Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

January 28, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Let us fall into life – kicking, screaming, laughing, loving, let us fall into life.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the too comfortable, let us fall into life.

Let us land upright in life and go forward to try and make love more likely, understanding less underrated, peace more possible, violence more rare.

We have a favor to repay. For we have received as a gift of life – everything. Our life, love, hope, compassion, our feeling for those who suffer, the feeling that wants to help, to reweave the torn tapestry of life. All of these come with the gift of life which we have received.

All this and more have we received. And life asks that we return the favor, and give life, hope, love and peace to others, to all others we can reach.

Let us answer by saying, “We are here. We hear you. We feel you coursing through our veins. We feel the love of life; we are the love of life.”

Let us fall into life, fully alive, for more than anything our world needs people who have come alive.

Amen.

SERMON

I want to talk about emotions in us animals today: love, attachment, and grieving, passions from the heart of life. This is an area where it’s easy to find religious stories, fables, myths and children’s stories talking about these things, because They’re so important to us. You think of a saying like “God is Love,” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” or Jesus” saying that the quality of your faith is judged by how you treat “the least among you,” whatever group that happens to be for you.

But you almost never hear these sayings applied to animals, just other people – and history shows the religious teachings haven’t done much there either. Just think of our wars, present and past.

Other cultures, formed in part by other religions, have a more natural inclusion of other animals as our kin. In Japan, there is a famous park called the Deer Park of Nara. It was set aside centuries ago as a sanctuary to experience the kinship of all living creatures. In this park, deer walk side by side with people.

In a pond near the Deer Park, Japanese Buddhists buy and release small fish in an ancient ceremony of setting life free. Small children come to the edge of the pond carrying a bowl containing a tiny goldfish. Parents and Grandparents stand by giving their blessings and encouragement as the children gently release the fish into the pond. In a flash of golden light the fish vanish. The children’s faces are full of wonder, for they have given the gift of freedom as the fish swim among their companions in the natural wonder of the pond. (Sharon Callahan, from http://www.anaflora.com/articles/oth-sharon/animal-bud.htm) And when I was in Thailand a few years ago, we visited a temple where people bought birds, in order to let them out of their cages.

But we have been taught that animals have neither intentions nor feelings, and that saying something like “the dog wants to go out,” or – even worse! – “my dog loves me” is committing one of science’s cardinal sins: anthropomorphizing. In other words, it’s ascribing to animals feelings that only humans could possibly have. As silly as this is, it has been with us and in our sciences for a long time. Most people trace it back to Rene Descartes. Animals, declared Descartes, are merely automata, responding mechanically to whatever stimuli confront them. Feelings are no part of the equation. (Humans are different, he said, because of the “ghost in the machine” – a divine inspiration that informs our nature, and ours alone.) (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 22)

Even today, in biomedical and other experiments done to dogs, monkeys, chimpanzees and other animals, it is easy to find scientists saying They’re sure the animals feel no pain.

Our blindness to our deep kinship with other species lets us treat them in awful ways – and, in the factory farms of cows, calves, chickens and others, in positively vulgar ways. But it also cuts us off from the connection with a larger picture of life that we need. I read part of an interview that Frans de Waal did with the NY Times several years back, and was struck when he said, “Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, “Doesn’t this guy have a dog?”” (Frans de Waal, interview, New York Times, 26 June 2001, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)

Do animals really have feelings like ours? Don’t ask a scientist, ask a pet-owner. Ask someone who’s been loved by a dog, and loved it back. Animals love, form attachments, and grieve at the loss of the one they loved, sometimes dying of grief. They can recognize and respond to the distress and loss of others, and seek to comfort them, and welcome reciprocal comfort. This is the Golden Rule in action, tens or hundreds of million years before there were humans.

In the last few years we have learned that there may be more communication between the human fetus and the mother than was previously thought possible. We know that the fetus hears sounds in the womb: similarly, in chickens information is communicated by the embryos inside the egg to the incubating hen. Even before birth the chick is capable of making sounds both of distress and of pleasure, to which the mother hen reacts. A day or so before hatching, the chick often utters distress peeps. The mother hen then moves her body on the eggs or makes a reassuring call to the embryo, which is followed by a pleasure call on the part of the chick. In other words, the bond between the chicks and the mother hen starts before birth. So it makes sense that a chick responds immediately after birth only to the calls of his mother. He recognizes her voice. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon p. 65)

A mother duck is usually silent while sitting on her eggs. But as soon as her unhatched chick inside the egg begins to peep, she too makes a quiet squeaking noise. Ducklings and mother ducks respond to each other’s calls before the eggs hatch. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 189)

And what about the odd fact that a dog only wags his tail for something that has life? (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 187) You can have a machine give the dog its food, and the dog will eat the food, but won’t wag its tail at the machine. But it will wag its tail at people, even those who don’t give it food.

People who train dogs to do rescue work, such as finding people buried under an avalanche, or under rubble when a building collapses, say that the dogs need to find a certain number of people alive or they become so disappointed that they refuse to work any longer. After the bombing in Oklahoma City, a rescue worker found that her rescue dogs were becoming depressed at having no success, so she decided to plant a live person in the ruins for her dogs to find. This cheered the dogs up considerably, and they were happy to go back to work. The dogs weren’t doing the work just for treats: they wanted and needed to feel that they were saving live people. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 109)

What about love? It’s hard to say whether animals love, but sometimes it’s even hard to say whether people love. Perhaps the best we have to go on is the behaviors we can see.

Take the matter of long-term loving relationships. More than 90 percent of bird species are monogamous, and in many of them the pairs mate for life”. Fewer mammals are monogamous, and the nonhuman primates appear comparatively callous when it comes to commitment. Chimpanzee males, for example, don’t spend much time courting, mating, or remaining with a female whose young they’ve fathered. And if divorce statistics in our society are any indication (about half the marriages in the US dissolve), we ourselves are hardly role models of committed love. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 30)

Some animals are also good at keeping romance alive. In some monogamous species in which the same male and female breed from year to year, courtship is prolonged and vows need to be renewed. In coyotes and wolves, for example, males and females who mated previously may act like strangers the following mating season, and a new round of courtship and companionship is in order before they pair off again, rejecting all other suitors. Once their young are born they stay together, forming a true family unit, until next breeding time. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 30-31) Here, there seems to be an awareness of attraction, mixed with a spark that keeps it alive by insisting on a fresh courtship cycle every year. Sounds pretty advanced!

It’s also hard to imagine anything more tender than the nurturing that many animals lavish on their babies. To begin to grasp the depth of parental love, we need only watch a gorilla mother ceaselessly grooming and cuddling her infant, or a cat bathing her newborn kittens, or whales tirelessly escorting their calves and protecting them from predators. Animal mothers and in some species fathers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and even cousins will feed youngsters, retrieve them if they stray, patiently teach them the skills they’ll need to survive. Their devotion is selfless and unflagging. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 31)

There have also been stories of animal emotions in the popular press. In one story, a troop of about one hundred rhesus monkeys in India, brought traffic to a halt after a baby monkey was hit by a car. The monkeys encircled the injured infant, whose hind legs were crushed and who lay in the road unable to move, and blocked all traffic. A government official reported that the monkeys were angry, and a local shopkeeper was quoted as saying, “It was very emotional – some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene carrying the injured baby with them.” (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of animal play” p. 635)

In another incident, baboons in Saudi Arabia waited for three days on the side of a road to take revenge on a driver who had killed a member of their troop. The baboons lay in waiting and ambushed the driver after one baboon screamed when the driver passed by them. The angry baboons threw stones at the car and broke its windshield. (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play,” p. 635)

Did the monkeys love their baby? Did the baboons have a sense of outrage, justice or vengeance against the human who killed one of theirs? Is the Pope Catholic?

And if monkeys, baboons and others show behaviors we would call loving, what about love that extends not only to their kind, but even to other species? That’s going well beyond even the Golden Rule. Here’s a story about Joanne and Lulu. Joanne was a human, and Lulu was her 200 lb. pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.

Joanne was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner’s house, where Joanne had suffered a heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Joanne knows in her bones that Lulu’s sixth sense saved her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27)

But was it really heroism? Isn’t it simpler to call it love? That’s what we”d call it if Lulu were a human.

What did it require for Lulu to do what she did for Joanne? Obviously a commitment to her friend, some awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. It seems unlikely that all this could have happened without conscious awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. Yet we are unwilling to credit the pig with a thought like: “Oh dear, Joanne is in serious trouble. At whatever cost to my own well-being, I must bring her the kind of help that can save her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27) But her behavior showed that those sensitivities, concerns, motives and abilities existed in her, as they have existed in animals for tens of millions of years before we came along.

And what if Lulu hadn’t been able to save Joanne? Do you think she would have grieved? Of course she would have. Animals have been grieving forever, as farmers and pet-owners have always known.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian naturalist who spent his whole life living with and studying animals, once wrote that you can’t really do a good job of studying an animal unless you love it. He was famous for his experiment on imprinting, where he got a whole batch of baby greylag geese to imprint on him and follow him around as though he were their mother. After years of studying them, he wrote that “A greylag goose that has lost its partner shows all the symptoms that John Bowlby has described in young human children in his famous book Infant Grief”. The eyes sink deep into their sockets, and the individual has an overall drooping experience, literally letting the head hang.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

There are a lot of stories of animals grieving, and we seem to recognize what They’re feeling immediately.

For example, here’s an interesting paragraph by Alexander Skutch, who at ninety-seven years of age was still conducting field research on birds in Costa Rica. In his book The Minds of Birds, Skutch wrote:

“It is remarkable how often the sounds that birds make suggest the emotions that we might feel in similar circumstances: soft notes like lullabies while calmly warming their eggs or nestlings; mournful cries while helplessly watching an intruder at their nests; harsh or grating sounds while threatening or attacking an enemy”. Birds so frequently respond to events in tones such as we might use that we suspect their emotions are similar to our own.” (Alexander Skutch, The Minds of Birds, 1996, pp. 41-42) from Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play“

It’s how it sounds to some who work with birds. In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and Jenny, as both parents busily fed their five nestlings. One morning only the male falcon visited the nest. Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur’s behavior changed markedly. When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done before. He called out again and again and listened for his mate’s answer. House struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and disappointment. Jenny did not appear the next day or the next. Late on the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound, “a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering.” The shocked House wrote, “The sadness in the outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 91)

Cynthia Moss, who has studied elephants in Africa for over 35 years, describes (in Elephant Memories) the response of elephants in Amboseli National Park when a poacher’s bullet entered the lungs of a young female, Tina. After the herd had escaped from danger, Tina’s knees started to buckle, and the others leaned into her so as to keep her upright. She slipped beneath them nonetheless, and died with a shudder.

Teresia and Trista, her mother and sister, became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and one even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.

Afterward, the others sprinkled earth over the carcass, then went of into the surrounding bushes to break off branches, which they placed over Tina’s body. By nightfall the corpse was almost completely buried. When the herd moved off next morning, Teresia was the last one to leave. Facing the others with her back to her dead daughter, she reached behind herself and felt Tina’s body with her hind foot several times before she very reluctantly moved off. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 53-54)

Marc Bekoff, another scholar who teaches at the University of Colorado and has lived in Boulder for three decades, works mostly with wolves and coyotes. He wrote about a pair of foxes that lives near him, had been together for several years. One day as he was leaving, he saw that some animal had killed the male fox, and the female was digging dirt on it, to cover it. Several hours later when he returned, she had completely covered the body of her dead mate. It looks like we didn’t invent the idea of burying our dead, doesn’t it?

So elephant mothers and whole communities grieve for the loss of a young one. Orphan elephants who saw their mothers being killed often wake up screaming. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

And perhaps the most important part of this is that the love, attachment, and grieving aren’t restricted to their own species. They seem to happen with whatever we have loved or been loved by. Some of these stories come from animals that bonded with animals of another species – like some of the chimpanzees that were raised by humans back in the 1970s when this was in vogue.

Roger Fouts, the man who began teaching the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language in 1967 and is still with her at his university in Washington state, tells several stories of watching young chimpanzees raised by humans dying of grief, or a terminal kind of separation anxiety.

“I had been teaching Maybelle for about nine months when her foster mother, Vera Gatch, decided to leave her chimpanzee daughter for the very first time. Vera was one of Lemmon’s students and a psychotherapist with her own private practice and a teaching post at the university. She had raised Maybelle from infancy and had never left her daughter alone even for one night. Now that Maybelle was four, Vera felt the time was right to attend a conference out of town, and she arranged for someone Maybelle knew to stay with her in her home.

