Albert Einstein was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and knew a lot but said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition places great emphasis on the use of reason to interpret our experience to derive meaning in life. But the solutions to some of the most difficult intractable problems in our lives seem to lie beyond our experience and reason. This worship service will explore what possibilities could be open to us if we make imagination a bigger part of our religious life.
Rev. Brian Ferguson is currently serving in his third year as the Consulting Minister to the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Prior to serving at San Marcos, Brian completed a year of chaplaincy training at Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin, specializing in the areas of Intensive Care, Trauma, and Mental Health. He was honored to serve as the ministerial intern here, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, in 2008 and also the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church in Cedar Park. Brian earned a Masters of Divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry, the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, California. His ministry is driven by the desire to explore and improve the human condition in an interdisciplinary and holistic way.
He is a native of Scotland but has lived in California since 1986 prior to moving to Austin in August, 2008. In his previous life, before attending seminary, he earned an applied physics degree from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and worked for 24 years as an electronic design engineer and project manager. Brian is joined on life’s journey by his partner and our office manager, Natalie Freeburg, and nine year old daughter, Isla Ferguson.
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Many of us identify as Unitarian Universalists, but do we mean the same or even similar things when we identify as such? Or is our biggest commonality our doubt about having any centralizing religious concept that pulls us to together as a religious movement? Something – or the lack of something – keeps inviting us back to be part of our religious community. This worship service explores what that central theme might be or perhaps what it could be.
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Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes.
Excerpt from A Treatise on Atonement by the 19th Century Universalist leader Hosea Ballou.
“Man’s major goal, in all he does, is happiness; and were it not for that, he never could have any other particular goal. What would induce men to form societies; to be at the expense of supporting government; to acquire knowledge; to learn the sciences, or till the earth, if they believed they could be as happy without as with?
The fact is, man would not be the thing that he now is, as there would not be any stimulus to action; Men are never without this grand goal, so they are never without their wants, which render such a goal desirable. But their minor goals vary, and their passions differ. Then, says the objector, there is no such thing as disinterested benevolence.
The objector will say, to admit that our happiness is the grand goal of all we do destroys the purity of religion, and reduces the whole to nothing but selfishness.
To which, I reply a man acting for his own happiness, if he seek it in the heavenly system of universal benevolence, knowing that his own happiness is connected with the happiness of his fellow-men, which induces him to do justly and to deal mercifully with all men, he is not more selfish than he ought to be. But a man acting for his own happiness, if he seek it in the narrow circle of partiality and covetousness, his selfishness is irreligious and wicked.”
Sermon
I find it interesting that on this July 4th Independence Weekend that you invited a worship leader who is British. I am reminded of the Romans, who would parade their captured enemies through the street then have the defeated leaders give speeches praising the Great Roman Empire. I wondered if this is why you invited me back? Those of you who remember my eventful Internship here two years ago probably realize that is not what I will be doing. What I do want to do is congratulate this religious community for the hard work you have done over the last two years and your selection of a fabulous Minister in the Rev. Meg Barnhouse. Congratulations, I am sure you must be very happy.
Now happiness is something I want to explore today. Happiness is a strange idea when you think about it. It is one of the most common wishes we make for others. This weekend we will be wishing each other a Happy 4th July, even to British people. Last Fall I even saw a sign saying Happy Veterans Day. I was taken aback and a little unsettled by this, Happy Veterans Day. Veterans Day has always been a day I recognized as a solemn day of remembrance for those who lost their lives in wars. Wishing someone a Happy Veterans Day seems to have missed the point of the day. Not everything in life is happy – in fact even our wishing of each other happiness on holidays implies that most of the time we are not happy.
Now being from Britain, happiness is not something that comes easily to me. I grew up Presbyterian which with its emphasis on human depravity seems much more grounded in reality than any foolish optimism about happiness. Human history seems to have plenty of examples where humanity has taken the low road in the treatment of each other. Reviewing human history with its seeming constant violence and injustice usually stirs in me emotions of sadness or anger and often both. History or our current news rarely stirs emotions of happiness in me.
Now perhaps I’m overly negative about this but to show that I’m not alone in this view, there was a proposal by a British psychologist to have happiness classified as a psychiatric disorder. I originally thought this was a joke from a satirical newspaper like the Onion but it was in the Journal of Medical Ethics1 which is not usually a barrel of laughs. Here is what the abstract to the proposal says:
“It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains — that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.” So there you have it to be happy is abnormal – at least in Britain. We British can be a miserable bunch. Perhaps that is why the American colonies wanted their independence from Britain -they wanted to be happy or at least the opportunity to pursue happiness. At the very founding of the United States in the Declaration of Independence there is talk about happiness. One of the most famous sentences from the Declaration says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is considered a powerful statement of individual human rights and has been called one of the best-known sentences in the English language.2 As a powerful statement of human rights it is great shame that it talked about all men rather than all people being created equal. If it had said all people then women might not have had to wait another 140 years for the vote. Alas like the reading from Hosea Ballou earlier, it’s sexist language was a product of its time.
Thomas Jefferson was the main author of the declaration and acknowledged that most of the ideas in it were not original. Scholars recognize multiple influences on the document. One of the major influences was somewhat ironically the British political philosopher, John Locke, who was one of the most influential thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. He wrote extensively about the just use of power by governments and about 100 years before the Declaration of Independence he said people had the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” Lock believed that property rights were fundamental to human rights both of which should be protected by the government. It is interesting that Jefferson changed this aspect of Locke’s work to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The pursuit of property seems much more in line with our lives in the consumer culture of the U.S. today.
The modern American and British views of individual property rights are by no means a Universal view. Many of the indigenous Native American groups to New England struggled to understand the early American colonists’ ideas of ownership of land. A common view among the Native American groups was “The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.” This in many ways is a radical interpretation of our 7th Unitarian Universalist principle of the respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part. Many Native American saw humans as part of the environment, part of something larger than themselves, with no sense of ownership by them. That is a radically different world view and makes a clash of cultures inevitable as soon as the early colonists started claiming ownership of land. What did the Native Americans make of the first “No Trespassing” signs?
Many indigenous groups throughout the world struggle with the dominant western ideas of individual property rights. Even, in my home country of Scotland, the native non-English language Gaelic, did not have a word for individual ownership, it only had language for community ownership by family or clan. The language had no way of saying that I own this, a person could only talk about how we own this. This is a remarkably different approach to living than we have in most of our modern society. Yet think about how we talk about ownership within this religious community.
In our religious tradition ownership and responsibility does not lie with some centralized power or with the minister, blame may lie with the minister but not ownership and responsibility. The ownership and responsibility lies with the members of this religious community, with each of us. We talk about our church, our religious education program, our members, our minister, the land that we own, and in the modern world we live – our webpage and our facebook page. As individuals of this religious community we own none of it but together with each other we own all of it.
The idea of individual property rights is so fundamental to how British and American societies operate that we forget it is a choice we make as a society. I find it interesting that the individual pursuit of property was down-played by Jefferson in the declaration of independence and replaced with the pursuit of happiness. There are many benefits to individual ownership since as individuals we often take better care of what we own individually rather than what we own in common with others. The desire for ownership, be it a house, car, or other item, can be the primary motivator for many of our actions.
Now the exact relation of ownership to happiness is a complex one. The material wealth of most Americans has increased enormously since the 1950’s but the surveys of happiness suggest most Americans are slightly less happy than the 1950’s. The pursuit of property may be a major motivator of our actions but does not seem to make us happier. This makes sense to me since pursuing property to a certain level of comfort such as having a safe place to live and ample food to eat will reduce our fear and insecurity therefore increase our happiness. Beyond these basic comforts the continual pursuit of property and goods which is encouraged by our economic system I believe can result in more dissatisfaction. As our expectations are continually raised then the likelihood of happiness or even just contentment can diminish. Perhaps Jefferson was on to something when he replaced the Pursuit of Property with the Pursuit of Happiness.
Some historians believed that Jefferson de-emphasized protection of property by the government to allow taxation but most historians believed that Jefferson wanted a more virtuous ideal to go along with life and liberty. Happiness was a very important concept in the 18th century since many liberal philosophers like Jefferson and Locke were justifying the curbing of the powers by Kings and Tyrants – often the same thing. The justification defined the role of government to serve the people by seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.3 Judging by this standard it would seem that our present government in America is failing badly since no-one seems happy with it.
At the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence Happiness was considered the supreme determiner of a person’s actions. This idea was mentioned in the earlier reading by Hosea Ballou, considered the father of the Universalist side our tradition. He stated: “Man’s major goal, in all he does, is happiness; and were it not for that, he never could have any other particular goal.”4 Hosea Ballou was writing just 30 years after the Declaration of Independence and still reflects that period’s belief in the pursuit of happiness as the major motivation of a person’s actions. The Declaration has a strong religious context emphasizing rights endowed by one’s Creator meaning God. Ballou likewise believed we had a God-given right to be happy and we were created to be fulfilled and happy. Jefferson from a political point of view stated the pursuit of happiness is a right and Ballou from our own Universalist religious tradition stated that happiness is our main stimulus to noble action. It seems like happiness is a very important idea but is the pursuit of happiness an appropriate religious goal?
In the earlier reading Ballou warned that acting only for our own individual happiness is irreligious and wicked5. The focus on one’s own individual happiness can easily slip into narcissism and selfishness. Ballou believed true happiness would come when we acted justly on the behalf of others and dealt mercifully with them – a universal system of benevolence. Over the last 200 years we have increasingly become a more individualistic culture and many in our society do not think in terms of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
As well as the overemphasis on individual happiness, the idea of happiness as a goal to be pursued seems problematic to me since it implies we can reach some stable state of happiness. I don’t think life is like that. Given the constant change in our world and the finite nature of human life then any expectation of a lasting state of happiness seems doomed to disappointment. Our lives are filled with challenges such as illness, loss of loved ones, disappointments in relationships, financial uncertainty, and injustice in its many forms. Now being happy through all the struggles of life may not be a psychiatric disorder as was claimed earlier but may not be a meaningful response to life’s challenges. Having expectations of lasting happiness can lead to a sense of disappointment and despair. I heard it said that expectations are just premeditated resentments therefore I treat life with high hopes and low expectations. So what are my expectations and hopes about happiness?
I think we have brief moments of happiness rather than lasting periods of happiness. These moments often come when reflecting on our past, often our immediate past. These reflections can be on some great time of connection with family or friends, or a great event we worked hard on that felt successful, or time we took for ourselves to reflect on our growth as people through skills acquired or changes of behavior. Happiness for me has a reflective quality where some past event gives us satisfaction and I think that happiness is more often the consequence of what we do not the motivation for what we do. Take some of the life’s struggles I just mentioned – with illness I seek care, for loss of loved ones I seek comfort, for disappointments with relationships I seek understanding, for financial struggles I seek support, and for injustice I seek to work for justice.
Mainly what I seek with life’s struggle is the compassion and understanding of others to help me cope. This is where I think religious communities can play an important role in our lives. Many people seek religious community to help them cope with life’s sorrows and celebrate life’s joys. The congregation I serve in San Marcos has a shared joys and concerns portion of our weekly worship service which is a ritualized form of that. But the sharing of joys and concerns amongst us does not just happen in worship, it happens in the fellowship hour after service, and through the friendships we have with fellow congregants. This is a vital part of the fabric of a healthy religious community.
Through this sharing and reflection on the struggles and joys of life we create the meaning in our lives. This sharing and reflection in community can allow us to feel cared for, comforted, supported, and understood which, in time, may leads us to moments of happiness as we reflect on how we are valued by other people. And the sharing of joys is important because if we can learn to truly find joy in another person’s joy then this can help increase the moments of happiness in our own lives.
In closing, I think Jefferson did get it right in pursuing happiness rather than property as one of our rights but happiness is not a goal to be achieved but moments of satisfaction to be savored in our lives. Aristotle said “happiness is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honor, health or friendship, which are sought not for their own sake but cause people to be happier.” I would add that people may desire happiness but life will place obstacles in the way of our happiness. How we choose between riches, honor, health, and friendship will determine the depth and frequency of those moments of our happiness. We do well to choose wisely.
Ballou, Hosea. A Treatise on Atonement Edited and introduced by Ernest Cassara (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1986) p.33-34
i Bentall, Richard P. Journal of Medical Ethics Volume 18, Issue 2 (BMJ Group, 1992) p.94-98
ii Lucas, Stephen E. Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism Thomas W Benson ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,1989) p.85
iii Willis, Gary. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence ( New York, NY: Doubleday, 1978) p.259
iv Ballou, Hosea. A Treatise on Atonement Edited and introduced by Ernest Cassara (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1986) p.33-34v Ballou, Hosea. A Treatise on Atonement Edited and introduced by Ernest Cassara (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1986) p.33-34
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
Reading
Impassioned Clay
by Ralph N. Helverson
Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse.
