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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 29, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Though this is a difficult and challenging time, it also provides us with an opportunity to truly realize our interconnectedness – to know we can only get through this together, even as we cannot be physically together. Perhaps our vision, at least for now, may be less about the future and more about how we can treat ourselves and others with kindness and compassion in this moment and time.

Chalice Lighting

We light this chalice so that its flame may signify the spiritual strands of light that bind our hearts and souls with one another. Even while we must be physically apart, we bask in its warmth together.

Call to Worship

Rev. Chris Jimmerson

It’s okay to sit on the front porch and stare into the blankness. It’s okay to scream into the void. It’s okay to weep into the pillow and pound the mattress. None of us knows how to do this. All of us are here with each other in our hearts and spirits.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Moment for Beloved Community

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Meditation Reading

Dr Amy Acton
Head of the Ohio Department of Health

I can tell you that I already envision a future that is full of hope. I’ve told you my story about how absolutely essential hope is. It’s the one thing that made a difference in a really rough childhood that I had and I feel more hopeful than I’ve ever felt. I actually believe that life is not shutting down right now. Life is not shutting us down, although we’re being quiet now and we’re making that physical distance.

Life seems like it’s shutting down but I feel life is waking us up. I truly see a vision of a future that is brighter than we have known. I say that from all my heart. I just know it in my heart and my soul. So please don’t feel like this is pulling us apart. I believe this is drawing us to each other and bonding us to each other, but it will have to be all of us.

Sermon

Well, it’s been a rough several days, hasn’t it? I know it has been for me. I miss being able to be physically with people, including you all. I’m wearing my rainbow kitties stole for this video because it helps me feel at least a little bit better.

I want to acknowledge the extra challenges those of you who are parents are facing with children at home all of the time because the schools are closed.

One of our church members, Kae McLaughlin posted on Facebook something one of her neighbors had sent out over NextDoor. It went, “Homeschooling is going well. Two students suspended for fighting and one teacher fired for drinking on the job.”

We are all facing challenges during this time, and we do not know yet how long this time will last. Our minds and our bodies know there is a potential existential threat to ourselves and those we love and care about. And this leads to several things we need to know.

Even as we go about the daily tasks of life, our minds are still processing what is happening in the background. Our bodies are producing a flood of chemicals that would normally prepare us for fight or flight in the face of danger. Only this is a danger that we cannot see and for which fight or flight do not really help, as we all have to shelter in place. Because of all of this, we are likely to tire more easily. We are likely to need more rest than usual. We have to be aware that we may be prone to be more snappish than usual, as those fight chemicals try to find a way to express themselves. I am trying even more than usual to pause before speaking whatever reaction I am having to try to counter this. My spouse Wayne claims I am only being partially successful at it.

Getting outdoors can help. Exercising can help. Connecting with those we love and care about in whatever ways we are able can help – phone calls, the internet, email, texting.

We are likely to experience both a wider range of emotions and to feel them more deeply than usual in times of stress such as this. Know that is normal. Let’s let ourselves feel the emotions. It is part of the way we move through stressful times.

The opposite can be true too though. We may experience times where we just shut down and stare at the wall for a while. Let’s be forgiving of ourselves and of one another during this time.

David Kessler, who along with Elisabeth Kubler Ross wrote about the stages of grief says that grief is one of the emotions we must acknowledge that we are feeling during this time. He says we are feeling grief both over the loss of normalcy and lack of physical connection that we are currently experiencing and what he calls “anticipatory grief.” That’s when we face an uncertain future where we know we may experience even more loss.

He says that our minds can begin racing, imagining the worst possible scenario but that, if we try to fight that and shut it down, our minds will not let us. In fact, trying to do so can cause us more pain.

Instead, he recommends also trying to imagine the best-case scenario to gain some balance.

Kessler says that one of the ways we can best manage our grief is to recognize the different stages of it, though he warns we do not move through them in in any certain order and that we can move back and forth between them more than once also.

See if you have experienced any of the example he gives: He says,

• “There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us.
• There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.
• There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right?
• There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end.
• And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.

Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.” Kessler says that naming these stages helps us move through them. Kessler adds one more stage of grief that he calls “finding meaning”. I’d like to close by talking about that for a bit.

Now, I know we have witnessed the hoarding of ammunition and toilette paper. I know we have politicians calling on Grandma to sacrifice herself for the good of the capitalistic economy.

I want to tell you a few stories of somethings my spouse Wayne and I have also witnessed lately though. I had to go to Randall’s a couple of days ago because we had run out of groceries at the house. And even though there were these bright red lines we had to stand behind at the checkout counter and signs everywhere telling us we had to stay at least six feet apart, people were greeting complete strangers as they passed one another, asking how each other was doing and really wanting to hear the answer. People were checking with the store employees to ask how they were fairing and thanking them for being there. A man who had a lot more items than I did offered to let me go before him at the checkout.

Wayne was at our neighborhood convenience store and saw a woman give the store clerk her cell phone number and invite him to call her if needed.

We live on a cul de sac, and the other night, someone down the street went into their yard and started playing their clarinet. Pretty soon, a woman at one of the other houses came out into her yard with her two young daughters and joined in by playing a saxophone. Then, a young man and his family came out into their yard, and he joined in with his guitar. And so, our neighbors provided us all with a free, impromptu jazz concert.

That’s the meaning we may be finding despite these difficult, difficult times. The ideology of dog eat dog, everyone for themselves will not get us through this and is being shown to be a failed ideology.

Instead, we are finding our interconnectedness in ways that we never have before. We are discovering that we will need each other to get through this. We are finding ways to make music together, even from a distance, both literally and metaphorically. Let’s do that in this congregation.

Stay connected.

Reach out to one another.

If you go to austinuu.org and click on the calendar, you will see several opportunities we are providing to connect online through Zoom.

Reach out to Meg Barnhouse our senior minister and to me. The best way to do that is through email. Meg.barnhouse@austinuu.org and chris.jimmerson@austinuu.org. We both have our church email on our cell phones and check it frequently.