“As soon as Vera was gone a full day, Maybelle went to pieces. She developed terrible diarrhea and a respiratory infection. Those of us who knew Maybelle set up shifts to care for her around the clock. Day after day we sat at her bedside administering fluids and trying to get her fever down, but poor Maybelle was wasting away before my very eyes and I felt utterly powerless to save her. Her diarrhea became dysentery and her lung infection turned to full-blown pneumonia. The doctor came but there was nothing he could do. By the time her mother returned home, Maybelle was dead. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168)

“Nearly two years later I watched my youngest pupil, barely older than a baby, also shrivel up and die in the absence of her human mother. Salome began learning sign language at four months of age, about the same age when deaf children begin signing. Thanks to her precociousness she appeared in the 1972 LIFE magazine spread with Lucy and other famous chimps. Salome was raised by a married human couple. Just when Salome was out of infancy, Susie became pregnant. After the baby was born, the couple decided to take a vacation with their new child, and immediately Salome lapsed into pneumonia and was close to death. Her adoptive human parents rushed home and Salome recovered from her grief-induced illness. Shortly thereafter, they decided to try another vacation. But this time Salome didn’t make it. She died within a few days.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168) The grief looks like the same grief that Flint showed when his mother Flo died, in that story from Jane Goodall, and we recognize it immediately.

And Jane Goodall, who has been observing wild chimpanzees in Africa for over forty years, has many stories of grief. Here’s one poignant and often-quoted story about an eight-year-old male chimp named Flint, who was thrown into the deepest grief after his mother Flo died:

Never shall I forget watching as, three days after Flo’s death, Flint climbed slowly into a tall tree near the stream. He walked along one of the branches, then stopped and stood motionless, staring down at an empty nest. After about two minutes he turned away and, with the movements of an old man, climbed down, walked a few steps, then lay, wide eyes staring ahead. The nest was one which he and Flo had shared a short while before Flo died”. In the presence of his big brother [Figan], [Flint] had seemed to shake off a little of his depression. But then he suddenly left the group and raced back to the place where Flo had died and there sank into ever-deeper depression”. Flint became increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell sick. The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died”. The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up – and never moved again.

– Jane Goodall, Through a Window

I don’t want you to feel like rescue dogs who aren’t finding any live ones, so here’s one more story about the care of a dying young creature with a happier ending.

Barbara Smuts writes, “Near the research station where I lived, an adult female baboon was found dead in a poacher’s snare. Her baby, cloaked in the velvety black fur of newborns, was still clinging to his mother’s cold body. Another researcher brought the baby home, fed him milk, put him in a cage in a warm room, and then forgot about him. I stumbled over him the next morning.

“He was barely alive. His eyes were cloudy, unfocused, and swollen half shut. His body was cold, his breathing almost undetectable. I removed him from the cage, remembering all I’d learned about how infant primates respond to maternal loss. I held him close, groomed him, and carried him everywhere for the rest of the day. Although I thought he was too ill to make it through the night, I wanted to comfort him during his last hours. That evening he went to sleep lying on my chest, his head against my heart. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a rambunctious baby baboon who wanted to play!

“The next morning, clear-eyed, he stayed close to me, venturing only a few cautious steps away when I sat down. But if I removed him when he was clinging to me, he threw a tantrum, writhing on the ground and screaming, just as baboon infants do with their mothers. And like the baboon mothers, I couldn’t bear his suffering, so I would pick him up again. Immediately calm, he would then gaze at me with utter devotion.

“When we took Hilary (she named him) to the Nairobi drive-in, we had to pay for him. In response to our protests, we were told, “Well, He’s going to watch the movie, isn’t he?” And in fact he did.” (by Barbara Smuts, “Child of Mine,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 151-152)

Since animals can’t speak English, some people think we can’t ever really know whether they feel as we do. But some of the apes who learned to communicate through sign language or keyboards can communicate directly with us, so we can know.

Roger Fouts tells a story about Washoe, the most famous of the chimps who use sign language – still alive at age 42, which is getting old for a chimpanzee. Fouts required all the volunteers who worked with the chimps to learn sign language, and he told the story of one of them, a woman named Kat, who had worked with Washoe. Kat was pregnant, and Washoe was very interested in the woman’s belly, always asking about her BABY.

Unfortunately, Kat had a miscarriage, and afterwards, she didn’t come in to the lab for several days. When she finally came back Washoe greeted her warmly but then moved away and let Kat know she was upset that she’d been gone. Knowing that Washoe had lost two of her own children, Kat decided to tell her the truth.

MY BABY DIED, Kat signed to her. Washoe looked down to the ground. Then she looked into Kat’s eyes and signed CRY, touching her cheek just below her eye. That single word, CRY, Kat later said, told her more about Washoe than all of her longer, more grammatically perfect sentences. When Kat had to leave that day, Washoe wouldn’t let her go. PLEASE PERSON HUG, she signed. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 291)

Reading these animal stories and others like them has convinced me that one of the worst stories ever told about the human condition is that Christian story about all of us being born in a state of original sin: sinners to the core, needing the intervention of the church and its priests. It’s an evil story, and wrong all the way down. It’s a story designed more to ensnare us than to empower us. We need a better and more true story out of which to live.

We are born embedded in a world of living, feeling beings who can feel joy and sorrow, who can love and lose, and who can reach out to others, sometimes with just a single gesture, like CRY, that offers us a reconnection with the force of life itself.

But we have taught ourselves bad stories, unfeeling stories that glorify selfishness, greed, invasion and occupation of another country, stealing their oil and murdering their people. Today, when the cries and screams of agony and grieving arise, they most often arise because of our armies, our economic policies, our official heartlessness.

Think of those little goldfish the children set free in Japan’s Deer Park, or the small birds that Thai Buddhists set free as acts of liberation and piety. Those are messages from the heart of life: life telling us what it needs from us. We too can set life free. Within and around us, we can set life free. Let’s do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

January 21, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them.

The gentle feelings that we can feel at times even for strangers, that knowledge beyond all argument that we are one, that we are indeed all in this together, flesh of one flesh and blood of one blood – where do they come from, those gentle feelings, and how can we get them back?

Sometimes we feel a more immediate and warmer compassion for a stray animal we”ve never seen before than we can muster for the other human beings with whom we live. Why is that? Can it really be that familiarity breeds only contempt? It seems so sour a view of closeness, we vote No.

Yet something, over time, seems to breed at least indifference, and the indifference can kill the spirit of life itself, left to fester. Something can seem to die, even in the very relationships we most cherish. How did it happen? And can what seems wounded be brought back to full health?

These questions run through our relationships, our jobs, our families, our nation and our world. Everywhere, so much has come undone. We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them. We will need all the help we can get . Let us seek that help, within and among our selves and our precious relationships with others. Amen.

SERMON

When the foundations of our Western religion were laid, when Yahweh, the main God of the ancient Hebrews, was created a few thousand years ago, he was created specifically to oppose the nature deities of the Canaanite culture in which the ancient Hebrews originated.

The Canaanites saw us as absolutely embedded in nature, because they were farmers. The Hebrews were sheep-herders, and created a religion that pretended we had no deep connection with nature at all, only with their God, who was created as a kind of tribal chief.

Yet we are profoundly children of nature. And that means that some of the biases in our religions have profoundly misidentified us and misled us. The real ground of our being is in our deep relationships with all other life on earth, and with the earth itself, not with authoritative voices from on high, or wishful and distracting poetry.

That’s why I think it’s worth trying to take a more serious look at who we are and where we came from, because Life knows a lot. There are a lot of deep and clear patterns that can help show us who we are, what we need, what we love, and how we can live more fulfilled lives.

So I want to look at some of the things life seems to know, by looking at some animal stories – today, stories from monkeys and the two apes who are our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos, plus a few stories about dogs, elephants, bulls and pigs.

One of the most important things these stories show us is how much other animals can think like us, find the same kind of solution to their problems that we might seek.

Modern study of animals” inventive problem-solving began in 1953, when a Japanese observer studying a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys, noticed that a young female she had named Imo, had suddenly solved a problem the rest of her troop hadn’t been able to solve.

Researchers were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, which the monkeys liked a lot. But the potatoes were covered in sand and dirt, and you can imagine the feeling of chewing a potato covered in sand and dirt, what would you do? I can tell you what the monkeys did. The one named Imo, just a year and a half old, took her potato into the ocean, and scrubbed the dirt off in the ocean water. Three years later, Imo came up with a second brilliant idea, when she figured out how to separate all the sand from rice they found on the beach. What would you do? Imo solved it by tossing handfuls of the rice and sand mixture into the water, letting the sand sink, and eating the rice that stayed on the surface, now lightly salted by the ocean water.

Before too long, the other monkeys in her community had learned to wash their potatoes and their rice, and now more than a half century later, long after Imo has died, the whole culture of monkeys still does these things, and teaches their children how to do them. Imo’s ideas have become a part of monkey culture.

Chimpanzees have done even more impressive things.

In Africa, they have devised a hammer and anvil technique to break open very hard Coula and Panda nuts. They will carry these nuts to a special tree root or rock with an indentation in it, put the nut in the indentation, then with a heavy stick or rock, crush it enough to get the nut out of the inside. They can get about 3800 calories a day this way, and many have become very good at it. It’s a skill that can take a decade to learn well. Children learn the skill from their elders, and it has been part of their chimpanzee culture for a long time now. (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi, p. 29)

The human natives living in the area also eat those nuts, and have their own hammer and anvil stations in their villages that look like those the chimps have hidden deep in the jungle. So it looks like the chimps and the humans thought alike, and figured out the same solution to the same problem, and we’re always impressed with an animal’s intelligence if they think like we do.

We used chimpanzees in the early years of our space program, in ways many Americans may not know today. In the late 50s, our US Air Force bought about 65 chimps from Africa and began training them to operate the controls inside space capsules. Some of you will remember – from history books if not from newspapers – that the first living things we fired into space were chimpanzees.

They trained the young chimps through a reward and punishment system, giving them banana pellets for correct moves and electric shocks to their feet for wrong moves, because they assumed that chimps could only care about rewards and punishments.

But the second chimp we sent into space showed us something different. His name was Enos, and after his Atlas rocket blasted off in November 1961, the machinery malfunctioned once he got into orbit. A fuel line stuck open, wasting fuel and sending the capsule into a dangerous wobble. He had to correct the wobble, and help bring the thing back to earth. Now remember, this was a five-year-old chimpanzee. It was like sending a 3- or 4-year-old boy into space, and expecting him to help correct the flight of an errant spaceship. Even worse, the reward and punishment system went haywire, and began giving banana pellets for wrong responses, and giving electric shocks for correct moves.

The rocket scientists assumed Enos would begin making wrong moves in order to get his banana pellets. Instead, he did the moves he knew were right, even though he got an electric shock for every right response. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, pp. 40-41) We talk of the joy of doing a job well, and the Germans have the term funktionslust, meaning the love of what we can do well. It plays a big role in self-fulfillment for many people. But also for many other animals. Those who work with seeing-eye dogs or rescue dogs talk of the dogs” delight, the dogs” satisfaction, in being good at what they do. It’s the healthy kind of pride, not to be confused with the kind that goes before a fall.

In post-flight tests the scientists could barely match the chimp’s in-flight performance, and none of them were receiving shocks. Thanks to the space exploits of our Astrochimps, NASA made 250 safety and comfort modifications to improve Friendship 7, the spacecraft that would carry John Glenn around the earth three times in February 1962. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 42)

But impressive as all this is, there are much more interesting things that other animals have to teach us about life. They’re more about animals showing us what living things need: things that we need too, and which may be some of the fundamental needs of all life, or at least most animals. Today I’ll talk about what life seems to know that it needs – what we can learn from the “mind of Life,” to put it poetically. Next week I’ll focus more on the heart of life: some of the emotional dimensions of life that are clearly recognizable to us even in species separated from us by tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Today, I want to share some animal stories that show us things we know about ourselves, but may not know are deep parts of what almost all animals need. The stories tell us that life needs

Health or wholeness (one meaning of “salvation”)

Freedom and dignity

A safe place

Fairness, or justice

These are needs that we have encased in our religions and our laws, but they are far older than gods, religions or laws.

1. Life seeks health, wholeness (“salvation”)

Seeking health and wholeness is very close to what is meant by the word “salvation” in Western theology. The word comes from a Latin word for “to save,” but it is also the root of our word “salve.” Salvation is a healthy kind of wholeness, and the desire for it predates the gods by millions of years. And we know, to a small or large extent, what we need to feel healthy and whole.

We all know that dogs and cats will lick their wounds, to clean and heal themselves. And cats will eat grass to help with their digestive system. But you may not have known about the evidence that chimpanzees in the jungle self-medicate. Some self-medication is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, or cats eating grass to aid their digestive system. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants, which cures worm infestations and dysentery. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 254)

Another discovery is that apes do what is called leaf-swallowing. Chimpanzees tend to swallow them in the morning, before foraging for food. They don’t chew them, they carefully fold them over so they can be swallowed whole. The leaves move through their system like brooms, expelling parasites from their intestines. Leaf swallowing has been identified in a lot of chimpanzee populations across Africa, involving over thirty different plant species. (The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 255)

Some of the human tribes living in those areas use many of the same plants for the same purposes, and Western doctors are now studying the chimpanzee knowledge of natural plant remedies. We seem to think a lot alike.

