Falling on the Sunday before Easter, the story of Palm Sunday is about Rabbi Jesus traveling into Jerusalem, even though he knew he was likely to be killed there. He refused to be treated as a hero or a king, even though that’s what the people wanted.
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
It may be trite to say that each of us has unique gifts, but what are the implications of that? Our individual differences mean that we never see the world exactly the same way. What a challenge for living together in the world! But Unitarian Universalism gives us a head start. What a resource, if we can bring ourselves to offer it.
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
We live in a culture that often values a kind of hyper-individualism and self-reliance, which can lead us to project an air of invincibility. Yet research by Brene Brown and others in the social sciences indicates that the opposite may be the key to living wholeheartedly. Being willing to embrace and express our vulnerability may be the source of authenticity, human connection, and empathy, as well as the ability to both love and accept being loved.
Call to Worship
Put Away the Pressures of the World By Erika A. Hewitt
As we enter into worship, put away the pressures of the world
that ask us to perform, to take up masks, to put on brave fronts.
Silence the voices that ask you to be perfect.
This is a community of compassion and welcoming.
You do not have to do anything to earn the love contained within these walls.
You do not have to be braver, smarter, stronger, better
than you are in this moment to belong here, with us.
You only have to bring the gift of your body,
no matter how able;
your seeking mind, no matter how busy;
your animal heart, no matter how broken.
Bring all that you are, and all that you love, to this hour together.
Let us worship together.
Reading From Brené Brown
No vulnerability, No empathy.
In a culture where people are afraid to vulnerable, you can’t have empathy.
If you share something with me something that’s difficult, in order for me to be truly empathetic, I have to step into what you’re feeling, and that’s vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability…
You can’t access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable…
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Sermon
Here’s a quote that I really love, “Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.”
That’s from a series of online lectures by Dr. Brené Brown, a well know researcher, author and speaker from the University of Houston School of Social Work. She defines vulnerability as “exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk”. I watched her lectures as a part of preparing for this sermon.
Dr. Brown says something else that I SO wish I had seen before I submitted the short description and title of this sermon for our newsletter.
While discussing people she has identified through her research that she calls the “wholehearted”, by which she means people who have embraced and can express their own vulnerability, and thereby are living more authentic, loving and connected lives, Dr. Brown says that embracing vulnerability doesn’t mean never complaining about the bad things that happen in life – the things that hurt. In fact, the wholehearted can complain as much as anyone else. They just do it in a specific and more life fulfilling way.
She says that they “piss and moan with perspective.” “Dang,” I thought, when I heard her say that, “Now that would have made a great sermon title”.
“Pissing and Moaning with Perspective” “A Unitarian Universalist take on the Problem of Suffering and Evil.” Actually, I think she’s Methodist or something.
Anyway, Dr. Brown goes on to say that while embracing our vulnerability is not weakness, neither does it mean we will never have problems, make mistakes or suffer. It is recognizing that we will, and loving ourselves and other people, not in spite of these things, but because of them.
To be alive is to be vulnerable. And yet our cultural norms favor extreme individualism and self-reliance that can strongly encourage us to attempt to a false sense of invincibility.
Paradoxically, cultivating this false sense of invincibility and certainty can drain our courage for loving and accepting being loved. It can lead to shaming and rob of us of the belonging and connection that are at the center of what it means to be fully human.
Now, I still struggle with all of this sometimes. A couple of Sundays ago, I had the pleasure of teaching one of our Sunday morning religious education classes for kindergarten and first grade children. After the lesson, it was too cold and rainy to let them go outside and play, so we had to come up with activities that they could do inside.
A few of them got bored and decided they would turn me into an indoor jungle gym. Soon, I found myself under siege by a group of five and six year olds demanding that I play with them by being their climbing, swinging and seesaw apparatus. I was outnumbered, out maneuvered and outlandishly on the verge of experiencing pure joy – if only I would let myself give in to it. And I resisted it.
Dr. Brown calls this resistance, “foreboding joy” – when we won’t let ourselves fully experience joyful moments because we start to project what can go wrong. We fear the joy because we know it will end. We start imagining all the sorrow that may come. It’s like we try to ward off the sorrow in our lives by stifling the joy. Yeah, that’ll work.
So, here’s all the foreboding and shaming thoughts I was having: “Oh my God, I have to keep them on the carpeted area or one of them will get hurt and it’ll all be my fault and the church will get sued and I’ll never get to work within Unitarian Universalism ever again.”
– and –
“What will their parents think if they come to pick them up and find that they’ve tackled their Sunday school teacher and taken over the classroom?”
– and –
“Good golly man, you have Reverend in front of your name now, you can’t be seen acting the fool with a bunch of first graders.”
Sometimes my shaming thoughts have a British accent. Luckily for me, the more I resisted, the more they upped the ante. Five and six year olds have a lot more energy and determination than me. So, I discovered that if I gave in and joined in the fun, they would actually more easily accept some parameters like staying on the carpeted area.
And it was pure joy.
Why do we adults so often experience shame around playfulness?
Here’s another Brené Brown quote, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy and creativity, of belonging, and of love.”
I went through all of that in a matter of just a few minutes. Plus, luckily, my back had healed enough by the following weekend that I was able to attend the 50th anniversary commemorative march in Selma.
Research conducted after the 1966 mass shooting from the U.T. tower here in Austin, as well as other such research, has found that one of the things people who commit such crimes tend to have in common is that they were not allowed to engage in play as children.
Some of the other research I looked at said that for adults to engage in playful activity is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because in our culture we are often taught a very strong work ethic that shames such activities. To play, we also give up a sense of control and propriety and allow ourselves to lose our sense of time and place.
And yet, the research also shows that play is one of the ways we get in touch with our deeper and more authentic selves and risk allowing others to see us more deeply. One of the many wise things I think our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, has done for First UU Austin has been to infuse our spirituality and religious practice with a sense of fun and playfulness.
In addition to the foreboding joy I mentioned earlier, Dr. Brown outlines a number of other ways that we avoid vulnerability and that ultimately rob of us of living fully. I don’t have time to go through all of them today but here are a few of the major ones that I think you’ll probably recognize.
“Perpetual disappointment” – you know folks who do this – these are the Eeyores of our world. “Oh well, best not get too excited because something’s gonna go wrong eventually.” Always the life of the party.
“Numbing” – These are the ways that we avoid feeling at all or at least dull our emotions to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Numbing include the things we normally think of as addictions such as alcohol and drugs, but also includes things like excessive television, eating, video games, smart phone use; working too much; buying too much, etc. After 911, we were told to all go shopping, right? Brown notes that “we are the most obese, in debt, addicted and medicated adult cohort in known human history. We numb.”
“Perfectionism” – She calls this the “20-Ton shield” when it comes to avoiding vulnerability, and of course, it is a trap because we can never be perfect, and perfectionism can stifle our internal drive to strive for excellence because even excellent will not be perfect, so why take any real risks at all? For me, it has some times been a way of sort of super-numbing.
I was the oldest child in my family growing up. Now, you may have heard about the oldest sibling syndrome wherein under stress, we can become over-functioning, something very closely related to perfectionism. Especially in anxious situations, over-functioners tend to try take care of everyone else – and maybe even micromanage a little: know what best for everyone, which is usually some level of perfection that’s impossible. My parents divorced when I was twelve and so I got an especially strong case of oldest child syndrome. It is something I still have to watch out for.
The other thing that happened after the divorce is that my grandparents on my mother’s side became like a second set of parents to me. They helped raise us. We spent as much time at their house as at our own. My Grandfather became my father figure, and I pretty much idolized them both. They became role models for me.
So when I got the call one day, about 17 years ago now, that my grandfather was in the hospital and it did not look good, I went into sort of an overfunctioner’s perfect storm. I didn’t stop to cry or grieve or feel anything. I called Wayne and started making plans to make the drive over to take care of my family. I was going to do this grieving thing perfectly!
And when we got to the hospital, and he was no longer conscious so that I did not even get to say goodbye, I didn’t cry or grieve. I took care of everyone else.
And when I got the call the next morning that he had died, I didn’t cry. I got up, got dressed and started planning and taking care of things. And even when I gave the eulogy at his funeral, I still didn’t cry, nor at the reception afterwards, nor on the drive back home when it was all done, nor after we got back home. I was too busy “functioning”.
And then, I think it was maybe a day later, I couldn’t find my glasses, and so I went out to our car, thinking maybe they had fallen under a seat or something and started searching for them. I didn’t find them, but I did find a map my grandfather had given me – he was a traveler and big on maps – and he had written his name on it. My grandfather had this habit of writing his name on all his belongings. Someone gave him one of those noisy, obnoxious, electronic engraving pens one time. Big mistake.
And suddenly, sitting there alone on the floorboard of the car, with no one left to take care of anymore but me, I ran out of ways to avoid it.
I started crying. And for a while it felt as if I might never stop.
A friend of mine who’s a playwright once had one of his characters, after having just lost her family in a car wreck, say, “I don’t have to cry now. I can cry tomorrow, or next week or next month or next year, because it’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop hurting.”
I guess that was kind of what I had been doing – trying to put off feeling the hurt. It doesn’t work eventually, but his character was right about one thing. It never really does completely stop hurting. We just learn to carry it with us. And I think maybe that’s as it should be because for me it is also carrying them with us.
My grandparents are the people who taught me to have a love of nature. To this day, even though they have both been gone over 15 years now, I will be on a nature hike and see something so beautiful that it fills me with joy, and I will think that I have to call them and tell them about it and their old phone number, 409-962-2010 will still come into my head, and then I will remember that I can’t and it stings.
The thing is, somehow because of this, the joy of the experience is also deeper, greater, more complex. I call it a joy so full that it is an aching joy, rather than that foreboding joy we talked about earlier.
Writer and poet Kahlil Gibran said it like this, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
And that’s why numbing robs us of living fully. That’s the reason to seek lives of vulnerability and authenticity. If we refuse to allow sorrow to carve into our being, we will also never experience the fullness of that aching joy. The thing is, living vulnerably is hard, especially when we live in culture that often values the opposite, so if you work for a high-powered law firm or in a cutthroat corporate office, I don’t recommend starting there with practicing vulnerability.
But I do think we can start in our personal lives – with our families and friends. And I think that we can create in this church a space where we can bring our vulnerabilities and our whole selves, and eventually maybe it does spread to those more tougher, more difficult environments.
To do this, I think we have to understand not only what expressing vulnerability is, as I’ve been discussing, but we also have to also know what it is not.
