Out from Silence: Writing your Life

July 1, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 30, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Poet Adrienne Rich says in her poem Transcendental Etude, “no one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives the study, as if learning natural history or music…” How might we go about studying our own lives?

Call to Worship

TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE
by Adrienne Rich

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should
–begin with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on-trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy become one with the daring
to leap into transcendence,
–take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

And in fact we can ‘t live like that: we take on
everything at once
before we’ve even begun to read or mark time,
were forced to begin in the midst of the hardest
movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

Reading

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SILENCE INTO LANGUAGE AND ACTION
by Audre Lorde

What are the words you do not yet have?

What do you need to say?

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.

Sermon

Do you feel like your life is just flowing by? Do you wish you had time to notice yourself? Do you sometimes feel like you don’t even know yourself or do you know yourself so well you’re a little bored? Are there things you might like to say that you are keeping silent about? Are there stories inside you calling out to be told?

I want to talk about a spiritual practice today. It can calm and soothe, and it can turn fierce and educational.

“No one told us that we should make of our lives a study,” writes Adrienne Rich. In Unitarian Universalism we don’t have one scripture that contains our truth. We can study and respect the Scriptures and stories of all religions. We can respect, study and look for revelation in poetry, art, nature and the lyrics of songs. In UUism, we don’t only find inspiration in the Bible. We draw from the following sources. This is from the UUA web site, a gold mine of information about this faith.

“Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote seven Principles, which we hold as strong values and moral guides. We live out these Principles within a “living tradition” of wisdom and spirituality, drawn from sources as diverse as science, poetry, scripture, and personal experience. These are the six sources our congregations affirm and promote:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”

But our own lives? Make of our own lives a source of revelation, truth and wisdom? I think so, if we pay attention in the right way.

On the simplest level, you can write about your day, about what happened along with your story about what happened and the meaning you make out of it. For example: a friend long ago and far away had a housefly infestation. She wondered if it meant she’d been cursed. She found she just needed to keep the cat food dishes cleaned out. To examine your stories about what happens to you is to understand that a different story could perhaps be told.

Make of your life a study.

Study your life for pattern recognition. If you find yourself asking “why does this always happen to me?” With people, or money, or bosses, try to figure out what part is yours, which is the part most easily changed. Reading the journal of a young woman from the 1800s, I saw that she spent an inordinate amount of time resolving to “improve the shining hour.” I’m not sure how she was wasting time. There was no TV then, and few novels. She was running the family home, ordering servants around and having a social life. Her life was so far from mine, I couldn’t relate at all. I read over my journals and realized I wasted a lot of time resolving to lose weight, grow out my fingernails and get a tan. When I put that energy into other things, my life got better.

Study your life. Maybe just make lists. Things I’m afraid of today. Things I’m worried about. Things I want today. The person I want to be today. The people who make me feel better. The people who make me feel worse. Things I feel guilty about.

Or, if you want to go deeper, you can start with questions.

Questions to start with: what was an early spiritual experience? I might write about the experience I had in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, when I was fifteen. They had a whole room where someone had pillaged a Hindu temple from its home and reassembled it at the museum. I was alone in the large room, my footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor. Stone pillars rose up on either side, in two rows. Walking through, I thought I heard a deep note resonating. Like the lowest register of an organ. It filled me up and stopped me in my tracks. Beauty. I made my way to the next room, which was a reconstructed Japanese tea garden. Water played softly from a bamboo pipe onto a stone, into a little pool. The sound was so peaceful, and the white walls of the tea house were quiet, the floor was quiet, there was a tea pot on a quiet table. I went home and put all of my shelf decorations and memorabilia into boxes, wiped off the shelves and left them empty. The space had more effect than the things.

What was an early spiritual experience for you? Not necessarily an experience in a church. Something that touched and changed your spirit.

A spiritual autobiography is writing that might give you an idea of the shape and color and weight of your spirit, its movement, its longings, its wisdom. Your spirit is where your truth is, and putting it on a page or on a screen can help you have a relationship with it that is different from the relationship you have with your truth when it just stays in your head. You may have a truth inside you that you are hesitant to let out, just write it down first. In a computer file named Rosemary or Boots, or something that won’t awaken anyone’s curiosity.

Do not resolve to write every day. This is a set up for failure. Just write now and then, something you’re sad about, or trying to figure out, or mad about, or scared to say out loud. Our silence will not protect us, says Audre Lourde. Some of us who identify as white are trying to become more competent about being aware of our whiteness.

When was I first aware of my whiteness? Or when did I first realize the color of my skin would affect the events and relationships of my life? When did I first know about race in this culture?

Back to the question I asked after the affirmation of our mission: When have I felt like I belonged? When have I felt like I didn’t belong? What might have helped me feel I belonged? What could someone have done to help me?

Inside most of us is a deep sadness. Inside most of us is a powerful rage. I’ve talked to many people who are afraid that if they open the door to their sorrow, if they take the lid off their rage, it will overwhelm their lives. Audre Lourde’s daughter said “‘You’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.’

Children in cages…. What I really mean to say is….

You are where you are. Do you want to stay where you are? Are you curious about who you could become? Do you feel settled and satisfied? What could you be better at? Spiritual growth, I think, means you grow more loving, more patient, kind, good, gentle, and self controlled. That’s from the middle eastern wisdom of the Christian Scripture. Maybe we would say our spirit needs to be more courageous, more clear, more hungry for the liberation of others, more empathic, more resilient for difficult conversation? What do you think are the symptoms of spirit growth? There’s another good question to wrestle with on the screen or the page. Blessings on your learning. Blessings on your cognitive humility, knowing you don’t have it all figured out to an A+ level yet. Blessings on your curiosity..

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

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PODCASTS

Stranger in a strange land

June 24, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Lee Legault
June 23, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Join ministerial intern, Lee Legault, in reflecting on what we gain when we leave the narrow straits of Egypt and lose our ego identities in the wilderness. Psychologist C.G Jung developed a paradigm for psychological growth called individuation and believed it to be humanity’s most important work. From a Jungian perspective, the Exodus account of Moses’ early life becomes a map to freedom through the arduous inner work of individuation.

Call to Worship
Mary Oliver

THE JOURNEY

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and
began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to
do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and
deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life that you could
save.

Reading
Celeste Snowber

Know there is a flow
working within the vessels
of your life and blood

through each spiritual artery and vein
which has a current all to its own

you cannot stop the life stream,
only enhance its surge

listen for the sound
of grace inhabiting
the map of your path

let what is Unseen carry you
in its crest

give into the wave
of the ebb and flow
of your own pulse

who knows where your journey will lead
or what you may discover

you are in a new chapter
of your own autobiography
rewriting your own narrative
every moment you take a breath

Sermon

I’m pretty new to religion. I grew up unchurched and adopted Unitarian Universalism as my family’s faith in 2012. In 2015, I decided to leave the law and become a Unitarian Universalist minister. As a warm-up, I spent a year working half-time as a lawyer and taking one course per semester at the seminary. I studied biblical Hebrew and the book of Exodus, in Hebrew.

I had never owned a Bible before seminary, and I needed something I was more fluent in than Hebrew to help me translate the biblical concepts into something meaningful to me. So in parallel with Exodus, I read up on Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical depth psychology. He helped me see the archetypal elements of my seminary experience: As Moses declared during his psychologically formative years in the Midean wilderness, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

To illustrate, I’ll tell you about my visit to the chapel at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. I went there after my first Hebrew class, to catch my breath, calm down, and meditate in their sacred space. It is a breathtaking place. A miniature version of the spired, buttressed cathedrals I associate with old Europe. Nobody else was there, so I could let my mouth hang open a little and turn around and around, soaking it in. Still loaded up from class, I went to put my books down on top of an ornate glass-topped table so I could have a better look at the even more ornate candelabra behind it — only to discover that the glass-topped table was, in fact, an enormous basin of holy water.

Fortunately, I was alone in the chapel, so nobody knew of my baptism by faux pas. Unfortunately, I was also alone with the sudden knowledge that my egocentric identity — “Lee Legault, attorney at law” — got me nowhere in this strange new land where I didn’t know up from down.

But after immersing myself in the Moses myth and Carl Jung, I see that losing my comfortable, safe, egocentric identity in that foreign place was not only embarrassing and wrenching, but also a WONDERFUL psychological development! I had taken a modest step towards psychological freedom, or what Jung calls an individuated life.

Jung by Way of Carrots

Individuation is Jung’s word for the transformation from an unconscious, egocentric person into one whose ego is in dialogue with the Self with a capital S. The Self is the central, creative, organizing source of life energy. Unitarian Universalists might call the Self the Spirit of Life.

I’ll use a carrot as an analogy. You could think of the Self as the vast expanse of soil that undergirds and nourishes the carrot and the leaves above it. The little leaves of the carrot pushing up into the light is the ego. Our ego is our sense of identity — the “I” part of each of us. But prior to individuation, the leaf of ego is unaware of the existence of the soil or the carrot and believes it is growing all alone, without any support.

Now, when I called Moses a myth, I meant no disrespect. In Jungian terms, myths are sacred stories. Irrespective of their external, historic truth, myths ring true on the inside. Myths are maps, and they contain keys: symbolic elements — called archetypes — that weave their teachings into the fabric of our souls, consciously and unconsciously. Let me tell you part of the Moses Myth from a Jungian perspective, focusing on the archetype of the wilderness journey.

Mitzrayim

Moses is born in Egypt to Hebrew parents at a time when the Pharaoh fears the ballooning Hebrew population. The Pharoah has ordered all Hebrew male babies be killed at birth. To save her son, Moses’s mother weaves a basket out of reeds, and sets him afloat on the Nile River. The Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, adopts him, and raises him as an Egyptian prince.

Moses, as we all do, spends roughly the first third of his life in Egypt developing his ego (his little green leaves). The Exodus text on Moses’s early life is spare, but we imagine he led a life of power, privilege, and safety there in the palace. He has an inkling of his Hebrew roots, but he is living life as Egyptian royalty.

The Hebrew word for Egypt is “mitzrayim” and aptly, it translates to narrow, constricted place. Right now, Moses’s sense of the world and his ego-bound, psychological state is narrow and constricted, but safe and protected.

Driven by some internal sense of restlessness, young man Moses (with his spring green ego) leaves the palace and ventures out to the Hebrew labor camp. He sees an Egyptian soldier beating a Hebrew. Moses becomes enraged, beats the Egyptian soldier to death, and hides the body.

For Jungians, this is a perfect example of the psychological stage of ego inflation, where the ego (the leaf) starts to get impressed with its own power and engages in some rash act that defies societal conventions.

The next day, Moses is inexplicably drawn back to the Hebrew labor camp. He sees two Hebrews fighting. His ego puffs up again, and he says, “Stop! Why are you fighting? You are brothers in oppression.”

One of the Hebrews stops fighting just long enough to put Moses in his place, saying “Who made you ruler over us? Do you mean to kill us too, like you did that Egyptian soldier?” This is the beginning of Moses’s ego demotion and identity crisis. Right now, he is not ready to lead anyone anywhere.

Sure enough, Pharaoh finds out about Moses’s killing the Egyptian soldier and orders his execution. Moses flees the narrow straights of Egypt, heading into the wilderness.

Midbar

A wilderness journey in a myth is an archetype for the psychological stage of alienation. Alienation is a painful, dark time when all that the ego thought it was, thought it had, and thought it knew is abruptly taken or discovered to be woefully insufficient. A seminary friend described alienation pretty well by saying, “Moses had to get the Moses out of Moses.”

In the wilderness, Moses comes across the semi-nomadic Midianites. Midianites don’t build pyramids or live in palaces; they herd sheep in the middle of nowhere. Moses spends years in Midean. He marries, has kids, herds sheep, and grows up.

Burning Bush

Painful as it is, alienation is probably the single biggest opportunity for psychological growth in a lifetime. Once the over-inflated ego (the leaf) is all battered to bits, it has a shot at realizing it is rooted in something bigger and deeper: the soil of the Self.

Archetypally, this reunion usually occurs in the wilderness.