2. Life needs freedom and dignity

A second need we animals have is the need for freedom and dignity. Nobody likes to be “dissed,” and feeling disrespected has led to many fights and wars. But a lot of animals won’t put up with it.

If you’ve owned a dog, you know that they do not like to be laughed at. They will often look at you and give you that “Rowr-rown-rowr-rowr!” noise, if you tease them. And you know just what they mean: “Stop it! Stop teasing me!” And maybe even, “I’ve got teeth, you know!”

A 19th century writer told a story about his terrier, who loved to snap at flies on the windowpane. When the owner noticed one day that the dog wasn’t actually catching any flies, he began making fun of him, laughing and pointing to the flies. The dog promptly snapped at thin air, pretended to have caught a fly, and chewed the imaginary fly up really good. And then I suspect he snorted and walked away with his head held high. (story from George Romanes in Animal Intelligence, 1886, from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, p. 105)

Nobody liked to be “dissed.” When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta last November, I talked with a scientist named Sarah Brosnan who said she could only do behavioral experiments with the chimpanzees when they were in the mood. She said chimps are very smart. They can easily figure out what you are trying to test in your experiments, and if you don’t respect their moods and strong wishes, they will simply sabotage you! She had run many experiments in “match-to-object” tests with an adolescent female chimp named Rita, and Rita always scored about 90% recognition. Then Rita came into estrus, and didn’t want to be taken away from the boys. Sarah persisted, and managed to remove Rita anyway, and take her to the testing room. Suddenly, Rita couldn’t do better than 10% recognition. A few weeks later, when she was through with the boys, she immediately returned to her 90% recognition rate. How much like teen-agers does that sound?

Let’s take a much heavier and more tragic story.

The state of New Hampshire’s motto is “Live free or die,” (the full quote from General Stark in 1809 was “Live free or die! Death is not the worst of evils.”) And we all know Patrick Henry’s famous battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We may think this shows a life-or-death devotion to abstract ideals like freedom and dignity that only we humans are capable of, because we never hear animals talking about concepts like freedom or dignity. But here too, we only put words to a feeling shared by thousands of animals for millions of years before we came along.

Just this week, one of the scientists with whom I’ve been in e-mail contact (Marc Bekoff, an ethologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder) sent me a story from a newspaper in Thailand, about the training program for the elephants they use to perform for tourists, and take people for elephant rides. The training is more brutal than I had wanted to know. It is called “crushing,” meaning crushing the elephant’s spirit, and about half the elephants die during the training, as They’re chained in small pens and abused.

But some of the elephants, they say, are committing suicide by standing on their own trunks and suffocating themselves, rather than suffer through the abuse. (from a Thai newspaper, reprinted as “Small is Huge” by David Neff in “Christianity Today,” February 2006)

I rode one of those elephants for about three hours, and watched others perform when I was in Thailand several years ago, and learning this has forever changed the feel of that experience.

Living things must have their dignity, their spirit. Techniques that seek to crush it – including a lot of the “breaking” of horses or the Calvinistic child-rearing programs designed to break the child’s spirit, may be deep crimes against the very spirit of life.

3. Living things need a safe space

A third thing all animals seem to need is a safe space. There is a Spanish word, querencia (kuh-den-see-uh), that I first learned in the context of bullfighting. The querencia is that place in the ring where the bull feels most safe. It is a different place for each bull. Online, you can find that the word is also used as the name for all kinds of upscale resorts, offering patrons a safe, comfortable place. Whatever we call it, all life needs this kind of place, this querencia.

Some species, including ours, make their own querencias. Both chimpanzees and bonobos build nests. Bonobos build nests in the trees for the night, but also for resting, grooming, or play in the daytime. These nests represent a private area that cannot be infringed upon, not even by the nest maker’s closest companions. For example, youngsters do not enter their mother’s nest uninvited, but wait at the edge, requesting access by means of facial expressions and distress calls. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158)

Females use the sanctity of their nests to help wean their young, by not giving them permission to enter. Other apes will make quick nests from a couple branches, then sit inside to eat special foods without being disturbed. And sometimes adult males will escape the threatening charge of another male by climbing up a tree and building a nest. In response, the charging males have been observed stopping at the base of the tree and moving away. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158) In our species, we say our home is our castle, and breaking and entering someone’s home is a crime. But the concept and the need are as old as most life.

4. Many animals expect fairness and justice

Sarah Brosnan at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center who I mentioned earlier, conducted a fairly famous experiment with capuchin monkeys which seems to show that they have a very strong sense of fairness, and won’t play a game that isn’t fair to them. Capuchins like cucumbers, but they really like grapes a lot better. Sarah put two capuchins in adjoining cages, led the first one through a task, and gave it a slice of cucumber when it completed the task correctly, while the second capuchin watched. Then she gave the second monkey the same task, and the same reward, a slice of cucumber. All went well until on a new task, she rewarded the first monkey with a grape, but when the second monkey did the same task, she just gave it a cucumber. In test after test, the monkey threw the cucumber down on the floor refused to eat it, and threw a tantrum. It wasn’t fair. (Sarah did point out that each capuchin only seems to be concerned about whether it’s fair to them. None seem upset if they get the grape and the other monkey gets the cucumber.)

There’s another story about a Norwegian farmer who learned an important lesson from his big sow. Extremely fond of people, the pig liked to lie with her head on top of the metal railing around her pen when there were people in the barn. Those passing her would speak kindly to her and pat her head. One day the farmer had to repair a rotten board on the floor of her stall. The pig was curious and kept nudging and poking him as he worked. He got annoyed, and smacked her with his hammer. “I should not have done that,” he said later, “for immediately she took my thigh into her big mouth and locked it completely between her jaws, though she did not bite. She probably only wanted to warn me not to do such a thing to her ever again. She found it intolerable that I would do something unkind to her.” This story shows a sophisticated sensitivity on the part of the pig. She had a sense of justice and of the consequences of breaking certain rules of behavior, but also of making allowance for a slow but otherwise decent human who could not be expected to have mastered all the fine points of fairness. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, pp. 29-30)

I’ll close with one more story about how deeply embedded in us is the knowledge that life needs health, respect, and freedom – and that playing fair with others sometimes asks that we figure out how to help them.

It’s the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird seemed stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to give them the bird so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156)

This is a much bigger, broader, deeper and more compassionate picture of the human condition than that presented by most religions, especially the three Western religions.

Our minds look at and structure much of life in ways very similar to animals separated from us by millions or tens of millions of years in evolutionary time. Yet here are all the parables we could need of noble, caring, gentle and decent behavior. Something bigger than God is calling to us, and not with a harsh voice. It is the voice of life, speaking through the mind of life, reminding us of who we are, what we’re like, how many living relatives we really have, and what a rich world it can be, if only we’ll remember our true heritage, our breeding.

Some of these stories are as profound as any religious parables I know. Think of how much about dignity, freedom, respect and justice the pig and the bonobos seemed to know intuitively. Then think about us. Do we really want to admit that we will settle for less?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

January 14, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We pray from within our human condition, wanting some help in getting it together. We have done things we should not have done, as we have left undone things we should have done. We are capable of more compassion and courage than we often show.

We come to be opened by visions that can enlist us in larger causes and more caring actions. We come to hear stories that might take us into a deeper kind of integrity and reconnect us with the better angels of our nature.

They are simple dreams, yet they seem forever beyond us, for we do this week after week, and still we are not there.

And so once more, we pray that we may listen for – and perhaps even hear – words, stories and images of the kind of wholeness and authenticity we seek. For the fact that we know to seek it tells us we are capable of becoming that which we seek, of being who we want and need to be, and of treating others in ways that make us a blessing to our world, each in our own way.

It would seem so little that we seek. Yet it is so very much. And so we seek this warmer fullness with all our heart, mind and soul. Amen.

SERMON

we’re living in a time when popular religion has become too degraded to trust. Don’t take my word for it. Ask people like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, or Bill Moyers, or others who have always been friendly to religion but now have almost nothing good to say about it. They ask why sermons are so trivial, why the pulpits are so silent about our slide into fascism, the removal of laws like the Writ of Habeas Corpus or the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, the “signing statements” that let a president simply ignore any laws he doesn’t like, the illegal invasion of Iraq about which the media still mislead us by calling it a war, and a dozen other things that healthy religion should protest loudly and without ceasing. But the healthy fire is gone from the religions, it seems. They have too easily and eagerly sold out to power, or silenced themselves so as not to disturb anyone.

A whole host of critics are saying that the “God” of our Western religions has too often become little more than a mute hand puppet of the worst religious, political and military leaders among us. This includes not only Christian evangelical support of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the predicted coming nuclear attacks on Iran. It also includes Israel’s murderous actions toward Palestinians and Muslims, and fundamentalist Islam’s sanctioning the murders of innocent people. There isn’t a God in any of these pictures worth worshiping. Too often today, religions call us to our lowest selves rather than helping us reach our higher possibilities.

While any religion, at its best, can be a positive personal and social force, many people feel that we’ve passed a point of no return with the popular Western religions. Christianity is virtually dead throughout Europe because once people saw how easily the churches sold out to the fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, they never again trusted those who controlled the religious symbols. I think that will happen here. I also think the current vulgar rise of the religious right is a sunset that some have mistaken for a sunrise.

Books by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Bishop Richard Holloway (Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics) are unanimous in their condemnation of the worst of religious delusions and hypocrisies, and these are always important critiques. Harris and Dawkins seem to think a shallow rationalism or scientism will meet the needs of humans, and it’s hard for me to understand their naivete. Bishop Holloway just argues that ethics should be a secular issue, and religion should be kept out of it because religious posturings spread heat but not light.

But it’s easier to criticize than it is to suggest a legitimate heir to these religions and their dangerous little gods.

We have been taught for centuries that religion offers the only adequate foundation for ethics, morality, and our sense of who we are and how we should live. How could we invent a new foundation to take their place? How could we invent a way to understand who we are and how we are to live that is more honest, more broad and deep, more empowering and more apt to point us in noble directions than the parodies of religion parading around today?

We seem to think, Well, here we are, and we need to know how to live, how to treat ourselves and others. So we look to philosophy, theology, psychology, law or great literature because they are, we think, our best sources of wisdom. I don’t think they are.

During November I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, and visited with Frans de Waal, the primatologist who heads the center. I had read all of his books, and wanted to talk with him about animal behavior, morality and religion. During our talks, he said It isn’t possible that religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the rest of our intellectual disciplines could tell us much that’s very deep or profound about who we are. They’re simply too new! (Frans de Waal) we’re not used to thinking of traditions that are two to four thousand years old as being “new,” but they are.

Think of it this way. If the time since the Big Bang is condensed into one year, then Cro Magnon – the first recognized human – has been here about one minute. One minute out of the 525,960 minutes in a year (365.25 days). And the 4,000 years of our recorded history, including the birth of all our existing religions and the invention of their gods, go back just one one-millionth of the way to the origins of life four billion years ago. Why would we think that stories invented in the last one-millionth of the year of Life could know or tell us much about who we are, how we came to be this way and how we should live? Four thousand years is only about two hundred generations. Yet “A hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them.” (Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992, p. 5) There is obviously a lot that was written in nature before we appeared.

We are all descended from that first life form, four billion years ago. We are all related. And we know the fact that we are all related has implications, has shaped much of who we are and how we think and desire and behave, because we can see them all around us. Some of these animal stories may sound pretty trivial, like knowing that thumb-sucking is a universal primate behavior around weaning time (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 155). Or that some apes (bonobos), like humans, are overwhelmingly right-handed. Or think about territoriality by realizing that the dog that barks at you from behind its owners” fence is barking for the same reason the owners built the fence. OK, some of these are sort of Oprah-style stories.

But other animal stories seem to call us by name:

Snakes, for instance, are separated from us by about150 million years of evolution. Yet even among snakes there is a core of basic behavior – including dominance, territoriality, and sexual jealousy – that we have no trouble recognizing. (Carl Sagan & Anne Druyan Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors,1992, p. 204)

We recognize courtship rituals, male posturing, defense of territory, aggression and maternal instincts in thousands of species because we share them. Unless all these behaviors evolved independently and coincidentally a million times, we are all related, and our similar behaviors come through the same process as the fact that the wings of a bat, flippers of a whale and human hands have similar bone structures.

We all know instinctively to play much more gently with young children, but so do our family pets. But so do rats. People who study rats playing – there are a lot of jobs out there you never really thought of, aren’t there? – have said that when larger rats play-wrestle with smaller rats, they let the small rats win about half the time. And we’re not surprised to learn that among dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, monkeys and many other species, the adults have a different and gentler set of rules for playing with their young than they do when playing or fighting with older animals. We all seem to know the difference between “play time” and “real time.”