It is not sympathy seeking or sharing every thought that comes into our heads. It is not expressing our feelings in a way that is harmful or shaming to others. It is not monitoring every conversation or lurking on email lists, online groups or at the back of meetings just looking for something to be hurt or offended by. That’s not practicing vulnerability, it’s just drama trolling.
I think maybe we start by being willing to ask for the space to be vulnerable and by being willing risk it – to reach out and say, “My son is in the hospital and I could use some help”, or “I just got that promotion I have been wanting at work, and I am thrilled and at the same time terrified over whether I am really capable of it, and I don’t have any where else to share it.” Too often in our culture of self-reliance, we do not ask for help even from our church.
I think, though, that we are creating in this congregation, a place where we can practice living authentically.
A place where we are allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect and to make mistakes and be forgiven for them rather than shamed for them.
A place where we are courageous enough for empathy to thrive. A place where we sometimes play with the spontaneity and abandon of young children. A place where we love and accept love and radiate that love out into our larger world.
I think we can create a space where life’s hallowed sorrows and aching joys can be sung into the rafters and held by beloved community.
What if we make that church?
In our increasingly individualistic, disengaged and power-centered world, wouldn’t creating “the church of sacred vulnerability” be subversive?
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
The Question Box sermon is a tradition in many UU congregations. Today Rev. Meg answers questions submitted by members of the congregation.
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
First in a new fairy tale sermon series, this Sunday we’ll talk about the things that take over our lives and compel us to do things we would rather not do, go places we meant not to go. How do we retrieve our spirits?
Starting a fairy tale series, once a month or so, we’ll use a fairy tale as the text of a sermon. Fairy tales are like the dreams of a culture. In a dream, every part of the plot is part of the dreamer. Fairy tales tell a truth about the human journey.
I’m often invited to do workshops for my colleagues on humor and truth-telling. We use commonly told folk tales in the workshop as sermon texts, and I wish you could hear some of the masterful riffs on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Three Little Pigs. We have kinder, gentler versions of these tales than the Grimm ones. Lots of people since those two lawyers took down the stories from Huguenot maids have scurried to take the sex and gore out of them. The Greek myths, too, evolved over the centuries. Once in a while in these workshops, though, I’m surprised when, at the end of a sermon, the three little pigs sit down with the wolf to a delicious vegetable stew. What is up with that? Again, a lie, or just editing? The story has never presented itself as history, yet it still shocks me when the “real” story is altered.
The Red Shoes is a strange little story with a terrible ending. It may be only a fragment of a story, or it may be part of a series. These tales were told to the brothers Grimm, two lawyers, by Hugenot maids. There are many versions of this one, as of all of them, and this is the one told by Hans Christian Andersen.
The story.
A peasant girl named Karen is adopted by a rich old lady after her mother’s death and grows up vain and spoiled. Before her adoption, Karen had a rough pair of red shoes; now she has her adoptive mother buy her a pair of red shoes fit for a princess. After Karen repeatedly wears them to church, they begin to move by themselves, but she is able to get them off. One day, when her adoptive mother becomes ill, Karen goes to attend a party in her red shoes. A mysterious soldier appears and makes strange remarks about what beautiful dancing shoes Karen has. Soon after, Karen’s shoes begin to move by themselves again, but this time they can’t come off. The shoes continue to dance, night and day, rain or shine, through fields and meadows, and through brambles and briers that tear at Karen’s limbs. She can’t even attend her adoptive mother’s funeral. An angel appears to her, bearing a sword, and condemns her to dance even after she dies, as a warning to vain children everywhere. Karen begs for mercy but the red shoes take her away before she hears the angel’s reply. Karen finds an executioner and asks him to chop off her feet. He does so but the shoes continue to dance, even with Karen’s amputated feet inside them. The executioner gives her a pair of wooden feet and she works as a servant.
Hans Christian Andersen interpretation:
The girl is vain. Vanity keeps you from spirituality, it is never satisfied, and so must be cut out.
Jungian interpretation:
We have our hand made life. It fits us, it feels rich and colorful. We get tempted by something snazzy that comes along, and offers us shinier, more accessible pleasures.
The old lady is this offer of a better life, but she takes away the girl’s way of being in the world. Her value system, where she stands. They were thrown in the fire, and the girl’s nature was restricted.
She fed her hunger with a too-shiny version of her own nature, her own dance. It took off with her, because its connection to her was not reciprocal. They danced her. She could not take them off and then put them on again.
We fill the hunger with work, a relationship, substances. They run away with us. We find ourselves going right when we wanted to go left.
You have to go to your inner executioner when the dance gets too horrible. You can try to kill off just the addiction, but many times you have to change everything. All new friends. Sometimes a new place. New patterns. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Lose the old values, the old places you stood, lose your old dance entirely. Suffer. Work as a servant.
Other interpretations:
Your interpretation of the story has to do with your culture, your values. Is this a parable against vanity? Is she really punished with the loss of part of her body for that?
Is it about addictions? Things that take you where you didn’t want to go, trying to get to the place you remember?
Is it about your gifts. People like us might think red shoes are good, and if you want to wear red shoes, even to church, you are more than welcome to. We’ll celebrate them with you. Could it be your individuality? Your gifts? Your gifts will keep you dancing until you die. It will be a good dance sometimes, but every artists knows it can be a terrible dance too. Many artists cut out their art, many people sever themselves from their dreams and then live miserably, broken, like the soldier who activated the curse of the girl’s shoes.
What does it mean? People can feel their take on a story is the correct one, and everyone else is an idiot. Is the dress white and gold or black and blue? Fundamentalist militants allow their interpretation of religion to wipe away all of the principles they may once have had. The people who don’t agree with you are against you, and they must be rubbed out.
Someone else’s shoes indicate someone else’s dance, and if you find yourself doing someone else’s dance and that you’ve lost your smile and path and heart, then you are leading an inauthentic life. There’s no “sin” here for which Kate is being punished, nor for you when you find you’ve adopted someone else’s notion of how to think, how to worship, what’s a practical major in school, what’s the right kind of job.
Help comes from mentors, who may even be gone now. But whatever remains of them, perhaps only the spiritual presence or the vestiges inside you, they are there for a reason when you need them. Call on memories of “moments of pleasure” — these are meditations but with healing personal content. Lose yourself, or shed your old self in a dionysian ecstasy which in one sense is being torn apart by Maenads but in another is a dismantling in order for rejuvenation or rebirth. (as Marianne Williamson wrote: a nervous breakdown is a highly underrated path to enlightenment)
Your soul is whole. It is a constant pulse, a tidal force that pulls you to do what you need to do to be authentic.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
This Sunday we welcome the unexpected and celebrate that which is special among us. Guest ministers Kristian Schmidt and Christian Schmidt from churches in easter Massachucetts deliver the message.
Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Let’s talk about love on this Valentine’s weekend. How can we learn to love one another and this planet on which we live? How can we get better at receiving love? We take a lesson from “The Book of Love”.
Sermon
This weekend is all about love. We’ve been sending greetings of love to friends and family, special ones to partners, spouses and lovers. There are ironic greetings, romantic ones, sexy and sweet and grumpy ones. Love comes in all the shimmering, sparkling shades of the rainbow, including shades of gray. About which the UU group Leather and Grace has come out with a statement, you can look it up online.
You may have heard me say that the purpose of life is to learn to love and be loved. Just my opinion, with no bearing on what you believe about its purpose, but there it is.
It is important to me to be honest about love, but I can only be honest from my perspective, my studies, my experience. When I was in seminary we learned that love was an act of will. You choose every day to love the people you love, the way you love them. I was married to a man I met in seminary for seventeen years. I often heard him say this to other people, that love was an act of will. After many years, this was embarrassing, unsatisfying. I wanted to be loved passionately, because I was fabulous, I wanted to feel it. When, for many many reasons I decided to end the marriage, I wondered if he might be able just to will not to love me any more. Easier for everyone. It turned out to be awful, harder, crazier than that, as most of you who have gone through a divorce already know.
Some people say love is complicated. In the Christian Scriptures there is a description of love in the letter to the Corinthians.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
One thing I love about the Christian Scriptures is that they proclaim that God is love. That is a basic foundational proclamation in that major religion, and I appreciate its followers who hold fast to that and stand on it with both feet. I find it interesting that some people whose whole religion says “God is Love” also sometimes seem to imagine a God who is not patient and kind, who is envious and boastful, easily angered, and who DEFINITELY keeps a record of wrongs. Do they not read their own Scriptures?
Human love relationships aren’t always patient and kind, even though we want to be. It’s hard for us not to keep a record of wrongs. They say that the happiest relationships are the ones where people have bad memories. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were many different loves, but never the same love twice.
Some of us are in love and others are between loves. Some are in long term relationships, and others are in ones that have just been born.
The text for this morning is a song sung by The Magnetic Fields
The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing
But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything
The book of love has music in it
In fact, that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb
But I, I love it when you sing to me
And you, you can sing me anything
The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know
But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
You can sing me anything. You can read me anything. That’s courage. That’s vulnerability. Open to hearing about dumb things, transcendental things, instructions for dancing, opening heart shaped boxes. So many of us have rules about love. You open it, you close it. You dropped it, you pick it up. You hurt me, I hurt you. Don’t talk to me any more about former lovers, about money, about my drinking or using. For me, it’s nutrition or music theory. I don’t want to hear about bee pollen or 251 substitution in jazz or solfege. I’m wrong about that, though.
Is it courageous to be open to being read to, sung to from any page? There is plenty that masquerades as love, but is accusing and needy, tit-for-tat, abusive, eye-rolling, ignoring, withholding, or toxic. These are for sermons to come. The bad love series?
Real love is what we’re talking about today. It can still hurt. It can still be difficult, but in the midst of the struggle you have, at your core, the knowledge that this is what you want. The voice saying “GO! Save yourself!” Is not there. I think good love is medicine, whether it’s romantic, friendly, family, animal companion love, or watching videos of elephants who are friends with dogs. Love is powerful.
What about receiving it? Some of us are better at it than others I work on my own capacity to believe and feel that I’m loved. Every other day. Let me read you what I wrote about it.
I didn’t even make a New Year’s resolution this winter. I’m not sure why. For the last ten years or so my resolutions have been very short, and they have come to mind, one by one, in late December. The first one was “Tell the truth.” I never thought I didn’t tell the truth, but as I tried to keep the resolution on a moment-to-moment basis, I realized how much a sweet small lie lubricates social interactions. I found a way around those and counted down the months till I could indulge in them once again.
About some things, you just have to lie. Clogging, for example. I had someone ask me once how I liked clogging. (We are in the Appalachian region here, and there is a right good bit of it going on at fairs and festivals.) I answered that clog dancing held a special place in my heart. It does: the place where I imagine hell, if there were one, and what it would be like. For me it would be filling out paperwork while a flatbed truck full of white people clogged in the background to a speeded-up track of “Give Me That Old-Time Rock and RoiL” But I digress.
