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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 18, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The experience of delight is essential to our spirits. Delight allows us to encounter the transcendent even within the mundane of this world. We will explore what brings us delight and how we may cultivate and find it – how we often discover that our path to delight lies in serving others and the greater good, being a part of creating something larger than ourselves.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
LISTEN
by Barbara Crooker
I want to tell you something.
This morning is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris, peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing.
I want to say, wake up, open your eyes, there’s a snow-covered road ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen.
Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies, tiny violins of longing and desire.
We were made for song.
I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take the breath of the meadow into my mouth, and I can release it for the leaves’ green need.
I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils.
The cardinals’ red song dances in your blood.
Look, every month the moon blossoms into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
SPELL FOR RECLAIMING THE MOMENT
By Adrienne Maree Brown
even now
we could be happy
even now
breathing in
filling our bodies with right now
from the dirt below us
from our toes to our knees
hips up our spines
shoulders to earlobes
the tip top of our heads to beyond
to the stars
breathing wide
across our wingspan
into that sacred and constant silk web
where we belong
breathing deep
inhale back to great grandmother’s bosom
exhale seven generations of blessings
that will come through our
next choices
even now
we can be present
even now
life is right here, still
an erotic pulse kissing your jaw line
a restlessness of mind: too much, too little
there’s still someone you are longing to see
someone who startles you with simple pleasure
just because they exist
even now
we can anticipate harvest
be shocked by the thunderclap, the storm
laugh at the abundance of our grief
and our earnest attempt to avoid the inevitable
we are a delight
we could be another’s blessing
with our brief and epic lives
where every day
we are given the option
of love
Sermon
How would you define “delight”?
The spiritual topic we’re exploring in the church this month is “The Path of Delight.”
I have to admit, when I first started thinking about this, I had trouble defining exactly what we mean by “delight”. I know what it is. I know when I experience it. And yet, how would I put it into words?
Is delight different than joy or happiness, and if so, how so? What path or paths transport us to delight?
How, is delight related to our spirituality?
So, I was lucky when in the midst of my struggle, church member Carolyn Gremminger told me about an episode of National Public Radio’s program, This American Life, titled “The Show of Delights”. In it Bim Adewunmi (ada woon me), a producer for the show, hosts the episode after sharing her own thoughts on delight.
Adewunmi was born in London to parents who immigrated from Nigeria. She talks about learning to organize her life around actively seeking out delight, despite being raised oh so very British, which caused many tut, tut, tuts to go off in her head, as if to say “enjoying yourself a bit much there, aren’t you dear.”
She tells of how discovering a collection of essay’s, “The Book of Delights” by American poet Ross Gay helped her embrace the path of delight.
She interviews Ross for the show, saying that his book “offers up many thoughts on what delight is or what it could be, but it never defines it explicitly. The take away is that delight, while important, is hard to pin down.”
Whew, I thought, “here’s a poet who did a whole book on delight, and he can’t define it either.”
“Yay, I feel better.”
Adewunmi also interviews 5 year old Cole and his mother, as he expresses sheer delight over riding the bus to school for the very first time.
And that’s when I realized that though both Ross Gay or I may not be able to precisely define delight for you, I can bring you the experience of it.
VIDEO of a father and a very young child playing and laughing with an oversized letter W, the father inverting it to become the letter M.
Every time I experience delight now. I may just sing out “double u”!
Actually, this may be one of the things that is distinct about delight. While joy and happiness are obviously a part of delight, this childlike letting go of all other cares in the world, of being attuned to the delight presenting itself in the present moment seems to be a unique aspect ofthe experience.
Delight comes to us when we give ourselves over to it, as we did as children, before we began to carry the worries of our world.
I love how Adewunmi described organizing her life around seeking out delight. I think this may be one of the ways that following the path of delight is spiritual. Life’s pain and disappointment and loss and sorrow will come. In fact, delight and broken-heartedness may not exist, one without the other.
The practice of actively seeking delight helps carry us through when things get more difficult.
Adewunmi interviews a wonderful woman, Noriko Meek. Niriko spent most of her adult life nurturing her husband and children, including several years during which she took care of her husband, as he slowly wasted and eventually died of cancer.
After a period of intense mourning, Noriko has discovered new life at age 72 – life that is, as she puts it, “just delightful, you know.” She says now she allows herself to do what she wants, when she wants. She hikes. She travels constantly. She’s seeing the world.