Some of our tenderest behaviors can be found in other animals that have been here practically forever. Crocodiles evolved during the age of the dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago, before monkeys or apes existed, even before mammals existed. A crocodile’s jaw muscles are very strong, its snout is long, and it can make a lunch of us in a minute. Yet we read about a crocodile mother taking all the newly-hatched little crocodiles into her mouth and carrying them to protect them – her babies looking out at the world through the spaces between her long teeth, and we know what she is doing and why she is doing it. She is caring for the life for which she feels a responsibility, just as we do. That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are all older than the gods, older than mammals, older than we have time to count. And we are part of that grand panorama of life. We aren’t so much “children of God” – that’s awfully new and young – but we’re children of this world, of Life, with behaviors, wants, feelings, fears and yearnings that connect us with almost all other life on earth. That’s a pretty strong foundation.

This isn’t to say it’s all like Disneyworld. Nature, including human nature, isn’t all sweetness and light. Biologists have observed forcible rape not only in our species, but also in orangutans, dolphins, seals, bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds (ducks). (When Elephants Weep, p. 140)

And like boys throwing rocks at ducks in a pond, apes sometimes inflict pain for fun. In one game, juvenile laboratory chimpanzees enticed chickens behind a fence with bread crumbs. Each time the gullible chickens approached, the chimps hit them with a stick or poked them with a sharp piece of wire. The chimps invented this game to fight boredom. They refined it to the point that one ape would be the enticer, another the hit man. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 5)

But it’s worth noting that they did this out of sight of the adult chimps, who would have stopped it. Even the juveniles knew this was wrong, according to the moral boundaries of their troop. It was something they would not do in front of the adults.

So it isn’t all Disneyworld. But the dark sides of animal behavior can also show us important things about our own dark sides. For example, can we learn something from knowing that the only two species which routinely expand their territory by killing the males in their target territories are chimpanzees and humans? And what happens when we combine this with the fact that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing more than 98% of our DNA? We pretend we kill for freedom, democracy or the American Way, but the chimps do the same things, without pretending to such high ideals. It looks more like we use language to help us rationalize doing the same selfish and vicious behaviors which we would think brutish and beneath us if we saw chimpanzees doing them.

All of this is part of the picture of who and what we are: the emotional structure and behavioral habits that show our profound kinship with more animal species than we can name.

In this extended series of sermons on Animal Stories, I want to sketch that bigger story of who we are and how we came to be this way. That story is grounded in hundreds of millions of years of evolution still shaping us, and it can offer some insights not from religion but from life, in response to our deepest and most enduring questions about our meaning and purpose.

The primatologist Frans de Waal is clearly right: morality, or an adequate understanding of who we are and how we should live, is not likely to come from religion – it’s just too new. Religions and gods arose as vehicles for carrying our hopes and fears forward in our culture. And when we study the origins of gods, they didn’t have very elegant births. Yahweh, the main deity in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the “Old Testament”) was modeled on a tribal chief, and given the tasks of a tribal chief: prescribing behaviors, demanding obedience, rewarding those who served him and punishing or killing those who didn’t. That kind of a god isn’t likely to lead us toward very high places, then or now. Today, the question is whether religions are very good vehicles for leading us to our highest possibilities. Often, They’re not. Often, they teach irrelevant trivialities grounded in fear, while all around us, there are stories that can move us more deeply and show us more clearly who we are and how we should and shouldn’t live.

For a simple example, scientists have learned that rats are reluctant to press a lever to get food if doing so will also deliver an electric shock to a companion. They will invariably press the lever that will not deliver the shock, and some will even forgo food rather than hurt their friends. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, p. 95). Similar experiments with rhesus monkeys had even more dramatic results. One monkey stopped pulling the lever for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 29, from Masserman et al. 1964) They felt an identity with that other life, and automatically volunteered for discomfort or danger to protect it.

Think of the similarities here to the story in the news last week about Wesley Autrey, the man who dove between the tracks of a New York subway, risking his life to save the life of a stranger. Doesn’t it share the same feeling for life similar to ours, the same instinctive drive to protect it? Mr. Autrey was treated like a hero, but what he said was, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” (NY Times, 3 January 2007)

And how different is this from the story some of you will remember from 1996, when a gorilla in Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo saved a 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure? That gorilla made the cover of Time magazine that year as one of Time’s “People of the Year.” It was ironic. On the one hand, we celebrated this gorilla mother because we identified her compassion with the highest of human behaviors, the kind to which we aspire. On the other hand, her behavior seemed to set her apart from the 250 million Americans who didn’t make the cover of Time for our behaviors. And as one gorilla expert said, her behavior could only surprise people who didn’t know a thing about gorillas. (Swiss gorilla expert Jurg Hess, quoted by Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 79)

It wasn’t high human behavior; it wasn’t religious behavior; it was compassionate animal behavior. And compare the gorilla’s behavior with some of our own society’s behavior that year. In 1996, our sanctions against Iraq caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, our economic policies made beggars and prostitutes of children in third-world countries, and the hateful voices of religious charlatans again called for the persecution of gays, lesbians, infidels, and pretty much every other group not in their clubs. Who would you want your children influenced by: a million religious bigots, politicians, economists and corporations turning the world’s children into beggars, prostitutes and corpses, or a gorilla who, with her own baby on her back, saved the baby of parents from another species because, I suspect, she simply felt it was the right thing to do? No wonder she made the cover of Time.

In some ways, this may seem an unusual sermon series. I”m not interested in leading you to God here – or any of the gods. I”m interested in leading us back to a much older, deeper and nobler place: the place within us that has created all the gods of history, to put us in touch with that spirit of life that can trump every little god, every self-serving religious or political ideology, that we have created. I want us to see far older and more empowering connections to all of life, the life coursing through us and the life sometimes carrying us and sometimes battering us and the kind of life we could have – not with more money or power, but with more integrity and authenticity, more caring and courage.

It is about opening us to an emotional awareness of life: ours and others. We’ll see, in these animal stories, the whole range of human behaviors shared by thousands of animals. We’ll find many stories of empathy, some of which will take your breath away. We’ll identify with chimpanzees, whose social expectations are constantly undermining the tyranny that the alpha males and their helpers are always trying to inflict. In some important ways, our species, like the chimpanzees, has a deeply subversive streak – the streak in which you find most of our liberals. We’ll see that creativity extends far beyond our species, to chimpanzees, dolphins and others. We’ll hear of pigeons who can identify Impressionistic or Cubist painters better than most of us can. We’ll see that chimpanzee politics is so identical to human politics that we won’t be surprised to learn that when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich assigned a book on Chimpanzee Politics to all new congressional representatives, so they could understand the nature of politics. And always the lessons will be religious, in search of better answers to the questions of what kind of a moral order we are part of, and how we should behave. Those lessons can come from many places, including thousands of animal stories. Here’s a final story.

During his final years in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote about how, at the end of the Italian campaign, a dog sat beside the body of his fallen master, licking his hand. Napoleon could never get this out of his mind, and at the end of his days wrote this:

Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, pp. 165-166, from Lemish’s War Dogs, p. 4)

I”m appealing to those parts of us that reacted immediately and emotionally to this story and others like it. That part of us that can get choked up and inspired by Napoleon’s tears, gorillas saving humans or humans saving humans. That compassionate potential has been in us for tens of millions of years, and we share it with ten thousand other species.

The Romans used to say that noble humans lived as though they were living “under the gaze of eternity,” by which they meant that we should live as though all the noblest and most sensitive people who ever lived were watching us, then do only what we would do in front of that audience. I want to expand the circle to include many, many animals whose stories you’ll be hearing. Those animals are also part of that gaze of eternity. We should act in ways that are worthy of them, too – especially if we’re going to have the conceit of calling them “lower” animals!

Just listen to these words from Napoleon’s story again, as he stood looking at the fallen soldier:

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.

Those tears over the grief of one dog put Napoleon in closer touch with his noblest traits than causing the deaths of thousands. The empathy and compassion that can reconnect all of us with our larger selves are far older than God. Many of them are as old as life itself. And they call to us, they call us back to our best selves and back to life. Let us pray that we can learn to hear their calls.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

December 24, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us prepare a manger in our hearts, where we can welcome the birth of the sacred this Christmas.

Let us not worry about building a place to hold all the presents we anticipate tomorrow. Holidays become holy days when we become aware of the gifts we already have; we’re not always sure how that’s supposed to happen. So let us make a space where we are open to life’s miracles, the ones happening within and among us.

They’re free, the best gifts: like the ability to accept ourselves as a cherished part of our world, or the fact that just being loved by people whose love we didn’t earn is a gift beyond measure. And the gift of life itself, the fact that we so often complain about not having enough and so seldom give thanks for the fact that we are here at all . These are the gifts that transform holidays into holy days. There is no room for them at the Inn. They can only be born in simple and honest places that make room for them. These gifts need a manger.

And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts.

Amen.

SERMON

This is the morning of the Night Before Christmas. Tonight, at our two Christmas Eve services, we will tell the traditional Christmas story, with some comments to relate it to our lives here and now, and lots of singing of traditional Christmas songs.

This morning, I want to put that old story in historical and human context by showing it as a variation on a much older story, one probably going back into our pre-history. For the story we tell about Jesus is a variation on a theme we have told countless times, in almost every human society in all times and places.

Some of these stories had been told for thousands of years before Jesus even came along. They were famous stories, and a lot of them were stories about special babies born on December 25th , because in the ancient calendar, the day we call December 25th was four days earlier, the date of the winter solstice, when the sun is “reborn,” days start getting longer, and the light in the sky starts coming back.

But we need to learn how to read religious stories, because they’re not meant to be read in a straightforward way. So I want to borrow an insight from a very odd place. Over twenty years ago, I read a what I thought was a profound essay in Esquire magazine by William Broyles called “Why Men Love War” (Esquire, November 1984) Broyles had been a soldier in Vietnam as I also had been, and in this essay he made the astonishing statement that no true war stories had ever been written. It wasn’t, he said, that those who write about war mean to lie. It’s that they are trying to write something that is true not to the mere facts of their war, but to the deep and powerful associations it generated within them. And mere words, mere facts, can’t do this without being shaped into an almost mythic story. That’s still one of the most important and enlightening things I’ve ever read about either war or religion.

All of our most important stories, our favorite stories, are in some sense not true, are in some sense mythic. This includes all of our favorite novels, popular television shows, movies, video games or fairy tales. They’re all imaginative stories made up to express and evoke some very deep needs and hopes within us. That’s what gives them their power. In this sense, the animated television show “South Park” is no more unreal than “All in the Family,” “Rambo,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars,” or all the world’s most fantastic-sounding religious stories.

They’re trying to serve something more important than mere facts; they’re myths. What’s a myth? It’s a story in whose images and terms we want to live for a while – sometimes minutes, sometimes years. It’s why action movies, love stories or fantasies like “Lord of the Rings’ and the Harry Potter stories attract a million times more people to them than documentaries and The History Channel do. We live in stories. Without a good story to live in, we hardly know who we are.

We live in stories a lot like hermit crabs live in their borrowed homes. These are animals without their own protective covering, who will find abandoned shells of other animals, or even tin cans on the floor of the sea, and live in them for protection. The little animals are really quite vulnerable, no matter how secure they may look in someone else’s shell or soup can.

And without a good myth to live in, we feel vulnerable, too. The stories we choose are almost always on themes that have been with us for as long as we”ve been humans. They give us a role, a picture of the world, always at least partly imaginative, and we need that. That’s what a myth is: a story that never happened but always feels true to some parts of our human condition. So it’s almost impossible to create a brand-new story that isn’t just a variation on some much, much older story.

Prometheus was the story of someone who gave “fire” – often interpreted metaphorically as creativity, an imagination letting us transcend mechanical fate. How many variations on this story can you think of? Atlas was the god with the life-consuming, boring job of holding up the sky for others. How many people still spend their lives doing this?

And to take just two more, Artemis and Demeter remind me of a book by Arianna Huffington on The Gods of Greece . She was raised in France, but her culture was Greek, and she learned the ancient Olympic gods as symbols and projections of dynamics and allegiances that are, as the Greeks recognized, timeless parts of the human condition. As a brilliant and ambitious woman with two daughters, she wrote that her adult life has often seemed like her balancing act between the conflicting demands of Demeter – the archetypal Mother – and Artemis, that defiant, bold spirit of an assertive woman. (Artemis was the patron goddess of the “Women’s Movement” of the 1970s, embodied by, among others, Gloria Steinem.)

Those who have read much by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, James Hillman or a host of other mythologists and depth psychologists will recognize this sort of thinking. It is saying that all the great religious myths, including all the myths about Jesus, are absolutely ancient, far older than Jesus, Christianity or Judaism, and that if we understand them well, they are actually stories about the human condition, about us, about our anxieties and yearnings.

We don’t have to put this in stories; we just like stories. But some of this can be put into pretty straightforward philosophical language for those who aren’t as fond of stories. Listen to these words the philosopher Aristotle wrote about us, more than 2300 years ago:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of [our] humanity, but by virtue of something in [us] that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.” (Ethics, X, 7, 7)

We want to believe this, but questions arise: like, how did this divine thing get inside us? Where did it come from? Most of our poets and mythmakers have said these things must come from gods. We don’t see gods in the world we live in, but sometimes, those rare people who we see as heroes or saviors – so many ancient writers described them as somehow coming from that place where gods come from. In ancient Greece, this is what a hero was: someone with a human as one parent and a god for the other. Human, but also a child of God. That’s how storytellers say what Aristotle said about that something in us that is divine.