Telling the truth was what I paid attention to that whole year, discovering that my untruths mainly consisted of lies I told to myself.
“Be quiet” was the next year’s resolution. It floated into my head during prayer and meditation. I did an inner double take. “What? I make my living speaking. How can I be quiet?” The Universe responded with-well, with quiet. I had to figure it out. It turned out that I needed to pay attention to being quiet inside, to not having to have an answer for every question I was asked, to being content to let others dominate a group discussion, to not voicing every opinion that was in my head.
Over the years there have been some easy resolutions and some hard ones. Who could have known that the year I resolved to “enjoy life” would turn into one big challenge? There you go. The Universe/God/Spirit/Wisdom is like that sometimes.
This year no resolution came to mind. I’ve been working on a question, though: “What would it be like if you felt really loved?”
Maybe the resolution is to wonder about this question. When I feel loved, my mind breathes better. My body relaxes. My behavior steadies. Something in my spirit opens like a rose. I want to feel it if I can, from the people around me or from the Spirit of Love that flows like an ancient river through the universe.
On my first CD I printed a quotation from a letter Martha Graham sent to Agnes de Mille. According to Agnes de Mille: “I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy…. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Martha said to me, very quietly, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
When I feel loved, it’s easy to keep the channel open, and that’s really what I want.
Maybe I could get really good at loving the world just every other day. Maybe on that day I could love myself as well. Just every other day, let go of self-improvement and challenging other people’s mistakes. I invite you to think about doing this, too. Every other day, maybe we could let go of wondering if we are good enough, of wondering if we are doing it right. Every other day rest, if we can, in the warm animal pleasures of wind, water, food, earth, friends, love, and beauty. Every other day put in abeyance the drive to feel that we are smart enough, thin enough, cool enough, doing enough.
The reason I wonder about doing it every other day is that, having read Kant, I have to ask what the world would be like if all of us did this every day. I’m not sure how well it would work. Maybe we would melt into self-satisfied goo. One the other hand, the world would be sour and clammy if we didn’t do it at all. So, on alternate days we can all agree that this is New Age pap, and we can sharpen our intellectual claws in ourselves and one another with edgy glee.
It’s February. Surrounded by talk of love, I’m growing aware that I do have a resolution for the year: I get to wonder about love. Maybe being grounded in love makes change easier, rather than lulling us into staying the same. Maybe if we felt safer we would grow more freely. What if we felt really loved? This year, I aim to find out.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse finishes her ongoing sermon series on the Ten Commandments. The tenth commandment has to do with greed and desire.
Call to Worship
The Summer Day Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Reading
Ellen Bass
The thing is to love life,
to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
Sermon
We have reached the end of our series on the Ten Commandments. This last one is the one that forbids coveting anything that is your neighbor’s. I was halfway through the work on this sermon before I realized I was going in the wrong direction. I was writing about how our US consumer economy is built on coveting, how advertisers work to make you want things you didn’t even know about, things you don’t need. I was writing about how we have lost our sense of “enough” and how that is the root of addiction, how people wanting more than their share is pillaging the planet.
Then I read the commandment again and remembered that it wasn’t about wanting. It was about wanting things that belong to someone else. If you just want something you can plan to save to buy it, or make something like it. Coveting, wanting things that belong to other people can drive you crazy.
Tenth Commandment
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
You can’t save up to buy that particular thing. It’s your neighbor’s. In this passage it talks about your neighbor’s wife like she’s a thing, and in those days the wives did belong to their husbands, as did the children. The commandment never could have read “don’t covet your neighbor’s husband.” Number one, that would be talking to women, which they would not have done, and number two, it would have sounded wrong to them to speak of a man in a list of animals and things. I’m enough of a 21st century person so that it sounds wrong to me to speak of a spouse as belonging to their partner. People do drive themselves crazy all the time, though, wanting a person who is in love with another person. People should be with the ones they choose to love. That’s just my opinion, and that’s another sermon.
Coveting, wanting something that is someone else’s doesn’t only make you eat your heart out, It sets you up for wishing something bad to happen to your neighbor, or it makes you think about how you deserve that thing and they don’t, all encouraging an adversarial dynamic rather than a compassionate or cooperative one. It can create bad feeling between you, guilt and anger and sorrow. The community is damaged. In a coveting situation, you are damaged and/or the community is damaged.
TEARING THE FABRIC
My friend Pat Jobe says he knew a woman who would see a nice car or a beautiful house, and she would say, “Ooooh, I wish that was mine and they had one better.” That’s how she got around the sin part of coveting. UU professor Philip Simmons is the author of “Learning to Fall” and speaks about what he’s learned while living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Writes that any wrong-doing tears the fabric of being. He points to our seventh principle, that we promote the view that everything is connected in an interdependent web of existence, and says that web, of which we are a part, sustains damage when we act destructively.
“All world religions place wrongdoing in this larger context. Papa-krita, the Vedic Sanskrit word that comes closest to our “sin,” denotes any action not in accord with the cosmic order. In Taoist philosophy, Tao refers both to the fundamental nature of things and the way of being in alignment with it. The Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma acknowledges that actions… not in alignment with the order of things, affect us both in this life and lives to come.”
Simmons urges us “to acknowledge that what we think and say and do matters in ways beyond our ordinary understanding. And so the sacred work of healing is harder than we thought: we confront our sins to heal not only ourselves and our relationships but the universe.”
Our lives are rooted in that connection, in oneness of all existence, and it is our religious practice to see that connection, to practice behaving as if it were real, to let the implications ripple through the living of our days.
Even if we are above wanting things, we UUs, in our passion for self improvement, can covet other people’s good qualities to the point that it makes us slide in to a spiral of despair and disappointment in ourselves. Forest Church, long time minister of All Souls UU in NYC wrote a great piece where he says that reading prescriptions for happiness is often so depressing that he thought he would try to point people in the direction of happiness by writing about how to be unhappy. “Advice on how to make yourself miserable could brighten your day. In this spirit, let me offer three bits of miserable advice that almost everyone can follow to his or her own detriment.
If you are anything like the rest of us, I expect you have developed a surefire talent for undermining your confidence by selectively comparing yourself to others. For instance, you have a co-worker who is enormously creative. Overlook the fact that she has just broken up with her fifth husband, has a “little” problem with alcohol, and is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Forget all that. Simply measure your creative capacity against hers and weep.
Then there is that friend who is always the life of the party. You know how immature and insecure he is. No matter. He is always the life of the party. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be the life of the party sometimes?
And how about your rich second cousin? Just look at him. He has everything anyone could want. Admittedly, you’ve never seen him smile and he barks at his dog. But how happy you would be with only half his money!”
Make a composite person, he advises, someone with all the kindness of this one, the beauty of that one, the health of this one, the money of that one, the happy family life of this other, and then compare yourself to that composite person. Then you can really be miserable!
Whether it’s coveting our neighbor’s house and garden, their money or their health, their ease with people or their loving parents, their vacation home or their sunny disposition, we all do it. It’s in our natures, for many among us. If you ever eat your heart out over someone else’s height or weight or complexion or their relationships or their personality or their talent, know that you are human. I understand that’ it harms the community for us to be coveting, but we do it. What now?
Philip Simmons gives us this wisdom:
“We do not heal ourselves by scourging or rejecting our sinful parts but by drawing them into a circle of holiness made large enough to include them. There’s nothing our demons enjoy more than a good fight, nothing that confuses them more than our embrace. Our goal, always, is to transform evil through love.”
Let’s lay aside the semantics of whether coveting is sinful or evil, and just agree that it can do damage. Can it be embraced in a way that helps?
How can we embrace the “demons” of coveting and jealousy?
Julia Cameron is a therapist who works with artists. In her first book, The Artist’s Way, says that jealousies can point you toward what you are being called to bring into your life next. When you list the things you are jealous of in other people, you have a “map” of where you need to go next.
One artist who did this laid hers out in a grid: Who I’m jealous of. Why. What action does this indicate? She blogs at bluedogbarking.com
Who
Why
Action Antidote
Nancy
Her ability to organize, get things done, and accomplish the goals she sets for herself
Start working
Natalie
Everyone gushes over her blog posts
Get real. Quit looking for validation through blog comments and appreciate the comments I do receive.
Martha
Her incrediable intelligence, memory, and ability to articulate.
Listen closely and learn from her.
One of my spiritual teachers, Martha Beck, would say “do you really want more comments? How would you feel if you got them? Warm, validated? What then? You would be empowered to keep going? Confident? What is it you’re really after?
Coveting is reality. We all do it. It just causes you suffering to think you shouldn’t, because it causes suffering whenever your thoughts argue with reality. Even if I could, I don’t want to hammer you into making yourself quit wanting things other people have. If you want to quit wanting, there is a way. You meditate, you learn to be still a lot, you practice being grateful for what you have. Meditation will help you grow in your spirituality, which will help you with craving and wanting. Gratitude is a powerful spiritual practice, which I wholeheartedly recommend. To supplement that, in the meantime, when you covet, when you are jealous, when you want something someone else has, write it down. Ask yourself why you want it. What do you imagine it bring to your life? What is the lack you are really feeling? What could you do to fill that lack? Coveting is an indicator of where you need to go. Use that energy for good. Use it to move yourself toward wholeness. Demons love a good fight. See if you can embrace them instead, turning their energy toward the good.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
The ancient Celtic festival of Brigid celebrated the fertility of the earth and its animals. We celebrate our animal companions in the intergenerational Animal Blessing service.
This Sunday we are celebrating a Blessing of the Animals. Why would be bless animals? Because they bless us so often. We don’t talk about them very often, but animals as companions have touched almost all of us, and it is good to acknowledge that. As children we may have fallen asleep with the purring weight of a cat on our chest. Or on our head. We watched TV in the company of the family dog. We went exploring in the woods and our parents would feel safer knowing that the dog was along with us. They comforted us when we cried, they made us laugh, they were a personality in the midst of the family. For most of us, they still do those things. Here is what people say about animal companions: they give unconditional love. They forgive you anything. They think you are the be all and end all of the universe. They are sensitive to your feelings. They don’t care what you look like, what your sexual preference is, what your beauty level or your car model or your job is. They just love you because you belong to them.
Animals have been in relationship with humans for thousands of years. Often in a mutually beneficial way. Often hurting one another. Humans were traveling with jackals, helping each other hunt. The dogs hung around the campfires and ate scraps, sounded the alarm for intruders. Enjoyed some protection from the humans, and gave them protection in turn.