One day while Moses is out shepherding in the wilderness, he sees a bush burning but not consumed by the fire, and he hears an awesome voice calling his name. Tn a less developed psyche that had not gone through the pain of alienation, the inner monologue might have gone something like this: “I’ve come to a fork in the path. On my left, there is a weird burning bush and a scary, disembodied voice. On the right is a well travelled sheep trail with regular shrubbery. Which way should I go? Moses forks left, toward the burning bush, and that has made all the difference.

Moses is eighty when he has that reunion with the Self at the burning bush. Individuation is not for the young pups.

Moses goes back to Egypt and has a talk with the Pharaoh about some plagues, but we’ll save that part of the myth for another day.

For today, our focus is on the fact that Moses has grown psychologically since the last time he was in Egypt. This time, he is able to lead the Hebrews, and he does: out of the narrow straights of Egypt.

As I understand it, this part of the Moses myth shows that — though it is not a fast, easy, or painless process–bending to the inner work of individuation is a path to psychological growth and freedom.

Three Tools

Here are three tools you might try out on your own inner searches for truth and meaning.

Read myths for yourself and read them regularly.
I believe a myth must be reinterpreted in order to maintain its vitality and living connection with the world. A myth, after all, describes the relationship between humanity and the Spirit of Life, and I believe that relationship is not static. It is dynamic, direct, and evolving.

While myths abound in the world’s holy books, they are almost certainly also in the books that are holy to you. For me, these would include the Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter, and the Alchemist. Know the myths that are sacred to you, and reread them periodically so their archetypes can do their conscious and unconscious work on your psyche.
Practice listening for the still. small voice.
Follow it in minor matters (like Moses did when he broke the norm and ventured out of the palace to the Hebrew labor camp). But don’t be surprised if there are times in your symbolic wilderness journeys when that inner voice is not so small, and is more like a burning bush. You are less likely to turn away from the burning bush if you have practiced listening to the still, small voice.
Mythologize your own life.
Dwell in your internal rather than external progress and see the myth patterns at play.

Notice when your ego has gotten inflated and you are too locked down in your safe, leaf life. Notice when you are in the wilderness and honor that for what it is.

In Jung’s autobiography, he exclusively discusses his inner life. Not the world wars. Not the famous people he knew. Just his internal shifts. His wilderness journeys. His burning bush experiences. That’s where the real action is.

Conclusion

You don’t have to live a myth on the scale of Moses. What I love most about the Jungian paradigm is that everyone’s inner journey matters. And not just to you. Your advances — however modest — on your inner work benefit humanity because we all contribute to and draw from the soil of the Self.

I’ll leave you with a story I’ve liked all my life, and like even more now that I’m familiar with individuation. A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, “What are you doing?” and the person without glancing up, replied: “I am laying bricks.” He asked the second, “What are you doing?” and the man rested on his knees and replied: “I am building a wall.” As he approached the third, he heard her humming a tune as she worked, and asked, “What are you doing?” The woman stood, looked up at the sky, and smiled, “I am building a great cathedral!”

From a Jungian perspective, every life is building the great cathedral of the Self.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Being a blessing to the children

June 17, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 16, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How do you walk through this world being a blessing? How do you give your blessing to your children? How do you live as a blessing to your friends and your community? How do you increase your blessing power, your soul power?

Call to Worship
Rev. Patrick T. O’Neill

It may be surprising to learn the traditional greeting passed between Masai warriors is “KASSerian UNgeh-ra?” “And how are the children?”

It acknowledges the high value the Masai always place on their children’s well-being. Even those with no children of their own give the traditional answer, “All the children are well.”

Masai society has not forgotten its reason for being, that the priorities of protecting the young, the powerless, are in place.

“All the children are well” means that the daily struggles for existence do not preclude proper caring for their young.

I wonder how it might affect our consciousness of our own children’s welfare if in our culture we took to greeting each other with this daily question:

“And how are the children?”

I wonder if we heard that question and passed it along to each other a dozen times a day, if it would begin to make a difference in the reality of how children are thought of or cared about in our own country.

I wonder if every adult among us, parent and non-parent alike, felt an equal weight for the daily care and protection of all the children in our community, our city, our state, our country …

I wonder if we could truly say without any hesitation, “The children are well, yes, all the children are welL”

What would it be like …
if the minister began every worship service by answering the question, “And how are the children?”
If every town leader had to answer the question at the beginning of every meeting:
“And how are the children? Are they all well?” Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear their answers? What would it be like?
I wonder …

Reading
Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Excuse Me, Was That a Conversation?

Sometimes I actually understand my children when we talk. Other times I don’t. Each individual word they are using is familiar, but after the whole sentence has come out, I’m lost. My dream is to have actual conversations with them, and for them to be able to converse with each other. This is where they were a few years ago, at five and eight:

“I know lots of tricks in life on how to get candy.”

“I invented them, not you.”

“Uh-uh. Einstein did.”

“How do you know that?”

“Einstein invented almost everything.”

“Oh yeah? He didn’t invent any of the good stuff. Like TV.”

“Well, he didn’t invent TV, but he invented electricity, and you can’t have TV without electricity.”

I couldn’t figure out how to join in that discussion.

Now my boys are older. They play video games. The ten-year-old plays Pokemon cards. The thirteen-year-old plays Magic cards. They say things to me like this: “Mom, see, you combine the Splinter card with the Wagon of Mortality and you can replicate any number of freezes you want to. You throw them at your opponent and unless he has Reap the Whirlwind, you can deal him fourteen damage for every artifact you have in play.”

I like it very much when they talk to me, even if. right now, it’s talking at me. I remind myself that I’m grateful they like to do it. What I don’t want is for them to turn into silent hulking teenagers grunting at me as they pass me in the hall. That will make me angry and hurt my feelings. Then I will lecture, which does not do any good.

My favorite times are when we have actual conversations, which are rare. Conversation happens when you say a brief thing to me and then I say a brief thing to you that has to do with what you just said to me. I may ask a question to clarifY for me what you said, or one that asks you to go into greater depth. I may connect what you said to something else in my experience, but I try not to jump right to my experience. We can talk about yours first.

The art of conversation is a difficult one. Many people lecture or indulge in long explanations of their ideas or blow-by-blow descriptions of their golf game last Saturday. I was raised to do the “ladylike” thing in conversation with a man. Mama called it “drawing him out.” The lady asks the man question after question so he can do all the talking. Finally I figured out that this is not conversation.

I don’t want my sons, when they are grown, to be comfortable with that kind of behavior, either from themselves or from their conversational partners.

My desire is eventually to have actual conversations with my children. Not a lecture from me, an argument about who is right and who is wrong, me “drawing them out.” or a long-winded enthusing from them about whatever sport they are playing at the moment. We practice asking questions of one another. At the dinner table I will sometimes say. “Yes, you may be excused … after you ask everyone at the table two questions.” They are getting better at it. It still feels sometimes like I’m tormenting them, but that’s okay. I’m their mom. Tormenting them is my job.

Text of this sermon is not available.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Beauty amongst the thorns

June 10, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
June 9, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Even in life’s challenging and difficult times, we may still experience beauty; sometimes when it is least expected. And that, in turn, can help us through such times.

Call to Worship

By Rev. Mary Katherine Morn

Beauty does more than awaken us.
It also admonishes us.
It demands something…
We are here, in religious community, not to hide from the anguished cries or the tender lullabies.
We are here, in religious community, not to protect our hearts from breaking.
We are here together to borrow courage for the task of coming alive.
We are here so that together we might heed the admonitions of beauty.
Answer its call to create; protect; and preserve.

Reading

John O’Donohue

It’s the question of beauty … there are individuals holding out on front lines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity,where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really ca!led to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often – like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

Sermon

“Where beauty is apparent, we are to enjoy it.
Where there is beauty hidden, we are to unveil it.
Where there is beauty defaced, we are to restore it.
Where there is no beauty at all, we are to create it.”

I loved that quote from the late minister, theologian and social justice activist Robert McAfee Brown.

I love it, because I think it captures so well the complex and profound ways in which we are called to interact with beauty in our world.

Beauty is the monthly theme we are exploring in our religious education classes and activities this June, so let’s take a bit of time to explore beauty together in worship this morning also.

Research has even begun to show that attentiveness to beauty may be beneficial us to psychologically and physically. Most of the studies have been based upon experiences of beauty in nature; however, now the research has begun to expand to such experiences through the arts and music.

Here are just some of the potential benefits that have been found:

Emotional well being.
Pro-sociality – having concern for others.
Greater life satisfaction.
Reduced stress.
Lower heart rate and blood pressure.

Here is how philosopher, futurist and social media and television personality, Jason Silva says that “Beauty Can Heal Us”.

Silva video

“Beauty can shake us out of our jadedness … Let the music make you cry … gaze upon the fading sunset.”

So, first, “where beauty is apparent, we are to enjoy it”.

That seems simple enough, yet how often do we allow ourselves to pay attention to and enjoy that which we find beautiful? How often to we explicitly set aside time for it in our daily lives?

I know for me, as some of you have heard me share before, one of my spiritual practices, one of the things that keeps me grounded and relieves stress, is to go on a meditative hike in one of our many local nature areas – to allow myself to just get absorbed in observing the beauty of nature.

And yet, in the times that are challenging and difficult, the times when I need it most, I am also most likely to put off this practice that so soothes and relaxes me. I have to remind myself to make the time to experience the beauty that will help me through such difficulties.

“Beauty can shake us out of our jadedness … Let the music make you cry … gaze upon the fading sunset”, Chris.

It is so hard to practice what I preach sometimes, I’ll tell you!

Next, “where there is beauty hidden, we are to unveil it.

It is easier, I think, for us to find beauty in the places that have been more traditionally associated with it – nature, the mountains, the oceanside, a spectacular sunset, those we love, the music that moves us, the work of art that takes our breath away, a stunning moment in a play or movie or dance performance, as just a few examples.

It can be harder to see the beauty in what we might otherwise consider unattractive or mundane. And yet, if we look for it, the beauty is likely always there in these places too.

When I was in seminary, they had us do an exercise called a beauty walk that was based on a Native American tradition. They had us go to an area we would not normally associate with beauty and walk through it slowly, being attentive to the potential for beauty we might have missed before, bringing a camera to take pictures of what we found.

I went to a warehouse/industrial area and was surprised to discover that it was teaming with life and elements of beauty.

Ants dwelling in the cracks in the sidewalk.
Flowers finding places to bloom even amongst all the metal and concrete.
Birds dwelling everywhere they could find.
The interplay between the bright colors with which people had painted some of the buildings.
Landscaping people had created to surround themselves with beauty when they sat at their outside lunch table.
Vegetable gardens people had grown in plots they had created outside the warehouses in which they worked.

My beloveds, beauty surrounds us, both in the classical ways in which we have conceptualized it and in places we might least expect it, as well as within so many of the seemingly mundane moments of our every day lives.

I invite you to try the beauty walk exercise and see what hidden beauty you may unveil.

Here is a short video that I think captures this idea that beauty is to be found in the sublime, as well as in the more mundane.

Video

Finally, “Where there is beauty defaced, we are to restore it. Where there is no beauty at all, we are to create it.”

I think this is at least partially what our call to worship you all read with Mary Jane earlier is expressing.

Our Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Sean Dennison, says it like this:

“The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy. With this, we are reminded that beauty does more than soothe and heal. It demands. It creates commitment. It doesn’t just say, ‘Love and appreciate me.’ It says, ‘Protect me! Fight for me!'”

So yes, beauty is there for us to experience it with awe and joy. Beauty is there to comfort us and sustain us in our struggles.

And, our experiences of beauty also call us to create more of it – to restore it when it has been defaced and to create it where it has not yet existed.

Beauty calls us to love and justice. It calls us to leave our world more beautiful than the one into which we were born.

And with all of the ugliness, all of the beauty defaced in our world today, I know, for me, it can sometimes be hard to hold on to a vision of that more beautiful world, that world toward which beauty beckons us.

For me, what would be beautiful, what beauty calls us to create, is a world in which children coming to the U.S. after fleeing persecution with their parents are welcomed with loving open arms rather than being torn away from their parents and locked in cages.