Meg and I both love this congregation with all of our heart and to the depth of our soul.

We will get through this together.

Amen.

Most sermons during the past 20 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

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 8, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Wisdom is more than just knowledge. In fact, sometimes we have to unlearn things to have greater wisdom. Sometimes wisdom is found in uncertainty, making mistakes and the ineffable experience of our interconnectedness with the interdependent web of all existence. Sometimes wisdom is found in experiences deeper than just the cognitive.

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

-Hafez

The beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor, hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Moment for Beloved Community

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Meditation Reading

-Marcus Borg

It happened as I was driving along through a sunless rural Minnesota landscape. The only sounds were the wind and the drone of the car. I had been on the road for about three hours. The light suddenly changed. It became yellowy and golden and it suffused everything I saw: the snow covered fields left and right, the trees bordering the fields, the yellow and black road signs, the highway itself. Everything glowed. Everything looked wondrous. I was amazed.

I had never experienced anything like that before unless perhaps in very early childhood and so I no longer remembered it. At the time I felt the falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary every day consciousness. That dome of consciousness in which we experience ourselves as in-here and world as out-there. I became aware not just intellectually but experientially at the connectedness of everything. I saw the connectedness, experienced it. My sense of being in here while the world was out there momentarily disappeared. That experience lasted maybe a minute and then faded, but it had been the richest minute of my life. It was not only full of wonder but also filled with a strong sense of knowing, of seeing more clearly and truly than I had ever had.

Sermon

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

– Albert Einstein

This month, our religious education classes and activities are examining the concepts of awakening and wisdom.

How do we awaken our wisdom? How is wisdom different than knowledge?

I’m betting that many of you, like me, have been following the developments with the coronavirus with some degree of concern, so I thought I would start with a little wisdom from our public health officials on how to try to contain the spread of viruses.

While there is certainly no reason to panic at this point, there are some practical things we can all do.

First if we are sick with cold-like symptoms we should stay home.

We’ve placed flyers all around the church with information on proper hand washing and other sanitary measures we can all follow, such as covering our mouth when we sneeze or cough and keeping food preparation areas sanitary.

We also found a formula for making our own hand sanitizer and ordered the ingredients to do so because pre-prepared sanitizer has been sold out pretty much everywhere. We will place it around the church as soon as the ingredients come in.

Another thing we can all do is become aware of not touching our hands to our faces. We all tend to this a lot without realizing, and it is one of most common ways that we end up infecting ourselves with something.

The Center for Disease Control has recently advised that older adults and folks with severe chronic illnesses stay at home as much as possible. They don’t define what they mean by “older adults”, sorry.

If you do make the decision to stay at home and would like to watch the church services via the internet, church staff will be happy to show you how to access the the video if you do not already know how to do so.

I also have a service which would allow me to talk with you over video on the internet if we needed to so during the week.

And finally, though many of us enjoy shaking hands or hugging each other, let’s please display our affection for one another with elbow bumps instead for the time being.

The management team here at the church will continue to monitor the situation very closely and will let you know if any further precautions become necessary.

OK, public health announcement over, so back to wisdom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident once wrote,

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil is. Against evil, one can protest; it can be exposed and, if necessary, stopped with force. Evil always carries the seed of its own self-destruction, because it at least leaves people with a feeling of uneasiness. But against stupidity, we are defenseless.”

Current theologian and minister, Tim Suttle writes that he is seeing a disturbing similarity in modern day America’s lack of wisdom, as that of the German’s in Bonhoeffer’s time.

Suttle notes that what many Americans lack is not knowledge. Instead, there is a refusal to apply that knowledge in wise ways and to dismiss as fake new any knowledge that contradicts our prejudices.

Witness the denial of so many about the growing possibility for global climate catastrophe.

Suttle says that contemporary America has lost several types of wisdom.

First – The wisdom of compromise. He writes, “Only fools believe in win-at-all-costs situations.” It is not that we need to sacrifice our values – but he notes that we gain wisdom through relationship with each other, particularly those with different Life experiences and world views. We can do more together than we can from within our ideological trenches.

Second – The wisdom of change. Trappist monk and mystic, Thomas Merton once said, “If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a hectic, you are not growing spiritually.” Yet so many remain entrenched in dogma and ideology, never learning, never growing. Growth and wisdom always involve change.

Third – The Wisdom of Fidelity. By fidelity, Suttle means staying engaged with each other even when we disagree or make mistakes and being willing to work for the good of society over and above what we want for own lives.

Fourth – The wisdom of suffering. Suttle says that we gain wisdom through our hurts and our mistakes. None of us can really avoid suffering in life, but too many of us try to numb it through the use of drugs, alcohol, television, habitual shopping, smart phone binging, etc.

And finally – The wisdom of uncertainty. So much wisdom arises out of mystery and paradox – in having the humility to recognize how much we really do not and cannot know.

I loved that reading from Marcus Borg that Leo shared with us earlier. There is sense of mysteriousness and paradox in these ineffable experiences of interconnectedness and oneness that so many of us have had.

And I think those experiences bless us with a wisdom that goes deeper than rational knowledge and move us toward acting with more compassion and wiseness in our world.

So ultimately what I think Suttle is trying to get at is that too many Americans have lost that sense of our interconnectedness and the many forms of wisdom to be found within it.

I would add to Suttle’s list several other sources of wisdom.

Sometimes wisdom can come from sorting through our rational knowledge to find what is really useful and strip away what is not. As our call to worship put it, “shake all the nonsense out.”

Paying attention to what our bodies are telling us and getting in touch with our emotions are also a part of awakening our full capacity for wisdom.

This is a lesson I have had to learn more than once. For instance, after my step-father, Ty, who had been more of a father to me than my actual dad, after Ty died in April of 2015, I found myself just feeling numb.

There was a sense of unreality.

And for a couple of weeks, it was as if I completely shut down emotionally.

I went though the routines of life and my ministry here at the church, but I couldn’t feel anything much less locate the pleasure and joy I normally get from life and ministry.

