A Juicy Slice of Unitarian History

December 4, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

December 4, 2011

Why has Unitarianism always been such a shy denomination? Why do we define ourselves so easily with what we don’t believe rather than what we do? What does Harvard have to do with our history? Who is William Ellery Channing? What is the Baltimore Sermon?

The opening scene in the birth of American Unitarianism as an organized denomination took place in 1805 in the halls of Harvard University.

I love reading church history. We need a Donimick Dunne to write about it for Vanity Fair magazine. There is intrigue and the clash of personalities, vanity and ambition, integrity and the clear sense that what is obvious to one group seems dangerously misguided to another.

In 1803 the man who had been Hollis Professor of Divinity died, leaving the post open. Ministers were trained by the Divinity professor. There was no Divinity School before this. Ministers were trained during their college years. Many went on for further study in Germany. At Harvard, the Hollis Professor of Divinity had been a moderate Calvinist. If it strikes you that you aren’t completely clear any more about what Calvinism is, I’m about to remind you. John Calvin, in the 1550’s, revived theological ideas of Augustine of Hippo, who was an Ethiopian Bishop of the Christian church in the early 400’s.

“TULIP” is the mnemonic device by which students remember the Calvinist precepts:

Total depravity of human nature: the belief that humans are basically bent, and we choose to do destructive things more easily than we choose to do good. No amount of peace education will take the warring out of us, no amount of coddling or challenging in school or at home will take the crime and stupidity out. Mostly we are inclined to choose selfishly, and it is mainly the fear of punishment that keeps us between the lines. This has been the most difficult of my Presbyterian beliefs to give up. I find it a moderately cheerful and relaxing doctrine. If we’re bent to the extent that it’s easier to choose to do destructive things than creative and live-giving things, we’re pretty amazing whether or not we’ve built hospitals or cured cancer. We’re doing well to have gone this long without knocking over a gas station, we’re doing amazingly well to be pretty good people most of the time. Now I try to believe in the basic goodness of people, but it opens one up to more episodes of disappointment.

Unconditional election of the saints: God, for his glory, chose some from the beginning of time to be saved. It follows logically that there are some who are chosen to be damned to eternal punishment. This is the “double predestination” that they somewhat sheepishly teach in Calvinist seminaries. Predestination does NOT mean that everything is foreordained by God, fated, only that the end of things is foreordained. Free will can operate in-between. Your end is the only thing that is predestined. Over the centuries, many Christians shrank from the harshness of this doctrine. After Augustine proposed it in the 5th century, a church council met to declare it “anathema” which is Greek for really really icky and not true.

Limited atonement: Also following logically from the election of some to be saved: that Jesus died, then for those who are chosen to be saved, and NOT for those who weren’t chosen.

“Irresistible grace of God.” If God chooses you to be among the elect, the saved, you will be, bec ause God’s will is always done. If you get saved, it is because you were one of the ones chosen. Don’t worry that you are getting saved all for nought, acting right even though you are doomed to damnation. If you are saved, you are one of the elect. If you refuse to believe, if you don’t act right, if you don’t believe, it is because God’s grace isn’t reaching out to you. If it were reaching out to you, you would “get it.” Since you don’t get it, it’s because, sadly, God doesn’t care whether you get it or not.

Perseverance of the saints: Once you’re saved, you’re always saved. You may struggle, but God will not let you go.

That is traditional Calvinism. There were a hundred years in New England where that was the only brand of Christianity taught by the churches. That is what counted as orthodoxy, right belief. The society in New England was fairly homogeneous. All the Quakers were in PA. The Baptists were in RI. There were Catholics, some Quakers, some Baptists, but most of the citizens of MA were Congregational Calvinist.

Every town had a church whose minister was paid with tax money. This was called the Standing Order, and it had been in effect since the Puritans. Attacked now and then as unfair, it had gone through several versions. By 1805, ministers were paid with tax dollars only if their church didn’t make its budget, and if you were a Quaker, a Baptist or a Catholic, you didn’t have to pay the tax. The Congregational ministers, by this time, were varied in their theology. Some were strict Calvinists, others were more moderate Calvinists. Some had become Liberals. Liberals did not believe or preach the doctrines of Calvinism. Some of them did not believe that humans were born in Sin. They had begun to believe that God had created human beings basically good. They did not see God as demanding blood to forgive sins. Jesus was a savior who saves by his teachings, and by awakening the mind and heart, not by his death on the cross. William Ellery Channing, whose face is on the front of your bulletin, likened the doctrine of the crucifixion as to having a gallows at the center of the Universe, and that the spirit of such a god, “whose very acts of pardon were written in such blood, was terror, not love.

Enter the Bad Guy. There was a Calvinist named Jedediah Morse, who had moved to MA. He was amazed that the Liberal s and Calvinists got along together there so well. He did not approve of this ease, and felt that ministers should be asked to take a stand, to be counted and categorized by where they stood on the TULIP principles. Morse began hinting that the Liberals were tainted with the “Unitarianism that was being preached in England.” Those Unitarians, most notably Joseph Priestly, a scientist and minister whose most well-known discovery was Oxygen) were preaching that Jesus was just a man, possessing no divinity at all. Dr. Morse was troubled that the lack of controversy came from differences not being voiced or pointed out. People were being too nice, and it was getting in the way of knowing who was who. Who could be trusted to preach correct doctrine and who could not.

Before the controversy of 1805, most Liberal preachers doubting Calvinist doctrines did not preach these Liberal thoughts from the pulpit. To avoid controversy and keep peace in the congregations, they did what many Liberal preachers do today. They just preached around the Calvinist doctrines, choosing to preach instead about social responsibility, ethical behavior, and the loving kindness of God. The ministers in MA, as a rule, got along peacefully and well together. At the ministerial association meetings, they avoided speaking of their Liberal beliefs. No one really stood up to be categorized as strict, moderate or liberal. The ministers in the associ ation were in the habit of pulpit exchanges. A minister would be in his own pulpit about half the time. The other half he would preach at other churches. This provided relief to the congregations, who got to hear other voices and other points of view. It also provided relief to the ministers, who had to write fewer sermons, since they could repeat their better ones when they visited another pulpit. The Standing Order of tax-supported worship and the pulpit exchanges were what gave what happened at Harvard the importance it had.

The Hollis professor who died and left his Chair vacant was a moderate and well respected Calvinist. These things were written about him at the time: “In him, never were orthodoxy and charity more closely aligned. and “He was desirous of correcting his own errors, and was willing that others should enjoy their sentiments. “That is the kind of man who can get along with both liberals and conservatives. Those people are hard to find, like a treasure when you come across them.”

Here’s where academic politics come into the story. The President of Harvard procrastinated in suggesting a candidate because the most obvious candidate was a Liberal Boston minister named Henry Ware, and the President was a Calvinist. He didn’t want the controversy. The President just never brought up the subject of a replacement at meetings of the Harvard Corporation, and for two years the post was left vacant. By 1805, a candidate had to be found soon. The Boston papers were making trouble, even intimating that the money in the endowment for the Hollis fellowship was being used for purposes other than that for which it was given. Then that President exited the fray by dying.

A professor. named Eliphalet Pearson took over the acting Presidency, and was widely understood to want the permanent job very badly. In the writing of people who knew him at the time, he was characterized as an “ultra-Liberal before the President’s death, and a staunch Calvinist after. Hm. Why the switch? Some thought he was playing a part for political expediency. He was disliked by the students as a bully, and he tended to alienate even those who agreed with him.

EP and five other men made up the Corporation that governed the university. There was one other staunch Calvinist, two liberals, and two moderates. One of tho se was Judge Oliver Wendell, a liberal whose daughter was married to the conservative Calvinist Abel Holmes. (She was the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) The selection process began with each man in the Corporation writing down two names. The two Calvinists each wrote down names of two Calvinist candidates, the two Liberals each wrote down the names of two Liberal candidates, and the two Moderates each wrote down the names of one Calvinist candidate and one Liberal candidate. Within a few weeks the choice was narrowed to two: Jesse Appleton (a moderate Calvinist) and Henry Ware. The meetings were sour due to the personality clash between EP and Dr. John Eliot, a Liberal minister. It was said that EP’s personal attacks on Eliot were school boyish and mean.

Finally Judge Wendell proposed a compromise. How about Appleton for professor and Ware for President? No, they answered. HW was not suited for the position of President. How about Appleton for President and Ware for professor? NO from John Eliot, who was concerned that JA had an unpleasant and dissonant voice, unsuited to conducting public worship for the community, which as President he would have had to do. Appleton could have won in spite of Eliot’s no vote if EP, wanting the presidency for himself, had not voted against the compromise. Judge Wendell’s compromise failed. Finally, several months later, Henry Ware was elected by a margin of one vote. There was no candidate settled on for President.

The appointment then had to be okayed by the Board of Overseers of the Commonwealth of MA, made up of ministers and politicians. The Calvinists were understandably distressed that the professor of Divinity would not be orthodox. All the ministers that would come out of Harvard now would be taught by a a man they all thought of as a Unitarian.

The only point open for discussion was whether Ware fit the stipulations of the Hollis grant. Dr. Jedediah Morse, who was an ally of Eliphalet Pearson, saw this as an opportunity to show the people how sneaky and deceitful the Liberals were, not wanting to declare outright their position. Here was a chance to cross-examine and bring the Unitarianism to light. With 45 of the 47 members of the Board present, he attacked. What procedure had the Corporation followed to satisfy itself that Ware’s views were in accordance with the terms of Thomas Hollis’s gift. Hollis had written that the professor should be “a man of solid learning in divinity, of sound and orthodox principles. ORTHODOX, said Morse. SEE? This man doesn’t fit! He will not adhere to the Calvinist Westminster Confession. Hollis was not an Arminian (someone who believes that everyone can be saved) or a Unitarian, and he would NEVER have countenanced the election of a man who had departed from sound doctrine. The Liber als’ position was that Hollis, as a Baptist, had already departed from the Westminster Confession, whose doctrines the Baptists did not believe. Baptists believed in Jesus death being for everyone. Hollis himself had written that the only article of belief to be required of his professor should be that “the Bible was the only and most perfect rule for faith and practice, and that it should be interpreted “according to the best light that God shall give him. The election of Ware was no breach of trust, as Morse and Pearson were accusing, but was in keeping with Hollis’s intent. Ware was elected.

Within a matter of weeks, Morse had written and published a pamphlet complaining about the election of Ware. Then, months later, another Liberal was chosen for President. EP resigned and went to be head of Phillips Academy. Morse and Pearson founded Andover Theological Seminary, still turning out Calvinists today, and within three years, in response, Harvard Divinity School was founded.

The ministers in the Standing Order, at Morse’s urging, started organizing. Trinitarian orthodox congregations made their own associations, refusing to exchange pulpits with liberals, accusing them of “Unitarianism. Jedediah Morse in 1815, published a pamphlet called “American Unitarianism, accusing the Liberals of, well, believing what they actually did believe. The Standing Order broke down as the Congregational churches split into Orthodox Trinitarian and Liberal churches. The liberals increasingly felt pressure to defend themselves against charges of English Unitarianism, since they held a higher view of Jesus as savior than the English Unitarians. ” Unitarian did, however describe their view of the Oneness of God, and finally in 1819, in Baltimore, William Ellery Channing preached the sermon that was the manifesto of American Unitarianism. In it he asked why God would created us with free will and then punish us for using it. Why he, as a supposedly loving father, would choose some of his children to go to eternal damnation. Weren’t his listeners all better parents than that? Why should we be better parents than God?

Our task from the beginning has been to define ourselves other than as against Calvinism. We still struggle with that. Many UU’s are most comfortable saying what we DON’T believe. At the beginning of our movement, we were pushed into declaring ourselves, “outed” by the attacks of the opposition. We still have a legacy of hiding, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to be right out there with our faith.

Unitarian means we believe in the unity of God, that there is only one. Or, as some agnostic UU’s put it, “at MOST one God, and Universalist, meaning we believe everyone is saved. No one dies into eternal damnation. This, to me, is truly good news, and I would like to join William Ellery Channing in his passion to proclaim that truly good news.