Beautiful would be a world in which we have answered the call to abolish immigrant concentration camps and prisons, and children no longer die while under the custody of our government.

Beautiful will be when Alirio, who has taken sanctuary here in our church, and Hilda and her son Ivan at St. Andrews, are all free and no longer fear for their lives.

Better yet, what would be beautiful, what beauty calls us to envision is a world in which we have helped to create conditions in people’s homelands that are safe, secure and prosperous.

Beauty beckons us to create a world in which our own children can attend schools that provide safety, equity, a caring loving environment. Schools where our 5 and 6 year olds and on up no longer have to live in fear and participate in mass shooter drills.

Beautiful will be when we have put into place a federal administration and state governments that all stand up for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed folks rather than encouraging discrimination against us by making it legal.

Beauty calls us to build a world in which transgender and all queer folks are able to live out loud as a our true and beautiful selves without fearing violence or even death at hands of hatred and bigotry.

Beauty will happen when women and all people capable of bearing a child have control over their own bodies in all states and regions of our country. Beauty calls us the cast the patriarchy upon the ash heap of history.

Beautiful will be a time when black mothers and fathers no longer have to feel terror over the prospect of their children and loved ones being shot by the very law enforcement that is supposed to protect and serve.

A criminal justice system that actually is just – that would be beautiful, and beauty is begging us to create it.

Beautiful would be Muslims in the U.S. and ALL people of faith living without fear and coexisting in peace.

Each of us living our own religious beliefs without trying to force them upon others. How beautiful would that be?

Beautiful would be saving our planet, bringing democracy to our work places, restoring our institutions of representative democracy to their proper balances of power.

Beautiful would be eliminating poverty and homelessness, wiping out economic and wealth inequality, dismantling white supremacy culture.

Beauty calls us, it lures us to these and all forms of love and justice.

OK, now just go do all of that, and I’ll see you next week.

I think one of the places beauty is too often hidden and must be unveiled is our inability sometimes to recognize our own beauty.

We must know our own beauty to be fully able to experience the beauty in our world, restore that which has been lost and create that beauty which has not yet become.

To build the beloved community, to create that world about which we dream, we must overcome the many messages that we receive telling us we are not enough, not beautiful as we are.

Certainly, our cultural standards for physical beauty, especially for women, exclude all but a small segment of the white European descendent population.

Even more so though, we are discouraged from expressing the beautiful unique wholeness that is each of us.

Here is a poem by Maya Angelou that I think expresses this idea so well.

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

My beloveds, you are beautiful.

You are phenomenal.

You hold within you your own unique spark of the divine. You have your own unique set of gifts that only you can bring into our world.

And as a religious community, as a religious faith, we may combine together each of our unique sparks of the divine, blend together our unique gifts to answer the call of beauty.

Together, may we radiate the divine our into our world, restoring beauty where it has been defaced, creating beauty where it has yet to become.

Amen.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Homecoming and Dedication

June 7, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Mr. Barb Greve
June 2, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Mr. Barb Greve will be joining us and speaking to the community. Barb is co-moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association, serving alongside Elandria Williams. He was appointed by the Board of Trustees on August 1, 2017, to serve in the bylaw-defined role of moderator. At the same time, the board named Williams co-moderator and stipulated that he and Williams would serve together and share responsibilities as co-moderators.

A Master-level credentialed religious educator, Barb has served for the past twenty years as an intentional interim director of lifespan religious education, a professional youth advisor, and a member of the UUA staff. He received his Master of Divinity from Starr King School for the Ministry in 2007 and served as the chair of the school’ s Board of Trustees. He is one of the cofounders of TRUUsT (Transgender Religious Unitarian Universalists Together) and a tri-founder of the Guild of Interim Religious Educators. Raised in the First Parish in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he maintains his membership, Greve loves committee and board meetings, believing that doing the ” business” of our faith is important.

Greve is a transgender guy, grateful for the life-saving loving acceptance that our faith has provided throughout his life.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Beautiful ‘Flower Girls’

June 6, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 26, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We celebrate the ritual of Flower Communion, created by Unitarian minister Norbert Capek, which lifts up the beauty of diversity and inclusion on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Playing ball on running water

May 22, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 19, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Western psychotherapy has emphasized insight as a way of healing emotional pain. Dr. Shomo Morita, a Japanese doctor, created a way of treating patients’ emotional pain that draws wisdom from Buddhism.

Call to Worship
Barbara Wells

O Spinner, Weaver of our lives,
Your loom is love.
May we who are gathered here
be empowered by that love
to weave new patterns of Truth
and Justice into a web of life that is strong
beautiful, and everlasting.

Reading
O. Eugene Pickett

WE GIVE THANKS THIS DAY

For the expanding grandeur of Creation, worlds known and unknown, galaxies beyond galaxies, filling us with awe and challenging our imaginations:

We give thanks this day.

For this fragile planet earth, its times and tides, its sunsets and seasons:

We give thanks this day.

For the joy of human life, its wonders and surprises, its hopes and achievements:

We give thanks this day.

For our human community, our common past and future hope, our oneness transcending all separation, our capacity to work for peace and justice in the midst of hostility and oppression:

We give thanks this day.

For high hopes and noble causes, for faith without fanaticism, for understanding of views not shared:

We give thanks this day.

For all who have labored and suffered for a fairer world, who have lived so that others might live in dignity and freedom:

We give thanks this day.

For human liberty and sacred rites for opportunities to change and grow, to affirm and choose:

We give thanks this day. We pray that we may live not by our fears but by our hopes, not by our words but by our deeds.

Sermon

I’m trained in the Western world’s methods of counseling. Listen to the pain. Explore the feelings. Look for patterns in the person’s life. Do the life archeology that tells you where the patterns start. When the client has insights into why she reacts the way she does, into why he self-sabotages, why she suffers from self doubt, why he is beset by anxiety, the insight will help things change. And sometimes it does. Over the years, though, I began to lose a little faith in insight. I knew why. People know why they drink, or why they gamble, but nothing stops drinking like – stopping drinking. People tell me they have a book in them, they just can’t get it written. They know all of the reasons why they can’t get it written, but the main one is that they don’t sit down and write.

Most of feel stuck sometimes, as if a piece of our life has become a mountain that is steep and forbidding, impossible to climb.

I was fascinated when I found my lack of faith in insight was shared by a school of therapy based in Japanese philosophy, developed by a doctor Shomo Morita. It has evolved into a school called Constructive Living.

Life they say, is like playing ball on running water. So much is coming at us. So much is disheartening, shocking, so much is sweet, and then terrifying, and then joyous, then disappointing. At times we go into overwhelm. Some of us grind to a halt.

Morita said: “There is a limit to the progress that can be made through insight.”

Morita saw that getting stuck in anxiety is a result of misunderstanding life. Life is hard. You can’t change your thoughts. You can change your actions. Remember that Buddhism teaches that our cations are all that we have. It’s natural that this school should arise in a culture where Buddhism is foundational. There is a famous Zen saying: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” It’s the day to day where character is built, where relationships are built, where a life is built.

Lots of times, in the midst of officiating at a wedding, I feel moved to talk about how relationships are built on ten small decisions a day. Do you look up and smile when the person comes into the room? Do you apologize first? Do you forgive first? Do you offer the first foot rub? Do you offer to make the tea? These are small things, but for most of a life there are only small things. That’s where the love lives.

Morita therapy was developed to help with overwhelming anxiety. In its early days it started with seven days of bed rest, just bed, no reading, no visits, meals in bed, just get up to go to the bathroom. This hits the reset button in someone who has been overstimulated, overcome by all that is to be done, all the decisions to be made. After seven days most people really want to get up and do something. For the next week you go into nature and sit. You may do light activity, like feeding the birds. In the next week you start by sweeping the patio, washing the car, paying attention to what you are doing.

The idea is to create in yourself the habit of doing the next thing. That’s the way to manage anxiety. Do the next thing. One thing. You trust your inner voice that tells you what the next thing is to do. You write a page. You cook a meal. You make a phone call. What if it doesn’t work?

Constructive Living encourages actions without attachment to outcomes. I’ve told you about the box of envelopes I bought to send out my writing. It’s scary to put yourself out there, to offer your words to the evaluation and judgment of strangers. Over the glue on the flap was a paper you peeled off to reveal the stickiness. “Detach before mailing,” it said. I thought that was good advice, so I hung one of those over my desk.

You can’t control or change anyone but yourself. Your mom is still going to bail your brother out of every mess. Your sister is still going to choose the wrong loves. You can say your piece, but you have to detach from results. Just do the next right thing. Maybe it’s eating breakfast, then washing the breakfast dishes. Action calms anxiety and lifts the fog of overwhelm. Not flailing random action. The next right thing. Breathing. Mindfully.

What if you think something is the right thing to do but it’s not? What if you make a mistake? I found out this week that I’d made a mistake. I still don’t know how big a mistake it was. I have already learned (or been reminded of something I already knew) from it. I still have the job of feeling out what the next right thing to do is. There is no same action that fits every situation. Morita says mistakes are good teachers.

They show you the next right thing. If you don’t know what it is, be quiet for a while and see if it comes to you. Mistakes teach you that you were paying attention to the wrong thing, they warn you about future embarrassment, frustration and trouble if we don’t adjust to the reality that confronts us.

You’re in traffic. You’re in a hurry. You can suffer by wishing all the cars out of your way. You can yell and pound the steering wheel, but the traffic is the traffic. You can choose another road, and then you can deal with the traffic on that road. Your computer is your computer, and sometimes it doesn’t do what you think it should do. You can pound the same keys as before, only harder. You can express your frustration. The reality of your computer doesn’t care about your feelings. It will be more likely to do what you want it to do if you press the correct keys.

You have feelings, but the goal is to do the next right thing in spite of the feelings. I hate going to the post Office. I mean, I HATE it. The PO doesn’t care. If I want something mailed I have to go. Or ask someone to go for me. Morita therapy is fairly blase about feelings. There are no “bottled up” feelings, they say. If you’re not feeling something right now, it’s not there. Your feelings are like clouds moving across the sun.

Most of you know the Buddhist story about the student who had a vision in group meditation. “Master,” he says proudly, “In my minds eye I saw the Buddha himself, and he was all made of gold.”

“Just keep paying attention to your breath and it will go away,” said the teacher.

Accept your feelings. Know your purpose. Do what needs to be done. These are the stepping stones toward skillful living. OF COURSE I fight with this. “What about the unconscious? What about fate and deep urges, intuition and desire? No one school of therapy has a big Theory of Everything that works and makes sense. I like the Buddhist-ness of this school, which says “Just try it and see if it works for you.”

One of the things you do in this school of therapy, as in others, is to write your epitaph, and write your obituary. You can see what you’d like to be remembered for, what stories people will tell at your memorial service. You can make adjustments if you don’t like where your current path is taking you. You write out your bucket list we call it in the west, of things you would like to do and see before you die.

I would suggest adding another list of things you want to let go of doing, things you don’t want to spend energy on any more. In my life, the title of that list rhymes with “bucket” but has more of a “I’m going to let this go,” meaning.

Knowing when to act is as important as knowing when not to act. Sometimes productive waiting is what needs to be done. Letting the water boil. Letting the glue set all the way before testing it. Letting a friend have time to get their thoughts together before responding to us.

The fully functioning human being isn’t one who is pain-free and happy all the time. We feel horrified by the suffering caused by unjust laws and the actions of elected officials. In addition to stewing and shaking, we go get trained to register people to vote, then we register people to vote, and then we VOTE. We are disheartened by our guest in sanctuary’s situation, so we ask the Sanctuary Network what needs doing, or, if we have Spanish, we come over to visit Alirio. As we say in the Carolinas: You can extrapolate from there.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Fiery and Fearless

May 13, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 12, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Olympia Brown is one of the “mothers” of Unitarian Universalism. This morning we’ll take a look at some UU history and let it inspire us.

Call to Worship

By David C Pohl

We come to this time and this place:
To rediscover the wondrous gift of free religious community;
To renew the faith in the holiness, goodness, and beauty of life;
To reaffirm the way of the open mind and full heart;
To rekindle the flame of memory and hope; and
To rekindle the vision of an earth made fair, with all her people one.