Now, she allows herself to experience delight in even the mundane – her heated toilette seat, her ballet class for seniors, eating discounted donuts for breakfast, reading biographies in bed for two hours every night.
And in all of this, Noriko Meek has discovered another spiritual aspect of following the path of delight – it enables us to experience the transcendent in even the seemingly mundane.
Our poet, Ross Gay, discovered this while creating his book by writing an essay about something delightful every day for a year. Here is part of what he described on the very first day, as he visited a favorite coffee shop:
“A cup of coffee from a well shaped cup.
A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say, “Notice the precise flair of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and the index finger that holding a cup can be.”
Or the light blue bike the man pushed through the lobby.
Or the topknot of the barista.
Or the sweet glance ofthe man in the stylish short pants (welllotioned ankles gleaming beneath), walking two little dogs.
Or the woman, stepping in and out of her shoe, her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.”
Transcendence revealing itself from amongst the everyday.
And whether it emerges from the every day or out oflife’s larger experiences such as witnessing the birth of new life, delight comes to us more often, if we engage in the practice of recognizing it.
Again in Ross Gay’s words, “It didn’t take me long to recognize that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
Now, here is one more spiritual aspect of delight. It is an essential part of our humanity – our interconnectedness.
Gay says that we are “negligent” if we don’t share our delights with one another.
And we so often find delight in being a part of something larger than ourselves – something that contributes to a greater good.
In our story for all ages earlier, delight emerged as much or more from the creativity James and Danny and their community had engaged in together as it did from the finished product.
The volunteer efforts of so many of you that Celeste celebrated earlier create so much delight in this community, as you make it possible for us to truly live into our values and mission together. As your minister, I experience so much delight witnessing this church and the folks who create it grow – both numerically and in spirit, again, due in such large part to these volunteer ministries. And that delight happens both within these church walls and beyond them.
Not long after I began ministry with the church, I had gone to Boston, to attend the first year Ministers’ retreat that our Unitarian Universalist Association offers at their offices.
I was at the airport for my return trip home, when my cell phone rang. It was our senior minister at the time, Meg Barnhouse, calling to let me know that the church was going to offer immigration sanctuary to Sulma Franco, invite her to live in the church to try to prevent her being deported to her home country of Guatemala where she might be harmed or even killed because she had publicly advocated for LGBTQ rights while still living there.
Meg wanted to know if! would be OK with that, as in had a choice, but that was Meg (and she knew I would be more than OK with it).
I couldn’t contain my glee, as she told me about how a church board member had responded to the possibility of providing sanctuary by stating that this fits exactly with our mission, asking “if we don’t do this what do we do”?
I was filled with delight.
Before becoming a minister, for seven years, I had been the executive director of American Gateways, a non-profit that provides immigration legal services and advocates on behalf of immigrant rights.
I had carried that into ministry when I did my internship at Wildflower Church, helping them set up an immigrant detention center visitation program and several other immigration related ministries. Immigration justice and the struggle against the racism and bigotry so embed within our immigration system had become just, part of who I was and what drove me as a person and a minister.
So, there I was in Boston Logan, teary eyed and gleeful over this church taking such a faithful leap toward justice. I think I may have squealed a little like the small one in our video earlier, because folks at Boston Logan were staring at me like I was suffering some sort of crisis nerveosa, not knowing it was actually a fit of delight.
I felt much the same way more recently, as our folks participated in actions at our Texas State Capital.
Despite some really terrible things that were happening this legislative session, there was a sense of exhilaration sometimes that arose from showing up as UUs, joining together with so many other solidarity partners in a co-conspiracy of radical love crying out for justice. Justice that we WILL eventually bring about.
These are just a couple of examples of how delight so often arises when we join together in loving relationship to reach for something greater than ourselves. That same delight then moves us toward building even more of that something greater – the Beloved Community.
And aren’t we fortunate then, that, here at first Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, our path of delight is following those words we emblazoned on our wall and that we say together every Sunday.
And to that, may we say, “Double You”!
Benediction
From the Hinu text, the Veen Yana Vuyer Va Tantra
I have been listening to the hymns of creation,
Enchanted by the verses,
Yet still I am curious.
What is this delight-filled universe into which we find ourselves born?
What is this mysterious awareness
Shimmering everywhere within it?
SERMON INDEX
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PODCASTS
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