A simple running stitch

November 28, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Nell Newton, Sermons, Video available

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Nell Newton

November 27, 2011

It’s the simplest stitch of all. Tie a knot in one end of the thread, and slip the other end through the eye of a needle. Hold the fabric taut between your fingers, and pierce the fabric – not your fingers! – with the needle. Draw the thread up and through, and then, catch the fabric up on the tip of the needle, one, two, three, four times, and pull the thread through. Smooth it all out and there is your clear running stitch. It is the Paleolithic stitch that first pulled together two pieces of hide, two pieces of matted wool, two pieces of handspun cotton, or two pieces of the lightest woven silk to make something useful. Ecclesiates tells us there is a time to rend, and a time to sew. This is a time to at least consider sewing.

A few years back I offered to teach a group of Camp Fire kids how to sew some simple garments. Most of the parents agreed to help their kids, but one girl’s mom wasn’t able to help. No problem. Eleven-year-old Mary was well behaved and smart enough that I knew she would be fine just following along with me. I told her to show up with a couple of yards of fabric and we’d go from there. When they came to my house, instead of just dropping Mary off, the mom hung around to talk. I was polite, but turned my attention to the matter of fabric, choosing a pattern, etc. The fabric they brought was a sensible, solid blue. It was the blue of those coverall jumpsuits my great uncles used to wear when they worked on engines. And, given the navy pants and plain white blouse Mary was wearing, I guessed that vanity was discouraged in their home. But that blue fabric was just too ugly to mess with. Instead, I told Mary to dig through my stash of fabrics – that’s what it’s called – a “stash”. She found a nice piece of calico with a light blue background, sprigged with tiny white flowers. It would be perfect for her skirt.

Meanwhile, her mother was explaining why she would not be able to help us. You see, she explained, her mother had never taught her to sew, never wanted her to sew because her mother wanted her to be an engineer, or a scientist. She didn’t want her to be limited to girl’s work, or be tied down by domestic drudgery. I listened politely while quietly showing Mary how to find the fabric’s grain so the garment would hang right, and how to lay and pin the delicate tissue paper pattern correctly. I listened to the mom tell me that it was her mother’s insistence that she never learn to cook or sew because she presumed that she would be earning so much money that someone else would always be doing that work for her. So that is why she never learned to sew and why she got a professional degree… Finally, I’d had enough. I turned to Mary who was carefully pinning and cutting out the pieces, and said “If you think about it, sewing is really a type of construction based upon engineering. And it’s a bit tricky because you are working with a flexible material with the goal of covering a moving body. It takes a fair amount of math and planning, and you have to understand the properties of the material and how bodies move if you want to have something worth wearing. Badly sewn clothes are really quite uncomfortable.” Eventually the mom ran out of excuses and left us in peace.

Mary learned how to make a loose running stitch and pull the thread to gather up the fabric, how to fit differently sized pieces together, how to create a waistband tunnel to run elastic through, and how to hem the bottom evenly. Within a couple of hours she had finished a lovely three-tier skirt. She knew every thing about that garment. There was no mystery to it because she had sewn it herself. And, when she finally slipped it on to her delicate waist, she looked down at her work and did what any young girl would do – she twirled around to see the skirt flare out and swing around. It was a magical moment. Even if she never sews another thing in her entire life, she understands the basics and when she looks at the inside, the underside, the lining, or the back – she will see how something was put together.

I want you to do something here – just a moment. I want you to look at the inside of your sleeve, or the hem of your shirt or pants. Look at the threads holding that fabric in place. You will probably see an even line of stitching. Maybe there is a complex web of threads to bind the fabric and keep it from fraying. Maybe the thread is a contrasting color, or maybe it matches the fabric so well that you can barely see it on the right side of the garment.

Someone’s hands did that work. Every thing we are wearing was sewn by another human being. Every pillow case, sleeping bag, backpack, and tent was sewn by someone. Every sofa cushion, slip cover, and seat belt was guided through a sewing machine by a skilled worker. The suits the astronauts wore were assembled by expert seamstresses who had never sewn such a thing before, but they put their minds and machines to work, and sewed suits to protect fragile human bodies from the cold of space.

Even in this era of astonishing technology, there is still no machine where you stuff a bale of cotton in one end and remove a pair of pants from the other. We are still doing pretty much what our ancestors did – cutting a flat cloth into pieces, and sewing the pieces together to cover our shivering naked selves.

Maybe your mother sewed clothes for you when you were younger? If you came in with a tear on your sleeve or a rip in your britches, did your mom work some kind of mundane miracle of mending? Along with my 10″ chef’s knife and my pen, my sewing basket is one of my most powerful weapons against chaos. Like many women, I sewed clothes for my children when they were young simply because they were so beautiful and store bought clothes were so unimaginative. My kids got to pick out the fabrics so that instead of the same old football, soccer ball, baseball, or truck, my son’s pants had penguins and frogs and feathers and fish! Unless you look closely, you might not see the places where I’ve patched and repaired the rips and three-cornered tears where one of us snagged on a fence, or caught on a nail.

A woman I spoke with explained that when she is sewing a quilt it might mean assembling 35 blocks of pieced fabrics. She cuts, and stitches, and presses the same thing 35 times. It becomes a meditative time and as her hands work, her mind travels out into its quiet fascinating places. If it will be a gift, she might be thinking of the people who will receive the quilt. It’s impossible to put a prayer into every stitch, but she takes care to choose fabrics that will bring a smile to the person who snuggles under that quilt at night.

A man who quilts simply says “it’s my safe place”. His quilts are dazzlingly intricate – each one is made up of thousands of small pieces of bright cloth. He listens to audio books while he works and has listened to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other great writers whose books we all mean to get around to reading, if only we had the time. And while he listens, his hands cut, and piece, and pin and sew artwork of kaleidoscopic brilliance. This world would be a calmer place if all of us had such safe places for our creativity.

Choosing fabric takes practice and it requires a sort of Buddhist lack of attachment off-set by a hoarder’s mania. Choosing a color is only part of it. You also have to feel fabric to determine the quality, the drape, any stretch or texture to it. When we are searching for fabric, we move through the store shopping with our hands — touching, rubbing, tugging, and even just waving it to watch how it moves. It’s getting harder to find high quality fabrics so there is a certain amount of scowling when I shop. And the goddess will just laugh at you if you think that you simply MUST have a certain fabric because you will not find it. Or you will find the Perfect Fabric but not the Perfect Pattern. Or vice versa. We learn to buy up the fabric when we find it and then wait for the pattern to show up. Or vice versa. This is how fabric stashes grow rather large.

I was lucky to learn to sew from my mom – who taught me the 4-H correct way – and from my stepmother who taught me all the ways to adapt a pattern, be creative, and have fun. My mother’s fabulous dresses sewn from Indonesian batiks fit her beautifully because she sized them to her petite frame. My stepmother opened up her own business doing everything from simple alternations up to designing and sewing gorgeous wedding dresses. Both of them drew upon deep patience to teach me. And, while I don’t have the time to sew as much as I’d like, when I spread out the fabric and pick up my shears, I have them both, and all of my grandmothers, along with me for every stitch.

Another woman I know was like many of us – forced to learn sewing in school. Girls learned sewing, boys learned woodshop. You know — the natural order of things… But she resisted sewing and hated it for the sexist holdover it was! She made her damn skirt moaning and groaning the whole time and was done with it. But then… as an adult, one day she picked up a book on quilting and was stunned – it was the most beautiful thing she had seen. The book pulled her in and in time she taught herself everything about quilting from the ground up – how to use a sewing machine – how to BUY a sewing machine. She found delight in all the odd doo-dads that someone, some where (probably a woman, probably in a snit) had invented to solve a specific sewing problem. Did you know, there really is such a thing as a bodkin? It’s very useful when you’re turning something skinny inside out. A fat safety pin works well too. As my friend learned to make quilts, she developed a respect for the ingenuity and engineering that paved the way for her. She loves choosing the colors, and that moment when she drops in a little piece of lavender or orange and the whole thing turns spectacular. And, when she sews a quilt – she is verrry selective of who receives them. Each one is more than a blanket, it is a gift of her precious time.

Sewing these days is anachronistic. It takes patience to learn how to sew and practice to learn to sew well enough to make something you’d want to wear out in public. Why bother? Someone else can do it better, cheaper, faster. And they are probably happy to have the work. I mean, it’s not like we really have slavery any more. Those people are skilled laborers who get paid. Right? Well… I don’t want to depress you with details, but if you pay $5 for a tee shirt, you can be pretty sure that the person who sewed it did not even make fifty cents for their work. And even if you pay $50 for a shirt, you still can’t be sure that the person in Vietnam, or the North Marianas, or Nicaragua was paid a fair wage. If you are vigilant, you can research your clothing choices, but there’s not a lot of “fair trade” garments on the market right now. Unless you sew your own. When I wear something I’ve sewn, I know the only person who was unfairly compensated or exploited was ME!

So what else can you do? How can you stand in opposition to a global economy that treats workers and their products as disposable commodities? It’s unrealistic for all of us to learn to sew clothing. But here’s a suggestion – treat every piece of clothing you own as if it were hand made especially for you. It might not have been hand-stitched, but hands guided the fabric through the cutting, stitching, and pressing. When you put on your shirt, consider the hands that carefully spaced the buttons and made sure they were secure. Think of the hands that folded it and wrapped it up for you. Wear it well. If the button falls off, catch it quick and sew it back on. And, when it is worn beyond repair, snip off the buttons – they might come in handy some day — and use the fabric as a rag to wipe your windows clean. Do you have a garment you love but that doesn’t fit quite right? Take it to a local seamstress for alterations or repairs so that it fits you – as you are right now, not when you’ve lost or gained or have an interview. And, when you pay that person and you’ll keep a few dollars in our local economy.

And, here’s my last recommendation: If someone gives you something they sewed, please don’t say “Oh! It’s so pretty. I’ll save it for sometime special” and then never use it. That would be missing the point. Put it on! Spread it out! Let the baby spit up on it! Hang it up where you will grab for it when you are in a rush. Wrap yourself up in it! And then twirl around slowly and see if the love swirls about you.

The devil and Martha Stewart

November 20, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 20, 2011

I’m going to talk about the devil this morning. We don’t do that too often in the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m also going to talk about Martha Stewart, because the holidays are here and we are going to be decorating and being with family and cooking and buying presents and traveling and it’s just a lot to deal with.

I’m fascinated by Martha Stewart. She was the idol of perfection for many straight women and gay men, and then she went to jail. I think she went to jail, not because she was a bad criminal, but because she was a woman with money and she was mean and arrogant. That’s just an opinion. Even the way she went to jail was perfect, though. She said “Enough delays, let’s just do it and get it over with,” and she went and held her head up and did some good for the other inmates and endured merciless mocking, and then went back to work cooking perfect things with her little house arrest bracelet on.

Long years ago, before I had children, I asked for her gardening book for Christmas, and I devoured it. The photographs of peonies and tomatoes were luminous. Even pictures of her garden in the winter, under snow, showed patterns of stone walls, brick walkways, hand built trellises, a gazebo, and an herb garden in a knot pattern. Month by month she instructed me about what to do, from starting seedlings to painting concrete urns. She taught me to prune trees and to make a poached pear dessert with the pears that came from my….. well, I didn’t actually do that. All I had in my garden were tomatoes, beans, and zinnias. I was a long way from pear trees. I wondered how she did it all. I felt clumsy and inadequate until I learned she sleeps four hours a night and has a staff of helpers standing by to follow her every instruction. The helpers even get into the pictures in the book once in a while.

I’m not here to trash Martha, I just want to look at how she affects some of us. I don’t know if there is an equivalent perfectly manly person. The guys on the Home and Garden and Do It Yourself networks might be close. Norm, on the Yankee Workshop, can use a miter saw, a router and a lathe. He can reproduce a 17th century French cupboard from looking at its photograph, but he’s a little goofy looking, and the way he says “remember, always wear eye protection is almost motherly. It makes me feel good. Back to Martha. Martha is fit and lovely and competent in all areas of making a home beautiful. She can make it perfect. And she will even step back from something she’s cooked or dipped in gold and make into a wreath and she will say, “Ah, that’s just perfect.”