Reading

STAND BY THIS FAITH
Olympia Brown

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it.

There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals,

Which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful.

Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,

That you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost.

Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.

Sermon

I have preached a few sermons on Unitarian history. Here is a little slice of Universalist history for you. The Universalists are a Christian denomination of people who believe in the divinity of Jesus (which makes them Trinitarian as opposed to Unitarian) and the love of a God who would not send anyone to hell. This is the story of a woman Olympia Brown, born without a lot of patience, who had lost it all by the end of her life. This is the story of a woman who got a lot done, the story of a person who, like all of us, had good times and hard times. This is a story of a person living her soul. This is the story of one way social justice happens.

The first of four children, Olympia Brown was born in 1835 to Universalist pioneers in Michigan. After beginning her education in a schoolhouse her dad built on the farm, Olympia went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In first year English, the instructor assigned in-class orations and readings, stating “all of the young men will be required to give speeches before the class. “The young women must bring manuscripts to class and read from them.” Many believed women inferior public speakers to men, and unable to recite from memory. Olympia did not argue, but when her turn came the next day, she delivered a rousing oration with her manuscript rolled up in her hand. Olympia and other independent young women caused Antioch continuing consternation. In the mid-1850s the Amelia Bloomer dress came into fashion, a sort of pants-skirt combination, comfortable, practical, and scandalous, as it only reached halfway down the calf. Apparently a woman’s ankles had the power to cause great excitement! Bloomers let the young women move freely, so they could run and climb stairs quickly. Olympia always wore her Bloomer dresses as a student, and ignored the ridicule she received from the many outraged Yellow Springs students.

Physical education was not available for Antioch women in Olympia’s day, and she and her friends took long walks for exercise. When the college president found out that young Antioch women were seen in nearby towns laughing, running, and talking noisily, he sent to Boston for a professional chaperone. No such person had been hired to watch the men, so Olympia and her friends expressed their displeasure by teasing the poor woman relentlessly — in German. The chaperone lasted a week.

She and other students invited Antoinette Brown to come speak. Antoinette Brown was a Congregational minister who had gone to Oberlin. “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach,” Olympia said in her autobiography, “and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.” She decided she wanted to be a minister, and finally found one seminary that would admit her. It was a hugely radical thing to do on the part of the seminary.

It was not the Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania, which on June 16, 1861, sent this response to her application: After apologizing for having kept her waiting for a reply, a Mr. Stearns wrote: “were it my private concern, I should say at once ‘come!’ I have no prejudice against a woman’s studying anything she can or against a woman’s speaking in public. From what I’ve heard of you, I’d be glad to have you for a pupil and more like you. But I have no right to commit the Institution to a new course of action.” I heard that a lot too, as a young seminary graduate, interviewing with search committees. “We have no personal sense that women shouldn’t be ministers,” they would say, “it’s just that my congregation would have difficulties. They’re not quite ready…”

Finally Olympia received a letter from Ebenezer Fisher, president of the Canton Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University advising her to study Greek there and board with a private family. He confirms September 25, 1861 as the beginning of her study. This was one of only three theological seminaries in the Unites States that would admit women students. At the end of the letter he adds: ” It is perhaps proper that I should say you may have some prejudices to encounter in the institution from students and also in the community here. Nothing very mighty or serious, I trust…The faculty will receive and treat you precisely as they would any other student. My own judgment is that it is not expedient for women to become preachers, but I consider it purely a question of experience and not at all of right–the right I cannot question. The other matter of expedience or duty I cannot decide for you. I am willing to leave it between you and the Great Head of the Church. (For the few of you who may be confused by that, he was talking about God, not the President of their denomination!) If you feel He has called you to preach the everlasting Gospel, you shall receive from me no hindrance but rather every aid in my power.” (June 21, 1861) Quite amazing, actually, for a man of that day. I head much the same thing from fellow students at Princeton Seminary. They would say “I’m so concerned about your feeling that you have a call to the ministry. Can you tell me what the story of that is? Can you tell me why you feel you would be a good minister?” In other words, “justify yourself.” Women students were asked to justify their presence daily. Some of the male students were there (and this is no fault of theirs) because they weren’t sure what else to do, or because someone had said “You have such a nice voice, you should apply to seminary. Here, let me help you fill out the application.” I’m sure there are places where men have to justify their existence every day too. It makes you tough. You have to be determined. Olympia Brown was determined.

No woman at the time, most books say, was ordained by more than one local church. No woman was ordained with the full authority of a whole denomination, which is what Olympia Brown wanted. She thought this would be a step in women’s access to authority and roles in decision making. When the Northern Association of Universalists were in session, she successfully presented her case for ordination.

When she was ordained in June 1863, Dr. Fisher, who had had such doubts about her coming to St. Lawrence, participated in the ceremony. He participated in the ceremony. That makes him a hero in my book. Rev. Olympia Brown later paid tribute to Dr. Fisher, saying: “This was the first time that the Universalists or indeed any denomination had formally ordained any woman as a preacher. They took that stand, a remarkable one for the day, which shows the courage of these men.”

The way it works is that the ones without power have to push and push and be told they are rude. They have to put up with folks acting like they are crazy or thoughtless or disloyal for pushing for change. Again, this isn’t the fault of individuals as much as it’s the way culture is. When you are Ôout of line,” when you are calling for justice, you all know that first they ignore you. When that doesn’t work and you become a little more powerful, they begin to ridicule you. Next, when you have more people gathered to your side, they begin to fight you. When you prevail, they say they were with you the whole time. In fact, it was their idea. Someone on the inside has to have the courage to stand up, to stand with those asking for justice if justice is to be done. You have to have help from the inside.

The Presbyterians did not ordain women untill 1955, the Episcopalians in 1973. The Roman Catholics, not yet. The denomination I grew up in, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church? Not yet.

1864 she was called to her first full-time parish ministry in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. At this time Olympia Brown became active in the women’s rights movement, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and other leaders. She and the people in that first church loved one another. It was not so with her next parish, a Universalist congregation in Bridgeport, CT. More about that in a moment, but first, her husband.

While still in Weymouth, she’d met John Henry Willis, a member of her congregation’s Board of Trustees, and they married in 1873. She “thought that with a husband so entirely in sympathy with my work, marriage could not interfere, but rather assist. And so it proved, for I could have married no better man. He shared in all my undertakings.” As did Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown kept her maiden name, with Willis’s agreement. It was a most felicitous marriage. When her husband died, unexpectedly in 1893, she wrote: “Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and upright in his life,….with an absolute sincerity of character such as I have never seen in any other person.”

Her ministry at the Bridgeport church seemed to have been one fraught with peril from the start. It was a struggling church, the only kind then open to having a woman minister. There is a letter written to her that first year begging her not to leave, as this parishioner felt the church is just starting to prosper under her guidance. He regretted the difficulties she had encountered in the past year, but was optimistic about a brighter future and noted that, “with one exception, all are satisfied with your course.”

That one was a Mr. James Staples, “a bitter agitator,” who stepped up his pecking away at her ministry “like a raucous crow.” When she took a leave of absence for the birth of her first child, ministers were brought in to preach who would say to anyone who would listen, “What you need here is a good man.” Despite the efforts of her many supporters in the church, including PT Barnum, she was able to stay there only six or seven years, before he ran her off and split the church. Churches suffer when the raucous crow doesn’t get shut down by members craving the health of the church. She had lots of support, even powerful help, but apparently James Staples was allowed to continue pecking away at her. I wonder if anyone in that church said to him “You are not just hurting our minister and her family, you are hurting the church when you do that.” Perhaps they did and he kept on. Perhaps this was the reason it was a struggling church when she got there. It was split and weakened when she left. She was strong and mighty, and she endured for seven years.

She and her husband moved to Racine, WI, where he published a newspaper and ran his own printing business. Olympia was pastor of the Good Shepherd Universalist Church in Racine, WI. It was a disheartened church, apathetic and broke. She was asked to come turn it around. Under her leadership they perked up somewhat, and it was a happy time for the family. Both of their children became teachers: Henry Parker Willis was professor of banking at Columbia University and key in writing the Federal Reserve Act, and Gwendolyn Willis taught classics at Bryn Mawr.

At the age of 52, immersed in the fight to enfranchise women in WI, she left the full time ministry Women could vote there on matters pertaining to the schools. Olympia and her fellow suffragists were of the opinion that every vote eventually had something to do with the schools. They won the fight, but two months later the new law was overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Gwendolyn Willis describes her mother as “indomitable and uncompromising, traits that do not lend themselves well to politics and leadership. She cared little for society, paid no deference to wealth, represented an unfashionable church, and promoted a cause (woman suffrage) regarded as certain to be unsuccessful. She was troublesome because she asked people to do things, to work, contribute money, go to meetings, think and declare themselves openly as favoring a principle or public measure.” (Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality, Charlotte Cote, Mother Courage Press, 1988, p. 171) Thank goodness we have some folks like that here too!

No longer having the patience for a state-by-state campaign, Olympia joined the militant “Woman’s Party.” I belonged to this party before I was born,” she declared. At the age of 82, in 1917, she was one of 1,000 women who marched in freezing rain and strong winds, picketing the White House to make known to President Woodrow Wilson their demands for a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. Many of the marchers chained themselves to the fence in front of the White House when the police came to break up the demonstration. June 1920, when she was 85, she marched to demonstrate at the Republican Convention in Chicago.

Later that year women were granted the right to vote. Of all the pioneers, Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Olympia Brown was the only one who lived long enough to cast a vote in a Presidential election.

Asked to preach, near the end of her life, at her former church in Racine, she testified to the importance in her life of Universalism, “the faith in which we have lived, for which we have worked, and which has bound us together as a church. . . . Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you.”

After the suffrage victory, Brown dedicated herself to promoting world peace and became one of the original members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She died in 1926 at the age of 91. In the Universalist Church of Washington DC, a plaque honoring her reads:

Olympia Brown
Preacher of Universalism
Pioneer and Champion of Women’s Citizenship Rights
Forerunner of the New Era
THE FLAME OF HER SPIRIT STILL BURNS TODAY.

May it burn within each of us, when we feel a call, when something needs to be done. May our sense of a loving God sustain us, or our faith in the strength of justice and truth uphold us, may we honor those among us who have the fire. We need them.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Curiouser and Curiouser

May 6, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Click on the Play Button Above to Listen to the Service Recording.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 5, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

As a people who have always been seekers of truth and askers of questions more profound than answers, following our curiosity can be a spiritual discipline for Unitarian Universalists.

Call to Worship

LET US BE CURIOUS
Alexis Engelbrecht

Let us be curious.
May we contemplate what we believe and why.
Let us be curious.
May we inquire to learn more about beliefs and experiences different from our own.
Let us be curious.
May we explore the world around us, so that we might broaden our awareness and appreciate the beauty that is, while exploring what else might be.

Reading
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Sermon

Dr. Michelle Khine had a problem.

Dr. Khine is a researcher whose scientific interest, life long empirical curiosity, involves developing nanotechnology that can be used for healthcare purposes.

Her problem was that at the time, her work with such nanotechnology required a lab with sophisticated equipment that allowed doing the work at the microscopic level.

She had just changed jobs, but the lab at the new job that she had been promised was nowhere near ready. In fact, it appeared to be months away from being equipped and useable.

How would she continue her work and meet the requirements of the grants to fund it that she was bringing with her? Without the equipment she needed to work on a microscopic level, all seemed to be lost.

Then, she remembered a toy from her childhood called, “Shrinky Dinks”.
Shrinky Dink’s are polystyrene sheets that can be cut into various shapes, colored and then placed in an oven, where they will shrink into small, hard plates without losing their original shape and characteristics.

Michelle Khine was curious whether she could use this process to allow her to do her work starting on a larger scale and then shrink everything down, thereby avoiding the need for the expensive lab equipment required to work at the microscopic level.

And thus was born the Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: 3D polystyrene chip.

And thus, did curiosity allow Dr. Khine to save her nanotechnology career with a toy from her childhood.

Dr. Khine’s story, I think, is a wonderful illustration of the power of our human capacity for curiosity. Among other benefits, curiosity is the source of our creative potential.