And then one day, I was talking with Meg, and I realized that what was happening was that I had been depressed. That for me, depression isn’t a feeling of sadness; it’s feeling nothing.

It was only after this realization, after I finally let myself fully experience my grief and sorrow over losing my step-dad that the depression began to lift.

It was only after I let myself have a good cry or two that I began to also the able to feel gratitude and joy and happiness again.

So our wisdom arises from our whole selves, our reasoning and know ledge, yes, but also our physical and emotional selves.

And, as I mentioned briefly earlier, but it is well worth repeating, our wisdom also comes from being willing to take risks and make mistakes. Sometimes our mistakes are our greatest teachers.

So, as artist and writer Debbie Millman puts it, “If you are not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks. Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody has ever made before.”

I think we can also find a special sort of wisdom within the metaphors contained in our stories, myths and poetry.

There is wisdom to be found in our music and drama – in our rituals and the arts.

All of these help us to grasp and understand life’s complexities in ways we cannot with only literal thinking.

This is the error, in my opinion, that too many people make by trying to read the bible or other sacred texts literally and thereby missing or even distorting the metaphorical wisdom such texts often contain.

For me, getting out into nature can also shift my thinking to this bigger picture, more metaphorical form of contemplation.

OK, we have now come to the portion of our service where I harp on the importance of spiritual practices, as I have been and will be doing each time I preach this year.

Spiritual practices, meditation or gardening or knitting, whatever you find connects you with the greater wisdom that is already within you, also help us become even wiser because these practices can also help to shift our perspective on life.

So sometimes our knowledge doesn’t change through our spiritual practices, but our understanding of that knowledge, our worldview, does.

Likewise, our readings and hymns and music and rituals and, I hope at least sometimes our sermons, here in worship at the church may provide us with new knowledge or insights but can also just help us shift our perspectives around knowledge we already had.

And this is likely more true the more we can engage, once again with our whole selves, intellect, physical and emotional. And his capacity to grow wisdom I think is there throughout the life of the church.

Certainly I believe our wonderful teachers and other religious education folks, along with our public forum folks, are helping people of all ages to cultivate greater wisdom.

When we work together for social justice and against all fonns of oppression, we encounter difference, which, in turn, can enhance our own wisdom and shift our perspectives once again.

Our work for the environment reminds us of the wisdom that we are indeed not separate from the interdependent web of all existence but a part of it.

Our First UU Cares Council teaches us the wisdom of caring for each other.

Our Fun and Fellowship and our games night remind us of the wisdom that we need fun, friendship, community, joy in our lives.

Our art gallery, Paradox Players, our many musical programs bring these special sources of wisdom to us.

Well, I could go on and on but there are about another 80 or so ministry teams and church programs I haven’t mentioned yet, so I better stop now.

My point is that as a religious community, in these and so many more ways, I believe we can and do help each other grow our wisdom.

Today is International Women’s Day, so I would be remiss if I were to fail to mention that in Proverbs of the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s wisdom is personified as Woman Wisdom or Sophia.

Sophia, Woman Wisdom, hearkens back to the Tree of Life. She was there at the very act of creation, frolicking in God’s presence and taking delight as God fashioned humanity, the heavens and earth, placing true wisdom within the interconnectedness between the many elements of God’s creation.

So my fellow guys, let us ponder in the days to come over what metaphorical truth Proverbs may be trying to teach us.

I’ll leave you with a poem by Unitarian Universalist minister Leslie Takahashi. It is titled, “Labyrinth”.

“Walk the maze within your heart: guide your steps into its questioning curves.
This labyrinth is a puzzle leading you deeper into your own truths.
Listen in the twists and turns.
Listen in the openness within all searching.
Listen: a wisdom within you calls to a wisdom beyond you
and in that dialogue lies peace.”

Here, as a religious community, may we walk the maze of life together.

Here, in this sacred place, may we help each other find the wisdom within us that calls to a wisdom beyond us.

Amen and blessed be.

Benediction

– Khalil Gibran

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry,
the philosophy which does not laugh,
and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Most sermons during the past 20 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

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 23, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Sometimes it takes grit and determination to stay resilient in times of challenge. Sometimes, though, like the trees, we need to be able to bend but not break when strong winds gust – change, but also hold onto our core selves, like when the river changes course around obstacles in its path. Always, we need each other to weather life’s challenges.

Chalice Lighting

At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.

Call to Worship

by Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Moment for Beloved Community

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

To deepen our reflection on the meaning of Beloved Community and the challenges we still encounter for building it, each week we have been asking folks to consider something that is may be outside their realm of experience.

Kevin was 17 when he fled Honduras with his sister. After their grandmother had died, they had been left parentless, and the gang MS-13 forced them to work for it at threat for their lives.

When the gang told Kevin he would have to kill a stranger to prove his loyalty, he and his sister made the decision to flee to the United States.

He was captured at the border and placed into a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for providing care for underage immigrants.

As a part of that care, he was offered psychological counseling, which he understood would be confidential.

He met with a therapist and talked about all of the things the gang had forced him to do or witness.

Little did he know, that under a new Trump administration policy, his therapist’s notes would be passed on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who would use it to declare him a danger to society and argue for his detainment and deportation.

He has now been in detention for over 950 days while his legal case plays out.

One has to wonder if they would have done the same to a teenager from, oh, say, Finland.

What must it be like to have a vulnerable counseling session used against you in a legal setting?

As we struggle with this, let us remember there is no need to immerse ourselves in guilt or shame. In fact, these can be counterproductive, as we need joy and community to sustain our struggle to do justice and build the beloved community.

There is beauty to be found in the struggle itself.

Meditation Reading

GRACE
by Chris Jimmerson

When she was a young girl, they told her that Grace was only available to her, a child of original sin, through the forgiveness and whim of an all-powerful God.

Then, she sat with her Grandfather as he was dying. She held his hand, as she and the ones she loved stayed with him through his great passage.

And she felt Grace arise among them.

Later, during her college years, she volunteered for the local refugee shelter. And one day she witnessed the counselor work with young children traumatized by war.