Out of the passions of our clay it rises.
We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient,
self-sustaining or self-derived.
We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present,
some self-respect beyond our failures.
We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up
at beauty,
when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.
We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all
that we have received.
We have religion when we look upon people with all their
failings and still find in them good;
when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our
our own heart.
We have religion when we have done all that we can,
and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is
larger than ourselves.
Prayer
As we take this time, may we become in touch with the deepest desires of our hearts and memories of our minds. We are creatures with knowledge of our past and hopes for the future.
In recalling our past may we find the humility to learn from both our failures and success. In anticipating our future may we find the strength and courage to challenge ourselves to become more of what we desire to be.
As the adversities of our life remind us of our illusions of control and delusions of independence, may they also remind us of those who can help us and our interdependence with others.
In times of our greatest vulnerability and uncertainty, may we remember the moments of our highest resolve. And in doing so may our life be the embodiment of our highest ideals and an inspiration to all around us.
Amen.
Sermon: Time to Change – again!
As we approach the end of the calendar year, I find myself thinking about that difficult subject of time. The year 2009 is almost upon us and I am one of those people who hasn’t quite got their mind around being in the 21st century and soon we will be in the second decade of it. But when I talk about the difficulty of time I do not just mean the speed with which it goes by or the seeming shortage of time.
I have that constant struggle I have to live in the present. My mind constantly planning ahead to the short term task ahead, like eating lunch, or longer term out to next year, “where am I going to get a job?” When not thinking about the future then I think about my decisions of the past the good ones, a year ago I really didn’t think I’d be living in Texas, or regrets, why did I think this would be a good sermon topic? My mind seems to make only fleeting visits to the present before concerning itself with thoughts for the future and memories of the past.
Midnight on Wednesday as the calendar flips to another year there will be that mixture of poignancy for the past along with hope and perhaps some anxiety for the time ahead. For some of us we will be happy to see the back of 2008 for the hardship and losses we endured. For others we will reflect on a year well-lived and enter the New Year filled with anticipation and optimism. Many of us enter the New Year with externally imposed changes which we had little control over.
As I consider my own situation as intern minister here I am in the middle of my year internship while simultaneously ending it here at First Austin and about to begin a new stage at the Liveoak church. I now understand Jean Luc Godard’s phrase “A story should have a beginning, middle, and an end but not necessarily in that order.” My current situation is simultaneously a beginning, middle and an end. Time is a tricky concept.
The end of a calendar year also imposes on our lives transition points, often artificially, as work contracts and projects end or deadlines imposed by the Christmas season itself. The busyness of the Christmas season can also become such a focus for many of us that it becomes difficult to plan for the time after until we get through Christmas. At this time between Christmas and New Year is when we have the time and energy to take measure of the past and look towards the future.
The month of January is a somewhat arbitrary beginning for a new year since it does not correspond to the beginning of an agricultural season or astronomical cycle. The month of January is named after the Roman God Janus, who had two faces which allowed him to simultaneously look forward to the future and backwards to the past. The tradition of New Year resolutions is also traced to the God Janus and when taken seriously New Year resolutions are about looking at our behaviors of the past and envisioning how we could do better in the future.
As individuals many of us in small ways or perhaps even in significant ways undertake the tradition of New Year resolutions. The most common resolutions are: losing weight, getting fit, eating better, quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol, paying off debt, spending more time with the family, volunteering to help others more, and just being less grumpy. Some of these might be useful goals for many of us. And probably very similar goals to last year, and the year before and the year before that. Or perhaps that is just me. I actually thought that I might take up smoking just so that I could give it up thus fulfilling at least one resolution this year.
Of course the joke of so much of New Year resolutions is how little time it takes to fail in keeping them and how we desire the same changes each year. There is a whole industry around this such as gym membership which sky-rockets in January as the next cycle of resolutions for weight loss and greater fitness begin. While the idea of New Year resolutions can be shrugged off as just another silly example of human nature and the large disconnect between our spoken desires and our actual behavior, I do think the idea touches on a real desire for many of us to live better than we have done and the great difficulty we have in doing so.
Our Unitarian tradition of the 19th and 20th Century has focused on the self-improvement of the person and has been summarized as “Salvation by Character”.
Salvation in our Unitarian tradition was about individuals improving themselves and working towards their own and others moral improvement. We moved the emphasis from a faith in and obedience to a God to an emphasis on improving ourselves to become better, more ethical people, and this improvement was often expressed as becoming more God-like. The 19th Century Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing said “To honor God, is to approach God as an inexhaustible Fountain of light, power, and purity. It is to feel the quickening and transforming energy of his perfections. It is to thirst for the growth and invigoration of the divine principle within us, and to seek the very spirit of God which proposes as its great end the perfection of the human soul.”
Now I think it is fair to say that most people do not think of their New Year resolutions as the perfecting of the human soul. Yet in their own way, New Year resolutions are about becoming a better person – physically, emotionally or even spiritually – tomorrow than you were yesterday. I wonder if the reason we do not take our resolutions or other desires to change seriously is that we do not aim high enough with our demands on ourselves? The desire for human improvement in our Unitarian tradition led to a great emphasis on the education of people. This belief is still strong in our movement with our strong support and belief in public education for all people.
For example, our split the plate donation today is going towards the American-Nepali Student and Women’s Educational Relief organization. This group, which we will support with half of our offering from today’s service, supports 12-15 years of education for children from the lower castes in Nepal. Our tradition of human improvement and belief in education has taken on a global perspective today, showing a growing focus for our social justice work that is in keeping with our religious tradition. As someone who was the first generation of my family to attend college I know of the transformative effects and opportunities that an education provides.
Religion for many of us is about the transformation of the individual and our society for the better. Transformation for individuals comes generally as a result of an interaction of external circumstances and our internal motivations. Many people come into our religious community desiring change in their lives perhaps by seeking a community where they can pursue spiritual questions, engage in social justice work, or find meaning for the changes their lives. All these can be acts of transformation.
The struggle many of us have in enacting transformations within ourselves is how we go from often vague desires for change into more firm beliefs until we engrain these beliefs as habits. I learned something about this struggle during my chaplaincy training last year where I was working with military veterans who had mental health concerns and addictions. By the time I was working with them many had reached a crisis in their life due to their addiction and were desperate for help.
There was a common pattern where there was a tendency for them to either blame everyone else or blame themselves for all of their problems. Much of the work I did was to explore where the blame should belong then encourage them to take the appropriate responsibility for their actions. Through the 12-step program of alcoholics anonymous there was a strong group support for the patient and the encouraging of humility in admitting the need of help from a higher power.
For many of the people I worked with they had admitted they were powerless to resist alcohol and chose to replace their addiction with a healthier, higher power which often gave them strength to address their addiction.
The major lesson I learned from these veterans was how they struggled with their addiction everyday. As one of them said to me “The difficulty is not to stop drinking but to stay sober every day. Stopping drinking isn’t hard. Not starting again is.” The discipline of choosing everyday not to drink alcohol for them was a huge act of self-control and I believe it to be a spiritual discipline.
In our Liberal Religious tradition much of our religion is to guide us in how we should act and how we should make decisions.
I see a commonality between how our religion guides us to enact changes in our own lives and how those in 12-Step programs were attempting to help people address their addictions. To take a vague desire of how I wish to be different and change it into a belief that I will act on a daily requires a commitment from me and the support of my community which holds me accountable. Enacting these beliefs in my words and actions is a daily spiritual discipline I engage in and often fail at.
As I fail at living up to my beliefs I am fortunate that the consequences are not as severe as those with addictions who I served as a chaplain to. I deal with my disappointment, reflect on why I failed to live to my expectations then begin the cycle again.
By letting go of any attachment towards any need of perfection and just focus on improvement allows me to show compassion to myself and stay engaged in changing my beliefs and habits. This model of action, reflection, and action with consistent emphasis on improvement not perfection is a simple yet significant approach for me to enact change in my life. For many Unitarian Universalists it can be hard for us to settle for simple improvement and not obsess about perfection. It is said that, “The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy. The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time.” In this vein I want to share with you a resolution I arrived at that guides much of my life.
There is a lot of talk, at least among seminarians with too much spare time, that we really need to find some guiding principles to help us in daily life. Of course, I undertook up this project with serious intellectual rigor hoping to arrive at some weighty, profound ethical principal. In truth, the outcome for me was on the surface a disappointment. My guiding principle is that I only want to make brand new mistakes.
The satisfaction of making the same mistake as others is a shallow, frustrating consolation and I don’t want to make the same mistakes as others by reinventing another broken wheel. By not wanting to the mistakes of the past then I learn from history and by accepting that I am going to make mistakes, albeit new ones, allows me to move forward into unknown areas and overcome the fear of failure. I have actually found this seemingly superficial guiding principle of only making new mistakes quite liberating.
This thinking may also be beneficial for organizations such as a religious community. Organizations seem to settle into a common behavioral pattern which prevents change and seems to condition any new person to conform to the expected behavior of the organization. Yet if the goal of religion is individual and community growth then we want an organizational structure that encourages change of individuals and renewal of the organization itself not stifle transformations.
A community that learns from the past and takes risks moving forward will make brand new mistakes by pushing boundaries. Hesitancy and resistance to change are understandable but limiting. If we wish to make brand new mistakes then we have to overcome our resistance to change as individuals and as a religious community. What is so bad about a mistake – especially one that no-one has made before?
As adults we become very conscious of what others think of us and we often do not wish to appear less than competent. Ask a group of Kindergarden children if they can sing or can dance then almost all of them would raise their hand enthusiastically and they would be very keen to show you. As we get older, our inhibitions seem to set in and our desire to try new activities or approaches diminishes. We encourage children to make mistakes and to learn. We develop for them compassionate boundaries for them to push against and we support them in their struggles and failures.
As adults we lose the ability to appear vulnerable or fallible. I feel we limit ourselves by not allowing ourselves to make mistakes. As the poem Suzy read earlier said “We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived. We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.”
There is a myth of competency we wish to project. Yet I think most of us have learned more from our mistakes than our successes. Those times we pushed ourselves into unknown areas, further than we intended beyond our comfort zone. By doing so we grow as people as we break down those barriers we have raised for ourselves or others attempted to impose on us.
Mistakes are almost a prerequisite for growth and success. Michael Jordan, the great basketball player, said “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
I would venture to say that perhaps the only real failure is to not attempt something that you really wish to do. When we think about our own life then we rarely regret what we did do, – now I’m only talking about legal activities here – our major regrets are those times where we did not do something when we had opportunity. Even when our efforts do not work out then we generally learn something, even if the lesson was to never to do that again. When we choose not to even attempt something for fear of failure then our learning opportunity is missed.
Of course to accept the possibility of our making a mistake involves us being willing to take a risk. The following words from the poem “To Risk” capture much of our struggles concerning our aversion to risk.
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk exposing our true self.
To place our ideas – our dreams – before the crowd is to risk loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
To live is to risk dying.
I would say that all of these actions – to laugh, weep, reach out, dream, to love, to hope, to try – are acts of coming alive and truly living. They all involve a risk but a risk of what – appearing foolish or sentimental, not being loved, exposing our true feelings. These may be sources of discomfort but are not character flaws. By growing from and beyond our failures and mistakes, we are coming alive to all of life’s possibilities. With knowledge of the past and imagination for the future we can make our whole life be a spiritual practice -breaking down the artificial barriers between the secular and the sacred, between ourselves and others. In doing this we awaken our soul to the excitement and nourishment of the complete spiritual life.
——————-
Cassara, Ernest Biography of Hosea Ballou http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/hoseaballou.html Last accessed on December 27, 2008
Channing, William Ellery, Likeness to God: William Ellery Channing Selected Writing Robinson, David ed., (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) p.156
Hansel, Tim, Eating Problems for Breakfast (Word Publishing, 1988) p.39 quote from Edwin Bliss
Anonymous. To Risk Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993) #658
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
Reading –
For So The Children Come
by Sophia Lyon Fahs
For so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show
where to find the babe that will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night
Fathers and mothers–
sitting beside their children’s cribs
feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.
They ask, ‘Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?’
Each night a child is born is a holy night–
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshipping.
Prayer
These are the words of Eusebius, the 3rd Century Christian Bishop
May I be no one’s enemy and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides.
May I wish for every person’s happiness and envy none.
May I never rejoice in the ill fortune of one who has wronged me.
May I, to the extent of my power, give needful help to all who are in want.
May I never fail a friend.
May I respect myself.
May I always keep tame that which rages within me.
May I accustom myself to be gentle and never be angry with others because of circumstances.
May I know good people and follow in their footsteps.
Amen
Reading
“Christ Climbed Down”
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candy canes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
through a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30 with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings
Sermon – Brian Ferguson
Here we are four days before Christmas and we are in the aftermath of a divisive church conflict regarding the dismissal of our minister. Everyone seems to be hurting.