This month, our lifespan faith development activities and religious education classes are exploring the concept of curiosity, and I thought it would be a great topic for us to examine together for a while this morning.

After all, Unitarian Universalists come from a long tradition of being the
questioners and the curious – those for whom revelation is never sealed but rather is continuously unfolding and therefore always to be explored anew.

The Unitarians got curious about how God as a trinity could make any possible sense and eventually rejected this idea, among several others that had been and often remain Christian dogma.

The Universalists became curious about how a supposed all loving God could condemn those who were supposedly so loved to bum in hell for all eternity.

Eventually, some Universalists came to reject hell altogether, while others thought that sinners might burn in hell for some unspecified time period before God would lift them out of the flames so that they did not have to burn painfully for the rest of all eternity.

I’m glad we continued to cultivate our sense of curiosity and don’t believe that anymore.

Now, some aspects of religion have actually discouraged curiosity – witness the Adam and Eve story about partaking of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge for example – but all in all, I think both religion and science stem from our curiosity about our human condition, the world and universe in which we find ourselves and the larger questions of meaning in life, death, beauty, truth and ethics.

And they are at times trying to get at, different types of questions and certainly in different ways. As such, I don’t think the commonly held perception that science and religion have to stand in opposition to one another is necessarily true. I think at times they might indeed inform and enhance each other.

Certainly, through science, we have discovered changes that moved us from cave dwelling to landing on the moon to having a phone in our pockets more powerful than the original computers and on and on and it has been our curiosity that has driven our science.

So why do we humans have such a curious nature. After all, our curiosity drives us to spend time exploring not just those big questions I was just talking about, but also to spend time exploring seemingly unproductive curiosities like reading news about people we will never meet, watching movies and reading stories about people who do not really exist, exploring places we will never visit again and learning about topics that seem to have no practical use in our daily lives, just to name a few.

Well one evolutionary theory is that it stems from a trait we evolved called “neoteny”, which means that even as adults we retain more juvenile characteristics compared to other mammals, such as being relatively hairless and having brains relatively large in relation to our body size.

And this neoteny, while making us weaker than our primate cousins, has given us our lifelong playfulness, curiosity and deep sense of attachment to one another, all of which have provided survival advantages.

And it turns out that in a complex world, even those seemingly unproductive curiosities we are prone to explore that I mentioned earlier provide an advantage. They do so by keeping our brains open to novelty and new learning, so that we do not remain stuck in old but useless thinking algorithms when we encounter new challenges or threats.

What may have seemed to be useless learning in our past can turn out to be very useful knowledge later on.

Curiosity then is what keeps our learning alive and drives us to engage our full learning capacity.

As Albert Einstein once said it, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”

And it turns out that some research has found that maintaining that passionate curiosity is associated with better health and greater longevity, as well as developing and retaining higher intelligence.

In other studies, people who were actively curious about others more easily established close relationships, found greater satisfaction in their relationships and were less likely to express racism and other forms of prejudice.

Other studies found engaging with novelty and remaining curious are correlated with a sense of overall life fulfillment and happiness.

Now, while it is important to note that “associated” or “correlated” does not establish cause and effect, still these studies might give us reason to consider whether actively keeping our sense of curiosity alive might be good for us.

Here are a few practices in which can engage that may help us do that. For a faith steeped in questions more profound than answers, we might even call them spiritual practices.

1. Reconnect with play. Children are naturally curious, and play is one of the ways that as children we explore ourselves and the world about which we are learning.
We too often lose our our sense of play as adults; however, even as adults, play can still open up novelty for us.
And actually one good way to engage with play is to be around and play with children. They can teach us how to do it again!
One warning though, those curious children may surprise you.
I loved one story I found about a little boy who was curious about why his mother’s hair was beginning to turn grey.
So, one day, when they were at the playground and his mom was playing seesaw with him, he asked her, “Mommy, why are some of your hairs turning grey?”
Thinking she might use this playful occasion as a teaching lesson, the mom replied, “It’s because of you dear. Every time you do something bad one of my hairs turns grey.”
“Oh,” replied the little boy innocently, “Now I know why grandma has only grey hairs on her head.”
2. Intentionally building our knowledge enhances our curiosity to learn even more reading, attending talks, watching documentaries, traveling to new places, making lists of things we want to explore for a few examples. Studies have found the larger our knowledge base, the more likely we will be curious to learn even more.
3. Get comfortable with uncertainty and being uncomfortable. Being curious by necessity involves exploring the unknown, and while novelty and surprise can cause us tension, they are also some our greatest sources of joy and learning.
For folks who watch sports for example, part of the enjoyment is in the tension of not knowing what the ultimate outcome of the game will be.
4. In every conversation, think of questions too ask, not things to say next. Listening more activates our curiosity and can add much greater depth to our conversations and relationships.

So those are just a few of the ways I found that we can keep our sense of curiosity alive and fulfilling.

Now, with the exception of religion and sometimes play, the ways we can pursue our curiosity and practice keeping it alive about which I have spoken so far have been in terms of very concrete and literal thinking.

I want to turn now to some more emotional, embodied and metaphorical ways we can both explore that about which we are curious and also keep our curiosity active.

There are times when we are curious about things that we either do not have the ability to fully understand because of our current scientific limits or that are just not as easily understood and expressed on a concrete and literal level.

Love, beauty, meaning, morality, justice and injustice, human cruelty and human altruism, God or that which is ultimate, to name just a few examples – these are just a few of our human curiosities that may be further explored metaphorically.

And one way that we explore these types of interests is through storytelling. Whether told orally, written, expressed through television, movies theatre or the opera, the power of stories is that they help us understand things that may require us to go beyond literal, intellectual thinking. They help us approach matters that can only be pointed at metaphorically and that must be felt in our bodies, hearts and souls in order to better grasp at their meaning.

And by the way, you can experience the power of storytelling, at an event called, “Story Telling Under the Stars,” here at the church, on our courtyard at 6:30 p.lU. this evening.

Likewise, the visual arts, poetry, music, dance and the other performing arts can also help us to experience that about which we are curious but that may be best approached through metaphor. These too can move us beyond only the intellectual and help with that which requires the engagement of our emotions and senses.

And all of these not only help us with that about which we may be curious but need more than only a literal approach, they also stimulate our curiosity even further.

How often has reading a good fictional book gotten you interested in exploring some subject brought up within the story?
Or seeing a movie gets us interested in visiting a place we have never traveled to before.
Or an engaging night at the theatre get us interested in a moral issue we had never thought much about, etc.

Experiences of storytelling, music and the arts then are other vital ways in which we cultivate and expand our curiosity.

My friends, we were meant to be curious creatures.
And science and religion are important.
Learning about the really big stuff matters.

But so too does the more mundane – something in which you get interested may seem to have little practical value in that moment, but go ahead and pursue your curiosity about it anyway.

Later on, it may well have value you would have never anticipated. At the very least it will keep your thinking adaptable and open to novelty.

So, yes, please do keep coming to church! Yes, keep up with what science is teaching us.

But also read that story about people you likely will never meet, attend that concert featuring music that is new to you, sing out loud, read up on shrinky-dink microfluidics just because your curious about it, spend hours admiring your favorite artwork, explore lands to which you may never return, start a new hobby just because it interests you, play with the abandonment of small children.

These too are spiritual work because they stimulate our curiosity and keep it alive and well.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Benediction

As we go out into our world now, may we go with the courage to pursue the curiosity that transforms us and moves us toward wholeness, compassion and transcendence.
May we carry the spirit of this, our beloved religious community with us until next we gather again.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be”.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

Youth Service: Reflection

April 29, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Senior Youth Group
April 28, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our Senior High Youth Group lead the service and invite the congregation on a journey in self-reflection, how we’ve grown, and who we’ve become over our lives.

Call to Worship

ELEVEN
by Sandra Cisneros

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are-underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is. You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you . And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.

Reading

REACHING NONETHELESS
by Sage Hirschfeld

If I could take every word I’ve ever written and ask them what this is all about
I think it might sound something like all the pots and pans in my kitchen falling out from every
overstuffed cabinet and onto the tile floor in a single moment
It would sound like every great and terrible symphony warm up
Like cacophony of chaos already insued
A ruckus of all things sacred in their hardness
Colliding
Greeting each other
Shaking hands with shock waves strong enough to rip through plaster and wood and flesh and
bone
To stir something somewhere you never knew was sleeping till you felt it wake up
To punctuate a period with an exclamation point and then another period.
But that’s not where it would end
It would sound like a collective exhale of everything daring to move
It would sound like doors creaking open throughout the house
Like footsteps down narrow hallways drawing near
Like my father’s voice calling in every shade of compassion
It would sound like hands outstretched in beaconing beyond intrinsic
Beyond first thoughts or old habits or logiced ways
Simply reaching out without truly knowing what for
But reaching nonetheless

Meditation

REFLECTION
by Shel Silverstein

Each time I see the Upside-Down Man
Standing in the water,
I look at him and start to laugh,
Although I shouldn’t oughtter.
For maybe in another world
Another time
Another town,
Maybe HE is right side up
And I am upside down.

Homilies

by Shanti Cornell, Julia Heilrayne, Rae Milstead, Abby Poirier

JULIA HEILRAYNE

Children’s hospitals aren’t like normal hospitals. They are places where we care for our youngest and our most vulnerable. They are places where the juxtaposition of emotions felt covers a spectrum larger than I ever thought possible. In children’s hospitals, the grief that is felt is felt so deeply, so loudly, so intensely, that sometimes it is easy to forget that the joy there is felt just as deeply, just as loudly, just as intensely. Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, the place where I spent a month of the last school year, is no different. From the bubbly decorations to the fish in the MRI machines and the graffiti style cartoon characters that bounce across every wall, it is in essence what a children’s hospital should be: a place to heal, to mourn, to celebrate, and to reflect.

From the branch of the hospital I spent the most time in, you can see the parking garage. This particular parking garage is adorned with an art installation, consisting of colored sheets of glass protruding from the side of the building, casting colorful shadows on the outside wall. In just the right room, standing on just the right section of blue carpeted floor, you can see yourself, reflected in those sheets of colorful glass. Sometimes you are blue, or red, or purple, or green. Sometimes you are clearly defined, so much so that you can see the expression on your face, and other times you melt into the colors, reflections of trees and noises cars coming and going. The first time I saw those glass sheets, the girl reflected back to me was anxiously fiddling with her fingers. There were dark circles under her eyes, and although her hair was pulled back into what might have once been a ponytail, it had since morphed into a clumped tangled mat on the side of her head. The girl was sitting in a wheelchair. As I watched the girl in the glass that first day, she watched me back. Together, we hoped, and we prayed, in our weird atheist UU way, that the doctors here would tell us they could make the pain go away. I left the hospital that day with good news- I was an excellent candidate for the treatment they provided.

Months passed before I was able to travel back to Children’s, and when I did, the girl in the glass was waiting for me, but she had changed. Physical therapists forced the girl to stand, they bent her legs in weird angles and took a million different measurements. The dark circles under the girl’s eyes had grown, and the tears that streamed down her face as the doctors worked on her felt warm and uncomfortable on my cheek. I turned away from the girl in the glass, and she turned away from me.

It was days later, when I let myself glance out the window back towards the parking garage, and the reflection glanced back at me. This time, the girl’s ponytail still looked like a ponytail, and although the dark circles still remained under her eyes, the tears had stopped falling. She looked stronger, better. She looked less like a patient in a children’s hospital and more like the girl I once knew myself to be. I smiled a small smile, and she smiled back, the same small, timid smile.

I continued to watch the girl in the glass grow stronger, watch her legs hold her straighter, watch her arms leave the wheels of the chair far behind. I watched as she became more sure of herself on the treadmill, more able to do the things that most 17 year old girls were doing every day- like walking. The dark circles under her eyes grew lighter, and the smile on her face grew bigger, and slowly, slowly, after days of watching her, I started to recognize myself.