In ancient Egypt, they worshipped cats and dogs. By that time, people had dogs as pets. We know because they were buried, sometimes, with their favorite dogs. The god of cats was named Bast. Egypt was the first country we know of that had laws against harming dogs.
Animals as companions can do so much for us. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in May, 1999 demonstrated that older people who have pets tend to have better physical and mental well being than those who don’t. A 1997 study showed that elderly pet owners had significantly lower blood pressure overall than their contemporaries without pets. There is an experimental residential home for the elderly called the Eden Alternative, which is filled with over 100 birds, dogs, and cats and has an outside environment with rabbits and chickens, has experienced a 15 percent lower mortality rate than traditional nursing homes over a span of five years.
Animal Assisted Therapy has been beneficial for kids recovering from abuse or other trauma. There are a few therapeutic homes for kids that use animals to calm agitated kids, to connect with autistic kids, to heal wounded kids.
Mending a bird’s wings, caring for sheep and cows, sitting with cats on your lap, relating to dogs, seems to be healing for children. Helping another life through the caring of disabled or unwanted animals teaches nurturing and lets the children see beings who are surviving and relearning trust, just as they must do.
We sometimes act like they communicate the same way we do. We smile at the animal to say hello. I hope they understand that. For animals, baring teeth is a threat. We would be in trouble if we said “look, that cute dog is smiling at me,” when we saw a dog baring its teeth. We feel close to animals, so we attribute to them the same emotions we would have in a certain situation. If a dog comes to you with ears lowered, chin down, you may think they are sad or being pitiful. That is their non-threatening friendly look. Their excited “Hey! Let’s go!” look is easier to read. Scientists who observe animals say they do have emotions. They just get excited, humiliated, threatened and confused by some things we don’t normally think of. Some things we have in common though. We want to be touched, loved, we want food shelter, attention, territory, a purpose, loyalty, belonging, exercise and fun.
Even for ordinary families in ordinary time, there is a strong psychological and emotional attachment between people and their pets. Studies have revealed that most pet owners view their pets as both improving the quality of family life by lessening tension between family members and waking up their owner’s compassion for living things (Barker, 1993; Pet Theories, 1984; Voith, 1985). Using a projective technique to investigate owners’ closeness to their pet dogs, one study (Barker and Barker (1988, 1990) found that dog owners were as emotionally close to their dogs as to their closest family member. They reported that more than one-third of the dog owners in their study were actually closer to their dogs than to any human family member. I read a book called The Social Lives of Dogs by a classically trained anthropologist who began observing dogs instead of far off tribes. She and her husband had a dog who the husband described as “the keeper of my soul.” He and the dog were inseparable. She asked him idly one day if he had to choose, would it be, her on the dog. He was quiet for a moment. “Don’t ask me that,” he answered.
Companionship helps us be healthy and happy. It is part of the art of living.
Economist John Maynard Keynes, saw the purpose of human history as our species learning to “cultivate the arts of life.”
It was in a publication called “Yoga World” that I saw a wonderful description of how to be a good companion. Sometimes an animal can be this to a human, sometimes a human can be this to an animal. Sometimes we can find this with another human. To be a good companion, it says, “You will need to be caring and concerned about his or her happiness. As a friend, you will want to share his or her concerns and labors. Naturally, you will want to make his, her, life more pleasant. You will have to know life and yourself well enough to become trustworthy, capable of keeping your agreements. To be a friend, your word must be true. A true friend, you will hold good will in your heart even when you misunderstand or distrust your gracious companion. You will refuse to indulge bad moods brought on by your inadequacies. It is not easy to be a true friend.
May we all find a being like this is our lives. May we sometimes be able to be a friend like this ourselves, to another being. Our job here on earth is to learn how to love and be loved. As our animal companions teach us those things, we are grateful to them.
Bless you my friend. You show me how to enjoy my life as I enjoy yours. You give me the chance to nurture you with food and exercise. I get mad sometimes at the things you do, but you always forgive me. I hope I get as good at forgiving as you are. Thank you for blessing my life and making it better. I want to make yours better too.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Most of us would like to think that we are good at demonstrating empathy, but the truth is, we all sometimes fall short. We definitely know how it feels to be cared for and to feel less than important ourselves. How do we navigate that narrow space between showing that we truly care and risking getting it wrong?
Call to Worship by Theresa Novak
Come into this place.
There are healing waters here
and hands with soothing balm
to ease your troubled days.
Bring your wounds and aching hearts,
your scars too numb to feel.
Your questions and complaints
are all welcome here.
Rest awhile.
Let the warmth of this community
surround you,
hold you,
heal you.
When you feel stronger,
just a bit,
notice those who need you too.
They are here.
They are everywhere.
Weep with them.
Smile with them.
Work with them.
Laugh along the way.
Pass the cup.
Drink the holy fire.
Take it with you into the world.
We are saved
and we save each other again, again,
and yet again.
Reading: “Who Knows You?” By Kathleen McTigue
Some of the old New England graveyards are serene little pockets of neglect. Their slate tombstones lean at odd angles and the elegant calligraphy is barely legible, spelling out obscure colonial names like “Ozias” and “Zebulon.” Some of the inscriptions that can still be deciphered tell poignant stories of sons and husbands fallen in long-ago wars and young wives lost in childbirth. Clusters of brick-sized stones mark the deaths of children in some catastrophic winter. The engraved cries of lament – “Farewell Beloved Daughter” – evoke a tug of grief even now, though the people named have been dust and earth for two hundred years or more.
One of these graveyards in my town evokes a sadness of a different sort, held in the inscription on a modern tombstone marking the resting place of Franklin F. Bailey. He was born in 1901 and buried in 1988, so he lived a long time. His epitaph says simply, “Here lies a man that nobody really knew.”
What a strange message to leave echoing down through the years- and what a freight of sadness is held in that short phrase! It tells of isolation, loneliness, a life lived invisibly, a voice unheard. “Here lies a man that nobody really knew.” We circle around each other like small planets on which each of us is the only citizen. Spiritual practices are meant to turn us directly into that inner landscape, so we can know it well and without illusion. But their larger purpose is to show us pathways to one another, because with practice we come to know a bedrock truth of this human life: However different each inner landscape is from the others, the same winds blow through us all. They are the winds of longing and fear, doubt, hope and regret. No one is exempt. That simple recognition opens a deep well of compassion, both for our own struggles and for those taking place behind all the faces that surround us.
I wonder about Franklin Bailey every time I take a walk through that little graveyard. I also wonder about the Franklin Baileys who walk among us. Who today is living a life of unremitting loneliness, in my town, in my neighborhood, perhaps even in my own family? Before it comes time for a sad epitaph summing up their isolation, perhaps we can extend a bridge of compassion, allowing them to feel seen, heard, and touched-to be known a little, in the brief, common walk of our lives.
Sermon:
“Doing Empathy”
Several months ago, the shockingly disturbing video of NFL player, Ray Rice, knocking his fiance, Janay Palmer, unconscious with a punch to the face and dragging her out of an elevator was widely circulated online and on national news. In addition to the expected criticism of Rice, were attacks on the intelligence and personal integrity of the woman who shortly after being publicly assaulted, became Rice’s wife. The world wanted to know, why in the world would this woman stay with this terrible, violent man? Though this question came from a genuine concern for her safety, the harshness of the criticism was hardly empathetic. In a show of empathetic solidarity, survivors of domestic violence began posting their stories to social media under the hashtag, “why I stayed.” These included such responses as, “Because he isolated me from my friends and my family and I had no one to turn to when the abuse started.” “It’s not one day he hits you, it’s everyday he works hard to make you smaller.” And, “Because he called me and told me he had a gun to his head.”
Although these women, all survivors of domestic violence, themselves, did not have to make a huge leap of the imagination to empathize with Janay Palmer, their bravery in sharing their stories publicly (many for the first time) helped to take some of the nation’s displaced anger off of Palmer and place it back where it belonged, on Rice, the abuser. Those who hadn’t personally experienced domestic violence were given a different perspective and the reality of easier said than done gave way to a deeper understanding of the complexities of the situation for the abused.
Empathy is defined by Karla McLaren, author of “The Art of Empathy,” as, “a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts, and needs of others, such that we can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.” What may be different about this definition of empathy is that it does not simply end with feeling and understanding the emotions of others, but it is active – it requires for us to do something; to “offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.”
To do empathy, we must employ the Platinum Rule, which I have spoken of here before- Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Empathy is not about the self, but it is extremely beneficial to the practitioner. Empathy requires that we lay down our defensiveness, our advice, and our ideas about what we believe a logical response would be and attempt to view the world from another’s eyes. In order to fully appreciate another’s perspective, sometimes a remedial lesson in history is required. For example, (this is the sermon in which I’ll talk more about sports than you’ll probably ever hear me again)
The Washington Redskins insist upon keeping an extremely racist and antiquated name, despite the outcries of thousands of Native Americans and their allies. This centuries-old slur was originally used to describe the scalp of a slain Indian, paraded proudly by white invaders as a war trophy. Understanding this helps to see those rallying to change the team’s name less as over-sensitive crybabies and more as fellow humans, deserving of dignity.
For me, I have a similar reaction when I hear fans gush over the Texas Rangers baseball team. Many don’t realize that the Texas Rangers were originally employed to deal with the “Indian and Mexican problem.” The Rangers were a government-sanctioned lynch mob that regularly hunted random nonwhite Texans in order to rid the land of us. When I hear people cheering their name, I can’t help but shudder. It’s as if a sports team was named the KKK or Gestapo. It’s difficult, though, to voice such emotions when we have all experienced less-than empathetical responses to concerns that others do not share. I would hazard a guess that all of us have been on the foot-in-mouth end of such interpersonal exchanges, as well.
Like most virtues, empathy does not fall into the either-you-have-it-or-you-don’t category. Empathetic behaviors can be learned, practiced, and honed until empathy as a feeling comes as second nature more often than it did before and empathy as an action no longer feels as inauthentic and methodical. We live in an incredibly individualistic, self-centered society. We are given messages that solving our own problems and not burdening others with being the constant Debbie Downer is the definition of strength.
We spend gobs of money trying to understand ourselves, with introspective work such as psychotherapy, meditation retreats, and self-help books. While such individualistic pursuits are valuable and knowing oneself well does help us to understand how we relate to others, too, oftentimes we do not give outrospection the same attention as introspection. We are not really taught how or even the value of learning to understand how the “beliefs, experiences, and views” of others are different from our own and how these differing world views influence the actions and emotions of others, of those closest to us and of our nations enemies, alike.