Can I tell you the number of times I’ve stepped back from something I made and said “perfect” ? Zero. There is something in many of us that wants to be perfect. Some are more controlled by it than others. There are those who have it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 and those who only have it a 3 or a 6. It can fluctuate depending on our state of mind, tiredness, bank account, weight loss or gain, stress at work… It comes from the fear we all carry of not being good enough– that there is something secretly wrong with us that is not wrong with anyone else, a deficit we must cover and adjust for in all our interactions. The fear of not being good enough, the shame of feeling that you are lacking an important competency others naturally have can drive us to try to control everything around us, to make everything just right.

Perfectionism can work its destructive power on any of us. Some of us don’t have it in the areas of housekeeping or cooking or woodworking, but it affects us when it comes to our personal appearance, or the written work we turn out, or the way we handle our money.

Perfectionism can have a positive side. Good effects of perfectionism include high quality work, reliability, and attention to detail. Bad effects include stress and anxiety, along with an unwillingness to take on something you aren’t already good at. You lose your ability to take risks, to say something in a group that might add to the mix, but you don’t want to sound stupid. Being wrong is out of the question. A mistake would mean humiliation of an unbearable magnitude. Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination. You start a job late so when it’s done, you can believe that it would have been perfect, only you didn’t have enough time. Perfectionism can also lead us to be more critical of others than we should be. We expect perfection from them too, and we become superior or enraged when they don’t do things just right. In all its aspects, perfectionism leads to more fear and less love. We as spiritual folk are trying to go the other way: more love, less fear. More love, less fear in every aspect of our lives.

Martha makes some people feel clumsy and incompetent because they are comparing their insides to her outsides. We know how unruly, unkind, inadequate we are because we see ourselves inside and out. Someone who looks like they are doing it all right — mostly we only see their outside. We don’t know what goes on with them in private, or internally. We compare our insides to their outsides, and we come up short.

Martha Stewart is not the problem here, it’s the devil. Let me explain. “Satan” in the Hebrew means “the accuser.” When I say it’s the devil who is the problem I’m talking about that voice inside most of us that whispers “You are not quite adequate. You’re a weak specimen, a broken reed, a slight disappointment to your mother and father. You have a shameful laziness, and you might be a touch stupid.” Do you know that accusing voice? That is the voice that fuels the fires of perfectionism. Some perfectionists look driven and capable. Others don’t. Lots of people who are perfectionists have given up. They act like they don’t care about things, like they will never be any good. They feel discouraged and depressed. They have grown up on maxims like “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” This is true, of course. It is a good thing to try to do things well. It is also true that “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”

Let me tell you about my mama’s violin. She practiced her violin every morning of the world. I always woke up to scratchy scales and finger exercises. She never got any better, really, but she sat in the back row of the Main Line Symphony and had a great time playing the music. It was worth doing for her. And worth doing badly. All-or-nothing thinking is one of the ways perfectionism damages us. Either we look fine or we’re a total slob, an unmade bed of a human being. Either we played our instrument at the top of our form and caught fire with inspiration or we bombed. Our home is in perfect order or it’s a wreck, either we had a calm, kind, and imaginative time with our families over the holidays or it was a disaster. There is little in between for a perfectionist.

I used to have a cartoon in my office with Glinda the good witch of the North, lying on her psychiatrist’s couch, and she’s saying “It got to be too much — You give someone a heart, you give someone else a brain, and people start calling at all hours. Finally I realized, ‘I don’t have to be everything to everyone. ” I can just be the ‘good-enough witch.'” One way to counter perfectionism is to have as your goal to be a good enough parent, a good enough spouse, a good enough worker, a good enough crusader for social justice. Be more compassionate toward yourself and others, more friendly.

What I want to say here this morning is that “the devil” is the spirit of fear that drives us into rigidity and anxiety, which saps our good will and clouds our compassion. The spirit of Love is where our allegiance lies as good people, spiritual people, people who want to make the world better place. Love is always in dialogue with fear in our souls and bodies and minds. So when perfectionism is sharpening its claws in you, take some deep breaths, stop comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, remind yourself to be a good enough witch, and wonder — what would this whole situation be like if I had more love.

Digging a good, deep well

November 13, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 11, 2011

How do you prepare for hard times? How do you protect your life against times when the rain dries up and the wind blows hard and everything is brittle and easily broken? When nourishment is hard to find and you aren’t sure you can face what’s coming next? If you are in that situation literally, what you need is to have a good deep well, a well that reaches way down to where there is nearly always water. In September we had a water ceremony, where we mingled our lives together by pouring water into the common bowls, talking about the places that fed our souls. Water is the basis for all life. Everything that breathes is largely made of water and needs water to live. The poet Bryon says: “Til taught by pain, [we] really know not what good water is worth.” Don Juan

Many of us are like that in our lives. Those things that sustain us – we don’t know what they are worth until we are in a dry spell. We need connections with people, friends, people who know not only our name but what moves us, what hurts us, what we love. Being here in this church community is a way of making connections, but Sunday morning is a time when having a conversation of any depth is hard. (Rabbi story)

One of the good opportunities here for building deep connections with people is our small group program – we call them Chalice Circles. In our Chalice Circles we talk together with 4-12 other people about big questions like “What is an example of grace in your life? When have you experienced a heartfelt truth, and how did it change your life? What about your daily work do you find nourishing?

What is the meaning of life? Why do we need religion? Why evil? How do we know what we know? How can we face death? Why do we suffer? What does it mean to be human?” The lessons have a structure for the purposes of sustainability and fairness. The format give us a way of structuring our interactions so that all of us, the quiet ones as well as the verbally quick, may be heard and made to feel a part of the whole. There is an opening reading. This is one from the lesson on Listening:

I like to talk with you.

I like the way I feel

when you are listening

as if we were exploring

something in ourselves:

The plunge into a silence

and how you come up with words

I tried to find:

The otherness about us which makes

conversation possible.

When I talk with you,

the give turns into take

and borrow into lend.

Now and then, a phrase from you

will kindle like a shooting star;

the mornings in you rouse me from a sleep.

I like the babble and the banter when I greet you

at the door,

and when the room is filled with guests,

your quiet look,

as if there were a secret between us

of which nobody knows.

– from Raymond Baughan

After the opening reading, everyone briefly checks in, saying a few words about how they are that week. Then a bowl is passed around with lots of slips of paper with readings on them having to do with the topic of that lesson: forgiveness, hands, failure, hope, patriotism, views of God. After they are read, there are a few questions posed in the lesson. Participants choose one question or a few questions and talk about them in a time of sharing. Everyone gets a chance to talk, and no one interrupts or talks back to you or even asks you a question. When you are through, they say “thank you.” That helps shy people feel safer sometimes. When everyone is through with what they wanted to say about the questions, there is a time of silence, where people just breathe together for a moment or two. Then the discussion starts, when you can comment on what someone said, ask questions, say what came to your mind as they were speaking. There is a covenant of respectful behavior that is followed. Each group works out a covenant of how they want to be together, so there is kindness in the discussion, support, so no one person dominates the group. A facilitator is there to remind people of that, to hold the covenants in mind like a container for the group. When the discussion is done, there is a check-out time. We usually say “How do you want us to hold you in mind this month?” It’s a way of getting to know and trust a few people you may never have otherwise had in your life. Another bonding experience is the service the covenant groups promise to perform together. One group I remember organized the library at the end of the hall, in room #6. Another group cleaned the kitchen together after their meetings.

In order not to form cliques, the groups hold an empty place in each circle to keep attention on the fact that there are always more people who may want to be there, and that the groups will grow and change. The chair is the stranger in our midst, the challenge of opening in hospitality, of not pulling the ladder up after you when you get up into the clubhouse.

Some of the groups will be long-lived and strong. Others will be short-lived. We would like to know what makes a group strong and fine. We read from other people’s experience that it is keeping the covenants. We will see from our own experience, though.

In the UU tradition, we believe in ongoing revelation. Everything that is knowable about the world, about the human being, about the truth, about the Spirit, about ourselves, about one another, is out there, still to be found out, still to be revealed. We believe that there is tremendous wisdom and beauty in the scriptures of the great religions of the world, but we believe the truth is still coming in, that it can evolve, that the story of each of our lives and the story of our lives together are as sacred as the story of the people of Israel or India. So the story of your life, the story of our lives together, is sacred scripture.

Dr. Thandeka, who teaches theology and culture at a UU seminary in Chicago called Meadville Lombard, says that it is in small groups that we practice the central ritual of our faith, the sacred act of being in right relationship with one another. She says that the power of people coming together to share their stories, to talk about ideas, to accomplish a service for others, that power is the central authority of our faith. I think that power is the water we use to quench our thirsty lives, and to quench the thirst in one another for being heard and known. In doing that, we help to put the world back together.

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

November 6, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons, Video available

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 6, 2011

You can add up the parts

but you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march,

there is no drum

Every heart, every heart

to love will come

but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen Anthem

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

One of the things you will hear over and over again from this pulpit is that church is for proclaiming liberty to the captives and setting the prisoners free. One of the things that keeps us prisoner is the idea of perfection, specifically that there can be perfect relationships, that if mistakes have been made, a relationship is somehow compromised, scarred, less than it once could have been. Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection, so we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks in our relationships? How do we live with the cracks in our experience of church? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.

If we do not practice forgiveness, our scars can wind around us like those monstrous vines in fairy tales, our resentments can hold us hostage. Oh we get to watch movies while we’re held hostage, though. The movie plays over and over, a bit different every time. We replay the wrongs done to us while waiting for an apology.

Booker T Washington, organizer and first president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had a lifelong motto: “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him”

When I talk about wrongs done, some people will think about a fight they have had with a sibling or a friend, others will think of the boss who is making their lives hell and still others brace themselves, wondering if I am going to say they have to forgive and forget incest or other abuse. What I want to ask is that you listen this morning as you are able, take what speaks to you and let the rest go. You are the only one who can say where forgiveness is needed between you and another, between you and yourself, or between you and God. Some people live feeling that God hasn’t forgiven them, and some people live as if they have not forgiven God. Why do we need to talk about forgiveness? Forgiveness is related to both emotional, physical and institutional healing. Every religion of the world says it’s important. Feeling you have been wronged is not good for you. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. It may be a collection of small grudges and resentments or it may be rage, but if the anger is not bearing good fruit for you in terms of moving you out of hurtful situations, protecting you from hurtful people, energizing you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. We may talk more about anger another Sunday.

Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is dangerous, the root of almost all wicked behavior. Remember the movie we watch over and over while our resentments hold us hostage? In it, we articulately explain our point of view with just the right amount of calm and just the right edge. The end is the best part. At the end of the movie we watch over and over, the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. They say. “How wrong I was!!! You were right and I was wrong. What can I do to make it up to you?” We exercise our arguments, we polish our grudges. We repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moment’s notice; we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. It feels good to be a righteous victim. We go to friends and get as many people as we can to hear our story. It is soul satisfying to hear them say “Oh NO she did not say that!”

There is nothing wrong with this if we do it in good faith. We are trying to validate our perceptions “Would this make you mad? Is this person being a jerk or is it me?” I have to say there is a lot to learn about yourself from watching to whom you go to tell your story. Some people are going to be on your side no matter what. Others will tell you if you are being a jerk. We go to the people we think will tell us what we are ready to hear. Many people are completely justified in feeling like a righteous victim. It’s an archetypal role, an ancient one, and it may be appropriate for a time, but we have to watch out for it, as we do all well-defined roles, that we do not start sleep-walking, letting it make our choices for us. Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive, looking at the stiffening righteousness. The harm is that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. The harm is that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced, ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers. You get to be the right one. Being RIGHT is a BIG part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely. And still be hurt by harboring anger against the person who hurt you. The Course in Miracles, which some of you have studied, says “You can be right or you can be happy.”

One way to let go of someone and get your strength back is the resentment prayer. Ask for/wish for them everything you want for yourself. You don’t have to mean it. Try it for fourteen days straight. It’s amazingly powerful magic, and I’m not sure exactly how it works. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working/playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.

1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.

2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation.

3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.

4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. Make a ritual to mark the event.

Several years ago I read a book called “Lovingkindness,” which expands on many of the things about which the Dalai Lama writes. The author says the first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself.

Say:

May I be free from danger.

May I be physically happy

May I be mentally happy

May I have ease of well-being.

Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself.

Honoring the Ancestors

October 30, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

October 30, 2011

This is the time of year when Celtic earth-based tradition says the veil between the worlds is thin. Halloween is tomorrow. The Christian tradition puts All Saints and All Souls days right afterward. The Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead (I won’t offend you with my accent in Spanish) is held on these days too, but rituals to celebrate and talk to the dead go back maybe 3,000 years. Some people like it when the veil is thin because they want to feel close to people they love who have died, but people are also scared, so the tradition sprang up to dress up so you would be scary too, and then maybe you would scare them before they scared you.

We want to talk about and honor our families today, not just the families we are living with right now, but our mothers and fathers mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and theirs, on back. We honor the people who made us part of their family too, aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends, adoptive parents and guardians. This is a day to keep the good things they gave us and let go of things they gave us that might not be good for us.

It is in our families that we first learn some ways of being in the world. We learn that being smart is important, or being neat. We learn not to hit when we’re mad, not to take other people’s things, we learn to share. We learn how to deal with annoying little brothers and sisters and bossy big brothers and sisters. In some families we’re taught never to upset the adults, and in some we learn never even to disagree with them! In some families, arguing is seen as fun, and in other families you’re taught not to argue. We learn what our family thinks a good person is. Sometimes our parents disagree about that. I remember my dad had more thoughts about keeping the house clean than my mom did. “Look at these spider webs in the windows!” My dad said one day. “Those have to go!” “Donald,” my mother said, “Those webs are educational. The girls can watch spider babies being born!” One friend said she feels like a good person only when her closet it clean.

Lots of people in my family don’t think being comfortable is important. My great-grandfather had a mean rooster in the yard. It would get in fights with the children and scratch them. Finally one of the uncles who was a doctor made him get rid of it because he was tired of giving the kids stitches. When I would say to my mother “I have a headache,” she said “Don’t be silly, children don’t get headaches.”

Birthdays were celebrated lavishly, and Christmas was a big deal. We were told I love you a lot. Some families don’t say “I love you” very much but they’ll come pick you up at the airport or iron your clothes or pack you a lunch or fill your car up with gas. There are lots of ways of showing love.

It’s important to find out about your people. Some of you all were born into different families from the ones who are raising you, so you have lots of people to find out about. They are all part of you.

How do you honor the ancestors? By learning about them, by noticing the things they taught you.

Now I’m going to talk to the grown-ups for a moment. Think about your ancestors, your mothers parents, your father’s parents. You learned some things that are standing you in good stead, and some other things that aren’t helping at all. Sometimes you are still waiting for their blessing, and they aren’t capable of giving it. Time to stop waiting and bless yourself. This is a day to say “thank you, but I’m letting this go.”

How do we honor the ancestors, after how they have wounded us, after how we have disappointed them? Honoring your father and mother doesn’t mean agreeing with everything you were ever taught. It doesn’t mean never speaking up around them. It doesn’t mean obeying them as an adult. It means treating them with courtesy. It means re-collecting those things of value you were given. Thanking them for those things. Forgiving them their failings. Knowing who they are, who they were. Having compassion for how they got that way. Keeping in mind the hand they were dealt.

As soulful people, our task is to root ourselves in compassion and understanding. Return to the texts of our religion with our free minds and our faith that God is love, and re-understand. Return to the text of your childhood life, the life of your family, with your new free mind, with your compassionate heart and re-understand. Re-understanding is one of the adventures of a mind that has been freed to re-see, to re-evaluate.

Take one of the cookies you have and, into it, pour (in your imagination) all the good memories in your mind right now. Put into it the gratitude for the teachings you want to keep. Let’s eat these cookies together to experience taking these good things in.

May we touch these people who have gone before us now, as the veil is thin between the worlds. May we thank them for the things they have given to us. Some of those things are precious.

Now take the things you were taught that do not work for you, ways you do not want to carry on, and put them into the other cookie. Put into that cookie the things you want to let go of in this time of the year, things you want to now give back to spirits who, having passed on, may now see and understand everything from quite a different perspective. Is this true? We don’t know. Can it help us move on with our lives? It couldn’t hurt.

Some of the people who have gone on taught us things that were wrong, that were not helpful. We can begin to forgive them for this, we can begin to let go of the things that are no longer helpful. We can move from that place into a new place. On this day, look to the mystery of the season to release that which has been completed. Look at and acknowledge that which has come to an ending within your own life and bid it a final farewell, even though this may bring you pain, it must be done.

Growing Out – Maturing as an Expanding Embrace

October 23, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Mark Skrabacz, Sermons

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

October 23, 2011

Widening our circle of compassion, opening our hearts, embracing life, living large…these are expressions of growing out, the theme of today’s examination of maturing. Most often, I think of it as unconditional love or attentive presence. This involves learning to acknowledge, allow, open to and inquire into the experience that each of us has of what is, without trying to have some other experience than the one we are in. This can be difficult.

Interestingly, there’s little in our Western experiences of community, religion, spirituality and psychology that helps us develop the capacity for unconditional presence. Most of what we learn in school, church and society sends us an opposite message — setting boundaries, isolating, developing caution and fear. These examples result in the tendency to turn away from aspects of our lives that are painful, unpleasant or threatening. They teach us that we must be strong — and that strength is about having power over. Yet from the East there’s a different lesson. The Tao Teh Ching reveals that genuine power is gentle and kind.

Chapter 8 begins: “The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.”

Chapter 13 concludes with this couplet: “Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things. Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.”

In Chapter 22 it says: “Yield and overcome.” And from Chapter 43: “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.”

Obviously, there is truth in both the teachings of West and East…and the both-and is a preferable balance to the either-or. Yet growing out, as the quality of maturing that we are exploring today asks the question: how can we expand our embrace into a quality of presence, awareness and equanimity that is able to respond with openness to unpleasantries, wherever and whenever they show up, most often in our relationships with family, friends, neighbors and our world?

Consider the idea of healing. We all have our scars. I have scars from various injuries, some more serious than others. They don’t go away no matter how much lotion, or massage or therapy I undertake. I have to learn to live with them. Part of this process is my recognition of how how I was affected. I’ve had to develop a different relationship to my wounds and because of them. Every time I see them and feel them, I recognize what they mean to me. My life has a different shape because of my scars. Healing does not mean the absence of suffering. It means learning from its presence. Recall the final words of the poem (The Cure by Anonymous) read by Eric (Stimmel, Lay Leader) before our time of contemplation.

And life is as natural as a leaf.

That’s what we’re looking for:

not the end of a thing but the shape of it.

Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life

without getting over a single

instant of it.

Have you heard of the practice of Tonglen? It’s described in some of Pema Chodren’s work. Do you know her? She’s a westerner who received training as a teacher of the Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the wild Tibetan master, author of Cutting through Spiritual Materialism and other powerful books, and who taught in Boulder, Colorado in the ’70s. He founded the Shambhala Training and the Naropa Institute. Chodron has written numerous books, including Getting Unstuck and When Things Fall Apart.

Tonglen is an integrative meditation consisting of a breathing practice with thoughts, visualizations and especially feelings. In Tonglen one vizualizes a real condition for which great compassion is needed, like domestic abuse, and inhales the feelings of pain, violence and anger. You breathe in and actually take on this issue physically, mentally, emotionally and consciously. One literally feels into the condition, making it as imaginatively real as possible. Then with the out-breath, one exhales compassion into the situation. This means one must access genuine compassion in the midst of distress, a beneficial exercise in itself. Tonglen is a practice of a Bodhisattva (translated as “awakened being”), a compassionate one, who willingly takes on and transmutes the energy of violence, hate, abuse, war, terrorism, overpopulation, genocide, environmental degradation and other forms of dis-ease. Tonglen is a very personal practice that can result in very transpersonal changes.

Pema Chodron writes: “If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that — then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone as ever taught.”

Can you imagine being that open and willing with your embrace?

Maturity begins when we can understand the basic distresses and blocks that are at the root of our immaturity, personally and collectively. I often speak from the pulpit about that which I find to be true and basic. Perhaps a most basic truth has to do with acceptance. No matter where you are or what the circumstances, come to terms and become friendly with yourself and with the present moment. Because if you do not accept the present moment, you’re not friendly with life because life is only now. Some call it “the eternal now.” If you’re not friendly with life, life cannot support you.

The nature of our basic distress as human beings is that we continually judge, reject and turn away from areas of our lives that cause us discomfort, pain or anxiety. We think that if we can just get rid of these areas then we’ll suffer less, we’ll finally be comfortable. What happens however, is that in getting rid of our problems, we simply trade these concerns for a new set of concerns that keep us just as distressed as before, lending truth to the aphorism that what you resist persists. Changing circumstances isn’t the answer. Changing ourselves is.

We are all involved somehow in an inner struggle. It’s the human condition and no one gets a free pass. This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided. This in antithetical to our nature as individuals; individual means undivided. We are constantly cutting ourselves off from the totality of who we are.

Of this totality, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote (in his essay The Oversoul):

“Within us is the soul of the whole,

The wise silence,

The universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related;

The eternal One…

When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius;

When it breathes through our will, it is virtue;

When it flows through our affections, it is love.”

This is a picture of our true nature. This is our goal. What we mostly experience is an emotional programming that contracts our bodies and minds, shuts us down, like a safety valve, keeping us from flowing when we perceive danger or threat. This is our way of survival, of protecting ourselves. Yet in cutting off our anger, our need for love, our openness, our sexuality, we form negative judgments against these parts of ourselves and of others. Hence we become disabled and disabling of others.

For example, say we didn’t get the love we needed as a child. One typical response is to contract our feelings when this need for love arises. We learned it is simply too painful to feel the rejection or unfulfilment. Hence we develop an emotional pattern or program, such that even as adults, when we continue to feel a need for love, we shut down our awareness of it. We become unable to function in areas of our life that evoke feelings we’ve never been able to tolerate. We contract and close off. This may be at the root of not asking for help and our incessant drive to do it my way. This is 180 degrees from opening our embrace as Einstein suggests (in a Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times 29 March 1972 and The New York Post 28 November 1972 and read by our Lay Leader today as our Call to Worship –

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”) or of the poetic description of Emerson of the soul of the whole.

This programming creates a false self, a personal self-image and identity based on distress. With such a pattern we are faced with the challenge of having to continually display this identity and prop it up like the mask that it is. We fuel it with stories about our reality, our parents, former or current spouses or friends. Stories like: men are emotionally unavailable, women are crazy, certain people can’t be trusted, etc. This petty and divisive false self system can lock us into a distortion of life and drain our energy that instead could be feeding our true nature, that of our larger self — the soul of the whole.

Hence, the call to maturing is a call to recognize this burdensome facade and to become a real explorer of the vast embrace of the Universe.

In order to grow out, to expand our embrace, to welcome what is we must expose our wounds which lie at the root of our disconnection from our larger being. We must engage our suffering directly. Of course, it’s hard to let ourselves feel our pain. We’ve spent our lives masking it, denying it, avoiding it. Our society, education and experiences reinforce the delusion of separateness. As in 12 step recovery work, the first thing we must do is acknowledge our distress, our human condition. That’s one of the reasons we meet here. An important component of our gathering is to connect with ourself and each other in honesty and humility.

There are many ways to observe life. There’s the view that we do make mistakes. We have failed to do as we would. We act and feel imperfectly. There’s also the view that there are no real mistakes, that all things work together to make life what it is.

Nisargadatta Maharaj says: “Nobody ever fails in Yoga. It is all a matter of the rate of progress. It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. When one is fully matured, realization is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right.”

Whatever our view, let’s get straight with ourselves and each other. We also need each other. We need to receive love — to give love.

And so I encourage us to develop an antidote to the emotional programming of our false self system, and that is in developing unconditional presence and a wider embrace. It starts within each of us. We must connect with that which shuts us down and accept what is. We must exercise our innate awareness to recognize (re-cognize) our dilemma.

I’m no expert in human behavior. Truth is, no one is. That’s because our true nature is unbounded and open-ended. We have yet to experience who we really are, who we fully are. As Unitarian Universalists we are committed by covenant to an exploration of our true and unlimited potential as human beings. We want to see evolution continue and to cooperate with it in every way possible.

