted on society by the presence of these drugs have just increased. The laws have been successful in filling our prisons with the less organized, less violent, less brilliant offenders, leaving this lucrative market to be filled by those who were more organized, more violent, and smarter. (Judge James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs [Temple University Press, 2001], p. 31)

Two things are really driving this failed drug policy today: our political system, which rewards (by electing) the politicians who posture as being the “toughest on drugs” – like our newly-appointed Drug Czar – and the “runaway freight train” of federal money. The annual budget for our War on Drugs is now about $20 billion, which does not even begin to take into account all of the additional state and federal budgets for the hundreds of other programs.

What has it bought us? Some dramatic statistics, for one thing. Between 1973 and 1983, the number of state and federal prisoners in the US doubled to about 660,800; and then that number more than doubled again by 1993 to 1,408,685. We had 668 inmates for every 100,000 residents. That gave the US a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world except Russia, which reported a rate of 685. (Gray, p. 29)

There are six times more people behind bars in this country than in all twelve of the countries that make up the European Union combined, even though they have 100 million more citizens. More people are behind bars for drug offenses in the US than are incarcerated in England, France, Germany, and Japan for all crimes combined. The state of California has more people incarcerated than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined, even though California has only about one-tenth of their combined populations. In fact, the US, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. (p. 30)

Let’s put the danger posed by illegal drugs in perspective. Over 500,000 people die in the US each year as a result of the use of legal drugs – tobacco and alcohol – while less than 10,000 die per year from the combined use of all illegal drugs. Yet someone is arrested for a marijuana offense somewhere in the US every forty-five seconds. That number is almost as high as the number of total arrests for all murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults combined (695,201 to 717,720). (p. 30)

We have made lifetime prisoners out of a nonviolent underclass of drug-using and addicted people. The average prison term for drug offenders in state prisons has increased – up 22 percent since 1986. But in the same period, average prison terms in state prisons for violent offenders have decreased by 30 percent. (p. 32)

Another result of prison overcrowding is that wardens throughout the country are routinely forced to grant an early release to violent offenders so that nonviolent drug offenders can serve their sentences in full. This is because, for the most part, federal law requires that even nonviolent drug offenders must serve their entire sentences; however, there is no such law for bank robbers, kidnappers, or other violent offenders.

Texas is number one in prison incarceration. Louisiana and Oklahoma are second and third, but we don’t have to worry about losing our Number One status for awhile. It costs taxpayers between $20,000 and $30,000 to keep just one inmate confined for a year. The average cost for a state inmate over the age of fifty-five increases to about $69,000 per year because of increased health costs. (37)

And here’s a statistic that might be interesting. After six years on the job the yearly salary of a California prison guard with a high school diploma was $45,000 in 1994. At the same time, the starting salary of a tenured University of California associate professor with a Ph.D. was $43,100. For prison guards, stiff mandatory sentences mean job security. So you won’t be surprised to learn that in the 1998 election, the association of prison guards (California Correctional Peace Officers Association [CPOA]) was the state’s number one donor to legislative races, with donations to all campaigns totaling $5.3 million. These contributions included a $100,000 donation to a group working for the passage of a tough three-strikes sentencing ballot measure. This $5 million wasn’t spent for the good of the state; it was spent to insure jobs for prison guards. The money we are spending on our drug war – while it has only made the drug problem a thousand times worse – has infected many federal and state agencies, many professions and unions, whose jobs are fueled by this money, and who therefore find reasons to support it. But they are not supporting it for the health of the country. They are supporting it for the security of their jobs and their purpose. They aren’t evil people; they’re just people, with the full helping of self-interest that most of us have.