In truth, research today shows us that although we are led to believe that humans are inherently an aggressive species, that waging war is a natural tendency, we are actually neurologically wired toward empathy to the point in which those relatively few who cannot exhibit empathy or cannot learn to understand the emotions and motivations of others are pathologized as “dangerous or mentally ill.” We have been taught that, biologically, we are all engaged in a fight to survive, that only the fittest will win, and that these self-preservation instincts are what has awarded us the top spot on the food chain. However, the knowledge that we are among the animal species who have survived and thrived through cooperation and empathy is gaining ground among contemporary scientists. Dutch primatologist, Frans DeWaal, tell us that, “Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia. If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would build upon, rather than going against, our natures.”
One recent breakthrough is the discovery of “mirror neurons” in our brains. These neurons become more active both when we experience pain and when we witness others experiencing pain. I always wondered why I can’t watch those silly home video shows- most often than not, someone is always diving into a cactus or falling off a trampoline! My mirror neurons can’t take it! Christian Keysers, head of the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands institute for Neuroscience, sums it up like this,
“Let me be bold and say that this tells us a new story about human nature. As Westerners in particular, we are brought up to center our thinking on individuals- individual rights, individual achievements. But if you call the state of your brain your identity (and I would), what our research shows is that much of it is actually what happens in the minds of other people. My personality is the result of my social environment. The fate of others colors my own feelings, and thus my decisions. I is actually we. Neuroscience has actually put the “we” back into the brain. That is not a guarantee (and my wife will agree) that some of my actions are not egotistic and selfish, but it shows that egotism and selfishness are not the only forces that direct our brains. We are social animals to a degree that most didn’t suspect only a decade ago.”
The implications of this finding are vast. While we may have thought of ourselves or others as simply, “a people person,” or the opposite, we now know that these mirror neurons can be strengthened through practice! If you heard my last sermon, you might be thinking, “Ok” so I’m not great at demonstrating empathy YET!” Or, the opposite, “I have not YET learned how to reign in my tendency to be over-empathetic and take on the world’s pain. I will learn healthy boundaries YET!” As I mentioned earlier, through practice of empathic action, we can develop new neuropathways and actually begin to sincerely feel and behave like skilled empaths.
We have all had failed attempts at demonstrating that we care, so what is the right formula for showing empathy in a way that it will be well-received? The both sad and exciting truth is, there’s no one way to do empathy well. Empathetic conversation should be approached as a spiritual practice. It is not something we will win awards for if we get it right more often than not, but our humanity will grow and our soul fed each time we try, especially if we fall flat, because we’ll be learning new approaches. Epathetic exchanges will never be formulaic. This is a form of improve that requires both parties to be observant and to make guesses at the emotions of the other in order to respond appropriately.
A technique called “mirroring” was popular for awhile, though this always felt condescending to me when I was the recipient. This is an attempt to make sure that there is clear communication between two parties, but doesn’t really require that the listener attempt to step into the shoes of the other and understand their beliefs, feelings, and motivations. Besides, it just feels like I’m talking to a parrot or in an echoing cave when someone starts in with, “So what you’re saying is… ” and repeats what I’ve just said. I feel heard but not listened to.
It’s important, especially for talkative folks who have some of the world’s best advice for any occasion, such as moi to remember that empathetic listening is not about us, it’s about the one who needs our care at that moment. This is easier to remember with those outside of our inner circles. Our partners, closest friends, children, and other family members are usually the ones who get the short end of our empathetic sticks. We want so badly to one-up a sob story with our own, “You think that’s bad, wait till you hear what happened to me!” Or, we give in to the urge to prove that we are in the right, “Well, don’t yell at me for your lousy day! I’m not your bullying boss! All I did was ask how your day went!”
In “The Art of Empathy,” McLaren advocates for the need for occasional “conscious complaining.” Meg has told me that she’s employed this technique with Kiya. She’ll have had a frustrating encounter with someone while out and about & say, “Kiya, I don’t need advice or another perspective. I just need you to let me kvetch and then say, “Those rats!” (She said to be sure to mention that it’s never about anyone from the church.) Kiya will nod and do as requested. McLaren says that the role of the listener here is to “support the complaining with helpful, upbeat, “yeahs!” and “Uh huhs!” The safe haven created in this way for complaining, immediately removes the toxicity from it.
The point of empathy is to be aware of what the one in need of it needs. How do you know what they need? One way is to ask! It helps to take a crack at naming the emotion you’re sensing and then ask what the person needs, in words that come naturally to you. For example, “It seems like you’re really angry at the way your boss is speaking to you in front of your colleagues. Is that the case?” “Yes! He doesn’t treat anyone else this way and I’m sick of it!” “What do you think you need?” “I think I need to talk to him about it. I’ll go and see him on Monday.” “Good. I think that’s a great idea. It’s time he know how you feel about all this. Let me know how I can support you. I imagine a conversation like that can be anxiety-provoking to plan for.”
Empathetic conversations are adventurous and require courage & a willingness to be wrong sometimes. Hazzarding a guess at the emotions of another involves risk. Sometimes people deny their emotions because they are not ready or willing to be that vulnerable or simply because you are way off base. Cultural and linguistic differences can lead to confusion about emotional display, as well. I remember asking a Cantonese speaker if she had been having an argument on the phone with a relative. I wanted to check in with her that she was alright. She had been speaking so loudly, she was almost yelling and talking in short, staccato-like phrases as if she were highly annoyed. She was perplexed by my question. It turns out, as I learned from living in San Francisco for over a year that Cantonese sounds very angry to those who are unfamiliar with its common cadence and the cultural norms surrounding pitch and volume.
To include outrospection in our quest for true understanding of our fellow human creatures is a spiritual pursuit and, as we are ever-changing and as we continue to come into acquaintance with new, complex individuals, the adventure of practicing empathy will remain ever-relevant. Blessings on your journey. May it be filled with risk and reward!
Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
As we as UUs continue the struggle for racial justice, it is important that we know from whence we come.
Call to Worship Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.
Reading Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Eulogy for Rev. James Reeb
So I can say to you this afternoon, my friends, that in spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period, something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away. Out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened. Those at the bottom of society, shirtless and barefoot people of the land, are developing a new sense of somebody-ness, carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. “People who stand in darkness have seen a great light.” Here and there an individual or group dares to love and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity.
Sermon
Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, Selma, Alabama. In reaction to the footage you just watched being broadcast on the evening news, people across America were horrified. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior dispatched a telegram calling on clergy of all faiths to join him in the struggle in Selma.
And religious people, both clergy and lay people, from all around the country responded. They went to Selma, and they stood in witness and solidarity, following the leadership of the African Americans in whose struggle they had joined. Eventually, 500 Unitarian Universalist lay people and 250 of our ministers would march with Dr. King.
And doing so changed them. It transformed them.
As Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed puts it in his new book, The Selma Awakening, they experienced in a visceral, emotional way the melding of their espoused religious values with their values in practice.
Rev. James Reeb was among the first Unitarian Universalist ministers to arrive in Selma, and he participated in the next March across that very same bridge you saw in the opening video. This time, Dr. King himself led the march. They started from the Selma African Methodist Episcopal Brown Chapel where they had gathered. When they reached the other side of the bridge, they kneeled to pray, and then Dr. King surprised everyone by leading them back to the chapel. He later explained that a judge had temporarily put a restraining order on the march, and that he feared for the lives of his followers if they continued the march without a court order to protect them. He pleaded with those gathered to stay a few days until the judge might rule in favor of allowing the march to go forward. Most of them did.
That evening, Reeb and two other UU ministers, Orloff Miller and Clark Olsen, had dined at Walker’s Cafe, an African American establishment because they had been told wouldn’t be safe at a whites only restaurant. As they left the cafe to walk back to Brown Chapel, they were attacked by a group of four or five white locals, at least one of whom was carrying a large club of some kind. He struck James Reeb on the head with it, knocking him to the ground. Eventually, they had all three ministers on the ground, kicking them and screaming, “You want to know what it’s like to be a nigger around here?”
Soon afterwards, James Reeb fell into an unconscious state from which he never awoke. Two days later, on March 11, 1965, Marie Reeb, his wife, made the painful and difficult decision to turn off the artificial support that was the only thing keeping his body alive.
The murder of this white minister galvanized white Americans and Unitarian Universalists even further. It did so in a way that the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the young black man who had been shot by an Alabama state trooper a few days earlier had not.
President Lyndon Johnson called Reeb’s widow. The Unitarian Universalist Association board adjourned a meeting it was holding so board members could journey to Selma to attend Reeb’s memorial service held at Brown Chapel on March 15. Dr. King delivered the eulogy.
That same evening, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress and introduced the bill that would in a few months become the Voting Rights Act. In doing so, he spoke of the suffering endured by the peaceful protestors in Selma. He said, “Many were brutally assaulted, one good man, a man of God, was killed.”
A few days later, the judge ruled the march could go forward and ordered government protection for it. On March 21 the march began, protected by troops sent by President Johnson.
No doubt, Dr. King’s and his leadership’s organizing and rhetorical skills were the primary factors that brought about these changes. Still there is an irony in the fact that, as Rev. Bill Sinkford, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association has written, ” …racism was at work even in the way the victory in Selma was achieved. The death of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black man, did not receive widespread press attention. It did not result in hundreds of white clergy coming to stand in solidarity. It did not produce support from the federal government or the president. It took the death of James Reeb, a white man, to do that”.
In The Selma Awakening, Mark Morrison-Reed notes that the clergy and the lay folks who had been viscerally and emotionally awakened by their experiences in Selma returned to churches and a religious denomination ill prepared to move beyond an intellectual commitment to religious values such as equal opportunity, integration and facial justice, all rooted in a belief in universal brotherhood (such was the male-centered language of their time).
They returned to encounter fellow Unitarian Universalists who could not understand what those who had gone to Selma now did – that true integration could not entail assimilation – that what was needed was a melding among equals, and that this required black empowerment. A few years, what has become known as the “Black Empowerment Controversy” would erupt within Unitarian Universalism. And that could be and has been the topic for a whole other sermon.
Reed notes that for both the Universalists and the Unitarians before the merger, as well as after they merged in 1961, there was a disconnect between these espoused religious values and their values in practice. He cites the following as evidence of this dichotomy:
– Worship devoid of hymns and liturgy reflecting the African American experience and their desire for more emotive, embodied spirituality.
– Religious education materials that very rarely reflected African Americans at all.
– Resistance to training, fellowshipping and calling African American ministers.
– Congregations and fellowships that tended to be fervidly intellectual, individualistic, and humanistic. And that most often located themselves in suburban areas, away from black population centers – often at the end of dead end streets where it would be hard for anyone not specifically invited to find them.