She heard the children begin to speak their truths with one another, in that language that is only fully understood by such children, and she watched the counselor put his plans aside and let the children begin to heal one another.

And she felt Grace radiate between them.

And as over and over again through her years, she witnessed this same emergence between and among people, she came to understand Grace as something we co-create, and, sometimes, something we allow to happen by simply getting out of the way.

Sermon

“Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

How many of you have heard one or more of these platitudes about human resilience?

The problem with them, besides the fact that they’re platitudes, is also that they center our resilience solely upon each of us as individuals. However, in reality our ability to remain resilient in difficult circumstances greatly depends on communal relationships and social support.

That’s not to say that there are not practical things we can do as individuals to build our personal resilience, and I’ll talk about some of these later.

It’s just that too often we forget that when we face challenges, we do not have to face them alone.

We have each other. We are a part of something much larger than ourselves.

As our religious education chaplain and communications coordinator, Bear Qolezcua put it in one of his wonderful Weekly Faith Connections bulletins, “These are the moments in which we are blessed to remember that we are part of the great, interdependent web of life upon which all things strum a rhythm of living and love and hope and sorrow and joy and pain and loss and newness.”

So this morning, as we consider the spiritual topic of resilience, which our religious education classes and activities have been exploring this leap year month of February, I want to start by stressing the relational, communal and social aspects of our resilience.

One group of psychologists who study resilience define it this way: “Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress .. .It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences.

However, Eric Greitens, former navy seal, humanitarian, author and ex-disgraced, shortterm Republican governor of Missouri, but hey, wisdom can come from the strangest of sources sometimes – Greitens writes that we do not really bounce back to exactly who we were before.

The parent who loses a child is forever changed.

The nineteen-year old who goes to war comes back a different person than when they left.

Greitens says that rather than bouncing back to who we were before, we move through our challenges.

He writes, “What happens to us becomes a part of us”.

Resilient people find healthy ways to integrate hard experiences into their lives.

And, especially in our most difficult situations, to do that, we most often need relationship with; we need the support of others.

As I began what was supposed to be my final year of seminary in the fall of 2014, my world had suddenly become very challenging.

My spouse, Wayne, had developed a debilitating and life-threatening illness.

I am happy to say he is doing well now, but at the time it was pretty scary.

My step-father, Ty was dying of congestive heart failure. We knew it was only a matter of time. We just did not know how much time he had left.

We were blessed that he actually lived more than a year longer than his doctors had predicted. I was so moved that he was even able to attend my ordination here at this church just a couple of months before we lost him.

On top of all that, the congregation where I was doing a part-time internship that was required as part of my final year in seminary was moving through a great deal of emotional turmoil because of abuses they had suffered at the hands of other ministers.

I began to doubt whether I would be able to complete the school year and graduate.

The seminary was a long distance program, where I could do much of the studying and work here, but then had to go to Chicago for intensive classes for several weeks three times per year.

With all that was going on, it seemed a high likelihood that I might not be able to be away at some point or that I might have to leave in the middle of classes if the worst happened in any of the situations going on back home.

I also just was not sure I was going to have the emotional stamina to push through the hard work of seminary.

My prior years at the seminary, I had served as the co-chair of the student advisory council, and the school’s president, Lee Barker, had asked me to fill a position that would serve as student representative to the faculty team and the board of trustees.

I realized that I had to call Lee to tell him I could not serve in the position. I dreaded making that call because I was afraid he would be disappointed in me.

Instead, as soon as I told him all that was going on in my life, he said, “Forget the position, you’re what matters. Let’s talk about what you need.”

He gave me such a gift of grace, because he stayed with me where I was as we continued the conversation. He didn’t try to tell me it was OK or that it would be OK because, of course, it wasn’t and he couldn’t make the promise that it would be.

He did tell me that the school would work with me to find ways around it if I had to miss class time or had trouble keeping up with readings and assignments.

He offered to be available to me if at any time I needed to talk more.

And as the school year went on, he helped me find a resilience that I could not have found by myself – a resilience that allowed me to complete that final year of seminary and graduate with my friends and classmates.

Research has found that our resilience is rooted in relationship in several ways.

Positive and supportive social relationships, such as Lee offered too me, are key to our resilience.

As the American Psychological Association puts it, “Many studies show that the primary factor in resilience is having caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family. Relationships that create love and trust, provide role models and offer encouragement and reassurance, help bolster a person’s resilience.”

So building and maintaining relationships and community are vital to our ability to weather life’s inevitable storms.

Next, finding a sense of purpose that involves altruism and working for the good of others is a second way that our resilience is rooted in social connections.

Research has found, it turns out, that when we get involved in contributing to our communities, working for social justice, trying to create a better world, we benefit ourselves, because in doing so we are exposed to different perspectives and life experiences, and we find that sense of purpose. These, in turn, help build our own personal resilience.

Finally, social safety nets increase the resilience of citizens. In countries with strong social safety nets, such as paid parental leave and universal free health care, people are healthier and express greater life satisfaction.

In turn, these seem to make folks in such countries more resilient when they encounter challenges in life.

So, paid parental leave and Medicare for all, ya’ll!

Now, while still stressing that maintaining the social relationships I’ve been discussing is vital, I do want to talk a little bit about what we can do individually to maintain and build our resiliency.

Jane McGonigal is a video game designer who a few years ago suffered a traumatic brain injury that left her with constant headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss and mental fogginess.

Her doctors told her that in order to heal, she had to avoid anything that triggered these symptoms – no reading, no email.nowork.no running, no writing – basically none of the activities she loved in life.

She found herself growing more and more depressed. She found herself having suicidal thoughts.

She decided to try to create a game she could play that might help her make it through.

She called the game, “Jane the Concussion Slayer” and invited her twin sister and her husband to play it with her.

The game basically just helped them identify how to battle the “bad guys” – anything that could trigger her symptoms like bright lightsand activate power ups – anything she could do to feel even just a little better like cuddling her dog for a few minutes.

Within just a few days her depression lifted. She still had symptoms of the head injury for another year, but she no longer had suicidal thoughts.