I know I am moving between emotions of sadness, anger, and confusion. It is not a good place to be. The future looks uncertain, many are disillusioned about our church community, and most of us are still trying to make sense of what just happened over the last month. Christmas time is where the dominant religious culture and dominant secular culture are telling us is a time of joy and celebration. I am not feeling much joy and celebration right now.
Christmas is often a time when we Unitarian Universalists turn to our Christian roots. There is a certain irony to this since for most Christians, Easter has a far greater religious significance than Christmas. Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus which demonstrates the divinity of Jesus. Christmas on the hand is very much a story about the humanity of Jesus since it is a celebration of his birth and the hope his birth symbolizes. I am feeling all too human right now and the powerlessness that involves. Hope is something which would be helpful at this time.
The religious message of hope often gets lost amidst the secular aspects of Christmas that the poem I read earlier somewhat cynically described – “the tinsel Christmas trees, the plastic babe in a manger, and the North Pole saint in a red flannel suit with a fake white beard.” Not much sign of hope there. These images of Christmas are so familiar to us from television, shopping malls, and the front yard of our neighbors – or perhaps if we are honest even our own front yards – yes confession time in the UU church. I warned you we would be going back to our Christian roots.
Despite the rampant commercialization of Christmas there is an important religious message to some Christians and it is perhaps the most important aspect of our Christian heritage that we Unitarian Universalists continue to embrace. That is the idea of the incarnation. The divine embodied in flesh is the literal meaning. Incarnation is the idea of the divine being active in the material world in human form. In Christianity this figure was Jesus Christ who came to communicate a message of salvation to people therefore took human form.
Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors embraced the idea of incarnation very seriously and reached some radical conclusions. Incarnation to them meant our highest ideals are embodied into our human form and become an active presence in our world through our own actions. The 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing says “Jesus came, not only to teach with his lips, but to be a living manifestation of his religion – to be, in an important sense, the religion itself. Christianity is a living, embodied religion. It is example and action” This is a call to us to live out our values actively in our lives – to be the incarnation of our values in our world.
Thinking of Jesus in these terms helps me understand the Christian idea of the Church as the Body of Christ. This term can be confusing but I find it helpful in thinking about our religious community being infused and guided by high ideals and moral values. The mission statement of our church reads: “As an inclusive religious and spiritual community, we support each individual’s search for meaning and purpose, and join together to help create a world filled with compassion and love.” Just as some believe that spiritual energy brings alive the material body of a person, our religious community is brought alive by the high spiritual ideas and morals of our mission. Without such ideas we are just a physical building and social group not a church.
In thinking of our church here in Austin as a body it is fair to say our particular body right now is feeling battered, bruised, and broken. It is difficult to find the infusion of high spiritual ideals as we assess where we are as a community. In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the local congregation has the power to call and dismiss a minister. There is no hierarchical power structure that imposes ministers on congregations as in some religions. The right of a congregation to call any minister of their choosing is a great strength of our movement and has allowed us to be the first religion to call women, gay, and transgender ministers. This is an aspect of our history that we are rightly very proud of. The shadow side of this congregational power is the conflict and divisiveness that can occur within a congregation around the dismissal of a minister. Sadly, this latter case has been so clearly demonstrated to us in the last few weeks.
We are in a time of great pain, uncertainty, and confusion as a religious community. We have voted to dismiss our senior minister, and our future is uncertain. There is pain about the loss of our minister, pain about the process leading up to the vote, and pain about the divisions in our community. I personally have a pain that is beyond the disappointment of losing a colleague and supervisor. I have a pain that is an injury of the soul. My spiritual wound is due to our religious community losing touch with the core elements of our mission such as compassion and love in the turmoil of the last few weeks. I look around our community and see great hurt amongst people on all sides of the vote. I am also pained as valued members of our community leave wounded by the events of recent weeks.
I heard and read statements about the senior minister and members of the board of trustees that I found offensive and disrespectful, and believe such statements should have had no place in any community let alone a religious one. This pained me deeply. We have a right to free speech and to disagreement, in fact they are at the core of our Liberal Religious movement, but we also have a responsibility to exercise those rights respectfully and for the greater good of our community. The value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not a value that is turned on at our convenience. Such values are principles we are called to follow and may be most important when we engage with those who we are in disagreement with.
Some people who supported dismissal told me that they feel they now have their church back. Others who wished to retain the minister say they feel they have lost their church and plan to leave our community. I would remind both groups an important yet often unrecognized aspect of our Liberal Religious Tradition – You only lose this church if you choose to leave it. The church as a community is still here and hopefully always will be. We do not exclude people because of how they voted, what they believe, or have creeds you must conform to before you can join.
For those who have come back because they feel they have their church back I caution them that is a different church today than the one they recall from their past. Churches like physical bodies are organic institutions which change over time as new people come in, bringing their energy and vitality forever changing our community. This is a very good thing. For those who feel they have recently lost their church, it is true the church they experienced before the conflict is no longer with us. It is said that forgiveness is the giving up of any hope of a better past. I would suggest that the church of the past for all of us is gone. We cannot unring the bell.
We must attempt to heal our present wounds and begin envisioning what church we want to be in the future. To begin healing we must understand the mistakes we made in the past and why recent events have caused so much hurt in our community. I sympathize with the frustration and sadness that leads people to want to leave a church. We have high expectations of people in our religious community, be they our minister, board members, committee chairs, office staff, other members, or even our ministerial intern. We are all human and often fail to live up to the values as we would wish to.
When wounded in our lives, many of us turn to our religious community for healing. When a part of our religious community is the cause of our wounds then we struggle to believe our church can be a part of our healing. I believe a spiritual injury needs spiritual healing. Perhaps the healing can happen in another religious community but I would suggest the healing might be more whole, more complete if it occurs within the religious community that caused the injury?
The great 16th Century Unitarian Francis David said “We do not need to think alike to love alike.” We hear these words so often in our Unitarian Universalist churches that the profoundness of them can become lost.
These words are so much easier said than acted upon. In the recent turmoil in our church, these words occurred to me often but sadly too often in the violation rather than the observance of the sentiment. We claim that we wish a diversity of opinions and then when we disagree on a major issue we seem to quickly fall out of right relationship with each other. Perhaps the problem is many of us join our movement because “we want to be around people who think like we do.” When a point of disagreement comes up in our community then our relationship with each other can quickly sour and we are at a loss about how to repair it.
As most of us know from our most intimate relationships, a relationship based on love is no guarantee of agreement on all things and avoidance of conflict. Apologies to any new lovers out there! A relationship based on love is a commitment to stay in relationship and work out the difficulties in a mutually beneficial way if possible.
Both our religious connection to our church and our intimate relationships can grow stronger as we work through our differences and conflicts. Being around people who have the same opinions as us is certainly comfortable and supportive but only limited growth can occur. I believe we grow more when we are in community with people who challenge us and are willing to stay in relationship with us as we differ in our thoughts. We can all grow spiritually through this challenge.
One of our duties as members of this religious community is to hold each other accountable for our actions, values and opinions by calling us to embody these values in our actions. I believe Davidson attempted to hold us accountable to these high ideals through his sermons. I believe the board thought they were acting to hold ministerial leadership accountable to our higher values. Many members of our congregation attempted to hold our leadership accountable to values of fairness and openness in recent weeks. These were all good aspects of what happened in the last few weeks.
I believe the failure of our community in the last few weeks is where we fell out of love, respect, and compassion with those we disagree with or were in conflict with. We stopped living our mission by failing to act with compassion and love towards those we disagreed with. Reasonable people can disagree on issues, and disagreeing respectfully is possible. A chasm developed between groups within us where listening stopped as the voices became louder.
There was a dehumanizing of people on all sides of this issue that was heartbreaking for me to witness. I also feel complicit in this since I did too little to stop it. I regret my failure not to do enough to address the dehumanizing words and actions I witnessed on all sides. For example I was talking to a ministerial colleague from another church yesterday who was disgusted by us having many of the documents available through our public website. I too was troubled by this but did not address it Damage was done not only to our church but our movement.
We all probably can think of areas we should have address or things we did differently. Our views became entrenched which limited our imagination to see a greater range of possibilities for the process and how our actions impacted others. I think much of our pain is that we know in our hearts we could have done so much better.
To return to the earlier analogy of the Church as a body: prior to the board’s request for Davidson’s dismissal, a large portion of this community saw our church body as healthy, vibrant, and happy. The request for dismissal and build-up to the congregational meeting showed that much of the body of religious community was injured and in pain. There was a disappointment for many of us that we were unaware of the true feelings of our friends and fellow members of our own religious community. This painful realization that what we thought was a community of health was really a community of brokenness and this was a shock to many.
In looking at how we heal and move forward, I am trying to find sources of hope. One hope I find is that we were not failed by our values but our failure to live up to our values. We often failed to stay in relationship with those we disagree with – to love those that did not think like us.
I have had people on all sides of the issues talk to me trying to find meaning in what happened and seeking to understand their own pain and the pain of others. An honest seeking to understand the pain of others is a sign of hope. The need to be in fellowship with those who share our view is understandable and may be needed in providing emotional support.
The beginning of healing in our community I believe begins with each of us getting together with those having differing opinions and listening to them. Not trying to argue our point or find reasons to dismiss what they are saying, but listening to them to understand why others have the feelings they do. Hopefully if we listen to them they may reciprocate by listening to us. We will hear why people with similar information as us believed, acted, and reached conclusions very different from our own.
Perhaps we may understand most of us were acting in what we believed to be the common good for our religious community. Out of this may grow that seed of respect and though this is not quite the same as loving those who think differently from us, it has the potential to grow there. And at least we will be back in right relationship with others and moving forward. I wish us all well on this difficult journey and hope that we can all be a part of the important work we need to do. As we move towards the Christmas holiday and look forward to our future together may the following words of Howard Thurman hold all of us with love:
When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the family,
to make music in the heart.
May we all find the music we need for our hearts at this time and through our actions may we be the incarnation of our highest values of love and compassion in this world. And in doing so let us do the healing, rebuilding, and bringing of peace that our community and our world desperately needs.
———————
Channing, William Ellery, The Imitablness of Christ’s Character: The Works of William Ellery Channing Vol.IV (Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1903) p.135
by contemporary Christian Theologian Sallie McFague.
Thanks to technologies of communication, transportation, and commerce, the world of the twenty-first century is more deeply interconnected than ever before, and it is increasingly clear that the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism. Not everyone chooses to recognize the primacy of that language, and some speak defiantly in other tongues, but there can be little argument that it has become the global discourse with which all others must contend. It is the defining myth of our time.
While we each have choices to make about the degree to which we will “buy into” the myth, practically no one on earth has the freedom to opt out altogether. It is that pervasive and that powerful. And at the heart of capitalism, I have argued, is the exact dynamic of freedom and bondage as described by the famous Christian theologian Augustine’s theory of evil. Capitalism assumes that we are creatures of desire, and it stokes our desire for lesser goods to the point of addiction, finally rendering us powerless to opt out of its dynamic.
What would it mean, after all, to get “outside” of capitalism in today’s world? Even those who want nothing to do with it, who view it as the pinnacle of Western corruption or imperialism, or whose minds and bodies bear the scars of its excesses and exclusions, are nevertheless pulled into its captivating influence.
Strangely, while market capitalism began with a classic Christian view of humanity based on selfish greed—the basis for the allocation of scarce resources and the eventual “trickle down” of prosperity for all in the twenty-first century—it has eventuated in a näive, optimistic, narrow, and undifferentiated view of sin and evil. Classical economic theory claims that the very core of who we are—individuals motivated by insatiable desire for more and more goods—is the basis from which to build the good life for all. From the selfish desires of billions of human beings turning the earth’s resources into goods for sale, prosperity for all will presumably come eventually.
This vision of the good life, however, neglects two huge facts: the just distribution of the earth’s resources as well as the limits of these resources. We now know that these matters are not mysteriously taken care of by the “invisible hand” of economics; on the contrary, the insatiable greed of billions of human beings causes horrendous injustice to other creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as undermining the sustainability of the planet itself.
But market capitalism does not deal with the tragic dimensions of sin and evil; its view of sin is narrow and viewed only as a sin against God, even though the implication of unregulated greed results in sin against neighbor and nature. By bracketing sin within the limits of the violation of God’s will, it eliminates from view the massive evil that our individual choices have created for others on planet Earth.
Prayer
The following are the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk 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, nd of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
Amen
Sermon – Religion and Economics
With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, there is now the seasonal tumble into the Christmas holidays. This past Friday apparently marks the beginning of the Christmas season, a beginning marked by shopping rather than any religious significance or perhaps shopping is religion for some people.