While my friends stressed over studying for finals back in Austin, I learned methods to control the pain that had been plaguing me for years, and the girl reflected back to me in every color of the rainbow did the same. I walked, then ran, then ran a mile. And the entire time, I watched the reflection of myself in the glass. On the hard days, I would check in with me in the glass, and assure her it was going to be ok. On the goo days, I would celebrate with the girl in the glass, and we would carry that success onto the next day. Those seemingly meaningless colorful glass panes gave me a way to watch myself change, in the best possible of way. As silly as it may sound to someone who didn’t spend 8 hours a day learning to walk, run, use their hands, and think again in those rooms, I am grateful to that glass.

I have been home for exactly 4 months and 3 weeks. It has been a glorious 145 days, and as I prepare mentally to go back in June for my 6 month follow up, I can’t help but wonder what the girl who will be reflected back at me into the hospital will look like this time, because the thing that the girl in the glass taught me above all else is that be it staring at yourself in the mirror and having a good chat with yourself, laying in bed with your eyes closed and mediating, or watching yourself go from a self declared “wheelchair sick kid” to the functioning human you want to be in reflections provided by your favorite children’s hospital, to reflect on your progress, change, and accomplishments in life, no matter where you are, is how you keep making that progress, and get where you want to go in life. Or as John Dewey so eloquently put it “we do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

RAE MILSTEAD

There’s this story in the bible where Jesus goes into the garden of Gethsemane and he kneels down and gives this very agonizing and very human prayer which is “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.” Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony he was praying very fervently; and his sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” This is a time you see Jesus letting himself be doubtful and in pain and quite frankly, afraid of his future. He ultimately decides that God’s will is stronger than his and that he had to lay that burden down as to accept his crucification. You see this same theory in so many faiths where you can’t really change some of the hardest things in life you have to go through and that you cannot will it away. It’s just going to happen and the inevitability of it is probably the most daunting thing.

I believe that every person has to go through those really hard, humanizing moments which I call “brick-wall” moments – because they’re moments in life that absolutely shatter you and force you to grow into a person that you can live with for the rest of your life.

My junior year of High School, my brother committed suicide and not even a year later, my father passed away after a long history of alcohol-abuse and drug addiction. I was 18 and I was fatherless and I had lost someone to suicide. I was just an 18-year-old girl. The days after I lost my brother, I kept to a corner of my room, refusing to eat food or water and I just stared into nothingness- I was shocked as to what kind of world I was now living in. The weeks following, it felt like I was outside of myself, just watching this girl slowly walk through life with this frazzled look. I was devastated and lost. My identity was ripped away from me and I was placed into a completely different universe. What I thought I knew seemed to dissipate and slip through the synapses in my brain. I felt like everyone around me was moving so much quicker and it was impossible for me to reach out and grab onto anything. I was just flying backwards.

I grew up In the church and I saw the bible and Jesus as a collection of lessons on what to do when no one else could give you any advice because the challenge you were given was not something any human could change-like death. I often wondered if Jesus ever stopped to look at himself in a mirror and ask himself first off, How many braids could he make out of his beard? and secondly, what on earth was he thinking?

But he asks himself this and he asks God this in the Garden of Gethsemane. He asks God, why it has to be him? why does he have to bear this pain when he’s done everything he was supposed to? What can He do to get out of this fate? And God gives him the strength and understanding that it was going to be okay. These are the same questions that were asked when I was looking in the mirror at this tear stricken grieving girl who just didn’t know what to do anymore to escape this loss. Why did it have to be me? Why am I the one who has to keep living through this? How do I do this?

For the past month and a half, I have been learning about lent and the core values of the lessons learned throughout this 40 day period. I’ve learned that lent is this time where you take the not so great aspects of your faith and lift it up into the light for you to reflect on it and help strengthen your faith and in the catholic faith, get closer to god. The UU church has a topic for each day to reflect on and share a photo of- things like struggle, vulnerability, courage, dreams, and recovery are amongst these topics. Things that aren’t always pretty or what you would put front and center of your identity but are still definitely there. I’ve found that a lot of people, no matter what your path of spirituality is, find themselves tearing themselves apart which is the exact opposite of what Grace is. I hear my friends in my youth group here that our lives are precious human lives and in my catholic youth group that god will always love me and that no matter where I go in my life, I will always be a beloved daughter of the king most high, yet the hardest part of accepting Grace is giving myself that. How many of us have just mindlessly scroll through facebook or instagram and comparing ourselves to someone else? Or after spending hours watching other people live their lives, felt like a wasted attempt of success? How many of us get a grade back on a test or feedback from a boss or a comment from a loved one and just make that one thing your entire identity and thought process for the next 48 or something hours? It’s self reflection but it’s also painful self-infliction.

I think that’s the greatest human flaw. I watch so many amazing people work so incredibly hard and then tear themselves down. But as I started to read more stories in the bible and read more about all the strongest empowering role models rising up in the social justice world I’ve discovered that no one in the bible made it in the bible by just having an easy life. The strongest people I know have been through some really incredible losses and experiences to get where they are. Jesus knelt onto the ground and SWEAT BLOOD begging to give up what he felt was a burden but was actually the thing that made him so incredibly strong. So yes, I may have no idea who I am or where I am going right now in this world, I do know that me, along with everyone else in this room and outside this room is destined for greatness. We go through things to build character and what you’ve gone through does not define who you are but how you choose to get off the floor of the corner of your room and keep going does. Greatness is defined by the ability to persevere through adversity. And perseverance isn’t always a beautiful A on a calculus test two weeks after your father died. It’s giving yourself the grace to take a day to just cry it all out, even if it’s a full on ugly cry. Questions like “why did I have to be the one chosen to go through these things?” is part of self reflection and building a stronger sense of perseverance through this internalized adversity. You’re doing great and just keep trying to grow from the things that were given to you and wrap each other with this unstoppable love through grace and growth. Perseverance is giving yourself the grace to love yourself and your precious human life, no matter how destroyed life looks.

Text of Shanti Cornell and Abby Poirier’s homilies are not yet available but you can click the play button to listen.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

How to grow a seed

April 22, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 21, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

If you were planted, what would grow? What is left in a room when you leave the room? What is left in a group when the group scatters? What would be left here on Earth when you leave?

Call to Worship
by May Sarton

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

Meditation Reading
THE GARDENER 85
by Rabindrahnath Tagore

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden… gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers an hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

Sermon

Long ago and far away, I went on a pastoral visit to an old man in the hospital. Mr. Hatcher had a career as a civil rights and social justice activist, retiring from being the head of Piedmont Community Action, bringing the Head Start program to the county and improving hospital transportation for marginalized communities. In the back of the house was a deep gulley, covered in brush and poison ivy. He started puttering in the yard, and gradually overspilled the yard and began clearing out the gulley. “By that time, I was burned out on trying to solve human problems, and I took to the woods, where I could have a little more control over my environment and my friends the plants.” Thirty years later it was a ten acre garden open to the public. He had always told me he hoped his life would end before his legs gave out. “I always wanted to live to 95, he said, ” but living to 90 has made me think about changing my mind.” I took him a big sprig of rosemary from my garden, so he’d have something from the outside in his room. He held it to his nose and smelled deeply. “Ah, that rosemary really pulls its weight.”

He was himself a seed, you see, starting small, making his way through obstacles, a centimeter at a time, gathering helpers slowly. “I find an ugly spot and make it a beauty spot.” He said.

If you were a seed, what would grow from you?

Theologian Howard Thurman wrote “Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We all know of people who started small and made a big difference. 16 year old Greta Thunberg started Friday Climate Protests in Sweden, and now she speaks all over the world. She starts her speech with “I’m Greta Thunberg, and I want you to panic.”

There is Yacouba Sawadogo, a man in Burkina Faso, who began planting trees to stop the desertification of his country. There is Kate Sessions, a botanist and horticulturalist in the late 1800’s who lived in San Diego. She did research and found trees all over the world that would grow in that dry climate, and she planted them there in San Diego. You can see the results of her efforts… it’s called Balboa Park. People have started great businesses in garages and kitchens. A publishing company started up and revitalized the town I lived in in upstate South Carolina. It started when a few friends were having coffee one morning. They wrote some words on a napkin. Now they publish amazing literature by Southern writers. A whole town now thinks of itself as a writers’ town. It’s not only starting something small, we carry beginnings within us like seeds.

We can be a seed in nearly every interaction. You have had people who have been an inspiration to you, who have said encouraging words that energized you. You have had interactions with people that discouraged you. You’ve read a line in a poem, a novel, a Scripture verse, you’ve heard lyrics of a song that made you stop short and say “I never heard it put that way…”

Here are some seeds that blossomed in me and changed my thinking. One was a teacher named Byron Katie, who said “We suffer when our thoughts argue with reality.”

One was in a 12 step meeting, when someone said “what other people think of me is none of my business.”

We can plant a seed of discouragement too: In my experience, someone bustling up and saying in an impatient voice “here, let me help you with that” can be nice, or it can communicate a lack of belief in your capability. In my Southern family, one way to sweetly diminish someone is by use of the word “little.” How’s that little project of yours coming?’ “How’s your little job?”

To be encouraging you might say something like “You’ve got this,” “You know what to do.”

“I’m right here if you need me.”

Some people are gifted at inspiring others to think, or to be courageous. If you look up the 10 most inspiring speeches, you get famous people saying things like “never give up, define success for yourself, make the world better, joy is always in process, it’s always under construction (Matthew Mconaughey) and Yoda “Do or do not. There is no try.” Which makes absolutely no sense to me. Then, of course, the ultimate inspire-er, (also fictional,) Coach Taylor, who wins, in my opinion, with “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”

I’m not saying that you have to be Coach Taylor every day as you move through your life. I’m saying this. We’ve all watched CSI enough to know about Locard’s Exchange Princple, which says that wherever you go you leave traces behind. Fibers, fluids, skin cells, words, feelings. “every contact leaves a trace.” Some of us are carriers of anxiety. We worry so much, and we worry when other people aren’t worried enough, so we agitate them a bit so their foreheads are more rumpled when we leave them. Some carry laughter, some carry a listening presence. Some people carry peace. You just feel better when they’ve been around. Some are calming, some are strengthening. Some carry love. After interactions with them, you know you are loved, and you can love more. These are little things, the size of a seed sometimes.

Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Some of you have touched so many lives. You have been teachers, coaches, you’ve been in business with people, you have co-workers, you’ve had family and interacted with strangers. You may never know what seeds you’ve planted. You may have a student communicate with you and tell you years later what something you said meant to their lives. If you have had such a teacher, or such an interaction, think about making contact with that person to let them know.

Letter to Agnes De Mille from Martha Graham

There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.
And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open….

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The power of story

April 15, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 14, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

In advance of a church storytelling event the first weekend in May, we will talk about the power of our stories. We will talk particularly about the stresses put on us by the stories told about people with our particular identities, women, LGBTQ, people of color, white men, Etc. How do those stories shape us and put pressure on our thinking?

Call to worship

A HAT FULL OF SKY
Terry Pratchett

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

Meditation Reading

THE NAME OF THE WIND
Patrick Rothfuss

Chronicler frowned. “Is that the one where the king sells his crown to an orphan boy?”

Bast nodded. “And the boy becomes a better king than the original. The goosegirl dresses like a countess and everyone is stunned by her grace and charm.” He hesitated, struggling to find the words he wanted. “You see, there’s a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.”

Chronicler relaxed a bit, sensing familiar ground. “That’s basic psychology. You dress a beggar in fine clothes, people treat him like a noble, and he lives up to their expectations.”

“That’s only the smallest piece of it,” Bast said. “The truth is deeper than that. It’s…” Bast floundered for a moment. “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

Sermon

We talk a lot about story in this pulpit. How events happen, and then we tell stories about what happened, to ourselves and to others. People experience the same event and tell different stories to make sense of it. The stories shape how you respond to the event. If someone is rude, you wonder if you did something to them. Maybe they were in pain, maybe they were tired. I’ve told you about my friend Pat, who, when cut off in traffic, says “Bless her heart, I bet she just got out of the hospital.” That’s one possible explanation. It changes how you feel about what just happened. If a bad thing happened some people will think it’s bad luck. Others will think the God of their understanding is punishing them for something. If someone sees a toddler crying, they might think “that baby is tired,” Someone else might think the parent is doing something wrong, or not doing something they should do. Someone without kids might think “When I have children, they will never behave like that.” The Karma Fairy laughs. My daughter-in-law posted a photo of my granddaughter crying. “She’s crying because her tongue is wet and I won’t let her keep drying it off.” No one would have guessed that story.