She renamed the game “SuperBetter” and shared it over the internet. She soon found herself receiving messages from around the world from people with a variety medical conditions saying that the game had helped them face their challenges with much less anxiety and depression.

She was curious how such a simple game could be so helpful, so she devoured the scientific literature and discovered what the game was doing was helping people identify simple activities that have been shown to contribute to four different types of resilience.

I want to share with you a few minutes from a Ted Talk that McGonigal presented in which she walked her audience through some very simple activities we can do even several times daily that help build these four types of resilience that she will describe.

I invite you as, in the video, she talks the people in her audience through these exercises to join in with them and do the activities too.

---

VIDEO

So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds, go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good.

(Laughter)

Well done, everyone. That is worth +1 physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That’s all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.

Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100,

93 … Go!

(Snapping)

Don’t give up.

(Snapping)

Don’t let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50.

(Snapping)

(Laughter)

Nice. Wow. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that’s worth +1 mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower.

So good job. Quest number three. Pick one:

Because of the room, fate’s really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you’re inside, find a window and look out of it. If you’re outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for “baby [your favorite animal.]”

Do it on your phones, or just shout out some baby animals, and I’ll put them on the screen. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let’s see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant.

(Audience) Oh!

We’re clapping for that? That’s amazing.

(Laughter)

All right, what we’re just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel looking at baby animals, when you need them most.

Here’s a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for everyone negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you’re facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It’s my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up.

All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone’s hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go!

(Chatting)

Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better.

Here’s one more secret for you: Shaking someone’s hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that’s the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities.

---

So just these simple activities, repeated enough, can build our resilience. And if her activities are not workable for someone because of a disability or such, finding some simple way to challenge ourselves in each of those four areas will likely still have the same effect – physical, emotional, mental, and, of course, social.

Now, have I harped on the importance of spiritual practices yet this Sunday?

No? Well, here goes. Yep, it turns out spiritual practices – meditation, prayer, gardening, gratitude journaling, etc. engaging in regular spiritual practices builds our resilience.

Here are some other activities that help us build and maintain resilience:

• Allowing ourselves to experience joy.
• Immersing ourselves in that which we find to be beautiful.
• Laughter and humor.
• The arts, music, poetry.
• Engaging our creativity.

I think sometimes we think of resilience as always meaning being tough, having grit and determination. And that CAN be part of it.

But like those platitudes with which I started, it is not all of the story.

Sometimes resilience means allowing ourselves to feel the grief and rage and sorrow and pain of our situations without falling into immobilization, without losing joy, laughter, humor, beauty.

Sometimes, like the “flag” tree on the cover of your order of service and up on the screens, we need to muster the grace to bend but not break up against the winds of traumatic challenge or dramatic change. And my beloveds, we need each other to do so.

Sometimes we have to have the courage to ask for help.

For after all, we co-create grace in our world together. We grow stronger together.

We build our greatest resilience together.

May this place and this religious community be a wellspring of spiritual resilience so together, we may:

• nourish souls, ours and others,
• transform lives, in our midst and out in our world,
• and do justice, within these walls and beyond them.

Building the Beloved Community requires just such a great spiritual resilience.

Thus, we are blessed to have each other, in this, our beloved religious community.

Amen.

Most sermons during the past 20 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

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 19, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Remaining true to our whole selves, as well as our religious principles and values, is integral to practicing our faith and nourishing our spirits. Indeed, our integrity is a soul matter.

Chalice Lighting

We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.

Call to Worship

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM Rachel Naomi Remen

Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves; it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live.

Being with peiple at such times is like waching them pat their pockets trying to remember where they have put their soul. Often in reclaiming the freedom to be who we are we remember some basic human quality, an unsusptected capacity for love or compassion or some other part of our common birthright as hman beings. What we find is allmost always a surpirse but it is also familiar like something we have put in the back of a drawer, lost long ago. Once we see we know it as our own.

Sermon

Lately, I have been remembering again the sometimes nightmarish time some of you have heard me talk about before – the earlier days of AIDS, when we had no effective treatments for HIV, nor for the many, often fatal infections associated with it.

During those times, I was working as the director of a non-profit that tried to bring clinical trials of potential treatments for HIV and these associated infections, to folks struggling with these HIV in our community.

Our purpose in expanding these studies beyond academic settings and into community clinics was twofold.

First, we wanted to get more people enrolled into them more quickly so that the science could advance more quickly. Secondly, we wanted to provide access to these potentially effective, experimental treatments, to folks for whom there were no good treatment options and who faced dire and often imminent consequences. That’s a euphemism for “they were dying”.

Our folks who were so desperate to get into one of these studies and our doctors often faced a difficult dilemma though.

Clinical research studies have inclusion criteria – a list of medical and other conditions one must meet to be included in the study. They also have exclusion criteria, which is a list of conditions that prevent a person from enrolling.

There are good reasons for these criteria involving the scientific study design, as well as patient safety concerns.

Too often however, the entry criteria for the studies were unnecessarily stringent. This was most often due to an overly cautious Food and Drug Administration, not used to dealing with so many people in such a desperate situation.

So, were our patients to bend the rules, hide parts of their medical history that might exclude them?

Were our physicians, who might suspect or even know, to have looked the other way? Would doing so risk the validity of the study results?

Would these folks and these physicians be acting with integrity if they bent these unreasonable and unjust rules?

I can tell you that they did. People were desperate. People’s live were at stake.

Eventually, this became such an issue nationwide that the entry criteria for studies began to get loosened.

The FDA also began allowing large, open access trials. These were generally just safety studies that had very flexible criteria to allow many more people to enroll.

Open access studies became a model that is still used today for cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

I particularly remember one of the physicians who provided care for some of our sickest, hospitalized folks.

So often, the drugs available for treating their life-threatening, HIV-associated infections were simply failing.

This physician kept up on all of the most recent science on treating such infections and would often know of compound treatments – mixtures of several drugs administered at once – that were showing great promise.