– Very few African Americans serving on governing bodies, both at the denominational and individual church levels.
And, yes, some of these continue to be a struggle for us. Though we have made great strides, our march out of Selma continues even today.
Another Unitarian Universalist also did not come back from Selma. However, she was not honored or lionized in the way that James Reeb was. For many years her story was rarely if ever told, because (a) she was a woman and (b) she was a woman. That this is so is another example of values in practice failing to uphold our espoused values.
Viola Liuzzo was a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit and worked with the NAACP. She was married and had five children. She answered the call to Selma by getting in her car and driving there against the objections of her family.
On the day that the march triumphantly entered Montgomery to end in a joyous rally at the Alabama state capital, she was helping by driving marchers back to Selma. On a return trip to Montgomery, a car full of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her and fired shots directly at her, hitting her twice in the head, killing her instantly. Her car careened into a ditch and came to a stop when it struck a fence.
One of her sons later spoke of how his fathers hair turned from black to gray seemingly overnight; of how, after her death, her family endured crosses being burnt in their front yard; of how he and his siblings were beaten up at school and told their mother deserved what she got because, as a white woman, she had no business being there in the first place.
I am pleased to say that today, she is honored in a memorial at our new Unitarian Universalist headquarters building, alongside the males who also died at Selma.
All white juries in Alabama acquitted the Klansmen who killed Viola Liuzzo of murder charges.
Likewise, all white juries acquitted the men who murdered James Reeb.
A grand jury failed to even indict the state trooper who murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson. In 2007, charges against the trooper, James Fowler, were revived. He pled guilty to manslaughter and spent a whole five months in jail.
And these failures within our criminal justice system seem a little too much like what we have seen across our country in the past months. I want to show you another video.
Not 1965 Alabama. 2014, the streets of cities across America. And though much HAS changed, still, we live in a time when the prosecutor in the Michael Brown shooting allows grand jury testimony from an eyewitness that’s key to backing up the story of the officer who shot him, even though the prosecutor knows that the witness has made racist statements and likely was not even at the site of the shooting when it occurred. And there was no indictment.
We live in a time when the coroner rules Eric Garner’s death a homicide, and yet a grand jury fails to indict the officer we have all seen holding Garner in a chokehold as he cries, “I can’t breathe”.
We live in a time when police shoot and kill a 12 year old African American boy for holding a pellet gun in a city park, and a 22 year old African American young man for holding a toy rifle in a Walmart, and yet white, open carry advocates can roam the aisles of our stores and parade through our streets carrying actual semi-automatic weapons and absolutely nothing happens to them.
We live in a time when even son1e peaceful protests have been met with military equipment, billy clubs and tear gas.
We live in a time where our criminal justice system is much more likely to search, arrest, charge, convict and sentence to prison people of color than white people who commit the very same crimes. Then, once convicted of a felony, we live in a system that often prevents these same people of color from being able to access federal benefits, find employment and housing, and, yes, often bars them from voting.
We live in a time when the Supreme Court has gutted a key element of that very same Voting Rights Act that people in Selma struggled, suffered and sometimes died for.
We live in a time when states across the country are passing laws clearly intended to disproportionately prevent people of color from voting.
We live in a time when lynching and Jim Crow have never completely left us. They’ve just morphed into new institutional forms.
I think that we Unitarian Universalists, we are receiving telegrams beckoning us to rejoin and redouble our efforts in the struggle again. And like those Unitarian Universalists that went to Selma, we are being called to show up, to put our espoused religious values into living practice. I believe this congregation has the means and a mission that requires us to do so.
On Sunday, March 8 of this year, Unitarian Universalists from around the country will cross that bridge in Selma again to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original march. I hope a sizable contingent from this church will be able to be with them.
If you are not already participating, the church has a number of social action and interfaith activities related to combatting racism. I hope you’ll consider visiting the social action table today to find out how you can get involved.
Over the coming months, we will have several opportunities to participate in religious education and discussions about multiculturalism and working against racism and oppression. Please, join in!
I believe that ultimately we are called to do this because engaging together as allies in the struggle for racial equity is part of how we, all of us, can be transformed. Systems of oppression and silos of “otherness” prevent us all from realizing our full human potentiality. Breaking them down is how we can know fully the interconnectedness and love and unbridled community that are luring us toward a world that is more life giving and loving. It is how we reach for our greatest creative possibilities.
Benediction
“We are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a singly garment of destiny”.
Martin Luther King’s words still ring true and powerful today. And that means that even as we leave this sanctuary today, our work together as a beloved community goes on as we do justice that can transform both the lives of others and our own.
Likewise, the courage, community and compassion we experience here go with us also.
Go in peace. Go in love. Blessed be.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
It is so easy to wish for more for ourselves and our lives, and to become victim to frustration or despair. “Yet” holds more power than we can ever imagine. How will we wield our “yets” in 2015?
Reading: “Feeding the Pit” by Barbara Merritt
Part of the advantage of having an elevator being installed two feet from my office door is that I can easily listen in on the construction crew’s conversation. It echoes up from two floors below. It rings down the hallway. And in between the drilling, the chain-rattling, the pounding, and the sawing, comes some helpful theological reflection.
This particular conversation occurred between a man who was balanced on a forty-five degree ladder over a three-story, open elevator pit, and the man assisting him. The man on the ladder, who gave me a greater appreciation for having been called to the ministry, asked for four bolts. His colleague said, and I quote, “I’ll give you five; you need to have one to feed the pit.”
Now I can only surmise that this wisdom had been hard won. People who work over great cavities of open air probably learned through experience about gravity. Objects fall. They will fall a great distance when there is nothing to stop them. Ergo: if you are going to suspend yourself over a deep pit, don’t assume that everything will go perfectly. Don’t assume that a nut or bolt won’t roll away. Assume that additional resources will come in handy. Acknowledge the challenging nature of the assignment. Take a relationship with the pit where you willingly and gracefully accept that it will occasionally need to be fed.
The alternative is simply too costly. To assume that things will go smoothly- that hammers won’t drop, that nails won’t bend, that parts won’t wander- is to place yourself in special danger. Especially when your workplace is at the top of a ladder suspended over a fifty-foot drop.
Pits are real. Some places in human existence pose genuine danger. Illness, conflict, and accidents can quickly take everything we hold as precious.
Some people advise, “Don’t look down. Pretend that nothing bad could ever happen to you or anyone you love.” This is the “Ignore the Pit” school.
Another popular opinion is to “Decry the Pit.” “Isn’t it terrible that there are pits in this world?” “Ain’t it awful that I have fallen in?”
Many allegedly smart people have spent their entire lives arguing about why pits exist and justifying how offended and angry they are that dangerous places continue to exist.
Some become profoundly cynical when they discover how painful a pit fall can be. “What’s the use?” they sigh. “With so much destruction and unhappiness in the past, and so much possible misery in the future, why build at all?” They become paralyzed with fear.
At the moment, I am drawn to the simple teachings of the elevator man. “Feed the Pit.” Right from the beginning, I should expect to encounter danger, demons, difficulties, and delays on the journey. We need to build a generous contingency fund into every life plan; and carry a few extra rations of energy, kindness, and hope in our pockets to offer to an unpredictable and hungry world.
Sermon: “The Power of Yet”
It’s officially the second week of January, folks. Those of us that make New Year’s resolutions are either congratulating ourselves for the hard work of sticking to them, forgiving ourselves every few minutes for breaking them, or hating ourselves for ever trying this nonsense, believing we should know better by now. Why try when we know we are helpless in the face of temptation to fall back into bad habits?
I would be lying if I said that it isn’t often that Jim Hensen’s fuzzy muppets didn’t point me toward deeper understandings of life. Listen to enough of my sermons and you’ll hear their influence, both directly and indirectly more often than an adult without children should admit to. But, when a seminary friend, who has young nieces, posted the video of Janelle Monae singing “The Power of Yet,” my series of rapid-fire responses led me to understanding that there was something in this concept for me, and I would guess others, as well, to still learn. At first, I thought it was a cute little ditty that can teach kids perseverance. Then, I wondered if the message could have meaning for me, as an adult. I agreed that it could, but then became immediately suspicious of it. After all, I’m pretty sure that, even with practice, Big Bird will surely learn to slam dunk before I will. And, though I can add 2 + 2, Elmo’s voice will have dropped before I ever master calculus. Sports and math have never been my forte.
This is ok, I always told myself. For, even though I was labeled “gifted and talented” by first grade and quickly developed an identity of a smart kid who didn’t have to try as hard to get a good grade, I was satisfied to barely pass math and to sneak to the back of the line each time it was my turn at the bat in P.E. None of this was important to me, I said. I was more of a creative arts kind of girl, anyhow. The truth was, I was humiliated when I was made to go out in the hall with the student teacher and do multiplication drills when everyone else seemed to know them already and I began to dread P.E.
When we moved to Odessa from Alpine, Texas, just in time for me to start 4th grade, I remember being in music class and everyone in this district had been learning simple sight reading for the past several years, something I had never really encountered. When the teacher, not knowing that I was a transfer student, reprimanded me for not knowing the notes on the scale or how to identify a half note, I started bawling. Why didn’t I simply practice math more at home, ask a friend to help me with my kickball technique, or let my music teacher know this was new material to me? Yes, genuine lack of interest played a big part in the sports and math, not everyone has to like everything or expect to excel at everything, but what about music, I was supposed to be good at the arts! That’s where my gifts and my talents were supposed to be found! Such things were supposed to be easy for me.
So intensely was my self-identity wrapped up in appearing smart and talented and a “natural” at certain skills, that it seemed that the more praise and accolades I received, the less I was interested in even trying. The bar had been set high. If I didn’t reach it, I would be a failure. Does this ring a bell for anyone else? In fact, I remember in a moment of sullen teen angst, having a moment of vulnerability with a friend and saying that my greatest fear, above even dying, was mediocrity. What drama!
This is that all-too-recognizable paralyzing fear that comes from knowing that “dangerous places” exist rather than having a mindset ready to live and learn from mistakes; to “feed the pit.” I just finished reading Dr. Carol Dweck’s best-seller, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I named this sermon a couple of months ago, after the Sesame Street song that got me thinking, and stumbled across her Ted talk by the same name and her book, Mindset, in doing my research. I highly recommend both. In both, Dweck explains how there are two mindsets, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In her research, she found that students, athletes, coaches, and teachers who held a fixed mindset felt the need to prove themselves over and over again. Many of them, believing that a failed attempt at something new or difficult did not simply mean that they needed to practice or try harder, but that they were stupid, incompetent, or lacked talent. Many gave up before even trying, rather than risk failure. She became convinced, though, that intelligence and personality are not fixed at all, but are something that can be changed, improved upon, for the sake of a happier and more successful life.