And there are thousands of these stories about the birth of someone sacred, about heroes or saviors with one parent from earth, the other from above the sky in the heavens. Stories of “sons of God” are in almost every culture. You can find them in Native American stories from long before they had any contact with Europeans. They are in all cultures, people living within very similar stories, like hermit crabs that look for similar shells or tin cans.

So in ancient Greece, Zeus, Father of the gods, visited the young woman Semele in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great savior Dionysus.

Zeus, again, visited the young woman Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, one of Greece’s greatest mythic heroes.

In Hinduism, the god Krishna, the favorite god of most Hindus, was born of Devaki, the human woman, and the great god Vishnu.

The Egyptians had their stories of Isis and Osiris, and the miraculous conception of their son Horus, and the many drawings and statues of Isis holding baby Horus on her lap were the models for the later drawings and statues of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Most people knew these stories weren’t true in a historical or factual sense, but were meant in that deeper sense that is so hard to put into words.

So when ancient people from all over the world tell stories about their favorite heroes and saviors, something deep inside of them seems to want to tell the story as the birth of a special human whose father was a god. They’re not lying, any more than those who write moving stories about the experience of war are lying. They’re trying to tell a truth that seems beyond the reach of mere facts, that seems to live only in that place within our imaginations where miracles can still happen.

Many of you have seen “The Nutcracker,” and you know it was written in the same way. People who see it know it isn’t really about dancing mice in the middle of the night. It’s about dancing spirits in the middle of the winter. When we read some of the world’s great myths, we could wonder whether there really were all these special births all over the world. Were they reported in the media of the day? Did historians mention them? Did anybody interview them? Did they leave writings, maybe memoirs? But we know better. These things never happened in historical time, public time. Instead, we wonder why it seems so natural to tell stories like this, and why they seem to make such comforting homes, such welcoming myths, for us to live in.

Dionysus, Krishna, Horus, Hercules and most others were mythic inventions, not real people. But we can even find stories of historical people who were said to be born in this miraculous way with God as their father, and there are a lot of those stories, not just the one about the man Jesus. The most interesting thing about these stories is that the special births weren’t awarded to these people until after they had died! It was a kind of posthumous recognition that here, something spectacular had dwelled in the heart of a person.

There was even a famous example of this that happened during Jesus’ life. In August of the year 14, the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus died – considered by many to have been the greatest of the Caesars – the month of August was named for him. And one month later, in September, the Roman Senate conferred on Caesar Augustus a virgin birth. This may give geneticists trouble, but not mythologists. For how can you tell whether this really was one of those people who lived by something in them that was divine, until you”ve seen how they lived?

The best pagan writers during the early centuries of Christianity were not at all surprised or upset by the Christian myth of Jesus’ “virgin birth” – they had lots of those, and understand the imaginative, literary genre. What they objected to was that Jesus was awarded a virgin birth. He didn’t achieve anything notable in history – certainly compared with rulers like Caesar Augustus; he didn’t deserve to be awarded a virgin birth! And of course during his life (if he lived), nobody said things like, “Well, there’s that Jesus. You know his mother was a virgin and his father was old Yahweh from up above the sky?” Virgin births, like resurrections, aren’t historical events. They’re imaginative, mythological events, trying to make a qualitative comment on the style of living and being we think this person exhibited – the degree to which that “highest thing in us,” that “divine thing” shaped and defined their behaviors.

Almost every other part of the story of Jesus was also used hundreds of years earlier in the stories of other heroes, saviors and gods. Three wise men are said to have visited the births of these miraculous babies hundreds of years earlier. There are hieroglyphs depicting the birth of a son of God with three wise men bringing gifts from ancient Egypt, over 1600 years before the Jesus stories were written.

Some scholars have said all this is from astronomy and astrology, and the three wise men or three kings represent the three stars in the belt of the constellation Orion in the sky, just as Jesus’ twelve disciples or Mithras’s twelve companions or the twelve labors of Hercules or the twelve tribes of Israel represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Twelve was a symbolic and mythic number in the ancient world; a way of saying this story isn’t just a local thing, that it refers to the whole universe.

Also in the Jesus story is the awful story about how Herod had hundreds or thousands of innocent babies slaughtered when he heard that Jesus would be born. No historians from the time record this, because it didn’t happen in real time. It happened in mythic time, and had happened many times before. It was in the myths of Sargon, Nimrod, Moses, Jason, and Krishna as well as Jesus. Innocents are also slain in the stories of Oedipus, Perseus, Romulus and Remus, and Zeus.

What this seems to be about is that someone has predicted that the birth of a certain child or mythic character will be destructive of the current corrupt regime, so all possible contenders are slaughtered. It’s another way of saying that the presence of that divine thing Aristotle talked about is a threat to everything on earth that is brutal or dishonest.

These are very old stories, and they don’t come from history, but from some of own deepest anxieties, fears, and hopes.

We are a funny species. We are these strange animals who know we’re here and know we’ll die and feel that somehow it matters who we are and how we should live. We don’t worry much about this with dogs, squirrels, whales or even with chimpanzees, with whom we share almost 99% of our DNA. We think it’s just about us. A good religion scholar (Peter Berger) once defined religion as the effort to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant. That’s an incredible statement, but it seems to be true.

The stories we write show our anxieties and yearnings. It’s as if we are saying, “Please God, don’t let us be like everything else on earth. Our life must have meaning, even cosmic meaning. The universe must somehow be humanly significant. Can’t we have a special star, a special god who cares most of all for us, and a special savior who lets us feel chosen? Can’t we?”

And these dreams seem to surface at this time of year more than at any other time. We have woven stories around the winter solstice for perhaps ten thousand years, have woven our webs of hope, wanting to make the return of the light into a metaphor for our the return of light in own lives. We must have hope return; we will have hope return, and some of our best-loved stories are on this theme. It is the great human yearning of the last 10,000 years or more, wearing a thousand faces.

There have been well over a hundred deities born on the day we call December 25th , probably over a thousand. It is, by definition, the “birthday” of all solar deities. It’s the time the sun returns, the light returns, days start getting longer, and something deep within us hopes and believes that somehow it might be “on earth as it is in the heavens,” that that light, that divine spark, might be born again in us, as well.

Jesus didn’t start out as a solar deity. In the first three centuries, he had no recognized birthday, and early Church Fathers used to write with pride about having no “holy day” in their religion, like those pagans who named days after their gods. But in the fourth century, as part of the accommodation to Constantine – who seems to have been a Mithraist rather than a Christian, all the way up to his deathbed – Christianity, while gaining the protection of the state, adopted Mithras’ birthday (December 25th ) and the holy day of Mithraism – the same holy day any solar cult would have: Sunday. The halos drawn around Jesus’ head by later painters preserve this ancient symbol of solar deities.

The purpose of writing so many stories about the winter solstice, the rebirth of the “sun of God” or “son of God,” isn’t to tell the astronomical truth about the sun and the earth. It’s about trying to tell stories that feel true at that deeper level where we yearn for more light, both in our world and in ourselves. And at this level, the literalism of Christianity – that unfortunate notion that all these mythic stories were only about a historical person, one man, rather than archetypal stories about the possibilities inherent in all of us – has been a profound enemy of honest or useful religion for two thousand years.

Stories about “virgin births,” birth of the sun/son of God, rising above lower temptations, and being “resurrected” in the sense of being “reborn” into a life serving that divine thing Aristotle noted, are all and always symbolic and mythic, not historical. They are about that divine spark, the power of that kind of light. We can see this is the Jewish story of Hanukah, too. A flame burns eight nights without fuel: impossible! Can that spark of the divine be kept alive in our world, in us, even when the nights are longest and darkest? Can our faith keep it alive?

It’s funny, and telling, that in all these stories we seem to keep a distance from them, as though we were handling fragile, sacred things and didn’t want to get too close. So we don’t tell it as though it were something in us being reborn, as though it were us in whom this divine presence entered the world. No, we say “I have this friend, this savior, in whom something truly divine lives, in whom lives a light that could bring a little light into the whole world. It’s a miraculous story, a birth of the sacred right in the middle of ordinary old life. I’m sure it’s not about me. I’m not that special. Still, I have this friend, this savior: Dionysus, Apollo, Mithras, Jesus, or a hundred others. And this friend of mine, this savior of mine, is a son of God, and just telling the stories about him makes me feel more special, more safe, even more sacred. It’s how I find that divine light that’s supposed to be in me.”

There was a wonderful op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday (12-23-06), written by a woman here in Austin named Jacqueline Woolley, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. She talked about how both children and adults decide what to believe, in large part by how seriously it is presented to us.

So she and her group invented imaginary things they called “surnits,” and presented them to children as parts of different kinds of stories:

To some of the children, we put surnits in a fantastical context: “Ghosts try to catch surnits when they fly around at night.” To others, we characterized them in scientific terms: “Doctors use surnits to help them in the hospital.”

The 4- to 6-year-olds who heard the medical description were much more likely to think surnits were real than children who were told they had something to do with ghosts. The children demonstrated that they do not indiscriminately believe everything they’re told, but use some pretty high-level tools to distinguish between fantasy and reality. (Jacqueline Woolley, “So you believe in Surnits?” in NY Times 23 December 2006 op-ed page.)

So why do children believe in Santa Claus? She suggests it’s because “The adults they count on to provide reliable information about the world introduce them to Santa. Then his existence is affirmed by friends, books, TV and movies.” And of course you can see him in every shopping mall.

And this is why we believe in religious myths and stories: they are presented in a serious attitude; people we trust take them seriously, and ministers are hired to treat them as sober facts. So they feel like safe stories to take seriously, to move into, in our hermit-crab mode.

But also like hermit crabs, as we grow bigger intellectually and spiritually, we need bigger stories in which to live, in which to let our imaginations soar and our souls grow. Many of you find yourselves in this church precisely because you need more room to grow, need fewer constraints on your mind and your spirit. So you come, often, to ask and to hear pesky questions, and you”ve heard a few pesky things this morning.

But we also need some answers. We’re also looking for new stories to live in, or new ways to live in old stories. And among those old stories, the ones associated with Christmas, our winter solstice stories, are still good stories if we can find our way into them, even if for just a few hours or weeks.

Because good Christmas stories are more than a hermit crab’s seashells or tin cans. They are like mangers , in which the tenderest of dreams and yearnings can be born. Let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born. It is the rebirth of hope, light, love, and the reminder that all the sacred stories we hear are trying to remind us that:

“There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity; [we] will live it not by virtue of our humanity, but by virtue of something in us that is divine, – [will] live according to the highest thing that is in [us], for small though it be, in power and worth it is above [all] the rest.”

It is the time of winter solstice, the return of the light in the heavens and the light – we pray – in our hearts and lives as well. And so let us prepare a manger in our hearts. For something sacred wants to be born, and it needs our help. Merry Christmas, good people.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

December 17, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

It is almost Christmas, the season that can remind us of gifts and wrapping paper. We think about gifts we want to give, gifts we want to receive. And the wrapping paper, to make them look really appealing. Sometimes, we know the wrapping paper is really better than the gift, so we hope we don’t give or receive too many like that.

And sometimes we get gifts from a child or a friend or relative who is dramatically gift-wrap-challenged, and it almost looks like the present kind of rolled down a hill of wrapping paper, collecting some as it went, then winding up under the tree, looking kind of like a sparkly tumbleweed among the really well-wrapped gifts.

Sometimes, our very favorite presents were also the best-wrapped. That’s rare but memorable. Sometimes the very best gifts come in the sloppiest wrapping paper. You just never know until you unwrap them. Then you discover what your real gifts are.

That’s what life is like too, we know. Most of the great gifts come in the plain wrapping paper of our regular old lives. Most of the great gifts don’t have to be bought. They’re free. It’s hard to believe we might really have something to give just from inside us, without spending much money or struggling with the wrapping paper. For this is the season when we, friends, family and merchants often seem like co-conspirators saying, “No, there really isn’t something just in you, just free, that’s worth giving. You need to go buy it.”

But really, we know better.

It is the gift-giving season, when we pretend and sometimes act like only money can buy the real gifts we long for from one another, and so we’ll spend our money again because it feels like there must be at least some truth to that.

And it is the season when the real longings of our hearts are for simple and quiet things K-Mart doesn’t have – love, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance, peace, a reassuring touch, feeling like we’re really home.

How much are those presents worth? And how much more often should we give them? It is the gift-giving season: time again to open ourselves to these questions, and to welcome their answers as gifts of the season, from the very heart of us. Let us prepare ourselves to give and receive real gifts – even if they have to cost money.

Amen.