I can say with confidence that if we wish to mature, we must learn to bring awareness to our false selves, to bring it out in the open, so that we can stop investing so much energy in propping it up. We must devote more and more of our energy and attention to the fact of our true nature. Our true nature may be seldom seen, but does not have to live for us as merely the poetic and visionary potential of an Einstein or Emerson. We are the people we’ve been waiting for!

Fact is, like the air that surrounds us and often goes unnoticed as a source of the life force in our breathing, unconditional presence is also already always here. It lies within, beneath the layers created by our busy and judgmental minds. Unconditional love and presence is accessible to everyone and is, in fact, our most intimate reality.

Whenever we open into our larger self and our unconditional presence, our conditioned self or our emotional programming tries to run away or else, says, “I know that,” and puts the experience in a familiar box. Fact is, our false selves can’t fix ourselves and neither can anyone else. Our natural opening, maturing and expansive embrace will only come when we can see and feel our truth. And truth shows up against the background of our sustained awareness of our facades, programming and dis-ease.

Sorry, no quick fix. However, like I’m find of saying, “You have to do your work, and you can’t do it alone.” We are a community in covenant to work out our lives together. As our awareness of unconscious patterns of our false selves starts to be seen, it becomes conscious. This awakens our desire and will to a new life. This new life is the life that is our real and present experience, that accepts our life as it is. It takes awareness.

This description may not fit the picture that our mind wants, just as those we are related to don’t always measure up. Folks, the world is in a mess and if you are paying attention, if you live from awareness, you’ll risk heart break. Yet our broken, open and fragile nature is the one that can open wide its arms in expansive embrace. We need to become vulnerable in order to be mature. “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.” Paradoxically we need to be vulnerable to be solid.

Understanding our false nature and the possibilities of our true nature is a start. It’s the beginning of self-awareness and self-acceptance. It provides compassion for ourselves and for others whom we may begin to understand are afflicted with the same human condition. We need to heal our separation from ourselves and those we meet everyday. We need to heal our separation from the life we know as our daily reality. This is true for us and for our whole world.

Let us join together in opening our arms in a wide embrace. Here’s a vision: imagine opening to all and fully accepting your present reality. Imagine transforming your identity into its full and unique part of the interdependent web of all existence. Imagine living so large that even the specter of death would appear as a friendly and fearless embrace of the Universe, which is not other than you. Our greatest difficulties provide us with our greatest opportunities.

Be a stream not a swamp

October 16, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

October 16, 2011

The third in the series on the seven UU Principles. We talk about acceptance, spiritual growth, encouraging one another. What is “spiritual” for Unitarian Universalists?

“Come into the circle of love and justice

Come into the community of mercy, holiness and health

Come and you shall know peace and joy.”

Reading:

The words of Maria Mitchell (pronounced with a long “i”) Nineteenth century Unitarian astronomer and educator

Small as is our whole system compared

with the infinitude of creation, brief as is

our life compared with the cycles of time,

we are so tethered to all the beautiful

dependencies of law, that not only the

sparrow’s fall is felt to the uttermost bound

but the vibrations set in motion by the

words that we utter reach through all space

and the tremor is felt through all time

Sermon

I’m in the middle of a series of sermons on our seven Unitarian Universalist principles. We’re up to the third one now, which says that we covenant (promise) together to affirm and promote: “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.”

Let me start with “acceptance of one another. That is Unitarian Universalism 101. We come in the door of a UU congregation and we feel that maybe here is a place we can be who we are. All of who we are. What a relief! What a blessing! So it comes with some reciprocity where we are called upon to accept others the way they are as well… it’s still great.

Our church not only accepted but celebrated differences yesterday afternoon on the Capital steps when you all turned out to bless a mass wedding service where around 20 same-sex couples said their vows to one another to make commitments to become life-partners. One woman came up to me after the ceremony to say “The support your faith community showed for us here has renewed my faith.” We sometimes focus too much on whether we feel accepted. I urge you to understand what your acceptance means to others. You lived your mission yesterday.

So acceptance is UU 101, but it’s never over. We work theoretically and practically on acceptance of groups and categories of people. When it gets down to it, it’s about individuals. Some people are easier to accept than others. We’re just talking about within our congregation here. We have astronomers sitting next to astrologers, Libertarians next to Democrats, those who pray next to those who only make wishes. One way of accepting one another is to ignore differences, keep everything on a superficial level, and be sweet. Another way is to engage with a person you’re having trouble with, be curious about your differences, ask questions.

The second part of the principle is “encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” The word “spiritual” comes from the base “spirare”, to breathe. Spiritus, the noun that most recently has given us spirit and spiritual, means “a breathing, the breath of life.” My definition of spiritual growth has to do with a bit of Christian scripture I memorized as a child. It’s a list of what the author calls “The fruits of the spirit.” If these things are growing, your spirit is being well fed and watered. If they are not growing, your spirit needs some attention. Here is the list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control are increasing. Given the etymology of the word, maybe you could say it is whatever gives you room inside to breathe deeply, and whatever helps people breathe when they are around you.

I’m going to talk to you about a few ways of growing spiritually as members of this congregation. People talk about church growth all the time, and what they often mean is getting more people in the door. I’m interested in that, in being hospitable to all the people in Austin who need this church, but I’m more interested in the growth of the people who are here right now: growth in spirit, growth in engagement, growth in generosity with time and talent here and elsewhere in life, growth in wisdom, and growth in enjoyment of life. Here are some ways to grow here.

1. Stretch yourself to say good, blessing things to other people. Blessing doesn’t have to be formal and scriptural sounding; it can just be “I like hearing your laugh.” “It’s good to see you this morning.” Blessing can be a question about your family. Saying “I’m sorry for your loss.”

2. Stretching yourself to serve people you don’t know. Making sack lunches for the working homeless, building houses for low-income families, serving meals at a soup kitchen, lobbying legislators for changes that will make those problems less severe. You could start serving people you don’t know right here. There are a good number of people around here that you don’t know. You serve them by blessing them, by having respectful conversation, teaching their children, inviting them to take another step into the center of this congregation.

4. A spirit deepens when a person practices gratitude. Focus on things you are grateful for, and open your heart in gratitude as much as you can.

5. You grow spiritually by giving when you don’t have that much stored up. One writer, Victor M. Parachin, put it this way. “Be a stream, not a swamp. Remember, it is the mountain stream that carries fresh, life-giving water because it flows out. However, the swamp is stagnant. A swamp collects and retains water that comes its way. Don’t be the kind of person who seeks to accumulate much before allowing a little to flow through. “If you own things you don’t use, clothes, furniture, houses, spiritual teachers will say that those things don’t belong to you. They need to be let go of to find their rightful owners. Now, some of you may be saying “she’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling’.” Just consider. What is enough? It is a sickness of the spirit that most of us share, to lose track of what enough is.

We are in the middle of our stewardship season now, when we ask one another for money. You visitors, close you ears now, because giving is a right and a privilege of membership. You members, this is a blessed time in a way, because we have to look at our money situation and ask “What is enough to keep for my family? What is enough to give away?” This congregation needs you to look at your money as green energy that fuels the mission of this church. You are needed. Yes you. It’s healthiest when we have each person, each little family, giving its fair percentage. It’s not up to someone else. We are all grateful to those among us who have promised their support for next year. The amount is not as important as becoming generous within your means in your support of this faith. Be a stream, not a swamp!

We are gay and straight together

October 9, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

October 9, 2011

It is exciting to live in the state capital. This weekend the “Occupy Austin” demonstration is starting, and it will go into early December. The people are angry about Wall St. bailouts with no gratitude or humility forthcoming from the folks who had to be rescued. We’re angry about credit card companies moving the due date of our payments to make us late, we’re angry about home foreclosures and predatory lending practices, we’re angry about out-of-control health care costs and the unavailability of health insurance for even middle-class citizens, we’re angry that people are not taken into account with as much near-religious fervor as is the bottom line dollar amount of the profit. We can stand on the capital steps and show the world that the people’s anger has been awakened, and change must come. This sermon is not about anger, though. This sermon is about love.

On the Capital steps next Saturday afternoon, there’s going to be a wedding. Or two. In the crowd will be Unitarian Universalists with our denominational banner, which reads “Standing on the Side of Love.” What’s that all about? It’s about some members of this community wanting to come out as straight allies to the cause of civil rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens. It takes courage to come out as a straight ally. Heterosexual privilege not to think about it. To be one of the in crowd. To fit in well. Not to be seen as hell-bound. To bother with civil rights. To brave the scorn. To have your neighbors look at you askance.

This congregation has expressed a desire to be hospitable. Not just warmly hospitable, but radically hospitable. Let’s talk about that… this will not be the only conversation we have about it. I want to talk about it in a context in which I can hear from you as well, but here’s a start. Let’s just talk about being welcoming to GLBT folks.

There are many layers of welcome. The first is just saying “I don’t care who you are or what you do, you may sit next to me in worship on Sunday and I won’t imagine you’re going to hell or anything.”

The problem with that layer of “welcome” is that it’s not all that friendly or informed. And it’s easily irritated. It doesn’t want to think about the issues. It doesn’t want to get on a bus, register voters, get fire hosed, be called names, or have to hear too much about your struggle to adopt kids. If you are one of the “others,” you’re still on your own. Studies show that if the percentage of “others” gets to 20 percent, the main group begins to feel overrun, like “they’re taking over.”

A middle layer is a warmer, more aware welcome. People know the history of your struggle. They know the situation. Concerning GLBT issues, these folks know what Stonewall was, know who Harvey Milk was, they know what people who come out give up, and what they get. What do I mean “What people give up?”

In life we have privileges of which we are not even aware. That in itself is a privilege, the privilege of being able to choose whether to think about these things or not. In our racist society, if you are white European American, you don’t have to think about the privileges granted to you by being white. You may think about them if you choose to, but it is rarely forced upon you. As a heterosexual person, you are in the same situation. You have the freedom to conduct your life publicly without scrutiny or repercussion. You don’t have to explain yourself. People don’t get upset about your life partner….. Well, they might say “honey, you could do better,”, but they don’t usually go “eeeuw, gross, I could never even be in the room with one of those.”

Let me read you a partial list of things gay people give up when they come out. In most states you can’t get married. More than that, you don’t have much public support for your relationship. It is rare for a family to send anniversary cards. It’s a big deal for your friends and family to ask how your partner is, to send them a present at Christmas. In groups of my straight friends, if one of them is dating, there are enthusiastic questions about how the relationship is going. When I was dating, they would try — it would be “So, how’s — um –….” Not ever “what’s she like? How did you meet? What did she say when you did THAT?” At most workplaces it would be more trouble than it’s worth to have a picture of your family on your desk.

All of that is emotionally discouraging. It’s not as bad as the legal things you give up: paid leave from work at the death of a spouse (not to mention being able to grieve publicly without being accused of being blatant) And those are not as bad as the danger of losing your job, your apartment, or your life because of hostility toward your sexuality.

You give up:

The right to inherit automatically at the death of a spouse. The right to immediate access to a spouse in case of a medical emergency where only family is allowed.

Gay people give up the privilege of learning about relationships from a wide variety of fiction, movies, TV. They don’t have too many media images of folks with whom to identify

It can be dangerous to express affection in public. This is getting better, but there are still hate crimes against GLBT folks. If you, god forbid, have to be in the criminal justice system, you do have to worry about being mistreated or victimized because of your sexuality.

If you come out, you give up being able to:

. join the military and be open about your sexuality

. expect that your children will be given books in school that implicitly support your kind of family and that they will not be taught that your sexuality is a “perversion”

. approach the legal system, social service organizations, and government agencies without fearing discrimination because of your sexuality

. raise, adopt, and teach children without people believing that you will molest them or force them into your sexuality. Moreover, people generally will not try to take away your children because of your sexuality

. belong to the religious denomination of your choice and know that your sexuality will not be denounced by its religious leaders

. expect to be around others of your sexuality most of the time. You do not have to worry about being the only one of your sexuality in a class, on a job, or in a social situation.

In giving up these things, a GLBT person gains the sense of living truthfully and authentically, you gain a group of people to whom you belong, at some level, automatically. If you meet another GLBT person, you have an instant sense of some of what this person has gone through in their life so far.