Police are even better at catching women for drug offenses. Between 1986 and 1996, the number of women imprisoned for drug offenses increased by 888 percent, compared to an increase of 129 percent for non-drug offenses. Typically the women involved are low-level lookouts or “mules” who transport drugs for short distances either as favors for their husbands or boyfriends or for a small fee. (p. 43)

About 75% of these women prisoners are also the single parents of young children; this is Mother’s Day for them, too. But legally, these mothers have abandoned their children, who are sent to child dependency court. Even setting aside the enormous human costs, the expense to the taxpayer of keeping one child in a group home can be $5,000 per month, above and beyond the costs of incarcerating the mother. For a mother with two children, this means that about $145,000 per year of taxpayer money is spent to keep a mother separated from her children. (p. 44)

Then there is the impact of our massive prison program on ethnic minorities. In 1995, 33% of young black men in this country were either in prison, on parole or probation, a total of about 827,440 young black men in one year. The figures for Hispanic males was 12.3 percent, and for white males it was just under 7 percent. (p. 44)

What do they do in prison, besides learn how to be better criminals? Well, a lot of them take drugs. In 1998, 9% of the 1.6 million men and women behind bars tested positive for illegal drugs – drugs they obtained in prison. Even high security prisoners like Charles Manson are testing positive in prison for illicit drugs – in fact, Manson was transferred from one high security prison to another for being caught selling drugs to other inmates. (49)

We can’t keep drugs out of our maximum-security prisons. How would we ever keep them off the streets? It is easier for our children to get illegal drugs than it is for them to get alcohol. (p. 50)

Our drug laws have turned illegal drug pushing into such a high-profit industry that there will always be people willing to take the risks.

For instance, if you bring $100 worth of cocaine from Colombia to any city in the US, it will be worth between $5,000 and $10,000. That’s a return of fifty to one hundred times your investment. Where in the world could you find a cash cow like that? Police and military forces are helpless to counteract economic forces that huge. (p. 57)

According to a United Nations International Drug Council Program report, world trafficking in illegal drugs made up about 8 percent of all world trade as of 1995 – it must be higher today. That was about $440 billion of international drug transactions. Illegal drugs are a bigger business than all exports of automobiles. (p. 80)

Our drug wars guarantee there will be hundreds of millions of dollars to be made selling drugs. When there’s that much money to be made, every time we imprison another drug dealer, all we do is create a new job opportunity.

You don’t have to look to national statistics to see the complete failure of the war on drugs. You can go down to Sixth Street and see it first-hand. Or look on the front page of yesterday’s Metro & State section of the Austin American-Statesman in the story titled “Drug problem loiters near police headquarters.” Since January, our police have arrested 66 people for dealing narcotics in the area and 143 for possession. It’s the area where the 15-year-old boy was stabbed in the throat last week.

Police Commander Harold Platt, who is in charge of the officers paid to patrol the area, says crack dealers have been there as long as he can remember. But with profits like these, you can’t get the dealers off the streets. Even if you do arrest and imprison a dealer, he says, “there are six people waiting in line, trying to take over his business. You arrest somebody, you finally get them put away, and the next day, somebody else shows up.” (Austin American-Statesman, Metro & State, Saturday May 12, 2001, pp. B-1 and B-3) With 30,000 people going into the Sixth Street entertainment district each weekend, there’s just too much money to be made selling drugs that are expensive because they are illegal, are illegal because we made them illegal, because we have still not learned the lessons we had learned 70 years ago when the prohibition of alcohol ended because of exactly the same failures.

Getting “tough” on drugs also inevitably translates into getting “soft” on all other crimes, including the more violent ones. With drugs taking a priority on police, court and prison time, there just aren’t the officers, the prosecutors, the courts, or the prison cells to hold the really violent offenders.

Our drug policy has been increasing crime in our country for decades, to the extent that, according to conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr., “More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from [drug overdoses].” The cure is worse than the disease. (p. 73)

This gives insanity a bad name!

Law enforcement corruption, sparked mostly by illicit drugs, has become so chronic that the number of federal, state, and local police and law enforcement officials serving terms in federal prisons increased fivefold in four years, from 107 in 1994 to 548 in 1998 (p. 74). By now, it’s probably tenfold.  (http://www.uudpr.org)

Today, when Mother’s Day is celebrated with feasts and flowers, it feels out of place to talk about wars, even wars on drugs. But think of these awful facts about our unwise, our disastrous, our murderous drug war, and then listen again to some of the words from Julia Ward Howe’s declaration written in 1870, and see how well they go together:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies – Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.”

“As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women – meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”

Today, she speaks to women, men, and children, and I say Amen, Julia Ward Howe,

Amen!