The media attempts to whip up excitement about the beginning of the Christmas shopping season as if it is some sort of race or competition. The mantra seems to be “they who buy the most present wins.” We are told about the must-have goods this season and the so-called bargains to be had. Those of us with children have already been barraged for a few weeks about the gifts our children want. A list that seems ever-changing – or perhaps I missed the point and my daughter’s new requests were additions to her list of desires and not replacements. I might have a very disappointed daughter this Christmas as she receives only one of her many requests.
Looking for someone to blame for these endless requests for presents, I blame at the media. Then I realize that my five year old daughter is too young to read and she doesn’t watch television but she has this remarkably impressive communication network which keeps her supplied with all the information about the latest hip toys. This week I read an article where a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had asked the Toy industry to cut back on its marketing to children due to the severe economics hardships which are particularly affecting families.
The Toy industry Association’s response was a firm defense of current marketing practices by asserting that children “are a vital part of the gift selection process.” It appears to me the toy industry association sees children as their most effective and certainly most persistent sales people. So begins the child on their life-long role as consumers. With little regulation of advertising to children then we leave the individual parents battling the massive forces of advertising in a David and Goliath battle where we have taken the sling slot away from David and given it to Goliath.
While the creation of desire for some product by advertising and the resulting peer pressure is most noticeable in children, I think most of us are affected by it. The philosopher and environmentalist, Max Oelschlaeger, says “In so-far as Americans have a collective identity it is as the consumer who lives amid unprecedented material choice and the worker who bends the earth to our virtually unrestrained human purpose.”
Even in difficult economic times as we are experiencing now then consumerism permeates our society in so many ways it creates values and purpose for many people. James Luther Adams, the 20th century Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. He says “The question concerning faith is not, shall I be a person of faith? The proper question is, rather, which faith is mine? For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts confidence in something. Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you’ve found his religion.” In listening to these words today, it appears to me that money, material possession, and our roles as consumers are defining meaning and value for many in our society therefore fulfills many of the roles of religion.
Our economic system through consumerism and advertising is a powerful perhaps dominant cultural force in our lives today. Yet as we reminded in the reading from Melita earlier, it is based on individual self-interest which unless we control it is just the contemporary reincarnation of the sin of greed. While Economics is often thought of as the study of money and financial systems, it is really a study of human decision-making for the allocation of limited resources. Economics is about how we deal with scarcity and limits with money being an important mechanism to determine the allocation of resources “efficiently”. Sometimes I find it hard to think of money as merely a tool in our lives since so often it seems like a goal in itself. We choose our jobs based on it, plan our retirements around it, and it places very real limitations on the lives of most of us.
Some people say that money makes the world go around. Another view is that money doesn’t make the world go around, but having it makes the journey much more pleasant. Regardless money is important in our society and necessary to meet many of our basic needs. But money can become an obsession for us as we desire more than necessary for their basic needs and distorting what is most important in our lives. All of the major religions caution us to beware of money becoming an idol or a false God, yet religious institutions walk that difficult line of needing money for their own survival but not wanting to be obsessed about it.
In the reading earlier, the author Sallie McFague states that in the 21st Century “the unifying logic or discourse is the language of capitalism” and asks the question of what it would mean to get outside of capitalism in today’s world? We are all so submerged in the world of commerce both as workers and consumers that it is difficult to remember that there are some institutions that do not operate on the typical model of market capitalism. Our non-profit philanthropic institutions are an example which collect donations then distribute goods and services to those in need. There is no attempt to make a profit therefore they can provide goods and services to everyone free or reduced cost.
Another institution that operates on the edge of the market capitalism system is this church. Some might say that our church operates in the hardest aspects of both the non-profit and for-profit world. Our income to support this church is through the donations of members like you – sounds like a National Public radio pledge drive – while much of our spending is in the world of market capitalism. We cannot turn around to the electrical utility company and say donations are down this month so we can’t pay you but we will as soon as donations pick up. I would love to see their faces at the suggestion.
The existence of all elements of this religious community is dependent on the donations of money and time from you the members of the congregation. You are asked to donate what you can financially to sustain and grow our community. There is no market mechanism that determines the price in competition with other churches. Could you imagine charging for people to come for our worship services – $20 to hear the senior minister, $5 for the intern minister and a refund if you don’t like the message?
Perhaps I’ll talk to stewardship about this idea. Not only is the idea crass it misses an important point about why we are here. We have our message, our culture, and our values which we wish to promote to all who are interested. We believe our religious vision has value but we also believe that it is too important, too valuable for people to be prevented hearing our vision due to lack of money. Most religious groups want to transcend the artificial limits placed on access to places and experiences based on limited money.
Those limits are placed by our economic system in an attempt to handle the scarcity of a resource and in a desire to make a profit. Religion is attempting to remove these limits by seeing our message and values as a source of abundance not a cause for scarcity. Most of us are attracted to our religious community because our lives are improved in some way by being here.
Many of us feel affirmed by being part of this community, some of us have had life changing experiences here, and I know people who feel our Liberal religious message has been life-saving to them. How do you put a dollar price on such a place? You can’t. The work is too important but such activities have a cost. Therefore as a religious community we let each of us decide for ourselves about the value of the community we have here and the contribution we wish to make to ease that cost. We are outside much of the market system since we give our service away without charge and those of us who choose, contribute our money and time as we determine is appropriate.
Our economic system is very efficient at delivering a variety of products and services to people for a low price. That is its purpose and we all live with the benefits of that. Our economics system was never developed to be the promoter of values for our society that was what religion is for. Values such as ecological sustainability and greater justice for more people are not promoted in our current economic system unless the consumers force it to. Our consuming habits are perhaps the clearest way that we express our moral choices on a daily basis yet there seems to be a strong separation between our economics and our religion.
The famous industrialist, Andrew Carnegie said that Christianity should not interfere with how money is made and only get involved in how its surplus should be dispersed in the form of charity. It seems that many religious organizations have not moved beyond such thinking therefore often fail to critique our economics system where it may be exploitive of people or abusive to our environment. If injustice in our society is caused by unethical production of goods, unsustainable consumption of resources, or deceitful advertising it not only appropriate to address the issues but I would say our religion calls us to do so.
In the reading we heard earlier, the author Sallie McFague discusses the use of the Christian doctrines of sin and evil in addressing the harm excessive and unregulated greed is harmful to our world. Her critique of market capitalism is that sustainability and justice for all inhabitants are not its central goals of the system. Now we do not talk about sin or evil much in the pulpits of our Unitarian Universalist churches perhaps that is why many of you are here and not at other churches – but I think the ideas behind the doctrines if not the terms themselves can be useful in addressing the excesses and exploitative elements of our economic system.
Now, the Liberal Religious tradition has moved away a long time ago from the doctrine of Original Sin where humanity is inherently depraved but the concept of sin itself is more ambiguous for us. I feel comfortable with McFague’s idea of sin being an excessive concern for ourselves at the expense of the needs of others or sustainability of the planet. Sin is something we are responsible for and can control through the choices we make.
McFague defines evil as the institutions, practices, and attitudes resulting from an exploitive economic system based on excessive individual self-interest, which creates suffering and deprivation in our world. For example, it may seem in my self-interest to buy a product at a low price but if the product was made by forced child labor then I think it is appropriate to call this a sinful act supporting an evil system. Strong but I feel appropriate words. We can replace sin with wrong and evil with bad, it is the meaning not the words that are important.
With these concepts of sin and evil then this sets up a great tension between our economic system and religion. Market capitalism believes that the good life is built by each of us pursuing our own enlightened self-interest. Religion cautions against excessive self-interest and reminds us that through our interdependence we are called to care for one another and our planet.
I think this is a question we deal with daily during satisfying our own needs is when does our enlightened self-interest become excessive self-interest? How do we, as religious people and consumers who desire to lead a good life, deal with this tension in our self-interest as we go about our busy lives and with the child who has just made yet another request for a Christmas present? You really want an easy answer for this one aren’t you – alas there isn’t one. We have to accept that tension between enlightened and excessive self-interest as real and difficult. Our choices as consumers can have a negative impact therefore we should be intentional and thoughtful about our purchasing choices.
The stewardship of our planet and welfare of all people is particularly important in the age of the Global Economy since the environmental impact and exploitation of people may occur far from our purchasing of a product therefore could remain invisible to us unless we are vigilant. The notion of interdependence between ourselves as consumers and the workers who produce the goods, wherever in the world they are, leads us to take responsibility for buying products that were produced without exploitation. Examples of exploitation would be child labor, coerced labor, or paying non-livable wages.
If our individual consumer decisions create an economic system that prevents those in need receiving basic necessities and those producing the goods a reasonable quality of life, then our individual decisions should be able to change this system. I, like many of you, have tried with my consumption habits to move beyond the obvious criteria of price, function, and style to consider the following factors:
Try to distinguish between my true long-term needs and my short-term often misplaced desires.
Can I borrow, barter or get used whatever I am wanting?
Consider factors other than price such as how goods were produced including working conditions, reputation of company involved, and environmental impact.
These criteria do not make shopping easier since they take effort and any desire for perfection will be very frustrating. The goal for me is greater intention and awareness in my consumer habits, which allows me to bring my religious values into my everyday life in a meaningful way. We are both beneficiaries of our market capitalism system and often sufferers in the hardships created by it.
Our economic system is good at delivering products for a low price and handling scarcity. It was not designed to and therefore does not do a good job of determining values or what is valuable.
In our consumer culture today it is too easy to confuse price and value – they are not the same thing. Just consider what is most valuable in your own life – I suspect it has nothing to do with the price you paid for them assuming they even had a price. The love of friends and family, the old photographs we have, a book of special importance to us, that great piece of music that brings us to tears, or that life-changing experience that might even have happened in this church. Those items are dealing in a currency that is far more important than money. They are dealing in the eternal values of finding what makes our life worth living and meaningful. Let the economic system determine price, we are the only ones that define for ourselves what has value and worth in our lives.
——————
Jones, Serene and Lakeland, Paul. Editors. Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) p.141, 148
Thanksgiving is part of a harvest cycle, where we plant and then hope we can be thankful for what we reap. In that spirit, I want to share a short and thankful focus from the Buddhist tradition showing us what we hope for every time we plant seeds – whether in the ground, in our lives or in our worship services:
Now we have finished. Everyone stand and we will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because even if we did not have a great enlightenment, we had a small enlightenment. If we did not have a small enlightenment, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So let’s thank the Buddha. (Hsuan Hua)
Amen.
HOMILY: Harvesting Thanksgiving
Davidson Loehr
Since I needed my Thanksgiving reflections today to be focused on something significant but fairly distant, I want to use a metaphor to transpose some deeper dimensions of Thanksgiving into history, politics and life. This may sound like the opening to the sermon of a few weeks ago, when I said I wanted to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. But it’s a homily, not a full-length sermon, so it won’t be that ambitious.
Thanksgiving, as we know, is a harvest festival, in the tradition of harvest festivals going back to ancient times. They planted, then they harvested what they had planted. What did they plant?
On the literal level, they planted the usual stuff – beans, squash, other vegetables, they cultivated orchards and the rest. But deeper, it’s different. So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving in this country, which happened in 1621.
You all know much of this story. In December of 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts.
Mother Nature wasn’t on their side, though Father Time was. They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. One hundred and two of them arrived here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.
Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.
The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead. This was the preparation for the first Thanksgiving, and there was not a yellow Happy Face in the bunch.
The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. According to one source, the menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.
But now let’s explore the metaphor. What did the Pilgrims really plant, that let them reap this feast? They certainly didn’t plant venison, wild turkey or oyster seeds.
What the Pilgrims really planted were two crops: hope, and empowerment. They planted hope rather than fear or despair, and empowerment rather than just rolling over and dying.
That’s an easy segue from history to politics because, to put it in a contemporary sound bite, what those Pilgrims were saying to life was “Yes, we can!”
We are just near the beginning of a new planting season in American history. And those seeds of hope and empowerment have been planted on lawns, bumper stickers and windows everywhere.
That’s a huge part of the reason this amazingly unlikely man Barack Obama will be our 44th president: because after the last round of political seeds planted and the harvest we have reaped from that, people were simply starving for hope, the power to make a difference, and the chance to make a difference. We don’t yet know how this new planting will work out, or what kind of harvest we will have.
But we should look over the last crops we’ve planted, because the harvest is damned near killing us.
Think of some of the seeds we have planted during the past three decades or so:
— We planted the seeds of what the French have called “savage capitalism”: an endorsement of high-level greed with only the barest of government restraint. We planted ideas and behaviors intentionally exalting profits over people, stock prices over the livelihoods and lives of human beings. And in the harvest was a crop of American workers forced to compete with the cheapest labor in the world, and unable to do so.
— We sowed the idea that healthcare was a market product deserved only by those who could afford it, rather than a necessary protection of all our citizens, as every other industrialized country in the world does. And we have reaped a harvest of perhaps fifty million citizens who cannot afford to be protected from accidents, disease, or astronomic medical bills that have plunged millions into bankruptcy and desperation. Also in the harvest are an estimated 18,000 deaths a year credited to their lack of adequate health care protection.