The problem was though, that these compounded drugs were most often not available in our area, even through clinical trials, and the pharmacist at the hospital refused to do the compounding to create them.

Understandably – the pharmacist could have lost their license by doing so and it would have quite possibly been, oh a little illegal.

So this physician would sneak down to the pharmacy at night, mix the compound treatment themself, and then take it up to their patient’s room and administer it themself, no nurses involved.

And time after time after time, though not every time, but so, so many times, their patients survived because of it.

It worked. They lived, at least for a while longer.

And yet, there were also unknown safety risks – potential interactions between such compounded drugs that could have caused possibly severe side-effects.

And it was, as I said, probably at least testing the boundaries of legality.

Was this acting with integrity? I’ve been reminded of all of this by the current, hellish situation at our border and within our immigration catastrophe that pretends to be a just system.

Immigrants and their advocates face unjust laws, unjust interpretation and administration of laws – sometimes just outright lawbreaking by a bigoted and racist administration.

Recently, the federal government tried twice to send one of our fellow Unitarian Universalists to prison simply for giving water to migrants trying to cross the desert. I’m pleased to say the Feds failed.

And so immigrants in desperate situations, sometimes at threat for their very lives, and their supporters, are choosing to defy these immigration laws in some cases.

And yet, then the administration and the forces of hate take examples of these cases and exaggerate them to paint all immigrants as criminals and law breakers.

So, is breaking a law we consider unjust acting with integrity? Who gets to decide which laws are just and which are not?

My friends, I can tell you that my perspective is that in both the cases of people with HIV and their doctors breaking the rules and the actions of immigrants and their supporters, I believe that they were acting with profound integrity.

Human lives were and are at stake.

I believe that all of these folks reached down to where a deep well of integrity resided within them, and, faced with no good choices, made the most live-giving, the most soul affirming decision available to them.

They brought pockets of wholeness into broken and morally incoherent systems that were shattering people’s lives.

This month, as a religious community, we are exploring what it means to be a people of integrity.

I wanted to start this morning by revisiting that time when the AIDS epidemic left us with such difficult choices – to lift up the immigration atrocity we are witnessing now to illustrate how sometimes living with integrity is not so easy.

I think sometimes when it comes to integrity, we can tend to take this Dudley Doright approach of “just do the right thing”, when, in fact it is much more complicated than that.

Our word, integrity, stems from the latin “integer”, meaning whole and complete.

As in mathematics, wherein an integer is a number that is not divided into fractions, integrity implies that we are not divided – our actions, speech and methods are consistent with our core self, our values, our aspirations.

And this wholeness helps us to maintain our integrity even when the ethical choices we face are complex and unclear.

This more nuanced conceptualization of integrity, I believe, has profound implications for us, both as individuals and as communities.

At the individual level, author, educator and advocate, Parker Palmer, writes that integrity comes when we get in touch with our very soul.

Now, “soul” can simply mean the essence of who we are; the person we were born to be; though for some of us it may have mystical implications also.

Parker writes of observing the birth of his first grandchild, “What I saw was clear and simple: my granddaughter arrived on earth as this kind of person, rather than that, or that, or that … we are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness, an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.”

For Parker, we can sometimes get separated from our truest self because of fear, societal pressures and the like. So, regaining our integrity means reintegrating our souls, embracing that at our core we are enough.

Now, embracing that we are enough as who we are, imperfections and all, while at the same time embracing that most of us have a desire to I grow and improve can seem like a paradox.

There are two thing that I think can help move this from Paradox to a sort of both land conceptualization.

Dr. Brene Brown, author and social science researcher, encourages us to approach other people with the assumption that they are doing the best they can with the tools they have.

I think we can offer ourselves this same grace. If I am doing the best I can with the tools I have, then my efforts at self improvement can be seen not so much as changing who I am but as learning new tools for maintaining wholeness and integrity.

I think also, we tend to think of growth as always being about adding something new. However, quite often becoming more whole involves letting go of something harmful or unearthing some part of ourselves we have lost.

Here is another really cool both and acting with integrity will nourish our souls and help us be whole … AND nourishing our souls through spiritual practices and engaging in faithful community will fortify our integrity when we face difficult situations such as I was describing earlier.

I now pause for our Sunday moment of harping on the importance of spiritual practices as promised in a sermon a couple of weeks ago.

I want to return to this idea of growth often involving unearthing something we have lost.

I think for those of us who have experienced having our identity marginalized, this can be an especially important aspect of wholeness and claiming our integrity.

Actress America Ferrera, whom you may know from the movie, “Real Women have Curves” or the TV series, “Ugly Betty” has a Ted Talk called, “My Identity is My Superpower”.

In it she speaks of dreaming of becoming an actress every since she was a nine year old girl who would dance around the den of her house.

She tells of going to her first professional audition, and being asked, “Can you read the part again but sound more hispanic?”

She describes how even after having found success, she still faced casting stereotyping and being turned down for roles because, quote “you look too latino”.

She says she even began to straighten her hair, tried to loose weight, avoided the sun so her skin would not turn so brown.

Finally, she had gotten cast in a movie with a Latinx character but was told her casting could not be announced until the white lead character got cast because the movie would sell better if the white person was announced first.

She had an epiphany. She was no longer going to change herself into something she wasn’t. She was going to reclaim her true identity and work to change the system instead. Here she is describing this altered perspective.

VIDEO

I want to close by holding up that this wholeness that is so vital to our being able to live with integrity as individuals is also crucial for us as a religious community.

Our integrity as a religious community comes alive when we get in touch with the core of our faith: when we live according to those principles we read together earlier, when our ways of being are whole, consonant with the values this church has expressed – transcendence, community, compassion, courage, transformation.

I think that do to that, we have to keep our principles and values in front of us, keep them explicit in our hearts and minds.

That’s why I support the proposed 8th principle – it takes something essential to the integrity of our faith that is implicit in our other principles and makes it explicit.

And my beloveds, we face a heavy challenge in these days in which we currently live, because we cannot be consistent with our principles and values, unless we speak out and take action against the gross human rights abuses of our current administration.