Today I want to talk about a different aspect of story this morning. Stories other people you grew up in a family with more than one kid, there may have been stories about each one of you. One is the quiet one, one’s the pretty one, one’s the smart one, one’s trouble. Family roles are assigned. Usually one kid is the hero kid, does everything right, gets good grades, doesn’t cause trouble. Sometimes one gets the “scapegoat” role, where, when something breaks its assumed to be their fault. When there is a fight, they are assumed to have started it. One kid sometimes is the family clown, where their humor diffuses tension, or distracts the rest of the family from something that might cause a fight. One kid sometimes has the “distractor” role, and they will sometimes develop a problem in order to give the parents something else to focus on besides their deteriorating relationship or financial situation. This kid’s problem is a semi-conscious try to pull the family together. If you were the hero kid, that story told about you that you never gave your parents a moments trouble, or that you were the smartest one, or the story that you were trouble – those stories can shape your life forever. We tend to re-create the roles we had in our families in our grown up families, in our chosen families, in our workplaces and in our church community.

What about stories that are told in the broader culture about us and our people, our identity groups? Studies since 1995 are showing that those stories affect us. This is called stereotype threat, or identity threat, and the stories cause stress if you are aware of them.

Girls are bad at math. Boys are bad at verbal skills. There are stereotypes about Black and Brown kids, sometimes borne out by statistics. There are stereotypes about Asians, sometimes borne out by statistics. Stereotypes about gay men and lesbians, stereotypes about older white men, about young brown women, angry black women …. What the psychologists found is that when you are aware of stereotypes about your group, you sometimes stress about being lumped in with the negatives about your group. You carry your whole group on your shoulders, or you are aware that you will be allowed fewer mistakes than someone else, or that you will not be given the benefit of the doubt.

Studies find that this awareness, this worry, interferes with some of the executive functioning of your brain. Updating, a skill of the part of your memory that is available for immediate work, is diminished. Learning new things is harder, the ability to take risks is suppressed. If a female student is treated in a sexist way by a male experimenter, she tends to do less well on tasks. When Slack students are told to do a task, and stereotypes about African-Americans are highlighted, they tend to perform less well than Black students who didn’t hear the stereotypes mentioned. When, before an experiment, men are reminded that the stereotype is that men are not so good at verbal skills, they do more poorly on verbal tasks than men for whom this stereotype isn’t highlighted.

In progressive circles, now, white men might be worrying about not talking or acting like “a typical white guy.” People of color might step on their expressions of anger and outrage. I’ve heard friends talk about not wanting to come across like “that angry Black woman.”

POEM I WROTE TO MY BLACK AND BROWN SISTERS:
by Rev. Kristen Harper
My beautiful black, brown, sister with your
Nonconforming grace and rhythm radiating soul.
You with the big deep brown eyes and piercingly fierce gaze.
You with the long, short, curly, straight, locked crown
You in all your regal baldness.
I know what lies beneath that controlled voice, that diminished expression
I can see behind the veil of servant, of surrogate.
I feel the anger, the sadness, the frustration, the slow death
of shrinking, of trying to become small so other’s won’t be intimidated,
won’t be afraid.
I know the depression of stuffing, pushing down the roar of righteousness
the roar that claims our humanity, our value, our right to name the truth. I see your goddessesness, your divine love,
the depth of your black, brown brilliance.
I hope someday you will too. See the
years of survival not as a test-but a testimony,
to a stubborn love born from generations of strong black, brown sisters –
Mothers who refused to give up, grandmothers who passed down
more than recipes of arroz con polio, tandoori or fried chicken.
Sisters, many sisters and aunts who held one another up, reached out a hand, shook us when we needed to wake up.
My beautiful black, brown sister with your
doubt, and your brokenness, and your dusty knees …
You are loved.

How do we counter this? The studies show that derogation works with some people, sometimes. It’s the old “consider the source” tactic. If you can think derogatory things about the person or people thinking bad things about you and your identity, you do better. Constructive behavior works also, where you just put your head down and do an amazing job. Some people try denying their identity group, or its importance to them.

So what is the take away from all of this? It’s natural to be a bit dimmed, a bit daunted and slowed down when you are worried about the stereotypes about one of your identities. When you see black and brown kids not doing as well at school, consider that one of the factors is this identity threat, that they pick up all kinds of subliminal cues about how teachers, administrators, other kids, and society at large “stories” about them.

Hearing and seeing positives about your group helps a lot. If you’re a Black woman in a STEM field, lifting up Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the women who were calculators for NASA, whose work helped the US land on the moon. If you’re a Latinx kid, knowing about Latino scientists, journalists, authors and warriors can help.

I don’t know if history erases the accomplishments of women and marginalized people on purpose, but it has a tremendous effect. The recent photograph of a black hole was taken in large part through an algorithm created by Dr. Katie Bouman. It only took the internet a day or two to notice that her contribution was downplayed, that she was an unnamed grad student in some stories, and that the right wing corner or the net began claiming that a white man in the lab was the one who really wrote the algorithm. He shut that down quickly. That’s an ally.

Hold in mind the proud things about your identity. Know the proud things about other identities. The stories are strong. Tell all the stories, dig them up, hold them in your hands like smooth stones, reminding yourself of your strength and power. Then go shining.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

If I needed you

April 8, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 7, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Using the music of Townes Van Zandt, combined with the April Soul Matters theme of Wholeness, we will talk about how we need one another in order to be whole. How can we care for one another? Is there a way to be loving and challenging at the same time? How do we reach out with compassion? Is compassion always the best approach to another person? How much are we supposed to take care of ourselves and how much do we take care of others?

Call to Worship

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Something should remind us once more that the great things in this universe are things that we never see. You walk out at night and look up at the beautiful stars as they bedeck the heavens like slinging lanterns of eternity and you think you can see all. Oh, no. You can never see the law of gravitation that holds them there. When I speak of love I’m not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of love. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

Reading

LITANY FOR PEACE (adapted)
Thich Nhat Hanh

“Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.
Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.
Let us be aware of the source of being,
common to us all and to all living things.
Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion,
let us fill our hearts with our own compassion-
towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be
the cause of suffering to each other.
With humility, with awareness of the existence of life,
and of the suffering that are going on around us,
let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.”

Sermon

“Heart of Compassion” story

I wanted to use the music of Townes Van Zandt because I love his lyrics, and he’s a local man. Some of you probably knew him. Some have been sharing your stories about him this week. I don’t know him, though, just watched a documentary of his life, which was lovely and frustrating and sad to watch. “To live is to fly,” he wrote, “low and high.” He certainly did both. In the movie friends tell a story about him being at a party. I’m not sure I remember the details exactly, but they were on on the balcony of a place, pretty high off the ground. He sat on the balcony’s ledge, and then, he explained afterwards, he just wondered what it would feel like to fall, so he fell. Throwing himself at the experience of life. That looks like something he did over and over. It looks like he was one of those people who are both amazingly easy and hard to love. There is a story in our culture about genius, about artists, that the more brilliant they are, the more messed up they are. The picture of the writer banging away on the typewriter keys, a bottle of whiskey on the table, or the rock star barely about to stand up, trying to get to the gig… It’s almost as if our culture both loves and loves to punish artists. They get to ride with the muse, they get to live in a garret and stay up all night and be adored, and then their passion, their excesses, carry them swiftly toward their own destruction. If you live too long they make jokes about you, about how after the nuclear winter, there will just be cockroaches and Cher. They blame you for aging, for continuing to be passionate about making art long after you should have thrown it over for a more responsible job.

In the writings of my colleague James Ford, I came across this: He says “I found myself thinking of something Achaan Chah Subato, the great Theravandan meditation master once said about broken glasses. I have it framed and hanging on a wall in my office:

“One day some people came to the master and asked ‘How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness and death?’ The master held up a glass and said ‘Someone gave me this glass, and I really like this glass. It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight. I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table. I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly.'”

When I read some of Townes Van Zandt’s poetry I see someone beating their wings like a moth against this truth. Everything and everyone is already broken. It takes the Sages years of humility and meditation to come to a place where they can look this truth fully in its face and find the joy in it, in being absolutely present in every moment with the beauty that is also there. Can you enjoy a friendship if there is always the lurking danger of one of you doing something that will end it? Can you look back at a marriage that ended and see that it was good for a while? Can you love your children knowing all of the dangers that are around and within them? Most of us can block out the knowledge that security is an illusion, that pain and joy intertwine in life, that when you love, you open yourself up to loss. Poets and artists don’t have that ability. They might try to forget what they see using drugs or alcohol, but when the daylight comes they see it all over again, the bright sharp truth that can blind you with its urgent light and send you spinning.

In the song “Rake,” Townes Van Zandt writes:

You look at me now, and don’t think I don’t know
What all your eyes are a sayin’
Does he want us to believe these ravings and lies
They’re just tricks that his brains been a playin’?
A lover of women he can’t hardly stand
He trembles he’s bent and he’s broken
I’ve fallen it’s true but I say unto you
Hold your tongues until after I’ve spoken
I was takin’ my pride in the pleasures I’d known
I laughed and thought I’d be forgiven
But my laughter turned ’round eyes blazing and
Said my friend, we’re holdin’ a wedding
I buried my face but it spoke once again
The night to the day we’re a bindin’
And now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding

Sooner or later what you know in the day stays with you at night, and what you know and do in the night comes all into your day until you can’t pretend any more that they’re separate. What you know when you are conscious and awake stays with you even when you are in your chosen oblivion. Once you see the fragility of things you can’t unsee it. You have to love if you can, knowing that what you love can go away. And for a poet, you have to keep writing about it.

What is the proper response to this painful realization? Is it to say “Gracious, that’s depressing, let’s not talk about it?” That is what most of us tend to do. As we grow in our spirit, though, we can learn that the best response to the pain, the joy, and the impermanence of this life is to embrace it with a wild courage. To respond to the pain with compassion. For others and for ourselves.

The British writer Warsan Shire writes:

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”

I am a happy person by nature, even though I worked as a therapist for many years and held oceans of pain in my ears, my eyes and my heart. I want to hold an atlas in my hand, acknowledge what Dr. Shire saw, and add “Where is beauty and joy? Everywhere. Everywhere.”

In Townes Van Zandt’s song “If I needed you” both are there.

If I needed you would you come to me
Would you come to me for to ease my pain
If you needed me I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain
Well the night’s forlorn and the morning’s born
And the morning shines with the lights of love
And you’ll miss sunrise if you close your eyes
And that would break my heart in two

How do we deal with a world of such impermanence? By being present to each moment, not wishing it away or clutching it to us. As the English poet Blake said

“he who binds to himself a joy, doth the winged life destroy. But who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”

Being present to each moment, and having compassion for all beings. Now, this part feels wearying to me. All beings, really? Most of us survive by blocking out some of the horrors of the world, or acknowledging them but not dwelling on them. I remember the Buddha lived in a world without TV, much less the 24 hour news cycle. I take him to mean compassion for everyone you meet in your day. Still that’s wearying. Some people are hard to keep feeling compassion for, as their problems seem to be self-inflicted and they don’t seem to learn. An addicted friend is hard to stay compassionate towards.

Then I remember. Oh, compassion doesn’t mean you have to fix it. You just feel for them in their struggle, if there’s no more to do for them. The Yogic teaching is helpful here. When you are acting with compassion toward someone for whom your compassion is not doing any good, and you are emptying yourself for someone who lets whatever you pour into them leak out, or when someone is just playing you, that is called “idiot compassion.” In this world things change fast. We try to stay present to the moment we’re in, compassionate to the people we’re with, and to ourselves. We learn as we go.

As Townes wrote:

To live is to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes

Hardly anyone in this life is healthy enough or wealthy enough not to need other people. Some of us have strong ideas about the people we need, but we’re often wrong. Teachers, another learning experience. Compassion fatigue. Not for any of you all, but for the world. “Where does it hurt?” Everywhere.