— We planted the idea that we could use our armies to invade any country with something we wanted. On one level, we’ve done this for a very long time, as have other strong countries. But in the last seventy years, the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq was the first invasion of a sovereign nation on that scale since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. And from this planting of violent militarism, we have harvested the deaths of over 4,200 American soldiers, and many times that number torn apart physically, mentally or both, as well as the deaths of nearly 1.3 million Iraqis, guilty of trying to defend their country from a foreign invasion, or of just being unfortunate enough to live in a country whose oil we lust after.
I could go on down the list of bad seeds we have planted and the bitter harvests we have reaped, but you all know those seeds, those crops, and those harvests of shame.
Choosing the seeds we will plant is not an isolated act. It is interconnected with everything that follows.
The wonderfully wise ancient Greeks coined a famous, short formula for how this kind of sowing and reaping works. Here’s how they put it:
Plant a thought, reap an action;
Plant an action, reap a habit;
Plant a habit, reap a character;
Plant a character, reap a destiny.
We rob ourselves if we treat Thanksgiving like a superficial happy-face festival. The harvest metaphor is too rich for that, and offers too much insight and power to ignore.
We plant, we reap, then we hope we can be thankful for the crop. But whether we can be thankful or not depends on what we planted, and our diligence in nourishing and attending to it.
No planting or crops are ever perfect. History doesn’t show us anybody who was ever that good. Even the wonderfully wise ancient Greeks had slavery, limited rights for women, allowed only about ten percent of the adult population to vote, and seemed to care about only those who excelled above the rest. The United States of America has, at its best, grown up around a very different dream, from very different kinds of seeds.
I wonder if you’ve ever read the full poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which our Statue of Liberty stands. She intentionally contrasts our dream with that of the Greeks, because she says we want a different kind of harvest. Her poem is titled “The New Colossus,” named in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Listen to the poem in terms of the harvest metaphor we’ve been using, and see if you don’t hear the American Dream in a new way:
The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Those are some of the most fertile seeds of hope and empowerment ever planted. That message, “Yes, we can!” is the most fundamental expression of the American Dream. Let us plant, in our nation and in our hearts, seeds of hope and empowerment. Let us tend to them, nurture them so they might flourish. Let us hope Mother Nature and Father Time will be on our side. And then let us pray that when the harvest comes, we can give thanks.
HOMILY: Brian Ferguson
Confession is not part of our Liberal religious tradition but I do have a confession to make. The Thanksgiving holiday remains a bit foreign to me. Now being Scottish I didn’t grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday but I don’t think we Scots are an ungrateful bunch. Yet again Scottish weather with its continuous rain and howling wind does not encourage a great sense of gratitude in anyone – except perhaps umbrella makers. The North American Thanksgiving holiday does not conjure family memories or traditions for me as it may for many of you. It also feels for me too close in time to Christmas – a holiday which has always been important to my family. Thanksgiving gets in the way of Christmas for me. Perhaps I’m missing the point but Thanksgiving seems to be predominantly about stressing oneself in preparation for the upcoming Christmas season. We attempt to fly or drive somewhere along with everyone else then express gratitude by eating too much. I’ve been your intern minister for three months now so I thought it was time you saw my curmudgeon side. That was it. The grinch that stole Thanksgiving.
More seriously, while not having a personal tradition of Thanksgiving I feel taking time to give thanks for our spiritual and material possessions to be a healthy practice. Meister Eckhart, the wise 13th century mystic, once said that if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. The idea of “thank you” as a prayer, as an earnest appreciation of something beyond our selves, resonates with me. Giving thanks when we are healthy, content, and life is going well seems easy and appropriate to do. We are probably too busy having a good time to do it but expressing gratitude would be the right thing to do when life is good. Giving thanks after we have come through hard times and recovering might even give us a heightened appreciation for the simple gifts in our life. What about giving thanks during tough times such as many of us are experiencing now? How do we adopt an attitude of gratitude when many of us are struggling with the various hardships we are experiencing as a nation, as a religious community, and as individuals? I struggle with expressing gratitude at this time. Avoidance or complaining would be so much easier.
There have been many studies conducted saying that during times of economic hardship two things increase – going to movies and alcohol consumption. Such times of uncertainty can lead us to want to escape from our present circumstance. Temporary escapes from a difficult situation can allow us some relief from stress and gain some distance from the issue at hand. Taken to excess such escapism can also lead to an avoidance of reality and an abdication of responsibility. At the other extreme of escapism is the tendency to look to blame someone or something for the difficult circumstances. Blaming others for our own misfortune can really feel good in the short term. We hear of plenty of blame for the global economic conditions – Wall Street, predatory mortgage lenders, greedy Chief Executive Officers, our President, the Republicans, Chinese imports, immigrants to this country – of which I am one. Voting for the Democrats four and eight years ago is not an immunization to our own responsibility or complicity for the current turmoil. Similarly voting for John McCain a few weeks ago is not an abdication of responsibility for what happens in the next four years.
If escapism and blame are unhelpful in tough times then how can expressing gratitude be useful? We usually express gratitude in return for something we receive such as the help of another, a gift received, or simple appreciation of our good fortune. The gifts that life presents us are not always apparent in times of hardship. We are more sensitive, perhaps overly so, to what we have lost or have fear of losing than what we have. We may have less than we had a year ago, financially many of us have a lot less than just two months ago. Do we give thanks for the contents of the half full glass or dwell on the losses of the half empty glass? In hard times the half empty glass seems the much easier option.
Another wise person, who also happened to be my manager in my first job said to me that “it doesn’t have to be a good experience to be an experience.” I have found this observation to be very useful at various times during my life. Life provides learning opportunities whether we want them or not. Perhaps in times of hardship rather than times of plenty we can find what really is most important to us as we are faced with limits, loss, and scarcity. Times of hardship force us to make difficult decisions that we would rather avoid. External events force us to give up things that seem important to us and sometimes we find those things to have been more of a burden than a treasure.
Many of us turn to religion to make sense of the hardships and losses we experience. Sometimes it can feel that religion is just a spoil sport in our life. When things are going well for us religion can be the nagging reminder that tends to dampen our happiness by making us feel guilty for our good fortune and reminding us of the suffering of others. Some religious leaders call this encouraging humility but really we just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time. Alternatively, when things are going badly for us, then religion becomes the voice of hope or explainer of our fate – have faith then things will turn out alright or there is a reason for our hardship. The famous American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed the function of the preacher was “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” In my less gracious moods this actually sounds like it could be fun. I think that is my curmudgeon side again.
While this view of religion as a counter-balance in people’s lives between comfort and affliction is popular amongst many I find it too simplistic and unhelpful. How can we in good faith separate people into the comfortable and the afflicted? Life is just not that simple. In our own lives most of us have that intertwining of good fortune and suffering simultaneously. Our jobs provide us both a livelihood and high level of stress. Our families can be both a source of support and a burden. Retirement is an opportunity for freedom and a source of insecurity. Even our religious community can provide us with both heartwarmth and heartache as we deal with the uncertainties of life. I think many of us have both doubt and suffering in our lives simultaneously with hope and strength. Religion at its best helps us to be grateful for the good in our life while providing comfort to the distresses of life. Good religion reminds us that we can be both the givers and the recipients of the great eternal values of gratitude, compassion and loving-kindness.
We are not individuals isolated from our surrounding community and our actions matter. Ultimately, this is what I am most thankful for since I do believe what we do and how we do it matters. While not everything we do may seem to be religious, I believe that how we do things can and should be religious. When we treat others with honesty, compassion and respect it is religious. While it can seem our small actions make little difference to the greater events around us, our actions matter greatly to those around us and most directly affected by them. I actually think our actions especially actions of gratitude, kindness and compassion are more significant in times of hardship and uncertainty. At such times people are in more need of help and support while there is less in terms of money and goodwill.
For me, the greatest gift expressing gratitude we have to give, is the gift of service to others and in troubled times it is often harder for us to give. In tough times then this gift is more needed and more appreciated, therefore our gift of service to others returns to us by making us feel more valued. The gift of service to others allows the giver to feel useful and the recipient to feel cared for. A gift that addresses the most basic human needs of being valued and being useful perhaps reflects a variation on our traditional view of Thanksgiving. Or perhaps our gift of service to others is a prayer that says thank you to the miracle that is each of our lives and maybe that is the very essence of Thanksgiving.
Or perhaps my view of Thanksgiving is too foreign for you in which case I’ll remind you of the Buddhist prayer Davidson read earlier: Now we have finished. Everyone stand and will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because if Brian’s message of giving thanks through service to others was not enlightening, then we had Davidson’s message. If Davidson’s message of a harvest of hope and empowerment was not enlightening, then we had the music. And if the music was not comforting, at least we had comfortable seats. So let’s thank the Buddha.
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak,
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited –
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel now new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.
Prayer
At this time of year nature and our mythology remind us of the cycles of life and death. Our environment seems less abundant as trees and plants prepare for winter. Many cultures in our world claim that the veil between the living and dead is thinner at this time of year.
For those of us coping with loss of friends and loved ones, that thinness feels vast – and thin. Vast because our relationship with those who have died has forever changed. Yet thin because our memory of the dead can keep them close and vital to us.
The cherished memories of our loved ones who came before remind us of the love they gave us and our love for them. We are reminded by them that how we live today matters not just to those with us today but the future generations to come.
As those who came before influence us then we will in turn influence those to come. If we influence others is not our choice, how we influence them is. Our time in this life is limited but what we choose to give to others can be abundant.
May our love and concern for others guide us in preserving the memories and values of those who came before – and may we pass on to those who come after the highest values and spirit that enriched our own lives.
Amen
Today’s reading
is a poem entitled Message in Colors
by Spanish Poet Julie Sopetran.
Here, in an impressionistic and sensory fashion, the writer tries to convey to us the kind of nostalgia that is a spiritual celebration on the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
Lit candles. Faces. Memories
and an entrance that’s a rainbow: protection for the place
It is the decomposition of matter, transformed into art.
It is the final curtain awoken from death.
Yes. An eternal dream of uncorrupt flowers and of celebration.
It is death’s lament, fading away
and it is also the respect made as tribute.
Who could have imagined so much beauty on a tomb?
Mole. Glass of water. Incense. Salt. Prayers.
Firecrackers. Fruits. Bread. Music.
Ballads, Poems. Romantic songs.
History praised. Creativity expressed
in its most raw form…
And they are laments in purple, white, blue, and pink.
It is a blow from grace so heightened as artificial fire
that reveals the soul’s presence in the darkness.
Something like the flowering of martyrdom in flames.
An arrangement for the dead
or the posthumous splendor of what one thinks is on the other side;
In that place everything is possible
grief battles with life and life wins,
it is once again for a little while, happiness, playful tradition
which overcomes reality.
It was before these ornate gravesites, when I knew
that in that place, as in my heart,
those that have departed return every year to remind us of their love.
And that only LOVE can save us.
Sermon: What the dead can tell us about coming alive
Today, in the sanctuary we are blessed by these beautiful Altars that were created for our Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations here at the church last night. Thank you to all of you who created them. Amidst this explosion of color I am feeling rather drab in my dark suit with only my red tie looking like it belongs up here with all these colors.
This time of year feels really busy. We just had Halloween on Friday and this weekend we also have the Day of the Dead celebrations. The election on Tuesday means that we are only three days away from the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Election campaign. The church year is in full swing with lots of exciting activities happening here most days of the week. The relaxed days of summer seems a distant memory as Thanksgiving plans are starting to coalesce and Christmas is looming just around the corner. Thank goodness for that extra hour we gained with the clocks going back last night, we need all the time we can get. Yet time is a quantity we only have a finite amount of. Our own health concerns or those around us are a constant reminder that we are creatures of finite lives. We are particularly sensitive to these issues at this time of year since in many cultures this is a time where we do honor and celebrate the dead. The Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead is one such tradition.
When I first came to the United States and encountered the Day of the Dead celebration, I naively thought it was just the Mexican version of Halloween. The proliferation of skeletons in various active poses and sugar skulls seemed to suggest a similar emphasis on the fearful and otherworldly aspects of Halloween. My assumption of any similarity with Halloween was mistaken. Day of the Dead focuses on bringing family and friends together to remember and honor those close to us who have died.
In the poem, Ron read earlier we heard about the atmosphere, beauty, and celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead tradition as families gather at gravesites or in homes with altars similar to what we have here. The altars contain mementoes and other objects such as flowers, food, and drink. The intent is to encourage visits from the souls of the dead so they can hear the prayers, music, and stories told in their honor. The commemoration of the dead has warm and pleasant overtones for the participants. In the words from the poem “grief battles with life and life wins, it is once again for a little while, happiness and playful tradition which overcomes reality.” The reality is death but for a brief period through community celebration then grief is transcended. This festive interaction between the living and the dead in a social ritual helps the living to remember how enriched they were by the lives of those no longer alive.