SERMON

For this Christmas season, today and next Sunday, I want to talk about three very different approaches to the figure of Jesus. There are good scholars who don’t think there ever was a historical Jesus, and perhaps they’re right. But if this Jewish man we call Jesus did live, I believe he was one of that handful of truly gifted prophets and sages of history.

We’re in what is called “the Christmas Season.” You could also call it “the merchants’ season,” since major chain stores make a third to half of their annual profits in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s why almost every Christmas decoration you see was paid for by merchants, whether they have a religion or not.

And it’s fair to remind ourselves that Christianity only began identifying the date we call December 25th as Jesus’ birthday in the middle of the fourth century – we have no idea when he was born, though some scholars believe it was in about 6 BC. Only Jesus could do that. But for many centuries before that, the date had been celebrated as winter solstice, the birthday of all solar deities.

I’ve never been a Christian, so in some ways it’s easier for me to see this as the season of shopping and solstice. But no matter what our personal religion is, the fact is that Christianity is the dominant religion in our society, many Christians see the season as having everything to do with Jesus, and whether you’re a Christian or not, it is one of the rich, deep and profound religions in the world, and understanding it better has something to offer everyone. In fact, as one of the minorities in a nominally Christian nation, we need to understand the religion better than most Christians.

So today, I want to look at two of these paths within Christianity. The first is the path of Christianity: the religion about Jesus. This is the belief that Christ was the savior of all who accept the story taught about him by the various churches. The second is the very different kind of path opened most recently by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, which is concerned not with the religion about Jesus, but with the religion of Jesus. I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for fifteen years, and think they have indeed shown a profound way of understanding Jesus that can offer challenge and wisdom to everyone, regardless of their religion. That’s the Christmas present I want to unwrap today.

Next Sunday, the day before Christmas, we’ll warm it up more, by looking at some of the powerful mythic and psychological dimensions of the story of Jesus, looking at them as timeless myths rather than one-time history.

All three of these paths deal in one way or another with some aspect of Jesus. They don’t agree. They each have different pictures of who we are and how we should live. The first path can be good, though throughout history it has also often been downright evil: the cause of bigotry, hatred, persecution and war. The second path, if it’s done well, will almost always be good. The third path, which we’ll visit next week, is a very different way of understanding what it means to be human: who we most deeply are and how precious and holy that is.

And yet I think you’ll find that not one of these paths that talk about Jesus is really about Jesus, but that each lead to a different place.

The First Path: the Religion about Jesus

The first path, the one that has always attracted and led the majority of those who consider themselves Christians, is the religion about Jesus, the religion of Christianity.

You all know this story. Jesus was the son of God. In orthodoxy, this is meant pretty literally, though nobody wants to go into a lot of detail about the genetics involved. Jesus was, for orthodox Christians, the only son of God. The next part of the story is that he gave up his life, was killed, to save us. Somehow, God was pleased when his son was killed – there are several parts of this story that don’t hold up well under much scrutiny. He is our savior, the only real savior we can have. This salvation isn’t open to everyone, only those who say they believe this story. Those who don’t buy the story may be called heretics, heathen, pagans, or just by the more inclusive and poetic phrase, “The Damned.”

This is the story of Christ as a sacrifice made to god – the highest sort of sacrifice there could be, the sacrifice of a god-man, a son of God, in return for which God gives us something we want. Put more crudely but accurately, this is the very ancient practice of bribing God, and its roots go back into prehistory.

Mary Renault wrote a wonderful historical novel about this back in 1958, still in print, called The King Must Die. The king must die as a sacrifice to the gods because as king, he’s the highest sacrifice the tribe can think to offer. The practice of sacrificing kings continued in some societies well into the 19 th century, but its roots are in pre-history.

The reason you sacrifice someone so important is because you want to ask a lot from the gods, and think you need to trade something of apparent high value. At some time in our pre-history, some kings got smart and decided they could sacrifice their son instead, and it could still be considered a sacrifice from the “A” list.

This practice went on in the ancient Hebrew tribes from which Judaism evolved, and it is reflected in the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. You may remember that in this story, God told Abraham to take his son up to the mountain, put him on the sacrificial altar, and kill him, and Abraham was willing to do it. (Never mind what deep psychological problems Isaac may have had for the rest of his life.) Once he was ready to sacrifice his son, this God told him that no, he would now accept the sacrifice of a ram rather than his son. This story marks the transition in ancient Hebrew history from human sacrifices to animal sacrifices. This must have made kings, queens and their sons a lot happier, though not the animals.

But the purpose of the sacrifice was still the same: to curry favor with Yahweh, to bribe God. And in return, this God was expected to grant some of our wishes – food, victory, mates, the usual list.

I can understand the logic behind this, but it is a Wizard-of-Oz kind of religion. It is saying that whatever it is that we really need, isn’t within our power to get. It’s outside of us, along a path defined by priests, and we must do as they say because we, after all, aren’t really holy, aren’t really sacred. We were made from dirt, after all. And dirt isn’t holy. It needs the help of gods, who wouldn’t care to help us out without a bribe. It sounds like primitive thought, and it very primitive psychology: also very powerful.

I have never liked Wizard of Oz religions, because I don’t buy their premise. They empower priests and rulers, and define believers as obedient, through a supernatural religion promising to save us through a human or animal sacrifice. I think it’s a bad concept of humans, and a worse concept of God.

And in Christianity, the person who would have hated this religion most was the man Jesus. Because if all religions of sacrifice and priest craft are playing the role of the Wizard of Oz, all great religious prophets and sages are Toto, pulling back the curtain to reveal the illusion, and to tell us that we don’t need the illusion, because we already have what we need, if only we will have the courage to claim it.

The Second Path: the Religion of Jesus

So let’s talk about Jesus, and the path of the religion of Jesus. This is the second path, the one that is not concerned with making Jesus a human sacrifice, or claiming that his death was good news for us. It is the path concerned with trying to know what that great teacher actually taught , the path that believes it was not his death, but his life that that was the gift to us.

Those who have been here for a few years know that in the past, I’ve invited several very good liberal Christian ministers to preach here. Every one of them is far more interested in the religion of Jesus than they are in the religion about Jesus. And there have always been Christian ministers like them, thank goodness.

While such voices have come up throughout history, in the last twenty-two years I think the best single guide to what Jesus thought and taught has been the Jesus Seminar. It has come as a breath of fresh air to millions of Christians and non-Christians alike, because it resurrects not Christ, but the man Jesus.

The Jesus Seminar switched the focus from understanding Christ as a human sacrifice, to understanding Jesus as a man, through his teachings. This makes his teachings available and challenging to everyone, and makes him easier to take as a sage, and teacher, rather than some kind of a supernatural character.

During Jesus’ life, the Wizard of Oz religion of sacrifice had become big business, with the huge Temple in Jerusalem selling all sorts of animals to be used in the animal sacrifices conducted by the priests. That’s how you got God to listen to you, how you bought a ticket in the lottery, hoping that God might grant your wishes.

But all great religious teachers are like that little dog Toto, who pulled back the curtain showing the Wizard’s illusions to be illusions made to empower the Wizard, not the people. Jesus, like all the Hebrew prophets, said God doesn’t care about sacrifices, but about how we’re treating one another. And there’s no short cut there, no way to duck that.

You can see this just by looking at the most mistranslated line in the whole set of Christian scriptures. It is the line from the Lord’s Prayer, which you have probably heard translated as, “and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” In that form, you wouldn’t have to think much about it. It sounds like it could say “Forgive our sins, and we may forgive the sins of others if we get around to it.” But that’s a horrible translation of the key word in the whole sentence.

Translated more accurately, it should say, “and forgive us our sins, to the extent that we forgive those who have sinned against us.” Unless we forgive the sins of others, in other words, we have absolutely no hope of having our own sins forgiven. That’s the religion of Jesus.

The kingdom of God is the state of affairs that exists when we treat all others like brothers, sisters and children of God. We have everything we need, and God is waiting for us to act, to bring it about, for the kingdom of God is not within the useless killing of people or animals; it is within and among us. Either we act in ways that honor high ideals or we have no claim to be following God.

Jesus attacked the Wizard-of-Oz religion of his time like an angry young man. He didn’t come like the Sweet Jesus of bad Hallmark cards, but like an ethical and moral explosion. He said those who mislead children would be better off thrown in the lake with a rock around their neck. He said he didn’t come to bring peace, but came to bring a sword, to divide members of families from each other.

A lawyer came to tell him he had kept the commandments, and asked if there was anything else he should do. You can feel that he expected to be told No, no of course not: just follow the commandments, buy your chickens and lambs for the temple sacrifices, and everything is just dandy.

Instead Jesus said he should sell all he had and give the money to the poor. A young man was drawn in by Jesus’ charisma and Jesus asked the young man to come follow him. The man said yes, but my father just died, so I need to bury him first. Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead!” This is not Sweet Jesus! You wouldn’t want to be sending a whole lot of Christmas cards with some of his most famous sayings on them.

He wasn’t a saint, and didn’t try to be one. The first miracle the gospels record automatically disqualified him from ever being a Baptist, when he turned water into wine! And he didn’t just do tricks with wine. He drank it. In fact, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus is described as a glutton and a drunkard!

Jesus would usually have been a bad role model, not one parents would want their children to emulate. He ran around with prostitutes. He had no job, no home, no mate, no family, and could always be counted on to insult the high priests. He was surrounded by people who didn’t understand him, and described himself merely as homeless. How many parents really hope their kids turn out like that?

But this Jesus, the man who lived, isn’t a role model or a savior or any sort of a supernatural figure at all. Forty to eighty years after he died, when the gospels were written, he was turned into a magical figure, a supernatural figure, a savior, and he would have hated it. He came to put the ball back in our court, to say that we have what we need, and God is waiting for us to act. And the priests, as they almost always do, turned it back into a magical Wizard-of-Oz religion that empowered them, and once more assigned their people the simple roles of believing and obeying – not Jesus, but them. Not much has changed, has it?

What I’ve enjoyed about my years as a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar was the exposure to this greater Jesus, this idealistic young Jew with such bold, disturbing and life-giving things to say. But while this is much better than the first path, the religion about Jesus, this one doesn’t really lead to Jesus either; it leads past him.

One of the Jesus Seminar’s most popular authors, Marcus Borg, even wrote a book called Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings , showing some of their sayings on facing pages, arguing that many of their teachings could be made to sound very similar – though of course the Buddha didn’t care about gods at all. And I have heard Marcus say that if he had been born into a Buddhist culture, he could have been perfectly content with Buddhism, and saw Jesus and Buddha as being on the same level, neither being higher than the other.

This is really where the Jesus Seminar leads, I think – not to Jesus, but to the desire for healthy and wise insights into the human condition and how we should treat ourselves and others – insights from any source.

There is a wonderful passage in the Gospel of Thomas that may not sound like orthodox Christianity, but Elaine Pagels described it as her favorite passage in that gospel. I think it is one of the most profound psychological insights in the history of religion:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

(Another translation of this same passage, much harsher, puts it this way:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.” [Jesus Seminar translation])

Understanding the teachings of the first-century Jewish sage may lead through Jesus, but it is not about leading us to Jesus. It is about leading us to ourselves: to our own best selves. It is about pulling back the curtain hiding all the wizard wanna-be’s who would keep us tied to bad creeds anchored to horrible notions of God. Bypassing the religions about Jesus to listen to some of the teachings of this great spiritual visionary can lead anyone – Christian or non-Christian – to life more abundant, love more generous, and an appreciation of ourselves as being, like the man Jesus, the sons and daughters of God, precious beyond measure, and the hope of the world.

And it’s free. It isn’t cheap, for it can cost us our comfortable smallnesses. But it’s a free gift, once you remove the bad wrapping paper.

Merry Christmas, all you daughters and sons of God. Merry Christmas.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

September 10, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Jack R. Harris-Bonham

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming,

we sit here this morning feeling solid and permanent, and yet, a nagging voice in all of us admits and possibly celebrates the fact that life is transient.

The most important things in life are simply invisible. We can’t see the love that exists between all of us, but it’s there.

It’s there in our helloes, and our asking, “How are you today?”

It’s there in our answers, even when we’re just being polite and say, “We’re fine,” regardless of our feelings.

Gathered together there is created between and among us something greater than the sum of individual parts. This is called community and in this case a covenant community.

Covenant means we’ve made a solemn compact to maintain our faith and discipline. In our case we have no dogma, and no sacred, holy book so our covenant is different.

Our solemn compact is to maintain our faith in each other. This is a loving and giving faith. We give each other the benefit of the doubt because we have an abundance of doubt.

The Buddhists say great faith and great doubt are the hallmarks of discernment.

When we UU’s read character we bring to that reading an abundance of faith in humankind, and an abundance of doubt in the idea that any god can save us. We put our invisible faith in one another and with that belief we promise to serve not because we will be served, but because a sacred command to serve the other and to see the other in ourselves has been given.

We serve ourselves by serving others.

Today we rejoice in things that seem contradictory.