We cannot claim our integrity as a religious community unless we rise up to counter with love the emboldenment of hate groups and increased hate crimes they are committing against folks who are already marginalized.

I don’t use terms like “alt right” or “white nationalists” or even “white supremacists” because those are euphemisms that soften what is at the core of these groups.

So, to know what we are really up against, I believe we must call them what they are – hate groups, even while we must resist returning the hate.

I know none of us can do all. We cannot all participate in all the rallies and marches, make all the phone calls, sign all the petitions, do all the visits with congress critters and all the things.

We can all do what we can though. Spend one day registering folks to vote, give what we can to those who are doing the work of the revolution, make what call we can help our children understand what living with integrity in the world looks like for our faith.

And this is an election year, so what’s one thing we can all do come November?

That’s right – vote! And encourage others to vote and help get folks to the polls if you have the time and ability. Parker Palmer says that to be whole, we need trustworthy relationships and tenacious communities of support.

That’s part of why I love serving this congregation so much.

I believe you are just such a trustworthy, tenacious community of support and integrity.

Amen

Most sermons during the past 20 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

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Lee Legault, Ministerial Intern
December 29, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Lee and Rev. Chris discuss their own and other spiritual practices, how to maintain them and why they are more important than ever in the year to come.

Chalice Lighting

As the days begin to lengthen, the world slowly moving from winter to spring, we kindle the flame of Transformation, the fifth of the five values of our congregation. May the light of Transformation lead us to the growth that shapes our lives and heals our world.

Call to Worship

IN THIS MOMENT
By Chris Jimmerson

In this moment, we gather together, in this our beloved community.

In this moment, we gather to know the power and beauty of ritual, music and the blending together of the loving presence we each have to offer.

In this moment, we gather to glimpse that which is greater than us but of which we are part.

In this moment, we gather to worship together.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

DEFINING SPIRITUALITY
by Brene Brown

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives … For some people, that power greater than us is God; for others, it’s fishing. Some are reminded of our inextricable connection by faith; others by expressions of shared humanity.

Sermon

Lee and Rev. Chris discuss their own and other spiritual practices.

Leo: To start, I’d be interested to know how you might define “spiritual practice”, Chris.

Chris: Well, I suppose we would have to define what we mean by “spiritual or spirituality”, and I loved Brene Brown’s description of it that you read earlier. So for me, then, a spiritual practice is anything I can do that gives me that perspective and grounding in love, compassion and interconnectedness that sense of being a part of something much more powerful and larger than myself.

Leo: Lee, Does Chris’s definition of spiritual practice resonate with you?

Lee: Yes, Leo, except that I often exchange the word “practice” for “habit.” You’ll hear me use “spiritual practice” and “spiritual habit” interchangeably this morning. Thinking of them as spiritual habits made experimenting with them more accessible to me when I was just starting out. A habit is a behavior repeated so many times it becomes automatic. Washing your hands, brushing your teeth, stopping at a red light, those are all habits, and I am great at those! I knew I had transferable skills related to habit building back when I did not know the first thing about a spiritual practice.

Also, I use and depend on my spiritual habits like a carpenter uses tools or Navy Seal uses weapons. My spiritual practices are my gear or armor for encountering life. If they are absent, rusty, or not working properly, then I do not have everything I need to do what the moment requires.

Leo: Can you share some of your own spiritual practices with us?

Chris: Sure. I tend to have a couple of types of spiritual practices. The first I would call committed, on going practices – what some folks call spiritual discipline. There are two examples I have practiced in the past. One was going on meditative hikes in nature three at least three times per week, weather permitting. Most often, would bring my camera, because having it helped me notice and focus on the beauty all around me.

Another was was listing three things for which I was grateful in the notes application in my iPhone each morning. That then got shared across all of my computers and devices so that I could access the list to remind myself later of all for which I have to be grateful. I have found over time that those became less effective for me, and I recently read that there are sound neurological reasons why me might want to change our regular, committed spiritual practices.

Currently, I spend an hour each month speaking with a spiritual director. I have also come to realize that going to the gym and working out three to four times per week, for me has become a regular spiritual practice. It beaks up my work day and requires me to be mindful of just the exercises I am doing for that time period. Even when I am tired or having a stressful day or am not feeling all that well, I find that after going to the gym I usually feel much better physically, have more energy and that the stress has melted away.

The other type of spiritual practice or the ones that I do not do on a regular basis but that are more impromptu, spur of the moment activities. So, for instance, though I don’t do the meditative hikes or list gratitudes on regular, scheduled basis, I still sometimes do these practices if I am feeling a particular need for them. Another example is that sometimes during the workday here at the church, I will go sit quietly in the sanctuary for just five or ten minutes or walk the grounds of the church. These seem to clear my thoughts and help me center myself. A friend of mine from seminary says that she has an impromptu spiritual practice of sipping Chateau st. Michelle Chardonnay.

Leo: What are your spiritual practices, Lee?

Lee: I tie my spiritual habits to things I do at certain times of day. After my alarm goes off in the morning, I say a mantra: “I greet this day with an open mind, a happy heart, and a grateful spirit. I will enjoy all that I can and learn from the rest.”

After I brush my teeth, I pick the stone pendant I will wear and the pair of rock balls to put in my purse and hold throughout the day whenever I’m seated for any length of time. I think of making these selections as a type of divination. I open my mind to what challenges the day may hold and feel into what rocks might best help me meet those challenges.

If I’m going to be working with people who are upset, I’ll choose black rocks to remind me to keep my own boundaries and avoid taking on pain that is not mine. If I feel down, rocks associated with nurturance or support may feel appropriate, like Jasper or Moonstone, and using them reminds me to be gentle with myself. Divination helps me have an open mind and listen for wisdom from the inner teacher or from the Spirit of Life.

When I feel cranky at mid-afternoon, I do twenty minutes of meditation. I love to do a body scan meditation while lying down, but some days walking meditation of seated breath work better fit my schedule.