Our Halloween celebration is also based on the idea of the dead being able to visit us at this time of year. The difference is the dead are seen as threatening to the living therefore the tradition of wearing costumes to scare off the dead spirits. What different approaches to the dead, one celebrating them, the other being fearful of them? Halloween has no religious significance for us today but the Day of the Dead has its roots in two religious traditions.
The Day of the Dead celebration – and it is a celebration – has its roots back hundreds of years to the indigenous groups in Mexico. These groups honored their ancestors through gifts and stories. After the Spanish Conquests of Mexico, the Christian missionaries saw these celebrations as sacrilegious and tried to banish the ritual. The Spanish had a fearful attitude towards the dead due to the devastation of the great plagues that killed one third of the population in Europe during the late Middle Ages. After many years of unsuccessfully trying to end the practice, the Spanish Christians then decided to assimilate the celebration. They moved the indigenous celebration from August to coincide with All Soul’s day which is today November 2nd. All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic commemoration of the dead so there is a tenuous connection of honoring the dead.
Christianity like other religions has been very effective co-opting indigenous holidays and making them Christian holidays. The birth of Jesus on December 25th is widely recognized to be the co-opting of a Roman Solar holiday not the actual birth of Jesus. The seeming coincidences of Day of the Dead and All Souls Day are not “God working anonymously” as some would claim but the appropriation of a less powerful group’s tradition by a more powerful group. Interestingly, the Day of the Dead celebration as practiced by most people today has little connection to the actual rituals of the Christian tradition and strong connections to the original ideas of the indigenous, pre-Christian tradition.
Sadly, like so many religious practices there has been some co-option of this holiday by that most dominant of all our present religions – consumerism. The commercialization of holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Day of the Dead often take the important symbols of a religion and trivialize them as nothing more than products to be sold. This may explain why on my first encounter with Day of the Dead I could not see a distinction from the overt commercialization of Halloween. In the tradition of the Day of the Dead, the significance of the skeletons and sugar skulls are their material symbolism. The skeletons are symbols for the dead family members, not to be feared, but to be loved and invited to join the celebration of their own lives. The specific activity that a skeleton is engaged in is usually the favorite activity of the deceased person being honored.
The desire to have some physical connection to a dead relative or friend is something I suspect many of us can relate to. Many of us have physical keepsakes that remind us of those special to us. The other important aspect of the Day of the Dead celebration is the idea of the gifts the living could give to the dead to bring us closer to their spirit and help bring their spirit more fully into our lives. Of course in Liberal Religion we need to do some translation to bring the idea into our context but I think this is a potentially rich way of thinking for us. What gifts can we give of ourselves today that would honor and bring us closer to departed family and friends? Can we live our lives to honor those who through their love, values, and support made us who we are today? Being a Liberal Religion each of us needs to explore those questions ourselves but perhaps hearing my own struggles with these questions might help you.
I mentioned earlier that this tie may be the only item belonging to me that belongs with these altars. I was referencing the red color in contrast with the dark, austere colors of my suit. Remember we Unitarian Universalists are religiously descended from the Puritans who were not famed for their bold color sense. This tie also belongs on these altars for the symbolism it means to me. I was given this tie twenty-two years ago for my brother’s wedding by my father. It was his tie and he gave it to me as a family gift. My father died unexpectedly in January of this year. Like many of us here who have experienced the loss of someone close to us and perhaps especially a parent whom we’re close to, it is a disorienting experience. A seemingly ever-present pillar of your life is removed. It is painful and destabilizing. This tie for me is an important connection to the memory of my dad.
My dad was an honest, hard working, and plain talking person. He was bright and inquisitive but not college educated and liked people to speak in plain language grounded in what he called the real world. I remind myself to keep my words honest, respectful, and accessible. My dad always loved a good argument and would often disagree with me just for the discussion. Family discussions around the dinner table had always been a huge part of my family culture for as long as I can remember. I believe the constant questioning and discussions in my family home set me on my long and winding path to finding a home in Unitarian Universalism. When I question with honesty, sincerity, respect, and clarity then I believe I am closer to the spirit of my dad while serving important religious values.
Davidson in a sermon a few weeks ago gave a wonderful example of living life as if all the great people of history were watching – living under the gaze of eternity I think he called it. As daunting as that sounds it does seem to be powerful guidance for living a good life. I also think it is in keeping with this spirit of Liberal Religion to consider some of the people who are watching us to be our dead relatives and friends who we most admired and were influential on us. When we invoke the memory of them to guide or motivate us in our lives then we are invoking their spirit and by doing so we are honoring them. I believe this is what May Sarton was saying in the earlier poem:
“Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.”
We are engaging with both the inspiration and the sadness of those important people who are no longer with us physically. At the heart of grief and mourning is the struggle we have dealing with multiple emotions simultaneously: the joy that person brought to us in our lives and the sadness at their absence, the anger at what is seemingly unresolved and fear of how we can live life without them. Our mourning does not end since we are reminded of them as they continue to influence us through their example.
As part of the Day of the Dead celebration many Mexican families tell stories about the dead person each year to keep their memory and influence alive. I think there is great value in this. In our religion the memorial services fill this formal role on a one time basis shortly after their death. We do not have a religious tradition of regularly telling a person’s story. What I wanted to do for my dad became clear to me when I was clearing through photographs when preparing to move here from San Francisco in June.
I was looking at some photographs and I found one of my dad when he was two years old and a photograph of when I was last with him just over a year ago. I looked at him in both photographs and thought what really connects these two completely different people – the fresh-faced two year old boy in 1932 and the haggard face seventy-five years later which showed the years of discomforting illness. What became clear to me is that it is the stories, experiences, and relationships connecting the people in the two photographs. I realized that I knew only a small portion of those stories. The father-son relationship, though intimate and important, is a limited lens through which to view any person.
Being a father myself, I’m acutely aware of the narrow view my five-year old daughter has of me – I’m a mode of transportation and a rather large climbing frame but primarily I’m the authority figure who denies her all things fun. Don’t believe her when she says I denied her any candy on Halloween. I think I allowed her one piece. To broaden my own view of my father I’ve undertaken a project to write his eulogy not from my own perspective or people I know well but from those who I do not know well and had a relationship with my dad very different from me. His friends when he was in the Air Force as a young man, the people who were his apprentices at work, and his brother in Canada who knew him during his early years. This will help me get a fuller perspective beyond just his later life as a father and perhaps gain insights into why he was the person he was.
When a person dies we can often freeze our relationship with them at the time of their death and not remember the changes that occurred in the relationship over the course of their life. I believe that we can continue to change our relationship even with those who are dead by getting a fuller understanding of who they were. As long as they are alive there is often that vain hope that they may still change to become the person we want them to be. Seventy-six years wasn’t enough perhaps the seventy-seventh year of their life will be the one they make the change I desire of them. Ah the eternal hopeful human spirit especially when it is about someone else changing and not ourselves.
When a person dies we give up any hope of them changing but if we choose we can change our own beliefs of that person. Perhaps what we wanted them to change was just not that important and we focus on those more important eternal attributes of the person that are important to us – their love for us despite our imperfections, their confidence in us despite our own doubts, or their friendship despite our sometimes feeling unworthy of it. The death of someone allows us to reframe what we remember about their life – for good and for bad – and perhaps allows us to see the essence of the person beyond the often trivial disagreements that are so much part of our everyday lives.
Despite the inevitability of death for all of us, it is not a subject that is discussed much in our society. There is often avoidance until it is thrust upon on us through our own loss. Many people, religious and non-religious, often turn to religion or religious leaders for guidance at this time. Religion is where we try to find some meaning and comfort about death. Different religions have different ideas about what happens to us when we die. Many propose some form of existence beyond this life, a hope that we will be reunited in some form with those who died before us. I understand the desire for this but to me what happens beyond death is a mystery – and perhaps it is good that it is a mystery. This allows grief-stricken people to find hope in different ways during difficult times. I have seen the solace and strength that friends of mine have gained from believing they would be reunited with a deceased child or young spouse in the future. This is not a denial of death but a belief in something beyond death. I personally struggle to share their beliefs but I cannot be certain what happens after death and at times even feel a little envious of the comfort these beliefs give them.
What I can be certain of is that death is a transformational experience for those close to the deceased. Our lives are changed as we are reminded of our own mortality. We are finite beings with a limited time in this life and it matters what we do with our life. I have heard the Spanish expression Manana described as meaning something might get done tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe next month. I heard someone being asked if we had any equivalent of that expression in Scotland and he replied that we had no word to convey that sense of urgency. Urgency is not a good way of determining what is important. Our lives seem to be surrounded by urgency. Urgency of creating Halloween costumes, making Thanksgiving plans, buying Christmas presents and even writing sermons. While death gives us a finite time we should react to this restriction by prioritizing what really is important.
Manana can be thought of as something never being started because of procrastination, alternatively it can mean something will never be completed because it transcends our timeframe. I suspect what is really most important is not what we get done before we die but those projects that we begin that will transcend our deaths. For example the work we do in community to address the social ills such as poverty, violence, hunger, racism, and sexism. This work to heal our world will not be completed in my life time – improved I hope but not completed. By building institutions such as this church with our time and money we hope this work and the promotion of our religious values to others will continue after we are gone. This is legacy work since it transcends our own life span.
I talked earlier about how a focus of Day of the Dead was the gifts whose purpose was to bring the spirit of the dead closer to us. Our legacy is the reverse of this, what will we dedicate ourselves to now that will be a gift to others when we are dead? Our time in this life is finite but our legacy and what we choose it to be is not. How we preserve the memory and values of those who came before us and pass on our values and spirit to others are perhaps the most important questions we will address in our lives. By acknowledging the reality of death and the losses we have in common we may find what is most meaningful in our life and worth passing on to future generations. And when we do that we are honoring the full human experience and celebrating life’s longing for itself.
______________________________
Sopetran, Julie, Message in Colors from the book Mexico City, Mixquic & Morelos – Through the Eyes of the Soul, Day of the Dead in Mexico. http://library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ03066/poems_english.html#message URL accessed on October 30th, 2008.
Sewell, Marilyn ed. Cries of the Spirit (Boston, Ma: Beacon Press, 1991) p.131
The author of the reading is Robert Bellah, the sociologist and author of Habits of the Heart. The reading is an excerpt from the speech he gave at the 1998 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly.
So, it is no accident, as they say, that the United States, with its high evaluation of the individual person, is nonetheless alone among North Atlantic societies in the percentage of our population who live in poverty and that we are dismantling what was already the weakest welfare state of any North Atlantic nation. Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. And this is in no small part due to the fact that our religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which, though it makes no distinctions between persons except monetary ones, ultimately knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. If the only standard is money, then all other distinctions are undermined.
What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren’t going to make it all alone. That is a tradition singularly weak in our country, though Catholics and some high church Protestants have tried to provide it. Nor do we have a tradition of democratic socialism such as is common in Europe-again, I would argue, linked to an established church culture-a tradition that believes the state has some responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.
So, alas, perhaps Mark Lilla is right: the 1960’s cultural revolution and the 1980’s Reagan revolution are two sides of the same coin. Radical religio-cultural individualism opens the door to radical economic individualism. The former provides inadequate resources to moderate the latter. Here I return to the paradox from which I started, the contradiction between Unitarian Universalist’s social witness and your religious tradition: in your social witness we are dissenters; in your religious beliefs you are mainstream in a culture whose majority is dissenters. How can you possibly gain the religious and cultural leverage to overcome this contradiction?
Prayer:
When the uncertainty of life threatens to overwhelm us, may we find comfort.
When the grief for loss of loved ones feels too much, may we find strength.
When isolation in our lives seems impenetrable, may we find connection.
When our brokenness seems irreparable, may we find healing.
When we find happiness and hope, may we spread them to others.
May we find the meaning, inspiration and wholeness in our life.
May others join us in our work with toward the common good.
When we stumble may they support us, when we doubt may they reassure us, and when we stray may they guide us.
Life is too large and too precious to journey alone, may we find the solidarity of others when needed and may we be the strength needed by others.
Amen.
Sermon:
We seem to have been hearing for many years now that we live in a time of uncertainty. Recent events seem to be only increasing that uncertainty. The financial meltdown is the latest in a series of unpredictable events that we hear about not knowing the outcome or how they will affect us. The roller coaster of the Presidential election creates an uncertainty about our political futures, worries about our jobs or retirement creates uncertainty about our economic futures, the threat of unexpected illness and violence creates uncertainty about the lives of our friends and loved ones. Climate change raises questions about our very existence. We most certainly do live in a time of uncertainty. Yet I suspect people have always felt that way.