What is the next level, beyond the kind of welcoming that understands all of that? The next level is being an ally. To want to stand shoulder to shoulder with by our GLBT friends by imagining what it would be like to let go of some of your heterosexual privileges for a span of time. I’m not suggesting that you give up getting married, but you may try acting for a week as if you have to be careful about touching one another in public, talking about your partner in gender-neutral language, imagining the vulnerability of your child custody arrangements. Refer to your doctor as “you know, that straight doctor I go to,” tell jokes about “there was this straight guy who went into a bar…” Speak up when someone is telling hateful jokes or assuming that everyone in the room, because they are straight, thinks being gay is weird and wrong, One way to speak up is to say something like “My daddy is gay,” if you don’t know the people.

Here is what the folks in the Spartanburg congregation did. They started a “Coming Out Coffeehouse,” where the church advertised in the paper that GLBT and straight allies were invited to a dance party. About 70 people came, three years running. Straight couples from the church danced next to and with GLBT members, and we had a great time. On Sunday, the adult program was “Ask a gay person anything you want to ask,” and a panel of volunteers fielded written questions from the floor. Whereas most UU congregations across the country are about 10% GLBT, that southern congregation is about 30% GLBT. There is still some ignorance. Two lesbian partners were on the Board at one time because the person from the committee who was supposed to ask the one to be on the Board got mixed up and asked the other one. Two middle ages women with salt-and-pepper hair and sensible shoes looked exactly alike to him, even though one is 5’4 and the other is nearly six feet tall. The wrong one said “yes,” so then he had to ask the right one too, and they served on the Board together.

Spartanburg SC had never had a pride march, and some community people and two straight women in the UU congregation organized the town’s first pride march. These two straight women went to the police and got protection for the marchers, went to the mayor and told him what was going to happen. Everyone was worried that there would be mayhem and violence. There were about thirty protesters, and about between three and four hundred marchers, both GLBT folks and their allies. I’m proud of that church too. Becoming an ally is what some of you straight folks here may be called to be.

We UUs are in the middle of a national campaign against hate, whether it is against immigrants, mixed-race couples, or GLBT folks. We call it “Standing on the Side of Love.” Many congregations are hanging big “Standing on the Side of Love” banners on the outside of their church buildings or on their church’s street side signs

Song: “The beauty in you.”

Repentance, Forgiveness, Reconciliation

October 2, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

October 2, 2011

During this time of shortening days, our Jewish brothers and sisters are celebrating the “Days of Awe,” Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is a good time for us to talk about a Unitarian Universalist understanding of guilt and repentance, making amends, turning to more “right action,” forgiving ourselves and others.

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen. This and other sermons are also available for free download on iTunes. Keyword: austin uu

Flying fish make me smile

September 25, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Barbara Gay Stoddard

Interim Director of LifeSpan Religious Education

September 25, 2011

Show Up, Choose Your Attitude, Make Someone’s Day and Play are the four principles of living from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. I’ll consider how these principles have informed my life and keep me smiling.

Barbara Stoddard has been a professional religious educator for 15 years. She has served as the interim religious educator beginning in 2003 for UU churches in New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Seattle and Houston. In addition to her work as an interim she helped design and teach the training for Interim Religious Educators. She is so very happy to be with First UU for the next two years.

“Flying Fish Make me Smile”

Or living by the Principles of the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market… “Show Up, Choose Your Attitude, Make Someone’s Day and Play”

Barbara Stoddard September 25, 2011 First Unitarian Universalist Church Austin

Years ago, I met a woman in my UU church in Manchester, NH named Charlene. She was a motivational speaker and great advocate for positive thinking. Charlene was beautiful, intelligent always had perfect hair and a wonderful smile, 3 gorgeous children and a very handsome husband. I wanted to be Charlene, but I could never quite embrace all that positive attitude stuff. After all, I was still in my 20s, full of angst, a divorced single mother, whose ex had deserted my daughter his child- never to contact her again until she was 15 years old.

Year’s later, Charlene shared with me that her life was not as perfect as it appeared. There were many heartbreaks and illness and money issues they had suffered through. But, they survived by loving each other and helping others and sharing positive energy to all those around them. She gave me a gift by telling me that it was my own sense of joy and wonder and love about life and people that helped make me a survivor and also helped those around me feel better.

Charlene was showing up, choosing her attitude, making someone’s day, and playing long before it was a part of the success story of the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. And I bet, if I were to call her today, she’d tell me she had incorporated the philosophy in her own speeches.

Music has always very important to me. Perhaps one could say it’s been the core of my existence. I was a child of the 60s so of course there were the Beatles, but mostly I adored my folk singers like Judy Collins and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I was going to be all of them when I grew up.

Music was always there for me in times of silliness, joy, hope, tragedy, sorrows, elation, passion, pain and the mundane. Music provided my first connection to UUism – when I was 18 years old attending Columbia College, a Methodist woman’s college, in Columbia, SC – I became part of a folk singing group called the Ladybugs. My beloved Ladybugs and I were asked to sing at a service at the Columbia UU Fellowship. They met at that time in a big green house, a small group of children went to one part of house for classes after a story while the adults listened to a speaker and then discussed the topic. I remember we sang “where have all the flowers gone” and other anti-war songs. It was the first time as a singer I got the chance to speak my values through music. I was exhilarated and wanted more of this UU thing.

A few years later, my now ex-husband and I were living in Manchester, NH – We were- house parents for 3 adults with cognitive disabilities and a year old baby in tow. We went to the Episcopal church in town. That morning the priest spoke about loving each other. Reaching out to strangers, etc. etc. etc. But when we walked out of church, he rebuffed this strange little family of mine in a way that devastated me. Wasn’t the church a place we could bring our joys and pains and be hugged and loved. Later as we mulled over our experience – I asked (being very new to New England) Do you suppose there are any UUs around here? Well – hallelujah there were. We next attended the Manchester UU church, walked in the door. Our minister, Elium Gault – greeted us with the biggest smile and heartiest handshake I’ve ever known. We were home.

The church continued from that first day forward to nurture us and care for us. They were my daughter Dayna’s and my extended family for over 20 years. They saw me with a guitar in hand and asked me to be a youth advisor, and sing at services. Over the years the church held fundraisers to purchase 2 different guitars for me. They held Dayna and me even closer as we went through divorce, poverty, and perils of life. They nurtured me by helping me discover that I had gifts beyond my knowing. I really discovered my singing voice, I found out I loved working with children. I further developed the comedienne that I can sometimes be, the organizer, the advocate, the storyteller, and on and on. They hired me to be their DRE for a couple of years. They got me to go to RE Week at Star Island (a UU conference center – off the coast of NH) for the fist time in 1985 – this has since and forever will be my “spirit’s home.” Any of you that have attended a UU summer experience know from whence I speak. These are life changing moments. The love is intensely felt.

I was always singing, performing and playing the guitar during the years I raised my child. My daughter would never really sing with me -I didn’t discover until she was older – how intense her own need and love of music had and continues to be. I didn’t even think she knew or cared for anything I sang – until I discovered that she was the one gen Xers that knew all the folk songs and even mimicked me doing some of my silliest ditties.

I’ve discovered for both of us that music actually gave us a voice in our worlds, but it also comforts us in great times of need. It has not been easy for either one of us. We’ve each made some really bad decisions and have had quite messy lapses in wisdom. But we have also found great love and hope that always surrounds us. We are both survivors of varying degrees of pain but through it all we pull out our songs and we remember the strength within that gives us the freedom to continually soar and soar again. Music has helped us choose better attitudes, make someone’s day and certainly helped us play.

But there have been times when the music has actually died for me in my life. Times when it gave no joy, no comfort, no solace, no laughter, no hope. I hid from music as it might open my heart. In my life, when music wouldn’t help I’d find solace in the next place which for me was food.

I’ve been overweight most of my life. There have been varying degrees of the weight I carried. I’ve even seen old pictures of myself that I didn’t recognize, I was so thin. But no matter the weight, I performed in front of people, usually confident at work, playing with my child, falling in love, volunteering for the women’s crisis service, and teaching in RE classes and so much more.

As I grew older, despite my weight I developed self confidence, sense of purpose, recognition of gifts I had, understanding of the world around me, and the impact I had on people in my life. I actually started liking myself and I understood that what was in my heart was so much more important than how good I looked. But I think I forgot that being healthy was actually more important than how I looked as well.

After my daughter was grown and left home, I decided to go to college again, this time to get certified to teach K-8th grade. I went home to live with my mother in Ft. Inn, SC. I went to Clemson and joined the Greenville UU Fellowship. And yes, that is when I first heard about our own Meg Barnhouse. I was home in a way even though as a child my family never lived in one place more than 5 years – it was home because mom was there. It was a good thing. We both got to know each other as the incredible women we are.

My first teaching job was one that I should never have been placed in. I was the wrong person for the children I taught. I was teaching at an alternative school for Jr. high students that were placed there as the last resort. A myriad of emotional and behavioral and criminal issues and hard family lives. I looked like the lady that only had experience popping bon bons all day and how the hell did I know what they were going through. I wasn’t good at the job. I was an out an out failure. I came home every night in deep despair, frightened and worried. I ate and ate. My blood pressure sky rocketed and I was on the verge of a heart attack. My doctor advised that I quit. I quit. I had failed. And it was then that I went into a new self imposed depression that included no music, no joy, no hope, I went into a cocoon of safety and never wanted to come out again, I felt as though the music in me had literally died.

But after my failure, I needed to find a way to fly again. I returned to a part of the country that for some reason feeds my soul. I returned to New England this time settling in on the coast of New Hampshire = right on Rte.1A, where I could look out at the ocean when I woke in the morning and also see my beloved Star Island every day. I needed to be back where my spirit would find a new path a new journey a new source of freedom, of joy, where my music might live again.

I think I returned to New England, because it was that part of the world that had really given me my UU community. I knew people all over the area, they knew me. They knew the gifts I had, they knew and understood my idiosyncrasies, they understood that I had flaws but they loved me and embraced me because they knew and believed I had great potential to continue to find my soaring ways again.

Yes, I survived my teaching disasters and with the help of love from a lot of friends I found grace. I’ve been in and out of cocoons (so to speak) so many times but each time I emerge from that cocoon stronger than ever.

Now, over the last 10 years, I’ve many wonderful successes both personally and professionally, but at the same time I subconsciously sunk into a new low and began an assault on my body that eventually got to a point that I could no longer deal with. No matter what I’d do, couldn’t lose weight. I was broken, I felt miserable – I tried hypnosis, nutrisystem, weight watchers, Jenny Craig, etc. etc. etc. I started losing my personality. Oh I’d manage to bring myself forward as best I could when at work and around children. But it was a struggle. I looked horrible, I couldn’t breathe correctly which affected my singing. I gave in to it all. I got canes to help me move around – I wont’ even bother to list all the medical issues due to being so heavy.

I felt so physically burdened, that I found no joy in my life and work and no energy for play. Being so very overweight – saps all the energy from you even the energy to love yourself and others around you. I was giving up. I wasn’t showing up for me. One week on a diet I’d say – well I’ve done that – lets move on. I felt I was a failure at life a failure at love a failure at, joy and I was no good for anyone.

When I arrive at Emerson UU in Houston, in 2009 I was at my heaviest, 280 lbs. I eventually had 4 doctors caring for me and all my health issues. They all said the same thing – lose weight. My hematologist lovingly said, your primary doctor and I were talking about you – have you ever considered Gastric bypass. I said yes but I was afraid. He directed me to the clinic where I finally had the surgery last November.

To say that I’ve changed is an understatement. I’ve lost over 110 lbs so far and still need to lose more to reach my goal. But, I’ve thrown out the cane, I climb the stairs, I walk, I exercise, I eat properly, I breath, I breath, I’m singing again. I’ve found joy and I’ve chosen positive attitude (most of the time), and the days that I make someone else smile are my happiest days.

In the book Switch, How to change things when change is hard. by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. They write: “The conventional wisdom in psychology, is that the brain has two independent systems at work at all times. First, there’s what we called the emotional side. It’s the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. Second, there’s the rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It’s the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future.”