We expand and contract stretching who we thought we were, admitting when we are wrong, taking back things said, asking forgiveness for acts unbecoming a friend and existing together as less than perfect human beings; loving as best we can, living better than we could have imagined, and laughing at ourselves all the while.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen

SERMON: Coming and Going

I’m starting the first half of my sabbatical tomorrow. Jack will be the minister for the next three months. Then I’ll be back for three months, then gone between mid-March and mid-June.

With all the coming and going, it’s a good time to ask what’s at the core of this place, and of liberal religion. What stays here? If you took a picture of this place once a day for fifty years, then ran all those pictures at 32 frames per second like a movie, everything but the building would be a blur. But you don’t come just to see the building; that isn’t the attraction. What makes this place worth having is invisible, but more important than all the visible parts.

What is at the center of liberal religion? If it isn’t the minister and we don’t have one book we call Holy, like the Bible or the Koran, then what’s the center – or is there one? Is it just a bunch of people who can believe anything they like and expect others to respect it just because they believe it?

No. That would be a group of narcissisms, each writing the others blank moral checks, as though it didn’t matter what we believe. But it does matter. Some beliefs are awful, or narrow or willfully ignorant, destructive, or just too silly.

But if it matters, why? By what authority? What must we believe, and how can you say it in a religion without a creed or a Holy book? You may see the pink poster in the hall with the Seven Banalities on it. And if you’re from an orthodox religion, you may assume that’s the creed here, the beliefs required or assumed of all members. But it isn’t. It even says so. It’s a behavioral agreement between church, not of individuals. As St. Paul said in one of his greatest lines, we must all work out our own salvation “in fear and trembling.”

That’s what I want to talk about this morning – what liberal religion, or any honest religion, is about, and why it’s a good thing for you, for our country, even for the world.

In some ways, it’s implied in the Invocation I use to begin each service:

It is a sacred place, this:

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

That’s not an orthodox Invocation. Orthodoxy poses answers more profound than questions. Turning it around the way we do means we have the ability and the duty to question all received answers: religious, social, or political.

And some of the core of liberal religion is in the Benediction I use each week, which is a very liberal benediction:

For those who seek God, may your God go with you;

And the courage to take it: step by step by step.

Honest religion is about asking the kind of questions that can inform and deepen our appreciation and acceptance of ourselves and others, our love of life, and our passion to try and make a positive difference in the world around us, as the rent we pay for living.

There are a lot of ways of saying this. The theologian Howard Thurman put it this way: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” You need something to connect the passions of your soul with the needs of your world.

Another way of putting it, a little scarier, is told in an old Buddhist story.

A seeker reported to the local guru.

“What do you want?” asked the teacher.

“To know the truth!” said the student.

“Very risky,” said the older man. “Do you know what is demanded of you in this quest?”

“Oh yes,” said the student: “A passionate desire for Truth.”

“No,” said the guru, “a never-ending ability to admit that you are wrong.”.

It is a mixture, perhaps, of arrogance and humility that’s required here. The arrogance comes with the willingness to question things we may never have questioned, that maybe even our family never questioned. Very risky. And the humility comes from knowing that life is so much bigger than we are, and that all our arrogance is both unwarranted and a little silly.

There are two wonderful stories from the Hindu tradition that picture both the arrogance and the humility. Part of what we’re about here is borrowing from any religious, philosophical or other tradition that offers us healthy spiritual nourishment. If it helps us to a wiser and more responsible path, it is equally valid, whether it comes from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or all the other religious and non-religious traditions reflecting on life.

Before telling you the first story, I’ll tell you how I learned the story, which is an interesting story in itself. A few years ago there was an Indian Hindu woman who used to attend here, always arriving late and leaving early. For months, I wondered who she was and why she came in late and left early. Then one Sunday we had some special music, and I snuck out to the foyer and caught her. “Aha! I’ve caught you!” I said. She said she knew she’d be caught sooner or later, and we laughed.

I asked her why she came late and left early. Well, she explained that she had to drive her son to Barsana Dham (perhaps a 35-40 minute drive from here) then had to drive back to pick him up after the service. “Why don’t you bring him here?” I asked.

“No!” she said quite forcefully. “Why not?” “Because he was bored here.” “Why?” She wagged a finger at me, and said, “Because you have no good stories here!”

Now I’m not about to go toe-to-toe with a Hindu over the quantity and quality of stories! But I was curious. “They have better stories for him there?” “Hah! They have hundreds of better stories!”

“Tell me one.” “One? I could tell you a hundred!” “Just one.” Very well, she said she would tell me the story he had heard last week, which they had been discussing at dinner every night because he wanted to talk about it.

It is a lovely story about the favorite Hindu god Krishna, as a boy. Krishna, if you don’t know, was a bit of a brat, so kids especially like those stories. The teacher saw him chewing in class one day and asked what he was chewing – they all knew that chewing gum was forbidden in the classroom. “Nothing,” he replied, and kept chewing. “Liar!” she said, and she walked to his desk. “Stand up,” she commanded, and Krishna stood up. “Now open your mouth and let me look inside!” Krishna opened his mouth. She looked in, and inside of his mouth she saw – a thousand million galaxies. That’s the kind of potential we have inside of us: a thousand million galaxies. Possibilities beyond measure, beyond imagining. You could get pretty arrogant believing only that!

The second Hindu story is one I heard from the great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell. It’s about Indra, who is sort of the king of all the gods, the #1 god. In this story, Indra had a big head. After all, he was chief among the gods, and it hardly gets better than that. So a wise man took Indra, said there was something he needed to show him. In Hinduism, as you know, there is a belief in reincarnation: that we keep coming back in one form of life or another. So the wise man pointed down to the ground, and there, in formation, were thousands upon thousands of ants marching along. “Ants!” bellowed Indra. “What are ants to me? What are they?” “Ah,” said the wise man, “They are all former Indras. Thousands upon thousands of former Indras.” Today, king of the gods; tomorrow just another ant. Great story!

How do we realize some of our infinite potential? How do we do it? Well, imperfectly, to be sure. The goal isn’t to be perfect; it’s to become more whole. How do we do that? There are clues from nature, from the world around us.

If you’ve lived in Texas for long, you’ve heard of mesquite trees, and probably seen some. Around here, they’re usually scruffy and small, seldom even a foot in diameter. But if you drive a couple hours west, you can find mesquite trees, growing by rivers, that are up to six feet or more in diameter. Same species of tree. Without enough nourishment, it will stay small; put it by a nice river, and it can grow huge.

Or think of the fish called Koi, those fish in the carp family that are so prized by many Asians, and found in pools at a lot of Asian restaurants. One of the most amazing things about koi is that how big they get is determined by the size of the pond they’re in. Put them in a fish bowl and they’ll stay very small. Put them in a bigger tank, they grow bigger. Put them in a very big pond, they will grow to lengths of a foot and more. Same fish. It’s potential can’t be unlocked without giving it the right amount of the right kind of nourishment. And neither can our potential be realized without the right kind of nourishment and an environment of large scope.

Sometimes, the vast potential we may feel inside is too big to cope with, and we go back to our smaller selves and cling to them because they’re all we know. And sometimes, we can grow from small to large in vision very quickly.

Just a few weeks ago, I saw an example of how this works in real life and real-time. I was in Colorado, near Aspen, to spend a week studying with a very good British woodturner named Ray Key. As some of you may know, woodturning is my hobby, my therapy and sometimes my obsession. I like to study with Masters, because it’s like swimming in a very big pond or growing near a big river. These guys have been woodturners for forty years or more, are better at it than I’ll ever dream of being, so there’s a lot to learn from them – as long as you can leave your ego at the door. I get a little better each time, though I may never be more than a fervent amateur.

There were eight of us in the class, covering the spectrum. One man I’ll call Bob had turned very few pieces before coming to this class advertised as being for intermediate to advanced students. So Ray, the teacher, suggested he focus on just one form, one bowl shape he really liked, and learn how to do that well this week. He showed Ray some magazine photos of bowls he liked, and Ray helped set him up to turn that shape. By the end of the week, he had made eight or ten bowls in this shape, and two or three of them were very nice. He had created small works of beauty, done with skills he learned that week. The ocean is very big. Just take the sips you can handle. Don’t worry about containing a thousand million bowls – just start with one small bowl you can handle.

We learn life and religion this way, too: step by step by step.

Another man I’ll call Tom had spent $5,000 on his lathe – you learned this within about thirty seconds – a couple thousand on tools, and seemed to need to be seen as good, though the truth is that he wasn’t very good. He kept exploding his bowls on the lathe, pieces flying everywhere as he made the cut wrong on a bowl spinning at over 1,000 rpm. And he simply couldn’t see the difference between a really nice form and an awkward one.

Ray was as blunt as any Buddhist guru. Once when Tom called Ray to look at a bowl he was doing to ask for suggestions, I heard Ray say, “Well, there is nothing you can do to save this form – it’s a disaster!” Very risky studying with masters, if you can’t leave your ego at the door!

But Tom couldn’t let go of his ego enough to open up and find a new way of looking at forms. He couldn’t really admit that he had a heck of a lot to learn, or that he had picked up a lot of bad habits. Day after day, he kept doing what he did at home, wanting it praised, it seemed, and day after day he exploded bowls and made graceless shapes.

At the end of the week, we had a three-hour class critique. We were each to show what we thought was our best work, and our worst work. Even more, we were to paint our worst work black, with blackboard paint. This ruined the piece, but made it very easy to see what was right and wrong with its form.

When Tom’s turn came, some of us were surprised with the piece he painted black, because it looked pretty good. The one he held out as his best work looked mediocre. Ray said, “No, you don’t have anything better than the black piece” – the one he’d just ruined by painting it. He couldn’t tell the difference, even after a week with one of the best in the world.

This reminded me of so many stories from religion and life. The title of this week-long wood-turning workshop was “Pure Form,” taught by a master wood turner whose stunning pieces are in some of the world’s best museums, art galleries and private collections. Form is what he had an exceptional eye for. He would be bothered by a little swelling in a curve that couldn’t have stuck out more than 1/100th of an inch. To him, it was glaring and grotesque. And once he pointed it out, you couldn’t forget it either, and had to try and recut it. And this man Tom, since he wouldn’t let go of the smaller vision he came in with, seemed to learn nothing.

The stories of these two men are like the difference between one who goes on a spiritual journey, and Rip van Winkle. The first returns transformed; the second spends the same amount of time away, but has only a beard to show for the time passed.

Life and religion are a lot like this. While there is more than one form – for a bowl or for a life – there is still a difference between good form and poor form, and it’s a difference we’re trying to learn: in life, and here in this church.

We have a duty to bring ourselves to our own kind of fullness. For some, that fullness will be more intellectual, or more athletic, or assertive, or nurturing, or mystical or artistic. We’re different people, and one path doesn’t fit all, in religion, politics or life.

And there is a responsibility – I think it’s a sacred responsibility – connected with serving high ideals. Ray did it as well as any Buddhist teacher, both in bringing his art down to the level of a serious beginner, and in being flat-out honest with a pretender. If he had flattered mediocre work, he would have betrayed his art. And if he had just wanted to show us his own work, he would have betrayed his duty to serve us that week.

Serving high ideals is like picking up a Stradivarius violin: they take the measure of you, and demand a high quality of service from you. This is true in every area, certainly including public service and religion. When I get angry at politicians – from this or any other administration – it’s usually because they forget their job is to serve the majority of us, rather than the special interests that butter their bread. That’s a betrayal of trust, and of their office.

And when ministers serve lower ends, they are committing the same kind of betrayal. When Pat Robertson says we should murder Hugh Chavez, he has betrayed every high teaching in the religion he claims to serve. When Jerry Falwell says we should blow away terrorists in the name of the Lord, he cannot in the same breath pretend to give a damn about the teachings of Jesus. Likewise when Rev. Hagee in San Antonio urges the president to launch a nuclear attack on Iran and start World War III – this is a betrayal of a high calling, of high ideals, and it is unforgivable. It is serious business, and we must take it seriously. As a theologian I’ve sometimes liked once said to a group of young preachers, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I hope that coming here can offer you the chance to find some of the galaxies you contain, some of the arrogance needed to break away from a vision that may be too small for you, and enough of a challenge to keep you humble. For vulnerability, humility, really can be more powerful than strength. Remember that an ocean is bigger than a river, yet it is big because it’s lower than rivers. That’s why their waters flow into the ocean. Its humility gives it strength.

A final story to make a final point about what liberal religion and this church are about, and what stays here through all the comings and goings of ministers and members. It’s from twenty-five years ago, when I was in graduate school studying with other kinds of masters. David taught “Arts of the Ministry,” and was one of the most gifted preachers I’ve known, with a sure grasp on what this religion business is about, on both sides. There were about fifteen of us in the class, covering many different religions. We met on Monday afternoon, and one Monday, before the seminar began, about four or five of the Lutheran students were complaining about the service at their church the day before. They went on about how awful it was, how inept the preacher was, how amateurish the liturgist was, how cheesy the music, and the rest of it. Then one of them said, “I didn’t get one damned thing from that service!” That’s when David finally spoke up from across the room, from where he had been eavesdropping on us. What he said was, “How hard did you try?”