A common response for many people is to turn to religion at such times. Sometimes looking for answers, other times an explanation, and often just for comfort. The old saying goes that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. While a religious response on the subject of taxes sounds really interesting, I’ll leave that for another sermon – perhaps around April 15th. Religion has had a lot to say about death and in Christianity particularity life after death. While life on this earth was uncertain, life after death was about certainty. You were going to hell if you were bad and heaven if you were good. The threat of hell was the motivation to live a good life. Our Liberal religious tradition has moved away from such thinking. We are not concerned much with what happens beyond death and more interested in the responsible search for truth and meaning in this life. To ensure a responsible search for truth and meaning then it is best that we do this search in a community. At least that is the theory.
Many of us today feel lonely or isolated as our sense of community subsides and we have less contact with our families or friends. Work absorbs much of our time and energy such that our community ties become frayed. In the reading we heard earlier, Robert Bellah was discussing the decline of community in the United States due to the emphasis on the individual. He says “our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing?” He blames economic individualism in partnership with religious individualism as the culprit for destroying much of our sense of community. He said these words at the 1998 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. He knew his audience. Our Unitarian ancestors in the 19th century put great emphasis on the individual religious experience and the individual’s use of reason to interpret those experiences. This emphasis on the individual continues to strongly influence our movement.
Many people come into our congregations because they feel our communities support their own individual values. I know I did. Yet the choosing of a community to support my values still has a focus on the individual. Having a community support my values is comforting but are we challenged to grow as people? Does having our values supported help us find greater truth and meaning? This focus on the individual within our Unitarian tradition is similar to many other mainstream Christian religions in the U.S. This is why Robert Bellah places the Unitarian Universalist movement as part of the religious mainstream. This conclusion may be surprising to many of us, it certainly was for me. He acknowledges that our social justice work is in the dissenting tradition often against the dominant thoughts of the time.
While I really value Bellah’s critique regarding religious individualism in relation to our movement I think he is only dealing with half of our tradition, the Unitarians. Like many he seems to have forgotten about the Universalist side of the movement. You know that part of our name where people’s eyes start to glaze over when you tell them what religion you are – “I’m a Unitarian Universa-whatever.” I noticed that it is around the second or third syllable of Universalist where people stop pretending to be interested. I believe Universalism is an important part of our tradition because, while the thinking is still liberal, the center is not grounded in religious individualism. This can help provide a balance to the individual emphasis of Unitarian thinking. Opinions regarding the importance of our Universalist belief varies widely. Some leaders in our movement would dismiss it as irrelevant and answering a question no-one has been asking for over a hundred years. This does not sound very promising. Other leaders in our movement see Universalism as a vibrant path forward for our movement in the 21st century. At the risk of appearing completely spineless on the matter, I agree with both perspectives. Let me try to explain.
Regarding why Universalism is answering a question that no-one has been asking for 100 years we actually have to go back 200 years. In the late 18th/early 19th century the dominant Christian view was that due to sin then all people were destined to hell in the afterlife and only because of the death of Jesus would a small elect few be saved and go to heaven. This is a difficult perspective for many of us to accept today but this thinking was the dominant religious view in the U.S. at the time. Universalism disagreed with this view and asserted that all people would be saved and no-one would suffer endless punishment in hell.
This idea is known as Universal Salvation. Hosea Ballou was one of the most profound thinkers and leaders of Universalism in the 19th century and is quite a character. He was from a farming background, had little formal education and is described as “rustic” in both dress and diction. I suspect “rustic” was not a compliment. In his early days Ballou was a circuit riding preacher who had no church of his own but rode around preaching in small towns and often debating other preachers. Ballou’s character, thinking and evangelism really defined the Universalist movement of the 19th century.
There is a story that shows the type of character Ballou was and his – shall we call them – persuasive tactics. He was riding the circuit when he stopped for the night at a New England farmhouse. The farmer was upset and confided to Ballou that his son was a terror who got drunk in the village every night causing lots of trouble. The farmer was afraid the son would go to hell. “All right,” said Ballou with a serious face. “We’ll find a place on the path where your son will be coming home drunk, and we’ll build a big fire, and when he comes home, we’ll grab him and throw him into it.” Remember this is one of the most influential thinkers in our history. The farmer was shocked: “That’s my son and I love him!” Ballou said, “If you, a human and imperfect father, love your son so much that you wouldn’t throw him in the fire, then how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect father, would do so!” I think Ballou would be a fun person to have over for dinner. Just don’t get close to the fire.
Ballou’s basic premise for Universal Salvation was that our human failings were finite therefore it is unjust for an infinite, all-powerful God to condemn us to eternal punishment. He actually holds God to a moral standard. He no longer views God as a punisher of human failings and believes people are trying to be in relationship with a loving God. For Ballou, God was about love not punishment. This salvation of all people was a radical idea because it destroyed the idea of only a few people being saved from God’s punishment and has a profoundly egalitarian emphasis. This gave all humanity a common destiny as opposed to the separation of a small elect to heaven and a majority damned to misery in hell. We all had equal worth in the eyes of God, not divided into the damned and the saved but one group: “The Beloved of God.”
To religious liberals like ourselves the notions of heaven and hell seem like obscure remnants from the past and have no significance for us today. Who cares about heaven and hell when we have the uncertainty and problems of this world to deal with? A reasonable question hence the earlier opinion that Universalism is answering a question that no one has been asking for 100 years. Certainly most religious liberals stopped asking that question over 100 years ago. Ballou’s insistence on a supernatural, otherworldly salvation is not the important part of Universalism for me but the consequences of his answer seem important and revolutionary.
For our religious ancestors notions of heaven and hell were part of their framework for making meaning in their lives and deaths. Through this framework the Universalists found a common human destiny therefore a belief in equality for all people. This message had great appeal especially to the less wealthy and less powerful. In the strict hierarchy of 19th century society, I would imagine that the religious elect were often seen as the elite in society. The Universalist message had a strong appeal to the non-elite, who flocked to the Universalist movement making it the six largest denomination in the country by 1840 with about 700,000 members. For comparison, today Unitarian Universalism has about 200,000 members.
The message of radical equality of all people gave the Universalist movement a strong religious motivation for social justice work in the 19th century. Universalists were at the forefront of movements to abolish slavery, promote equality of women, establishing public education, and working to change prisons from places of punishment to places for reforming criminals. Humanitarian concerns were foremost amongst Universalists such as Clara Barton who was the founder of the American Red Cross. Universalist members were primarily in rural communities and relatively poor financially. They rarely saw a conflict of interest between their religious principles of caring for others and their economic self-interest. This is in contrast to the Unitarians, who were primarily wealthy and amongst the elite of society. Some Unitarians took a strong abolitionist stance against slavery but many Unitarians accepted slavery because much of their money was made as a result of it. Their economic self-interests conflicted with their religious principles and guess which lost? While the 19th century Universalist movement was still Christian their uniqueness was the love for all humanity at the center of their beliefs. This was not an individualistic religion which put humanity at the center of religion, they put love of humanity at the center. An important difference.
While Ballou’s religious ideas had a profound impact on Universalism in the 19th century his personality also left an indelible mark on the character of the Universalist movement. While he often disagreed with others, he also tolerated a range of opinions. There is a wonderful example of this when Ballou was preaching at a church of another prominent Universalist leader. The wife of the church’s regular minister so strongly disagreed with Ballou’s sermon that she sent a message to the choir master expressing her displeasure. Ballou finished his sermon and was about to announce the hymn, the choir master arose and announced to the congregation: “I wish to give notice that the doctrine which has been preached here this afternoon is not the doctrine that is usually preached in this house.” Ballou listened attentively to the announcement and then said simply, “The audience will please to take notice of what our brother has said.” He then proceeded to the hymn.
So if any of you are unhappy with this sermon then please just let Brent our musical director know and he’ll announce it when I’m finished. I do not guarantee such a dignified response as Ballou’s. I feel this story is very telling about Ballou’s character. He was opinionated but he created a tolerance for differing opinions that influences our movement to this day. He exemplifies the phrase “We do not need to think alike to love alike.” Religion was about high ideals and not his own ego. He engaged in his own responsible search for truth in his Universalist community and I believe our movement is the better for it.
Universalism had a strong sense of human solidarity – people sharing a common purpose and responsibility. Solidarity is not a word you hear in religion very much but it is a good word. There seems to be a greater intimacy about being in solidarity with another rather than just supporting them. Solidarity has a sense of working together for the common good. Support has a sense that you are doing something as an individual that others agree with but are not engaged with themselves. For example, when you are in jail – for some non-violent protest of course – and someone comes to visit you, that is support. Solidarity is when the person is in jail with you. Perhaps this is not the best example of a common destiny.
A relationship of solidarity means a passionate and intimate concern for the welfare of another. Think in our own lives – which relationships do you have with others would you describe as relationships of solidarity? Which are relationships of support? Where do we as a religious community take a stand of solidarity with others? Our work on marriage equality? Our anti-racist work that is done in many of our congregations? These are important questions to consider.
The deep-rooted concern for others in Universalism comes from the sense of a universal love of others. I believe Universalism with its concern for others is a powerful corrective to the religious individualism of which we are often accused. Some people within the Unitarian Universalist movement say that Universalism leads with the heart and Unitarianism leads with the mind. I see this tension between the passion of our hearts and the reasoning of our minds as healthy. The passion of the heart can help us reach beyond our own self-interest and emotional detachment to engage passionately for the welfare of others. Reason can prevent our passion from being misplaced, naive, or ineffective. We should not see the choice of our Universalist or Unitarian heritages, as an either-or choice. We can and do engage both traditions – our hearts and our minds.
What brought the Unitarian and Universalist movements together were the causes we cared about, not shared religious doctrines. On many social justice issues the Unitarians and the Universalists found ourselves working together, on issues such as civil rights, public education, and women’s suffrage. It was our actions not our beliefs that brought us together. Robert Bellah acknowledges that it is in our social justice work where we have been dissenting from mainstream religion. As I look today the only area I see us showing religious leadership on social issues is on marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We do not seem be showing leadership in other areas such as environmental concerns, health care, economic justice, and immigrant rights. We are doing work in these areas but I do not believe we have a leadership role in them. I am not sure we even work in partnership with other religious denominations which are showing leadership in these areas. We are a small religion therefore working with others even those we disagree with on some issues, makes sense on many issues. Do we as a religious movement, play well with others? I wonder if our individualism has been institutionalized even in our social justice work. I am reminded of Denise Levertov’s earlier words “We have only begun to know, the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.”
The common thrust of both the Unitarian and Universalist movements was in the changes they wished to see in society. For the Universalists, this work was driven by a radical view of human equality and the faith in a loving presence for all people in the universe which they call God. The idea that a loving presence cares for us, all of us, helps many to get through times of uncertainty. Sometimes that loving presence is family, other times a friend, often it is a religious community, and sometimes a presence that one can’t explain. Universalism placed that loving presence and love of humanity at the center of their theology. That was an act of faith and hope. It is also a challenge to us.
Can we rise up to that challenge by loving others, not just those who are easy to love, but also those where it is difficult? Loving those who disagree with us and loving those who show us no love in return. That is the Universalist notion of love so challenging. Perhaps to guide us we need to remember Francis David’s famous statement “We need not think alike, to love alike.” If we believe that and embrace its meaning then we might be able to care for each other a little better today than we did yesterday – and care for each other a little better tomorrow than we did today. This might be transformational for us, our religion, and even our world.
Bellah, Robert N. Unitarian Universalism in Societal Perspective Lecture given at the UUA General Assembly on June 27, 1998 http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_7.htm (accessed September 30th, 2008)
I invite you to join me now into a time of prayer.
Spirit of this Community, in which we find strength and common purpose,
we turn our minds and hearts toward one another
seeking to bring into our circle of concern
all who need our love and support:
those who are ill,
those who are in pain, whether in body or in spirit,
those who are lonely,
those who have been wronged.
Our thoughts go to those living lives of hardship throughout our world, we think especially today of
Our neighbors on the Texas coast and the Caribbean Islands who have suffered due to the recent Hurricane.
May they all find the strength to rebuild their lives.
We think of all in our world who live with violence as part of their everyday lives:
we pray that they may find peace soon.
We are part of a web of life that makes us one with all humanity,
one with all the universe.
We are grateful for the miracle of consciousness which we share,
the consciousness that gives us the power to remember,
to forgive,
to change,
to cry,
to love,
to learn,
to hope,
to care,
to heal.
May we all find healing and hope at this time.
Amen
Sermon
Our invocation at the beginning of service states this is a time for questions more profound than answers. Good questions can help us expand our world view and give us insights into our human condition. Not so profound questions can also provide insights, usually into the condition of the questioner. A couple of years ago I was asked “Why was I born in Scotland?” I was confused by the question and after some thought I answered. “I was young at the time and I wanted to be close to my mother.” Maybe this is a good example of a question being more profound than the answer.