The authors’ feel the “tension between the two brain systems is captured best by an analogy used by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. but the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.” They continue to state that “most of us are all too familiar with situations in which our Elephant overpowers our Rider. You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever slept in, overeaten, dialed up your ex at midnight, procrastinated, tried to quit smoking and failed, skipped the gym, gotten angry and said something you regretted, abandoned your Spanish or piano lessons, refused to speak up in a meeting because you were scared, and so on. “

They explain that “the weakness of the Elephant, our emotional and instinctive side, is clear: It’s lazy and skittish, often looking for the quick payoff (ice cream cone) over the long-term payoff (being thin). When change efforts fail, it’s usually the Elephants fault, since the kinds of change we want typically involve short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs. Changes often fail because the Rider simply can’t keep the Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination.”

“The Elephant’s hunger for instant gratification is the opposite of the Rider’s strength, which is the ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment (all those things that your pet can’t do.)”

“But the Elephant also has enormous strengths and that the Rider has crippling weaknesses. The Elephant isn’t always the bad guy. Emotion is the Elephant’s turf – love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty.. That fierce instinct you have to protect your kids against harm – that’s the Elephant. That spine-stiffening you feel when you need to stand up for yourself – that’s the Elephant.”

“And even more important if you’re contemplating a change, the Elephant is the one who get s things done. To make progress toward a goal, whether it’s noble or crass, requires the energy and drive of the Elephant And this strength is the mirror image of the Rider’s great weakness: spinning his wheels. The Rider tends to over analyze and over think these things.”

As the authors point out, “if you want to change things, you’ve got to appeal to both. The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant provides the energy.. So if you reach the Riders of your team but not the Elephants, team members will have understanding without motivation. If you reach their Elephants but not their Riders, they’ll have passion without direction. In both cases, the flaws can be paralyzing. A reluctant Elephant and a wheel -spinning Rider can both ensure that nothing changes. But when Elephants and Riders move together, change can come easily.”

I think perhaps this is why I’ve found a love for the interim work that I do. I get to use both my rider and elephant while helping beloved communities such as First UU Austin find the balance. I feel a wee bit more competent and confident in my own ability to do this with each new interim and I learn more about how churches function and how I function as a leader. It’s a fantastic, exhilarating place to be. But…..

In my personal life – forget it. Elephant 90% of the time. Fortunately, in mine and for most of us I suspect, the elephant does get tired and wants a little help. That’s the time when perhaps, we stop and say I need to listen to the rational side of me I need to rest and analyze why I do what I do, or where I’m going, or what I want. , I’m too tired to feel the passion for the things I love. I need to stop. That’s why I was able to make the decision that I couldn’t lose weight by my own will. I needed outside forces to help me find success and to re-learn what it is and who it is that exists in this body.

As I’ve begun this personal/physical transformation, I know that I have more weight to lose, that I still and always need to exercise and eat healthy and care for myself in ways that I let fall by the wayside in the past. I’ve had to rediscover all the things I love and love to do and that I love people. I love people. I was getting to a point where I couldn’t bear to be with people because I couldn’t bear to be with myself. Ah, the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.” I wasn’t being very nice to me – how could I find the energy to be nice to others. When I’m in right relationship with myself, (in the words of Iris Dement) I can give joy to my mother, and I can make my lover smile., and I can give comfort to my friends when they’re hurting and I can make it feel better for a while.

Does this mean all my trials are over. Of course, not – I still have many worries and people to take care of and love and aches and pains and bad hair days ahead. But now, the excitement that wells up inside me – the joy that I am feeling right now about attending the connections fair later, and the excitement of moving into my new apartment on Oct. 13 is delightful. The happiness of seeing my 91 year old mother twice this summer and the fun I had literally running around with my 2 grandsons is indescribable. Oh I’m still mostly that Elephant – but my Rider is firmly attached and helping me push on the walls of my cocoons and guiding me as I fly through this wonderful thing called life.

While I have many friends that are not UU, I am so blessed to have found so many loving UU communities that over and over again, hold me, call me to look beyond myself, but also call on me to love myself , communities that support and restore my soul. That love is miraculous.

So I say to you, Remember the Pike Place Fishmongers and start throwing fish around. Show Up, Choose your attitude, Make Someone’s Day, and Play. Fly with the freedom to explore, fly with the freedom to fill your soul with all that you are, fly with the joy of giving and receiving, fly with the wonder of discovering who you are and the gifts you have – each day is a blessing when the spirit of beloved community is there to embrace you. And when you need to rest, or seek comfort or find peace of mind, know that we are with you in those moments as well as the moments of joy and play. We are here for you always. Blessed Be.

All the gossip from Concord

September 18, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

September 18, 2011

In the early days of Unitarianism, a group of friends formed what historians have called “a genius cluster” in Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcott family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller were giants in forming American culture and thought. How did this explosion of growth and influence take place? This is one of the stories of our heritage.

“All the Gossip from Concord”

Sometimes there is a cluster of people who make things happen, who influence one another, build on one another, challenge and inspire and complement one another until each is greater than they could have been alone. In the eighteen thirties, forties and fifties such a group of people lived in Concord MA. It could not have happened without Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was born to a Unitarian minister and his wife in Boston MA in 1803, as Beethoven was writing the Eroica Symphony, as Napoleon was considering invading England, and the Louisiana Purchase is made, doubling the size of the United States. Emerson’s father died when he was almost eight, and his mother struggled to make ends meet. His aunt Mary Moody Emerson became the one who paid for Waldo’s education at the Boston Latin School, then Harvard, where his academic career was undistinguished. He was class poet his senior year, but only after six others had turned down the offer. Mary Moody is said to have been a curmudgeon, having the questionable gift of being able to say more unpleasant things in half an hour than anyone else living.

Waldo became a Unitarian minister and fell in love with a delicate young woman named Ellen Tucker. They married as soon as she turned eighteen. She was from a wealthy family, and had a great deal of money coming to her when she turned twenty-one. Unfortunately she died before that birthday, leaving Emerson heart-broken, crazed with grief. He visited her grave often, even opening her casket a year after she died because he missed her so terribly. His belief in God began to fall apart, or it began to evolve, from my perspective. The members of his congregation were not so supportive of these changes. He finally quit the church because he couldn’t stand the ceremony of communion any more. People should pay attention to living their principles during the week instead of focusing on having communion on the weekend to make everything okay. He began writing and lecturing, making his living through his stirring speaking style, which drew enthusiastic crowds.

He was asked to give the graduation address at Harvard, where a class of ministers was graduating, and he came down so hard on the local churches, talking about how dull they were, how rule-bound, how frozen and intellectual their ministers’ sermons that it was impossible for their people to get nourishment for their souls at church. Harvard did not appreciate the alternative vision he painted of finding the divine in nature, in the oneness of all things, of following your inner wisdom, respecting the knowledge that comes fresh to you from your experience rather than quoting people whose wisdom may have been good for their own times but might have nothing to do with the now. The people at Harvard asked him not to come back, and he did not, until he was an old man and they asked him to help with the memorial service for those killed in the Civil War.

At the time of the obscure little lawsuit that changed everything Waldo was a young man, grieving over his beloved wife. Emerson’s brother-in-law felt he should not get the money that had been coming to Ellen, but an angry Waldo sued the family and was granted the inheritance. This money made all the difference. The money made all the difference for him. It made all the difference for Thoreau. It made the difference for the Alcott family and for many men and women escaping from being enslaved in the South. Interest on the money granted to him by the courts paid him as much per year as he was making as a minister.

One of the places he spoke was on Cape Cod, where, at the post-lecture reception he met a slender woman named Lydia. They had a nice conversation, and several months later he wrote her a letter proposing marriage. He apologized for not having time to ask her in person. She wrote him a letter accepting his proposal. He asked that she change her name to Lydian, and she did. They bought the big house by the road in Concord and started a family.

Emerson made a practice of inviting people who interested him to come to Concord. Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston had just gone broke due to his not being a very practical headmaster and because they believed that there was no original sin, that the children were basically good and their spirits did not need to be broken. They believed the children should move around a lot during the day and have various experiences as they learned, rather than sitting still and reciting the knowledge the teachers were imparting, and also perhaps because there was a slight scandal as they believed in teaching the children frankly about procreation. Emerson wrote and invited the Alcotts to come to Concord. He found a house for them to rent. They came and stayed.

Mostly it was Emerson who paid their rent, another neighbor who paid their taxes while Bronson taught his daughters and expounded his theories about vegetarian eating and proper education. His daughter Louisa May Alcott was a wild pony of a girl, always pretending she was a horse. She told her parents she’d been a horse in a former life. She was outspoken and had dark eyes and dark hair, unlike his blonder daughters, and he felt there was a correlation between having a divine nature and being blond. As you know, Louisa May came through for the family, and when Emerson wasn’t around to support them any more, she did it with her writing.

Another friend in Concord was David Henry Thoreau, who changed his name to Henry David Thoreau. He was another Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory in Concord. He was a green man, always in the woods or on the river, with strong views on simplicity of living, on the divine being found in nature, of living without getting drunk – drinking only water. He had a child like spirit, scorning nice clothes, baths and haircuts in favor of befriending the foxes and trees, and knowing the call of every bird and the name of every plant. Emerson and his family found him delightful. He became a teacher for their two sons, who adored him.

For a while he courted Lydian’s sister Lucy, who was staying with the family. He was in his twenties and she was nearly forty, but he thought she was elegant and sophisticated. Mostly though, as the years went on, he loved Lydian. When Emerson went on speaking tours he stayed at the house to look after everything. He planted the garden, fixed the porch, built Lydian a secret compartment under one of the dining room chairs to store her good gloves. The Emerson children loved him. Did Lydian? We don’t know. The Emersons supported Thoreau, and when he wanted to move to the woods, they gave him use of a woodlot they owned by Walden Pond, where he built a tiny shack in which he lived for a time to write a book about his boat trip up the river with his brother John. John had died of Lockjaw the same year the Emersons’ young son Waldo died of Scarlet Fever, and the community was bonded in sorrow over these two terrible losses.

Another frequent house guest was the brilliant, beautiful and radical Margaret Fuller. Lydian took to her bed when Margaret was in the house. The way Emerson looked at her, the letters they wrote back and forth across the hall from his study to Margaret’s bedroom, the long walks they took in the woods together, all were too much for Lydian to endure. Margaret’s father had educated her well beyond the limits normally observed by young women of the day. She had studied Latin and Greek, astronomy and history, theology and literature. She was the first women allowed access to the sacred halls of the Harvard Library. In a time when women were forbidden to get paid for speaking in public, she made her living by hosting “Conversations” at the Boston bookstore run by Elizabeth Peabody. Women would come from far and wide to hear these conversations on marriage, the role of women, sexuality and all manner of topics challenging the commonly held mores and values of the culture. She was a challenging woman, who would “break her sword on your shield,” and the men loved to engage with her. It helped that she had large beautiful eyes, abundant hair and a lovely figure, and that she was as well educated as any of them.

Another friend who came to Concord because of the people gathering there was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He had courted Elizabeth Peabody, but had ended up marrying her less challenging and sicklier sister Sophie. Emerson arranged for a friend of his to rent them a house within walking distance of his own and the Alcotts. Hawthorne was handsome and moderately successful as a writer. He was a member of the Transcendental Club that Emerson hosted, where they talked about Eastern religion and philosophy, about the oneness of everything, about the old mores and what the new ones should be. If Emerson was in love with Fuller, Hawthorne was more so. He would come take her for walks, and they would sit in the woods on a blanket and talk for hours. Sophie Hawthorne handled it the opposite way from Lydian, declaring that she adored Margaret too, maybe more than Nathaniel did. When Emerson came looking for Margaret and found her in the woods with Hawthorne, though, suddenly the man whose house the Hawthornes were renting needed his home back and they had to move to Salem. In his fever of loss he wrote a book about a sensual and lovely young woman who was made to wear a scarlet letter A after having been caught in an affair. She embroidered it with gold thread, insisting that coming together with her lover was a sacred act. Sophie hated the book, as she knew exactly who that woman was.

Horace Greely offered Margaret a job as an editor of the New York Tribune, so she left for New York to do that.

Thoreau came out of the woods and began living in Concord again. His book about the boat trip was published but it didn’t sell well. He began putting his journals from the pond together, looking for a publisher. No one wanted to touch them. He kept polishing them until they were the first American memoir, one of the books that shaped American thought and philosophy. Finally Emerson paid to have them published.