Those with a growth mindset see failure as an opportunity for learning; an exciting new challenge. The growth mindset believes that “your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”
This is where the “yet” comes in. I’m not good at math… “yet.” I’m not fluent in Chinese… “yet.”
Of course, it’s often the case that people are more complex than that. We may have a growth mindset with everything in our lives, believing that a challenge we’ve yet to master is exhilarating and practice and hard work is the only secret behind lasting greatness, but fall into a fixed mindset in the company of our spouse or families of origin, remembering and fearing the repeat of abandonment and betrayal, believing deep down that we’re unlovable. Dweck says, that the fixed mindset is dangerous to leave unaddressed when it comes to interpersonal relationships. She says, “As with personal achievement, this belief- that success should not need effort- robs people of the very thing they need to make their relationship thrive. It’s probably why so many relationships go stale- because people believe that being in love means never having to do anything taxing.” Remember that old line from the movie “Love Story?” “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” What awful advice!
Dweck tells the story of a woman who thinks that everything is going so well with her boyfriend. She believes he’ll pop the question soon. One night, they sit down to watch a movie, and he tells her, “I need more space.” Her heart sinks. She knew this was too good to be true. Just like every other guy before … What was she doing to turn him off so suddenly? Will she ever find someone who can love her? Then, she thought about her tendency to employ a fixed mindset and risked asking, “What do you mean?” He responded, “I mean I want you to move over a little. I need a little more space.” She thought he was trying to break up, when in fact he was simply trying to get cozy!
Dweck warns us about the messages we tend to give our children regarding success. For example, “You learned that so quickly! You’re so smart!” “Look at that drawing! You’re the next Picasso!” “You’re so brilliant! You got an A without even studying!” can be heard by kids as, “If I don’t learn something quickly, I’m not smart.” “I shouldn’t try drawing anything hard or they’ll know I’m not Picasso.” And “I’d better quit studying or they won’t think I’m brilliant.” To raise children with a growth mindset, she says, is to encourage hard work, opportunities to learn something new, stick-to-it-ive-ness, and progress, rather than perfection. She sums up the difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset as, “Judge and Be Judged” vs. “Learn and Help Learn.”
This is an unsettling practice at first. In fact, it kind of sounds too difficult to even work! Do you hear the fixed mindset at work there? It’s where the dismissive phrase, “easier said than done” came from, I’m sure. But, this shift, which will require a lifetime of practice, can.’truly seem overwhelmingly difficult. It requires that we give up a bit of our sense of ego; our self-identities and all of the good and bad narratives that limit our potential. We can’t so easily shut off our mind, and for members of marginalized groups who are often the subject of stereotyping, women, the differently abled, LGBT folk, and people of color, this ability to have our eyes open to reality serves us. As we’ve seen in the news, sometimes understanding this is a matter of life and death.
Yes, but it only serves us to an extent, says Dweck’s research. With the growth mindset, the “teeth” are taken out of the oppression and allows folks to be better able to fight back and “take what they can and need even from a threatening environment,” such as having a racist teacher or a sexist boss. I heard the following poem Friday, read at a protest-performance, Black Poets Speak Out,
Won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton
Won’t you celebrate with me
What I have shaped into
A kind of life? I had no model.
Born in Babylon
Both nonwhite and woman
What did I see to be except myself?
I made it up
Here on this bridge
between Starshine and clay,
My one hand holding tight
My other hand; come celebrate
With me that everyday
Something has tried to kill me
And has failed.
I also encourage you to go listen to another inspiring story of resistance along these lines on NPR’s new show, lnvisibilia. This past week was a story of Martin Pistorius, a man who developed a rare illness as a child that left him completely paralyzed and mute. All his caregivers, including his parents, were convinced that he was in a vegetative state, unaware of the world around him, but he wasn’t. For years, he believes awful things about himself, “You’re pathetic.” “No one cares about you.” “No one will ever show you kindness.” The short version of the story is that, somehow, over time, in that very lonely world, Martin discovered his own power of yet. His mindset change allowed him to gain small control over his body, begin to communicate and answer questions with his eyes movements, and eventually was outfitted with a computer that can speak for him. He went to college, learned to drive, wrote a book, and is today happily married to a woman who fell in love with his honesty, sense of humor, and dedicated spirit!
With people like Martin in mind, while everyone else is floundering on their New Year’s resolution, let’s all take a cue from the Tao of Sesame Street and remember the Power of Yet!
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
We greet the new year with our annual Burning Bowl service! It is good to begin the new year by clearing out old regrets and resentments. We toss those things into the fire and get a fresh start.
Call to Worship
by Sylvia L. Howe
We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year.
Like Janus we gather with part of us looking backward
and part of us looking forward.
We gather on the edge of the new year
saddened by our losses,
cherishing our joys,
aware of our failures,
mindful of days gone by.
We gather on the cusp of this new year
eager to begin anew,
hopeful for what lies ahead,
promising to make changes,
anticipating tomorrows and tomorrows.
We invite you to join our celebration of life,
knowing that life includes good and bad,
endings and beginnings.
We bid you welcome!
Reading
For The New Year by Barbara Rohde
We gather together at the beginning of a new time.
We stand on the edge of a wilderness that is a true wilderness.
No one has entered it before us.
Yet there is also that in us which causes us to face the unknown territory –cautiously and anxiously.
Now, in this place, we take time out of time, to look back,
to see where we have been and what we have been,
to reflect upon what we have learned thus far on our journey.
We gather together to remind each other to seek for our True North,
and to encourage — to place courage in – one another.
When we leave this place, we must each find our true path.
We must walk alone.
But now and then we may meet.
When we meet, may we offer each other the bread of our being.
And oh, my brothers, and oh, my sisters, if you hear me
plunging wildly, despairingly, through the thicket, call out to me.
Calm me.
And if you find me sleeping in the snow, awaken me,
lest my heart turn to ice.
And if you hear my music, praising the mornings of the world,
then in that other time, in the blackness of my night,
sing it back to me.
Sermon
In one of the first few classes I took in seminary, the instructors led us through this exercise called, “The Big Assumption”. “Big Assumptions” are beliefs we hold about ourselves that may be outside of our explicit awareness of them:
– Messages we got as kids
– Unconscious expectations or evaluations of ourselves that we absorb through our culture
– Internalized judgments we can get from friends, family and others in our lives.
The exercise we went through to discover our big assumptions involved identifying a key life goal that was a struggle for us. Then, they led us through a process that helped us to determine:
1. What we were doing or not doing that was undermining our goal,
2. What hidden, competing commitments were causing us to behave in this way,
3. What underlying, big assumption was leading to these hidden commitments
To get started, they gave as an example involving someone who says, “I am committed to stand up for myself more often when people make unreasonable demands of me, but instead I say ‘yes’ to people even when I know I am too busy, and I take on projects when others are really responsible for doing them”. That’s the goal and what they are doing that undermines it.
The hidden, competing commitments in this case might be, “I try to avoid conflict. I try to get others to think well of me”. The big assumption might be something like, “If I didn’t do these things, no one would like me”. It might simply be, “I don’t deserve respect”.
After we did the exercise ourselves, we went around the room, and those who were willing to do so shared the assumptions they had unearthed. It was a revealing and powerful experience. People, sometimes near tears, said things like:
“I don’t deserve to be loved.”
“I’ll never be attractive enough.”
“I’ll never be a good enough parent to my daughter”
Our instructors told us that they had done this same exercise in a number of our churches with both religious leaders and lay people, and the results were always very similar. The assumptions almost always involved some version of “not enough” and “don’t deserve”.
“I’ll never be successful enough. I don’t deserve to be”.
“I’ll never do well enough to satisfy my parents”.
“I’ll never have enough house, the right car, the expensive stuff my television keeps telling me I am supposed to acquire”.
If we consider some of the messages we are all constantly receiving, it’s easy to see how such assumptions could develop.
For me, it was simply, “I’m not good enough.”
Looking back on it now, it’s not surprising that I might have had that assumption. Growing up as a gay kid in a small, conservative town, I got a lot of that message.
As a minister in formation, the value for me in identifying it was that this assumption could lead to a kind of perfectionism: reluctance to admitting to vulnerability. I had to do the work of letting the assumption go, because a big part of doing ministry is to accept and even embrace vulnerability – to model appropriately expressing vulnerability – to create a sacred space where others may feel more comfortable doing so too.
Brene Brown, a researcher in the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, has studied people who have a strong sense of purpose and meaning in life, who feel worthy of being loved and have a sense of belonging. What she has found is that one of the things they share in common is that they not only accept their vulnerability, they believe that their vulnerability is part of what makes them beautiful.
The real problem with the big assumption is, it’s a lie.
You are enough. You are worthy – you are deserving – just as you are, imperfections and vulnerabilities included.
That doesn’t mean we stop working to more fully become our best selves. It just helps us be in a place where we already know a deep sense our own inherent worth and dignity.
In a moment, we are going to light our burning bowl to begin our annual ritual about letting go of the things that hold us back, so I invite you now to think about about something you would like to let go. Is there a big assumption you have discovered today that you would like to release?
If not, maybe there a habit or something you’ve been doing that works against you, or a competing commitment you’d like to let go. Maybe letting these go will reveal an assumption underneath them.
Here are some examples of what you might want to let go: – What other people think of you.
– Hoping to finally win an argument with Mom, Dad, a spouse, partner, brother, sister.
– The need to win arguments at all.
– Fixing other people.
– Trying to control things that can’t be controlled.
– Needing to be the perfect spouse, parent, son, daughter, partner, friend or whatever occupational role you fill.
– Any sound file that keeps running in your head saying, “not enough”, “don’t deserve”
One of the values of ritual is that it allows us to embody our thoughts and intentions, to make them concrete. It allows us to hold them in a much deeper place inside – or to release something from that same deep place.
What will you release during our burning bowl ritual this year? We begin with a poem.
“Burning the Old Year” Naomi Shihab Nye
“Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies”.
We will now light our burning bowl.
(— We ritually burn our slips of paper —)
May your life, your spirit be unburdened of that which you have burned here today. May you experience a lightness and a joy from having released it from a place deep within. May you move into the New Year with a deep and an abiding sense that you are enough. Inherently, you have worth.
Benediction
Now that you have let go of the things that needed releasing, hold on to the knowledge that you carry a spark of the divine within you.
Carry with you the love and sense of community we share in this sacred place.
Carry with you a mind open to continuous revelation, a heart strong enough to break wide open and a peace that passes all understanding.