I always have a beaded rock bracelet on or with me, and can hold it any time I have a few minutes and do some breath prayer work. I touch a bead and say on the in-breath, “I serve the One,” and on the out breath, “Glory be to God.” Then I move my finger to the next bead and do the same thing. The words don’t matter, but it is helpful to say something a little longer on the out-breath so you are breathing in a four-seconds-in, six-seconds-out pattern. You could say “breath in,” on the in breath and “release the breath now,” on the out breath and achieve this 4-6 pattern.

Leo: What other types of spiritual practices might folks consider?

Chris: You know, I think we tend to think of spiritual practices as being in some way tied to one or more religions – prayer, meditation, yoga and various religious rituals. But prayer doesn’t have to be seeking help from a higher power. It can simply be articulating our wishes and hopes and inner state. And spiritual practice can also be simply digging in the ground if gardening centers us. They can be journaling, creating art, singing, chanting, knitting, learning something new, acts of kindness toward other people, engaging with others in public act for justice, absorbing the beauty of nature, holding those we love in front of a fire at night, volunteering, attending a communal bonding event – the list goes on and on. We’ve given everyone a hand out with a partial list spiritual practices. The main point is that any activity which gives you that sense of grounding, interconnectedness and being a part of something larger can be a spiritual practice. Some practices are more directed toward the mind, others the body, heart or soul. A wonderful book called, “An Alter in the World” by Barbara Brown Taylor talks about how just the way we go about our daily lives, if we practice mindfulness, can be a spiritual practice. So from that perspective voting our values or the way in which we treat other people can be spiritual.

Leo: You do more than one spiritual practice a day then?

Lee: Yes. The reason I like to layer up my armor of spiritual habits is that the day that you most need your spiritual practices is going to be when everything is going wrong. On that kind of day, you’ll miss most of your spiritual practices, and that is fine, because you will have fallback practices.

I learned this lesson when my husband had a near fatal car accident. A neighbor called me, saying he did not did not know if my husband was alive or dead but that paramedics had used the jaws of life to pull him from the wreckage, and an ambulance had taken him to the nearest trauma 1 hospital. Well, I missed my twenty minutes of meditation that day. I missed my gratitude practice. I was in spiritual freefall for a lot of hours, waiting to see if he would emerge alive from emergency surgery (which he did and he is miraculously 100 percent recovered).

The spiritual practice that I grabbed onto during the freefall was my prayer beads. I have them in my purse, so they are essentially always with me. I could do my prayer bead work in fits and snatches and unobtrusively in front of other people. In that situation, I had a tool that helped me meet the moment. All it takes is one, but you are a lot more likely to have the right spiritual practice if you have options you are comfortable with to choose from.

Leo: What obstacle or challenges can folks encounter when trying to maintain their spiritual practices?

Chris: For me, one of the biggest challenges is that when I am busy or stressed out, I tend to feel like I don’t have the time available to engage in my practices. And of course, these are the times when I need them the most! Having an accountability partner can help. For example, knowing that I have an appointment with a trainer at the gym (and that I get to pay him whether or not I show up!) is good for getting me there even on days when I am tempted to skip it. I think sometimes people get frustrated because the first few things they try don’t have the desired effect for them. For instance, I have never been good at sitting meditation. I’m too hyperkinetic. But then I discovered walking/hiking meditation and that can still be very powerful for me sometimes. Also, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes a practice may become less effective for us over time, so we may not vary our practices from time to time or find ways to deepen the ones we are already doing.

Leo: Lee, what tips do you have for folks starting out with spiritual practices? [To ask just before or after Chris talks about obstacles or challenges of spiritual practices.]

Lee: I offer four pointers for building a successful habit from James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits”:

1. Make it obvious,
2. make it attractive,
3. make it easy, and
4. make it satisfying.

Make a new spiritual practice obvious by stacking it on top of a preexisting habit. “After my alarm goes off, I will wake up [an existing habit] and then I will [do my spiritual practice: meditate, say a gratitude, create an intention for my day–whatever].”

Make your spiritual habit attractive–step two–by bundling it with something you want to do: “When my alarm goes off, I will wake up [existing habit] and do my spiritual practice [new habit], and then I will have coffee [making the new habit attractive by smacking it against something you like to do].”

Step three is “make it easy.” Set the bar for your new spiritual practice so low that you can’t fail. If your new habit is saying a gratitude, then say one and say it in your head. If your new spiritual practice is meditation, meditate for five breaths–not five minutes–in the beginning. Build up your spiritual practice after you have succeeded in building the habit of doing the spiritual practice in the first place. Your goal is to get 1 percent better at doing this new thing every day, not 100% better at doing it on the first day. Make it easy.

Finally, make your spiritual practice satisfying. What is rewarded is repeated. My prayer bead bracelets are smooth and beautiful. It is sensorily satisfying for me to use them.

Eventually, the intrinsic reward of feeling less stress and more compassion is reason enough to use them, but in the beginning, it helped a lot that I loved and wanted to hold them, like a crow likes shiny objects. For a new spiritual practice to take root, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

Leo: Finally, why would you say that engaging in one or more spiritual practices matters for us?

Chris: Well, first, I would mention that there is a pretty good amount of research on at least some of these practices that shows they can be very good for us psychologically, physically and spiritually. They can even do things like lower blood pressure and relieve depression and anxiety. I also think they help ground and sustain us, especially when times are tough. They help us gain perspective and give us a sense of interconnectedness and belonging. And I think we are really going to need practices that help give us this resilience as we come up a new year where we know things like a senate impeachment trial and an election that likely to get very ugly will be happening. Finally, I would say that our practices do not all have top be individual. We can support each other. We can develop shared practices such our guided meditation group. These bind us together, deepen our relationships and reminds us that during these challenging times, we are never truly alone.

Leo: Lee, Why should people go to the trouble of developing spiritual practices?

Lee: I think your identity–indeed your humanity–is tied to your daily habits. To me, karma is a kind of compounding of habits. Peaceful, loving people practice being peaceful and loving. They do peaceful and loving things daily. Spiritual practices are embodied actions consonant with the kind of people we want to be. With practice, we become those kinds of people.

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