Yes. And. There is joy and pleasure everywhere too. I’ve needed a lot of help in my life. I’ve given a lot of help in my life. I have to say I like giving it more.

IF I NEEDED YOU
Townes Van Zandt
If I needed you would you come to me
Would you come to me for to ease my pain
If you needed me I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain
Well the night’s forlorn and the morning’s born
And the morning shines with the lights of love
And you’ll miss sunrise if you close your eyes
And that would break my heart in two
If I needed you would you come to me
Would you come to me for to ease my pain
If you needed me I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain
Baby’s with me now since I showed her how
To lay her lilly hand in mine
Luke and Lil agree she’s a sight to see
A treasure for the poor to find
If I needed you would you come to me
Would you come to me for to ease my pain
If you needed me I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain

We take care of each other to a certain extent, but not over certain boundaries. American Pema Chodron describes a conversation she had with an old man who was living on the streets for over four years. No one looks at him or talks to him. Sometimes someone gives him a little money, but no one really looks at him. No one asks how he is. It’s very lonely for him. People respond from discomfort, fear, anger, or judgment. According to Chodron,

“Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.”

This openness is sometimes called emptiness in Buddhism. It means not shutting down or holding on too tightly When Things Fall Apart,

I found myself thinking of something Achaan Chah Subato, the great Theravandan meditation master once said about broken glasses. I have it framed and hanging on a wall in my office:

“One day some people came to the master and asked ‘How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness and death?’ The master held up a glass and said ‘Someone gave me this glass, and I really like this glass. It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight. I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table. I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly.'”

The false view of being an artist meaning you have to be tortured and addicted.

RAKE
Townes Van Zandt
You look at me now, and don’t think I don’t know
What all your eyes are a sayin’
Does he want us to believe these ravings and lies
They’re just tricks that his brains been a playin’?
A lover of women he can’t hardly stand
He trembles he’s bent and he’s broken
I’ve fallen it’s true but I say unto you
Hold your tongues until after I’ve spoken
I was takin’ my pride in the pleasures I’d known
I laughed and thought I’d be forgiven
But my laughter turned ’round eyes blazing and
Said my friend, we’re holdin’ a wedding
I buried my face but it spoke once again
The night to the day we’re a bindin’
And now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding
FLYIN SHOES
Townes Van Zandt
Days full of rain
Skys comin’ down again
I get so tired
Of these same old blues
Same old song
Baby, it won’t be long
‘fore I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes
Flyin’ shoes
Till I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes
Spring only sighed
Summer had to be satisfied
Fall is a feelin’ that I just can’t lose.
I’d like to stay
Maybe watch a winter day
Turn the green water
To white and blue
Flyin’ shoes
Flyin’ shoes
Till I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes
The mountain moon
Forever sets too soon
Bein’ alone is all the hills can do
Alone and then
Her silver sails again
And they will follow
In their flyin’ shoes
Flyin’ shoes
They will follow in their
Flyin’ shoes
Days full of rain
Skys comin’ down again
I get so tired
Of the same old blues
Same old song
Baby, it won’t be long
Till I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes
Flyin’ shoes
Till I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The Holiness of Wholeness

April 1, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Chris Jimmerson, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 31, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How do we nurture our whole selves, especially those parts of ourselves that we may have been taught were no acceptable? How do we create communities and a society that are more whole?

Call to Worship

ALL OF YOU IS HOLY
Anonymous

Forget about enlightenment,
Sit down wherever you are,
and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins.

Feel the longing, the fear, the love in your bones.

Open your heart to who you are, right now,
not who you’d like to be,
not the saint you’re striving to become,
but the being right here before you, inside you… All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, Look in, Let go.

Reading

WHOLENESS
Parker Palmer

If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, …
I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else!

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues;
it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.

An inevitable, though often ignored, dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

Sermon

“Making the World Whole Again” Video

During the upcoming month, our Lifespan Faith Development ministries and religious education classes will be exploring the topic of “wholeness”.

How do we become our whole selves?

What are some ways we can bring wholeness to our relationships with those whom we love?

How do we create wholeness and holiness within this, our beloved religious community?

In our larger community?

Our society?

Our world?

One of the things I loved about the video with which we started just now is how, among other things, it points toward one of the paradoxes we encounter when we start examining this idea of wholeness.

In order to help make our communities and our world more whole, we must move toward wholeness ourselves as individuals.

And yet, it can be so difficult to do that when our society and our world can seem so fragmented and tom apart sometimes.

So our journey toward wholeness, by necessity, is both an individual trek and yet a passage that must also be done in relationship and community with others and our world.

Now, it might help to take a moment to examine what we mean by wholeness or to become our whole selves.

There were several quotes that I found reading the materials for this topic that might be helpful.

“Happiness is just one part of our existence, wholeness is to embrace all that is within us. It’s to embrace our shadow qualities, to embrace our self-doubt, fear, anxiety, as well as the brightness, joy, and curiosity. It is all welcome”.

That’s from Dan Putt, a consultant and entrepreneur who works with folks on developing the ability to take risks and embrace change.

That quote, and the reading from Parker Palmer that Carol read for us earlier I think both remind us about an aspect of finding wholeness that can be difficult – embracing and accepting the parts of ourselves that we do not like as much; the things we are not as good at; the sides of ourselves that might make us feel vulnerable about being judged by others.

Part of learning to be whole is loving even the parts of ourselves that we may not like or that cause us challenges sometimes.

My parents divorced when I was twelve, and my mom ended up having to work more than full-time to make ends meet. As the oldest child in the family, that meant I often ended up caring for and to a degree parenting my younger sister and brother.

Later, as I moved into adulthood, I started to recognize this pattern I could easily fall into of taking on the needs of others – parenting people who were themselves adults and could therefore take care of themselves.

Family Systems Theory calls this “overfunctioning”, and it is something I have to monitor about myself even today.

The thing is, that experience of helping to raise my brother and sister and all of the tendencies it created within me are a part of who I am now – the whole human being I have become up until now.

And those tendencies are not necessarily entirely unhealthy or bad. For instance, I suspect that they are a part of why I have spent most of my adult life within the caring professions, which has been amazingly rewarding.

Perhaps paradoxically again, embracing the wholeness of ourselves, including the areas on which we may want to do some work means first, we have to accept those areas in order to be able do that work, and second some aspects of our whole selves may be both sometimes problematic and sometimes beneficial. In some instances, wholeness is not either/or.

Unless you’re a narcissistic psychopath, in which case you don’t get to go “oh, that’s just part of who I am.”

Anyway, author and editor for the spiritual series “On Being”, Kristin Lynn says “Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.”

What a wonderful way to think about wholeness, and one that I think leads us to some other ways in which our sense of wholeness can be challenged.

Inevitably in life, we face loss and sorrow. Inevitably, we will encounter the judgements and prejudices of others.Inevitably, we will run up against constraints that cultural and societal norms place upon the expression of our full and whole selves.

When we lose a person or even a creature that we love, a job, a physical or mental ability, it can feel like our wholeness has also been lost.

I remember after my stepfather, Ty, died, my mom saying that it felt like a part of her was missing. It felt that way to me too, and I remembered feeling that same way after other times of loss.

The thing is, we so often would not give up one moment of our relationships with those we loved and have lost. We carry them with us. They and our loss of them become part of the whole person we now are.

Parker Palmer says it like this

“We all know people who’ve suffered the loss of an important person in their lives.
At first, they disappear into grief, certain that life will never again be worth living.
But, through some sort of spiritual alchemy, they eventually emerge to find that their hearts have grown larger and more compassionate.
They have developed a greater capacity to take in others’ sorrows and joys, not in spite of their loss but because of it.
Suffering breaks our hearts – but there are two quite different ways for the heart to break.
There’s the brittle heart that breaks apart into a thousand shards, a heart that takes us down as it explodes and is sometimes thrown like a grenade at the source of its pain.
Then there’s the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love.
Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”

The supple heart allows us to find wholeness.

Similarly, when we experience the loss of physical or mental abilities we once had, it can feel like we are less than whole.

I went through this when I was temporarily disabled by an impacted nerve in my neck a while back. It did feel like a loss. I’m fortunate that it eventually got resolved, so I never had to reach acceptance and find a new sense of wholeness for myself.

I have a friend who was born with a condition that left her physically disabled in a number of ways. She says that her journey toward wholeness has involved unlearning the many ways in which other people and societal systems labeled her as and made her feel incomplete.

And far too many of us have felt limits imposed upon us, barriers to becoming our whole selves because of gender role stereotypes and restrictive gender binaries, because of our race or ethnicity or religious beliefs (or lack there of) or our sexuality or our gender identity (or lack there of) and on and on and on.

I’ll talk a little more about this in a moment, but for now I want to note that even the scars we bear from our losses, as well as those we may bear from fighting to become our full, whole selves even up against oppression and restrictive mores – they too, these scars are a part of who we are now – the whole person we have become.

Many of you are probably aware of Kintsugi (Kin Sugi), the Japanese art that provides a beautiful metaphor for what I am trying to express, but here is a short video that explains it better than I likely could.

Kintsugi video

Here is another quote related to all of this that I loved, from a UU named Paula Goldade

“As a Unitarian Universalist, I have come to see that universal salvation is not just for all of us but for all of me. There is no crevice inside of me that love cannot touch.”

Now, so far, I have been concentrating mainly on how we become whole as individuals, but I want to return to this idea that we also must be in relationship to find wholeness. We must work to create wholeness in our communities and our worlds to know wholeness for ourselves.

Here is one more quote that I loved, from our own Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael

“We don’t really know our own wholeness until we see the wholeness of another or work to serve wholeness in our world. Wholeness, a sense of our own fullness, a spiritual realization of our own strength and beauty, is given when we give of ourselves… We heal our own aches by healing the aches in others. We put back the pieces of our own souls by helping others redeem their own wholeness.”

I think she is so spot on there, and I also think that this has implications for the work we are called to do in our world to build the beloved community.

My friends, I believe that we, none of us nor our communities or our society – we can never be whole while black lives are still so far too frequently being extinguished and destroyed.

We cannot ever be whole when people are still being forced to proclaim that their lives do matter.

Black Lives Matter.

They do matter.

And we can never be whole when brown and queer bodies are treated as if they are of little significance; when indigenous peoples are treated as expendable; when female and nonbinary gender identities are treated as “less than:”; when entire cultures and religious expressions are demeaned.

We need all of humanity’s beautiful variations to be fully realized and embraced for all of humanity to become whole.

It seems like you can hardly ever attend one of my sermons these days without also hearing from author and researcher Brene Brown, my personal guru and diva.

I want to share with you a short video from Brown, because I think she has identified a root cause of what lies at our lack of feeling whole sometimes and then bringing and perpetuating that unwholesomeness and unholiness in our world.

She says it has to do with how we are constantly receiving messages that make us feel we can never be enough. And this, in turn, undermines our feelings of belonging and worthiness.

She says that to counter this, we have to be willing to be vulnerable and to live in a way that she calls “wholeheartedly”.

But maybe I should shut up and let her speak for herself.

Brown video

Unitarian Universalist have seven principals that we affirm and promote and the first of those says that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

I wonder sometimes though if whether we affirm that for and about our self.

My beloveds, you are worthy.

You have inherent dignity.

You are capable of knowing and becoming the whole person you were born and are called to be.

And by doing that – each of us individually and yet also together – by doing that, we may yet bring more wholeness and holiness into our world.

And hallelujah to wholeness and holiness!

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS

The Kindness Connection

March 25, 2019 by tom Posted in Audio available, Meg Barnhouse, Sermons

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 24, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Using the children’s book Zen Ties, by Jon J Muth, we will tell the story of the summer when Koo, a young panda bear, came to visit his Uncle Stillwater. Uncle Stillwater encourages the neighborhood kids to help an elderly neighbor in need, and friendships blossom. All ages service.

Call to Worship
Dalai Lama

This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness.

Reading
– Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style

We are all so deeply interconnected we have no option but to love all. Be kind and do good for anyone and that will be reflected. The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessing of the universe.

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

SERMON INDEX

PODCASTS