Emerson also paid the way for the runaway slaves who were on their way to Canada. The homes in Concord were a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Throughout the story of this group is the refrain “Emerson paid…” If Thoreau had had to get a job, where would American thought be? If the Alcotts had disintegrated under the grind of their poverty, where would American literature be? If the Transcendentalists hadn’t been rooted un Unitarianism, hadn’t formed the thought of a religion which could contain those who believe that everything was connected, that all was one with one soul, that wisdom comes from within, that there is a spark of the divine in everyone, that the divine can be seen and felt in nature, where would UUism be? Emerson paid for the space where all of this could happen.

In this congregation we have people who don’t make much money, people who have just enough to live on if they don’t go on vacations or send the kids to private school, and people who have enough to share. It’s sometimes hard to be one of the ones who gives more than others do. This congregation needs about two thousand dollars per family to be sturdy, to have the people it needs to hold the sacred space for us to have the indescribable and life-sustaining experiences we have here, to have the outreach that supports justice work in this state. For some, two thousand is not possible. For others, ten thousand or twenty thousand is a possibility. Some can step into the role of being the Emersons of this community. It will never be fair. Did Emerson always support the community happily and without a thought of resentment? No. Sometimes he felt he was the only grownup around. Sometimes he gave openheartedly. He always gave. Think about whether it might be your time to be an Emerson here.

Whatever happened to Margaret Fuller?

She became a journalist, and traveled overseas, the first female foreign correspondent reporting on the Roman revolution. She wrote about Garibaldi and the rebels, and news made its way back to MA that she was in love with a Count.

The Count had been disinherited because of his revolutionary activities. He was going to make her a Marquesa. She was pregnant. Had they married? She wanted to come home. There was hardly a place for her around Boston with her radical ideas, her education, her conversation. How much less would there be a place for her now, married to a foreigner. If not married, then with a child out of wedlock. It was beyond imagining.

The boat left the harbor too low in the water from all the Italian marble in the hold, including a bust of John C Calhoun bound for Cola SC. He was also a Unitarian, although not one of the angels on the abolition issue. Margaret’s friend Robert Browning begged her not to get on the boat. She herself had a sense of foreboding. She and the baby, Nino, and the Count set off. The Captain died of smallpox and was buried at sea before they’d gone very far at all. Nino, the baby, got smallpox too, but his parents nursed him back to health.

The new Captain, inexperienced, overshot the NY harbor and the ship ran aground off of Fire Island at three in the morning in gale winds and high waves. The ship began to break apart. All that marble in the hull began to break through. One ship board friend jumped into the water to try to swim to shore, visible and not too far away through the pounding surf. They watched him drown. A sailor who had befriended the baby offered to take the child to shore. They strapped Nino to the man’s chest and then had to watch them both drown. Margaret was seen by folks on shore standing on the deck, her long dark hair whipping around in the wind, her white nightgown already making her a ghost , and then the ship and everyone still on it disappeared under the waves. The bust of John C Calhoun was recovered and sent to Cola. The Count’s body washed up on shore, but Margaret was never seen again.

Where are the strong? Who are the trusted?

September 11, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

September 11, 2011

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we will respectfully remember those who died and talk about the second of our seven UU principles: “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”

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Water Communion

September 4, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

September 4, 2011

This is a service done in September at most UU congregations across the US, a home-coming where people renew their sense of being a community.

A large bowl is set up at the front of the sanctuary. Singly or with their partners, spouses or families, people come with water in a small container and add it to the water in the bowl. Members of the congregation share a few words about the places that feed their souls. That might be the tap in your grandmother’s kitchen, a stream behind your house, or a place you visited during the summer holiday.

Meditation – Tess Baumberger

Drops of God

God, God is water sleeping

in high-piled clouds.

She is gentle drink of rain,

pooling lake, rounding pond,

angry flooding river.

She is frothy horse-maned geyser.

She is glacier on mountains and polar ice cap,

and breath-taking crystalline ideas of snowflakes.

She is frost-dance on trees.

And we, we are drops of God,

her tears of joy or sorrow,

ice crystals

and raindrops

in the ocean of her.

God, God is air wallowing

all about us,

She is thin blue atmosphere embracing

our planet, gentle breeze.

She is wind and fearsome gale

centrifugal force of tornado and hurricane,

flurry of dust storm.

She is breath, spirit, life.

She is thought, intellect, vision and voice.

And we, we are breaths of God,

steady and soft,

changeable and destructive.

We are her laughter and her sighs,

atomic movements,

(sardines schooling)

in the firmament of her.

God, God is fire burning,

day and night.

She is sting of passion,

blinking candle,

heat that cooks our food.

She is fury forest fire

and flow of lava which destroys and creates, transforms.

She is home fire and house fire.

She is giving light of sun and

solemn mirror-face of moon,

and tiny hopes of stars.

And we, we are little licking flames

flickering in her heart,

in the conflagratory furnace of her.

God, God is power of earth,

in and under us.

She is steady, staying,

fertile loam, body, matter, tree.

She is crumbling limestone and shifting sand,

multi-colored marble.

She is rugged boulder and water-smoothed agate,

she is gold and diamond, gemstone.

She is tectonic plates and their motion,

mountains rising over us,

rumble-snap of earthquake,

tantrum of volcano.

She is turning of our day,

root of being.

And we, we are pebbles

and sand grains,

and tiny landmarks,

in the endless terrain of her.

God, God is journal of time marching

through eternity.

She is waking of seasons, phases of moon,

movements of stars.

She is grandmother, mother, daughter.

She is transcending spiral of ages

whose every turn encompasses the rest,

history a mere babe balanced on her hip.

She is spinning of universes

and ancestress of infinence.

She is memory, she is presence, she is dream.

And we, we are brief instants,

intersections, nanoseconds,

flashing gold-hoped moments in the eons of her.

God, God is.

And we, we are.

A Spiritual Stretch

August 28, 2011 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

August 28, 2011

The first in a series of sermons on the seven Unitarian Universalist Principles, this one is about affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of each person. What does that entail, exactly? What is confusing about it? Why does Rev. Meg sometimes wish she could still believe the old Calvinist doctrine of “the total depravity of human nature” instead?

Since the early days of Unitarianism, in the 1700’s, the Unitarians have insisted on not coming up with a set of beliefs by which to define themselves. We call that being “non-creedal.” (The Quakers are a non-creedal denomination as well.) The Universalists, on the other hand, adopted several statements of belief over the years of their history. They wanted to create a statement that defined them, which was that God, in God’s infinite goodness, would not send people to the eternal torments of hell. When, after years of discussion, originally initiated by youth groups, the two denominations decided to merge in the early 1960’s, a list of commonly held beliefs was drawn up to articulate the common ground. Twenty years later the women of the two denominations initiated a rewriting of those commonly held beliefs in the 1980’s to make their language more overtly inclusive of the female half of the population, and those are the Principles we now agree together to affirm.

Over the next seven months I’m going to preach on each of the seven principles, as they are a part of what defines us as Unitarian Universalists. The first principle is that we covenant together (a covenant is a promise, a statement of intention, an agreement between or among people.) We covenant together to affirm (that means say “yes” to) and promote (that means tell other people that we affirm this thing) the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This is one of the principles that sets Unitarian Universalism in direct opposition to the Calvinism that underlies much of American Christianity.

I was raised Presbyterian, which is a Calvinist faith. One of the things Calvin taught (and he was not the first, just the worst) was that human beings, indeed the whole creation, is broken, not as it was meant to be. They would scoff, when I was young, if someone said “Follow your heart.” The heart was fallen. It would not tell you, could not tell you the right way to go. John Calvin put it this way “We believe in the total depravity of human nature.” It’s a cheery little doctrine. No, really, it’s cheery in that when someone embezzles, cheats, or disappoints, you say to yourself “What can you expect? People break bad. It’s our innate tendency. Because we were born in sin (original sin,) we could choose to do good things or bad, but we have an inherent bent toward choosing to do bad things. It’s kind of a miracle, then, that I’m a pretty good person, that I haven’t robbed the hospital pharmacy, that I returned the money in that wallet I found. Because of the depravity and brokenness of our nature, we need redemption. The theological problem comes in trying to understand why so many people live generously, do kind things, and love each other.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage has its roots in the hopeful eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where reason was trusted to find answers to all mysteries, where the progress of humanity was expected to continue until we create a golden age where reason rules, all truth is discovered, all injustice righted, all shadows dispersed by the light of the human mind and spirit.

Taking a stand for humanity’s being born just fine the first time, (I wrote a song by that title, which I will sing to you in a few minutes) in no need of redemption, we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This is not to say that there are no torturers, no murderers, no really bad people. We just agree that in their original state, when they were babies, they were inherently good. The temptation is to go straight to Hitler when talking about the principles. “Did Hitler have inherent worth and dignity?” I would like to suggest that we probably don’t have Hitler in this congregation, and that we make a pact that, for the next two years, the first person in any discussion who brings up Hitler loses. This is not to say that we don’t go wrong, make destructive decisions, hurt people’s feelings, or throw plastic things occasionally into the trash. We need forgiveness. I don’t mean to be flip about this. Sometimes we hit someone we love. We need forgiveness. Sometimes we scream at our kids or cheat on our partners and spouses or slice someone to pieces with our words.

What does our UU first principle ask us to do? To affirm one another’s worth and dignity has multiple ramifications: be encouraging to them, to listen to what they have to say, to believe they have the same rights you do regardless of their religion, their ethnic background, their sexual preference, gender identification, political party. You believe they have the same rights to community as anyone else, and you welcome them into your church if they have the mental and emotional capacity to enter into covenant relationship with the congregation.

It means you don’t beat people up, not if they are strangers and not if they are in your family. You don’t behave sexually with people against their will. Not with children at all. That is a sure way to insult and injure a person’s sense of their own dignity. This principle is also related to our attempt to become aware of our own learned racism and c1assism, our homophobia, our sense of superiority.

It means you don’t give up hope for people. Here is where I fall down almost every day. We violate others’ worth and dignity when we dismiss them out of hand because they love Rush Limbaugh, or because they think the right wing has some good points to make, or because they are a fundamentalist Christian. Even our Republican UUs members and UUs who identify as Christians sometimes feel attacked in their own congregations. Now, while I do think that dismissing people by saying “they just want to be told what to think,” or “what a bunch of idiots,” violates this principle, I think it’s respectful of someone else’s worth and dignity to engage them in conversation, argument, debate.

Sometimes we fail this principle because we understand it too broadly. We get confused and think that it asks us not only to affirm the dignity of everyone, but to affirm and promote the worth of every behavior and every idea. Some ideas lead to destruction and injustice, and some ideas are just stupid. We’re allowed to say “I disagree with that. Can you help me understand why you think this?”

We don’t have to tolerate bad behavior If someone is being destructive, I think it is respectful of their worth to say “Come on, you can do better than this.” If people continue with that bad behavior, you calmly withdraw from interaction with them until, as the I Ching says, they begin behaving correctly. Mostly, we pay attention to our own behavior, even though it’s a lot more fun to focus on others.

I could be wrong, though. Listen to this teaching story: A young Japanese man was riding on a crowded train when a belligerent drunk made his way through the train car and began to insult passengers. The young man had studied martial arts for many years, and he felt his blood begin to boil. He stood up, blocked the drunk’s path, and opened his mouth to challenge him. Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm. It was a frail old man. “Let me handle this,” the elder said mildly. The old man invited the drunk to have a seat next to him. He began to talk to the man, asking him questions about his life, looking him in the eye with kindness. After a while the thug confessed that his wife had just died and he was in great pain; he had gone out and gotten drunk to numb his agony. The old man placed a comforting hand on the fellow’s shoulder, and he began to weep. Before the young man’s eyes the thug was transformed from a villain to a suffering human being. If we look at one another through what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls “soft eyes,” we will grow in our understanding of one another, and we will grow in compassion.

Some of us are awful to ourselves, using words like loser, failure, idiot. I don’t have to tell you that is not respectful of your own worth and dignity. When you are feeling down remember your own inborn worth.

“Born Just Fine the First Time.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776