I found it strange to be asked about an attribute of mine over which I had no control. Having responsibility for our actions assumes we have some control over them. Not really the case with our own birth. Yet through the use of stereotypes we often make assumptions about others based on factors over which they have no control such as gender, region of origin, cultural background, race, or class. I think my questioner was trying to gain some understanding of my country of origin, an area with which he had no familiarity. I sympathize. I sometimes struggle to relate to people from different cultural backgrounds and fall back on stereotypes to relate to an individual.
One author says “One reason for stereotypes is the lack of personal, concrete familiarity that individuals have with persons in other racial or ethnic groups. Lack of familiarity encourages the lumping together of unknown individuals.” Stereotypes can be a useful but limiting way of relating to people different from us. Useful in allowing us to categorize and organize the many people we meet but limiting in the generalizations and projections we make onto those people. Generalizations become most problematic when we make judgments or form values based on them.
I sometimes feel that people are like icebergs – there is 10% above the water is what we really know of the person from our actual encounter with them. The other 90% of the person is hidden from us and we make up by projecting onto the person stereotypes from the group we feel they closest match or even just from people they remind us of. Stereotyping attempts to assume everyone within a particular group is similar because of one common attribute such as color of skin, primary language spoken, or financial well being. Such over-simplifications fail to capture the complexity of individuals and groups but stereotypes are not about the truth. They play into our conscious and unconscious prejudices, often simplifying what really are complex relationships and resulting in uninformed judgments of others. It is convenient for us to make decisions based on stereotypes because they help us generalize about groups we know little about.
Once we have a stereotype of a person or a group then we can find the examples that reinforce the stereotype and it can become our truth. This makes it hard for us to change our mind about someone or for us to recognize the changes others undertake in themselves. We resist letting facts get in the way of our opinions and we constrain others with a generalized image of them. Yet if we really seek the truth then we must be open to change our views. A great promise of Liberal Religion is the ability to change as our understanding widens and knowledge deepens. Our beliefs are open to change and the truth we seek is really just the best world view we have at the present time and will be enriched by the world as we experience it.
Stereotypes are created for a reason. I believe the purpose of many stereotypes is to justify the privileged status of an insider group based on some common attribute and stigmatize the outsider group as somehow responsible for their own lesser status. Those most marginalized in our society because of poverty, color of skin, gender, or sexuality are most likely to have their individuality and identity limited or distorted by a group identity. Stereotypes of marginalized groups arise to justify their lower status in society with the reason for their lower status somehow being that groups own fault. For example, the poor are poor because of laziness and desire not to work rather than other reasons such as prejudice, simple misfortune or an unfair economic system.
I remember getting a rude awakening to my own stereotyping of others while serving breakfast in a homeless shelter. I noticed a number of the men wearing work uniforms for some very well known companies. I was surprised by this. In closer observation of other men, I noticed they were grooming themselves and rushing out the shelter much like many of us do when late for work. Many of these homeless men had jobs. I realized that my stereotyping was that homelessness was synonymous with unemployment. For some, being homeless is synonymous with joblessness for many it is not. I wonder if the workmates of the working homeless know about the housing situation of their colleagues or is that part of the 90% of the iceberg that we do not know about others.
This type of disconnection or separation between people goes against what I see at the core of liberal religion. Liberal religion strives for greater inclusion and connection between all people while recognizing the contribution each individual life makes to the fabric of our religious community. Each individual life contributes a unique story and the difference between our own story and the stories of others helps us grow our understanding of the human condition in all its complexity. I believe that diversity of religious thought and a variety of life experience is a source of spiritual growth for us. We learn much more from our differences than our similarities yet our differences can also separate us from each other. This tension with difference both being the source of our growth and a source of separation is a struggle for us within liberal religion.
In the reading that Jim read earlier we heard the author Jesus Colon struggle with whether he should help the woman with the children. He knew the right thing to do, to help her, but was concerned about how it would be perceived for a black-skinned, Puerto Rican man to help a white woman. He was aware of the potential prejudices that the woman COULD have, prejudices based on the stereotypes of the day. Would she think he was being too familiar or threatening her? Would her children be frightened of him?
The author, Jesus Colon, chose not to help her and says “I failed myself. I buried my courtesy early on Memorial Day morning.” I believe he felt that through his own actions and human separation he lost an important part of his own humanity. There is such a broken human connection when one is fearful even of offering help, not asking for directions or asking for money or even just casual conversation – but to offer help to someone he perceived needed it. He resolves next time he will do what is right regardless of how it is perceived. Jesus’s experience occurred in the mid-1950s yet much of what he says still resonates with me today.
I know that I often second guess my own behavior because of how it will be perceived by people particularly people of a different gender, age, race, or cultural background. A childhood female friend of mine said to me many years ago “Brian you have to realize how intimidating you can be to people because of your height, of course you are only intimidating until you start talking.” I guess there will be no fire and brimstone sermons from this preacher – pity. I remember being quite shocked when she told me about how I could be intimidating and that self-awareness has stayed with me. That perception of myself does affect the way I interact with others.
I would imagine most of us here today can think of characteristics of ourselves that we are aware of when interacting with others. Some aspects become more dominant when we are dealing with those different from us – often gender, race, class, or power differentials between people can change how people perceive themselves and the other. I became most aware of how those from marginalized groups can perceive of themselves in stereotypical and limited ways by an experience I had at the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist church.
I met Nathan Cistone on his first day visiting our San Francisco church. I was the first person who spoke to him at the church and we talked for about a half hour. I must have been behaving myself (or very quiet), since Nathan came back and became very involved in our religious community. Nathan and I became close friends. He was bright, funny, and kind-hearted. Prior to knowing Nathan I had no friends who were transgender. Occasionally we would discuss his struggles as a person who is transgender and how he had become estranged from his parents four years previously as they struggled to accept Nathan’s desire for others to recognize him as a man.
Nathan found a welcoming home in our church and was popular with many. One day I approached him about becoming a worship associate which involved co-leading worship. He resisted asking “Do you think people would be okay having a transgender person leading worship, or do you have an ulterior motive and are asking me because I am transgender?” I understood his concern, and replied, “I’m asking you because I think you are bright and articulate but I do have an ulterior motive. I’m 41 years old and do not want to be the youngest worship associate here, so I want a 26 year-old like you.” Nathan’s hearty laughter quickly subsided into tears. I was confused and asked what was wrong. Still sobbing, he explained, “Nothing is wrong. That is what I love about this church, people see me as a whole person, sometimes I need to be reminded of my own complete humanity.” This was a revelation for me to see how one marginalized aspect of a person’s identity came to dominate their own view of themselves. We often need to be reminded by others of our own worthiness and wholeness as people regardless of some specific identity.
I think this was Jesus Colon’s struggle in the earlier story, he could not see past his identity as a black, Puerto Rican. This is understandable given the history of racism and persecution that blacks and Puerto Ricans have experienced in North America. This sensitivity to one’s own identity was probably a healthy self-preservation mechanism but as demonstrated in the story so limiting to human connection. My friend Nathan was fortunate in finding a community that could help remind him of his wholeness as a person and allow him to embrace his full humanity. Some of us here today I would imagine feel the same about this religious community in Austin.
The San Francisco Unitarian Universalist community was also blessed and transformed by Nathan’s humanity and this became all too sadly clear to me about six months after the conversation I just described. On September 28th 2004, at the age of 27, Nathan died in a car accident. This occurred about a week after he and his mother had re-established their relationship after several years of estrangement. The Sunday after Nathan’s death he was supposed to give a reflection at the worship service in the San Francisco church. The minister asked me and two other friends of Nathan’s to read his reflection during the service. There was a sense of disbelief amongst everyone present. Despite the solemnity of the occasion we could not suppress the optimism of his words. It was a difficult and profound experience. I left the service sad but uplifted by the community support and Nathan’s optimistic outlook despite the adversity he had faced in his life.
After the service I read the newspaper report of his death. I remember feeling my heart sink as the last sentence of the article said the coroner had identified Nathan as a woman. I was angry that even in death his desire to be who he wanted to be, who he believed he was, being denied. My relationship with and affection for Nathan was so strong that I was hurt by the denial of his identity. This shows me the transcendent power of a relationship where people can bring all aspects of their full humanity including their differences and uniqueness. This is transforming to all involved, both individuals and community. I know it was true for me, and I believe it was true for Nathan and many members of the San Francisco church.
I think this shows the great promise of liberal religion with its drive towards inclusiveness and not only acceptance but an embracing of various identities. At our best we enable all members of community to embrace their fuller humanity beyond restrictive stereotypes and prejudices common in the wider society. Our religious community benefits from the diverse range of experiences and identities people bring into our community. I know my relationship with Nathan forever changed my understanding of and compassion for people who are transgender or struggling with their own gender identity.
Historically both the Unitarian and Universalist movements have sought greater inclusion of people in all aspects of our movement. Women in many religious denominations have had a major role in lay leadership and that continues today but that is not true of ordained leadership. Universalist Olympia Brown was the first woman ordained into ministry in North America and this happened in 1863. In the late 19th century Unitarians had ordained twenty-three women. During much of the 20th century leadership in the Unitarian movement actively blocked and discouraged women from ordained ministry.
After the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists only about 2% of our ministers were women as late as 1970. Reflecting the greater equality women have elsewhere in our society, today there are more women actively serving as Unitarian Universalist ministers than men. So if you want a stereotype of a Unitarian Universalist minister today is it would be woman not a man. I believe that the struggles women have had for equality can only enrich the ministries within our movement. While women ministers may be common in Unitarian Universalism we should not forget that many religious movements in the United States women are a small minority or not allowed in ordained ministry.
Another example of our Liberal religious drive for inclusion within the Unitarian Universalist movement has been the acceptance and support of gays and lesbians. This includes many openly gay ministers serving without controversy in contrast to other denominations. Yet I still feel there is work for us to do in this area. I was very surprised to read a recent survey conducted within a Unitarian Universalist church in the San Francisco Bay area where 25% of the congregation expressed concerns about potentially calling a gay minister. This situation gets further complicated when one considers the same congregation a year later called a gay minister with a 94% vote in favor.
In thinking about these two apparently contradicting facts I wonder if there was some stereotype of a gay minister at work here such that 25% of a congregation felt troubled by the idea. When a gay person was proposed as the minister for the church people were able to see the individual minister beyond a gay stereotype. While this can sound a hopeful example of transcending stereotypes I wonder if a different gay ministerial candidate could overcome the same prejudice. This suggests to me that we still have work to breakdown stereotypes since I can’t imagine 25% of a congregation saying they would be concerned about a heterosexual stereotype.
This shows the struggle we have with stereotypes. When a person comes from a group we are familiar with or we perceive as “more like us” then we see them more as an individual but I suspect we still project much of our own values onto them. When a person comes from a group we perceive to be different from ourselves then we are much more likely to stereotype an individual with properties of a group, properties that have nothing to do with the individual themselves. This can be a problem since most stereotypes are negative.
So how does liberal religion guide us to respond to the limited perspective demonstrated by stereotypes. I believe our striving for inclusion of people with differing beliefs and life experiences is fundamental to overcoming the prejudices created by stereotypes. One of the defining characteristics of Liberal Religion is that we are non-creedal, where we do not have to profess a shared belief to be part of this community. This allows an openness of religious and personal expression within our communities and creates a place where through honest and open interactions spiritual growth of individuals and our community can occur.
Our differences are our strength. Similarity leads to conformity – conformity of religious views, conformity of societal norms, conformity of a patriarchal culture, conformity of political orthodoxy, and conformity of what it means to human and fully alive. The difference that comes from a diversity of opinions, histories, cultural background, class, gender, and race leads us to wrestle with questions that are more profound than answers. A seeking that helps us to grow our soul a little each time we struggle to live to our highest ideals. In serving our highest ideals we seek to understand the struggles of those who are different from us.
In serving our highest ideals we seek to overcome our own biases and prejudices as we honestly encounter the individuality of people different from us. In serving our highest ideals we accept that we are capable of great service to others even as we are imperfect in our relationship them.
The encounter with difference is the great promise of our Liberal Religious community. Our honest, humble, and compassionate response to this encounter helps us to transcend the stereotypes of others and ourselves. In doing so we connect more fully with our own humanity and the humanity of others, this I believe is how best we can bless our world. I believe Jesus Colon connected with himself in the story we heard earlier when he promised to offer his help regardless how it would be perceived. I believe my friend Nathan connected with his own wholeness as a person when he realized others viewed him as more than a person who was transgender. I believe I am most complete and whole when I am serving others in the cause of higher ideals. I leave you with this question when do you feel most alive and whole as a person? When we live in our actions the answer to that question we are blessing and enriching our world.
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Hurst, Charles E. Social Inequality: Forms, Causes, and Consequences. (Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007) p.6
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