All blessings go with you until we gather here again. Amen.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
Each time we approach the coming of a new year, we tend to be more open to new possibilities. We are more likely to embrace change and even make resolutions about what we would like to change. What if we were to view life this way all year? What if we thought of everything as continuous change – as ever-unfolding possibilities? We explore limitless “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”
Is it just me or is this a very strange time of the year? To me, it always feels like the year should have ended with Christmas, and yet here we are with several days of the year left before New Years Day, and even at that, the New Year will not really get started until everyone gets back to daily life somewhere around January fifth.
It is an in between time – a liminal time. A time when it is still darker for more hours, and we are reminded that like it or not, change, it will come – a year closes out and a new one springs forth, and sometimes, in this liminal space each year, perhaps we are more open to change, more willing, even, to initiate it.
How many of you plan to make New Year’s resolutions or have made them in the past? That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Raise your hand if you have. Now, how many of us have made such a resolution and broken it within a few weeks or months? It’s OK to raise your hand. There’ll be no shaming here this morning. See, my hand is way up.
Change can be difficult. Old habits can be cantankerous. And this is true not just for us as individuals, but also for families, groups and institutions.
And churches.
Sometimes, we just don’t like change, and we don’t always even know why or even realize that we’re resisting it. Haven’t you ever heard someone, when someone else was trying to change something, even if it might be for the better, haven’t you heard someone say, “but that’s the way we’ve always done it”? Have you ever said it yourself (or at least caught yourself thinking it)? (Hand up) My hand goes way up again.
And yet, as I said, change will come. This morning, there are likely many folks here who are going through some sort of change in their lives. Others may be thinking about initiating some sort of a change. Our world around us is both changing rapidly and in need of changes that would bring about more justice, more love and compassion.
Often, our church is one of the resources we look to help motivate and sustain us in such times, and yet the church too is ever changing. Our voting membership list this month included 621 people. That’s growth of about 200 in just 3 years. If we add to that folks who are who don’t meet all of the requirements for voting, which is more difficult to quantify, the rate of growth has probably been even greater.
On top of that, we just completed a highly successful three million dollar capital campaign. All of that is great – it means we’re living that mission we put on our wall and say together every Sunday, AND it also will mean that our building will change and some of the ways we do things will likely have to be adjusted along with it. At some point we’ll be coping with construction and the disruption that goes with it for a while.
And if that makes some of you feel a little nervous, a little queasy inside, that’s OK. It’s human. I feel that way sometimes too.
So this morning, since we are in that liminal space in so many ways, I thought I would share with you some ways of thinking about change – even of finding spirituality within uncertainty – which I have found particularly helpful.
It turns out that there may be some truth to the old adage that we can experience greater difficulty adapting to change as we grow older. Until sometime in our thirties, our brains are highly malleable. We easily lay down new neural pathways that allow us to learn and to adjust to change. As we age, we can start to lose some of this “neuroplasticity” as it’s called. That’s why, for instance, as we get older we may experience more difficulty adjusting to moving to a new residence. Our brains want to keep looking for things where they were at our former residence.
Now, losing some neuroplasticity is not entirely a bad thing. Laying down new neural pathways uses a lot of energy that the body could otherwise use for other purposes. And, it doesn’t mean there’s no hope for those of us who may be a bit past our thirties; it just means we may find ourselves more challenged by new life situations sometimes.
And it turns out that challenging ourselves by intentionally experiencing difference through multicultural interactions, travel, and varied forms of music, for instance, can help. Some studies also found that meditation, ritual and other spiritual practices can help keep our brains remain more open to change as well.
And if you are in your thirties or younger, – these types of experience can also be advantageous for you because they allow you to build up a sort of plasticity reserve, so to speak, that will help you stay more neurologically flexible as you age.
Now, the neuroscience is a bit more complicated than my quick summary, and the research is ongoing, so our understandings of how the brain functions are changing at a rapid pace. We are offering a five session adult faith formation course on the subject beginning on the first Sunday in January. It’s fascinating stuff, so I encourage you to attend and learn more. Plus, then you can come back later and tell me what I didn’t get right!
The book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, borrows a metaphor for how our brain works from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and uses it to develop some really useful advice on how to deal with change.
In this metaphor, the rational part of our brain, the part that uses reason, is a small rider sitting atop a giant elephant. The elephant is the emotional part of our brain and the part that contains our innate desires and survival instincts. The problem when it comes to change is that we tend to rely too heavily on the rider. We think we can use our reason, our rider, much more so than is actually possible. The thing is – the elephant is so much larger and stronger than the rider, that when the elephant wants to go a different way, the rider can only keep it going in the reasonable direction for so long. The rider wears out. The elephant takes over.
The book says that to create change we can do three things: direct the rider; motivate the elephant; and shape the path. My favorite example they give is of “Clocky,” an invention by an MIT student. Clocky is an alarm clock with wheels designed to address the scenario wherein the alarm clock goes off but our elephant really wants to keep snoozing under our nice warm covers.
And our rider uses our reason to rationalize hitting the snooze button or just shutting the alarm off by thinking things like, “I can sleep a few more minutes if I just skip breakfast” or “It really makes more since to go to the gym before work tomorrow morning anyway.”
Clocky short-circuits this process by rolling off our nightstand when the alarm goes off and proceeding to scurry around the bedroom floor, alarm still blaring.
Clocky lets us direct the rider by providing a way to set up the whole scenario before snuggling underneath the covers and by leaving no other logical choice the next morning but to get out of bed, capture the thing and shut it off.
It motivates the elephant by being so annoying that it overrides the strong desire to keep snoozing.
It shapes the path because, well, now that you’ve gotten up to catch it and shut it off, you might as well stay up.
Now, I’ll admit that my elephant might be tempted to stomp Clocky into a gazillion pieces, so I’ll never own one, but hopefully you get the idea anyway!
Another book, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, adds what I think is an important conceptual framework by distinguishing between technical change and adaptive change. Technical changes involve altering things like the technology we use or our policies and procedures. They usually can be solved using knowledge that already exists. Adaptive changes on the other hand involve changing how we do things at a more fundamental level. They require examining our values and purpose. They require experimenting and learning.
The problem is, we have a tendency to concentrate on the more tangible technical change when what is called for is really adaptive change. Adaptive change can be harder, and oftentimes, a little of both are required.
I think the relatively recent history of this church provides a great example of people working to make change on both levels. In the just over a couple of years before the church called Meg Barnhouse as Senior Minister, the interim ministers and church leadership worked with the congregation to begin a new form of governance and to create the policies and procedures that would support it. The church also wrote a covenant of healthy relations and went through a process of discerning its values and mission.
The establishing and writing of all of this involved a good deal of technical work; however, it also began the adaptive work of examining our values and purpose and how we wanted to be together as a religious community. And then, Meg and the church leadership expanded the adaptive work even more by making the mission central to all church decision making and activities, as well as by creating a culture of mutual accountability and covenantal relationship.
Leadership on the Line also points out something else important about change. We often talk about how people are resistant to change itself. We can gain more empathy and understanding, including for ourselves, if we understand that we are really resisting is loss. If you think about it, any transformative change, any creative act, involves the destruction of something existing in order to create something new.
And this is closely related to a way of viewing the world that, for me has fundamentally altered the way in which I view change – process-relational philosophy or process-relational theology when applied to religion.
Process theology grew out of the philosophical work of a British mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead. Later, others, including Charles Hartshorne, a professor at the University of Texas here in Austin and a longtime member of this church, developed this theology further. I am currently reading a book by Dr. Hartshorne titled, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it just sound like a Unitarian? “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” He lists six of them, by the way.
Anyway, process theology views humans, and indeed everything in the world and universe, not as discrete, unchanging, static things, but as processes that are always becoming, experiences that are always unfolding and evolving, so to speak.
In this way of viewing the world, right now, in this moment, I am not a being or an object, but a series of events unfolding – my experiences of the past, the possibilities available to me in this moment and the choices I make of those possibilities.
But even as you have been listening to this, I made choices and became something new, and the Chris that spoke that prior sentence perished within the continual process of becoming, and so did the “you” who heard it! The physical world is like this also for process theory. The cells in our bodies, the molecules, atoms and particles in all things are themselves ever changing processes – mixing, dividing, perishing and being replaced.
Buddhism has a similar concept called “no-self” or “no thing” which says that what we think of as the self is really an unfolding series of conscious experiences and events. There is no actual object there, just as the flame in our chalice appears to be a thing but is in reality an ongoing process of fuel being burnt.
Likewise, some Hindus hold that Brahman, the ultimate, divine reality, is expressed through three Gods: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu the Maintainer; and Shiva the Destroyer. Again, all is ever changing in this continuing cycle of creation, change over time, destruction and new creation. Birth, life, death, new birth.
In these world views, change is not something outside of ourselves or our reality; it is the essence of reality. Our task, then, becomes to choose wisely among the creative possibilities, the change that will come.
And for some process-relational thinkers, this is where we encounter the divine.
Several times each week, I go to a park or natural area and take a meditative hike. It’s a spiritual practice that I find particularly sustains me and reinvigorates me.
Sometimes, though certainly not every time, the meditation takes me into an experience that some psychologists would call a peak experience. It’s what the first of our six Unitarian Universalist sources calls the “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”
They are extremely difficult to describe with words, but here’s a try.
A couple of summers ago, I went for a meditative hike at Mayfield Park. It is one of my favorite nature spots, and I had earphones on so I could listen to some music that I find particularly moving and beautiful.
At some point during the hike, I found myself simply standing in this lush valley with a creek running between two limestone hills. I had no idea how long I had been just standing there. Time seemed to have stood still, or perhaps to have somehow blended all times into one moment.
I felt somehow spread out, connected with and a part of all of the beautiful life and creation around me – paradoxically, standing there alone in the wilderness, the experience was as if I was interconnected, in ways that are normally beyond understanding, with all of humanity and all of creation’s continuous unfolding.
These experiences, these glimpses of the enormity of that continuous unfolding of our universe – the ever changing, always becoming nature of all creation – they can drive a sense of awe and humility that we are such a small part of it. And yet, they can also bring that sense of spreading out, of ever expanding connectedness, a sense that our own becoming is an integral part of the ultimate becoming.
For me, they are also a reminder that change is how we know we are living – that we are fully alive – both literally and metaphorically.
Benediction
May your heart sail on warming winds to new heights of exhilaration.
May your thoughts embrace all that is ever unfolding within and around you.
May your spirit discover new depths, new understandings, an ever-growing sense of peace and right place in the world.
May you know that this beloved community holds you and is with you not just today but throughout your days.
Blessed be. Amen
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 14 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.