I sometimes hear people say that life sucks, or they don’t see what there is to give thanks for, and I want to say, “How hard did you try? How much of yourself have you invested in it?” That’s the other part of liberal religion. You don’t get canned, pre-packaged answers or paths here. We can’t give you a slogan that will save you, just some imaginative building materials and a safe place to try your hand at building. It’s a do-it-yourself kit, in an atmosphere where everyone who’s trying is doing it themselves, with the material they get from sermons, from discussions after church, and from interacting with and being around one another.

It matters what we believe. You’ll always hear, I hope, that it matters how we live: that life is a gift, but we owe something in return for the gift of life. We owe the world our best efforts to bring ourselves to fullness, then to offer something back, to try and make a positive difference in the world around us. How close to the river have we managed to live? How big a pond have we tried swimming in? When there are things to learn, can we let go of our smaller selves and admit we need to learn? We need to go where nourishment is, and stay away from people and places where there is no nourishment. And then, before we can throw a fit about how unsatisfied we are with life, there is that question always hanging in the air: “How hard did you try?”

Inside of us are a thousand million possibilities. There is also a clock, ticking, reminding us that we move every day toward that time when we shall not move at all, and that it is our move. And we learn these things here in this pretty big pond, this large river of people moving through life, touching each other as we pass. In all of life, there are so very few places like this. That’s why I wanted to remind you, on this canvass Sunday, just why this marvelous church is worth supporting, as generously as you can.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

June 25, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for inspiration of the higher sort. Too often, we act inspired by motives too low to be proud of: selfishness, greed, using other people as things to serve our own ends, rather than ends in themselves.

We move so easily into attitudes of taking or entitlement, looking out for #1, as though the other people around us should be assigned numbers rather than respect.

Yet we do this against a background of high ideals, high teachings, high expectations that are continually trying to get our attention, trying to help us become the solution to the human predicament rather than one of its symptoms.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best when he prayed that we listen to the “higher angels of our nature” rather than the lower kind.

It is about who we shall become, and in the service of what ideals. Let us pray for inspiration from the higher sort, and develop the ear that listens only for the better angels of our nature.

Amen.

SERMON: Selves & Souls

The general theme for this sermon came from Stephan Windsor, the man who bought the right to negotiate the sermon theme at last fall’s services auction. He offered several ideas on which he had done a lot of work, and I chose to address the notion of the Self. I wasn’t sure how I would keep it from being just an academic lecture.

What it means, or what I think it means, is that each of us has this distinctive style of being, a distinctive character that our parents saw the seeds of when we were still babies, and that people who’ve known us all our life say has always been who we are. It seems to come, somehow, as part of our genetic package. Some are shy, some are outgoing; some are aggressive, some avoid confrontation; some analyze, others feel, and so on. That core style helps us choose the teachings, philosophies, theologies and values we find most natural.

This core personality, this fundamental style of being who we are, with all our gifts and strengths and weaknesses: I think of this as our Self.

I don’t need to belabor this; you all have a feel for what I mean. The question is whether that’s enough. Can’t we just follow our intuition through life, follow our own gifts and style? After all, it’s what we largely do. Isn’t it enough? What would or could you add to it? Specifically, what on earth do religion or philosophy or ethics really think they have to add to us that we would care or need to care about? Every person seems to have this core, this Self, that’s apparent not long after birth, still identifiable when they become very old. If we need more than that, why do we need it, and what is it?

You can see how easily this could become so abstract you’d need to doze off.

As I thought about this, I wondered what it might look like if serving that core character got seriously out of bounds. For nobody really wants to defend our total freedom to act however we want. As someone has said, my freedom to swing my fists has to stop at your nose, and eventually my self-serving wishes will run up against your self-serving wishes. And then what? Then does the strongest, the greediest, or the one with the most guns win? Or should there be something else to us?

As I free-associated on this, my mind wandered far from the human species, as I remembered some drama that took place a year and a half ago in the attic above my bedroom, involving raccoons. These are some of the cleverest animals around, and it took many months and finally calling out a roofer to discover that they had torn the heavy screen off from around my hot air escape vent on the roof, crawled in and dropped down to the attic. We never figured out how they got out, though they got in by climbing trees and dropping onto my roof.

But during what passes for “winter” here, one raccoon entered my attic, and the noise she made sounded like she was making a nest. Before long, the noises made me believe she had given birth to a couple little raccoons. So instead of thinking they were invading my space, I started thinking of my attic as a kind of homeless shelter for single raccoon mothers. When her babies were old enough and it got a little warmer at nights, I figured she would take them out into the real world, and I could close my raccoon homeless shelter.

But a few months later on a cold night, I heard a heavier thump on my roof, then in my attic. Soon there was much noise and scrambling, and I heard the two young raccoons squeal and scream, as the intruder killed them.

I knew what had happened, as you can probably guess too. A male raccoon had entered to claim the space and – like males of many species do – had killed the young ones because they weren’t his, weren’t extensions of his own genetic line, had no connection to his raccoon Self.

Now when people do such things – and sometimes they do – we call it murder, and we prosecute them. We don’t hold other animals to those higher standards – I doubt that you thought the raccoon had “murdered” the two young raccoons – because we don’t think they recognize those standards. But we do.

Those raccoons may seem an odd introduction to a sermon about Selves & Souls. But in humans, it can point us to the difference between those acting out of self-interest and those acting out of an allegiance to much higher standards. See if you find it useful as I try and flesh it out.

These nasty raccoon behaviors are things we see in so-called “higher” animal behavior, especially in politics, in our treatment of others around us.

A few months ago, I read an interesting book in the field of ethology, or comparative animal behavior, a field I’ve liked reading in for thirty years. The book was called Our Inner Ape, written by one of the world’s foremost primatologists, a man named Frans de Waal. Among other things, he studied human political behavior by studying chimpanzee political behavior, finding them nearly identical. Both species seek power and privileges over the others through combinations of strength, shrewdness, and carefully chosen political alliances.

He talked especially about a very shrewd old male chimp. In his early years, he had been the strongest and fiercest, so he was the alpha male, with all its privileges of power and access to females. As he got older and weaker, he got more clever, and began forming alliances with a strong younger male who lacked his political savvy. He would help the young male become the alpha male, in return for keeping his privileges and power.

Like human politics, chimpanzee politics can be vicious, bloody business. De Waal described a time when the old chimp got even with a male who had twice defeated him many months earlier, by waiting until night when the human guards went home, then setting up an ambush, in which he and the young alpha male attacked his old rival and killed him. Like the raccoons, these male chimps were only interested in what was theirs, what they could gain for themselves, and no amount of violence seemed too much.

It’s easy for us to see patterns in chimp behavior, to reflect on them and judge them in ways chimps cannot do. That ability to see actions against a background of higher expectations is one of the key abilities that distinguishes us from what we like to call “lower animals.”

That’s a funny, and telling, thing to call them: “lower” animals. It sure isn’t a comment on our relative strength! There’s probably nobody in this room that could win a one-on-one unarmed fight with an adult male chimpanzee, or baboon, leopard, elephant, or a few hundred other so-called “lower” animal species.

We mean something else when we boast that we are “higher” animals. And it has everything to do with this difference between Selves and Souls.

So let’s move from chimpanzees to humans.

First, a few words about souls. Scholars have shown that very ancient Egyptian religions, from which our biblical religions got their message and many of their stories, celebrated a divine presence within us thousands of years ago. The Greeks brought it down to earth about 2500 years ago, when they evolved the concept of Psyche, which is the source of our word “soul.” It was tied to character, to what is most essential about a human, though for the Greeks there was no afterlife; it was all about what happened here and now, and our Psyche referred to what was highest or noblest about us.

They had a visual image of the person rising to their full humanity. It was a set of nested concentric circles. The smallest circle in the center represented what you could call our undeveloped Self: just us. The next larger circle was of our relationships with lovers, friends and family – the relationships that make us bigger people, that begin to call us to higher values than the raccoons and chimps showed.

What the Greeks were doing with those concentric circles – and what Christian theologians followed them in doing – was saying that, since we have the ability to see our actions against a background of the highest ideals and expectations, we have a duty to do this. Living in accordance with the highest ideals, rather than just those that serve our private selves, is what we must do to realize our true nature. That’s what can raise us above the so-called lower animals: our greater capacity for understanding and compassion. In humans, we expect these higher ideals to trump the “Selfishness’ that’s also a part of us.

Ethologists like Frans de Waal argue that much or most of this also comes with our animal heritage: that altruism, a caring for others like us, is as much a part of us. You’ve probably read about the mother gorilla who saved a young boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at a zoo a few years back, and returned him to his mother. Or stories of how dolphins have saved drowning humans, carrying them into shallow water. And Jack Harris-Bonham has a great personal story about being saved from circling sharks by a school of dolphins that he can tell you. Altruism, even across species lines, is demonstrably a part of our evolutionary heritage.

And every religion, philosophy, culture and system of law expects this of us. Though, like the raccoons and chimpanzees, we have those lower and more self-centered tendencies in us too, of course. We can see the contrast between serving our selves and a need for higher aspirations by looking at our own behavior, even better than by looking at raccoons and chimps.

So let’s move from chimps to people.

I recently had dinner with the District Executive of another Unitarian district out in the East. We were talking about churches with living spirits versus churches with dead spirits, and he said some of the churches in his district seemed to have dead or moribund spirits.

He told me about an old church with only fifteen members. The church itself was old, 250-300 years, begun as a Congregational church in the 18th century, before the members rejected two-thirds of the Trinity and became Unitarians in the mid-19th century. All the members are over seventy now. But once it had many members, and enough money to buy the land and build the church that was now much larger than they needed. And many members over the centuries donated a lot of money to build quite a healthy endowment.

But that was long ago. Now there are just the fifteen members, with no interest in attracting any more, especially young ones. They are content with just themselves, and will use the remainder of the endowment to cover operating expenses, and the cost of burying the remaining members. When they are all dead, the endowment will be gone if they plan it right, the church can slip into past history, and they are all quite comfortable with this.

They’re taking care of themselves, and it looks like it’s hard to criticize them. After all, they’re the only members, they”ve probably all been there for a long time, they can even vote unanimously to spend the endowment on their funerals at a duly called congregational meeting, so it’s perfectly democratic.

They act like there are only the few of them to consider, taking care of themselves with free money for which they owe no one an explanation.

But is it really just them?

For over 250 years, a few thousand people have belonged to that church. They gave their money, their time, energy and spirit to that church, and established the endowment, in the hopes that Something would continue to live into the future.

What is that “Something”? It was certainly not the hope that all this money, all these hopes and dreams, would be buried in the ground, never to be used for serving life again. When we serve only ourselves, we lose access to that higher level of visions and inspirations. We lose the inspiration of that whole Grand Reservoir of our human and animal heritage, and I think we need that Grand heritage to help us rise to our full human (and animal) height.

Well, you see the patterns I’m trying to sketch here, I’m sure. And now that you can see these patterns, and know what I’m trying to get at, let’s move from churches to some of the political behaviors we all see around us, and which are defining us as “Americans” to much of the rest of the world.

As many critics have written, our present administration and lawmakers have effected a huge transfer of wealth, greater than at any time in at least the last eighty years, if not in our nation’s history, and a host of other money-transferring schemes that look for all the world like a vicious kind of greed that the chimpanzees would recognize immediately: looting our society the way Alpha males and females feel entitled to do.

And where to start in our illegal invasion of Iraq? I’m sure most of you have read, as I also have, that the desire to invade Iraq was discussed in January 2001, the week President Bush’s administration moved into power. Greg Palast – who spoke to an audience of over 350 in this room last Sunday – has written that as early as March of 2001 – six months before 9-11 – Dick Cheney met with oil company executives to review oil maps of Iraq. And by October of that year, Paul Wolfowitz had drafted an elaborate plan detailing the “sale of all state enterprises’ in Iraq – that is, most of the nation’s assets, “especially in the oil and supporting industries.”

(See http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html, or Google terms like “Iraq Timeline,” “9-11 Timeline,” etc.)

We were led into the illegal invasion through outright deceptions about weapons of mass destruction to serve motives that look completely selfish, and far more vicious than chimps could ever imagine – estimates of how many innocent Iraqi people we have killed since invading their country run to 250,000 or more, in addition to the more than 2,500 of our own soldiers whose lives were lost not defending “freedom and democracy,” but defending what looks to many people like little more than the looting of Iraq by some of our greediest and most well-connected corporations.

We could go on to a dozen other activities and events of the past five years that all paint the same pattern of chimpanzee-style US geopolitical behaviors. In this country, when you kill people in order to steal from them, it’s called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, that’s a capital offense. If chimpanzees were observing us, they might say that we kill those people in Iraq because they’re not ours, not like us, because they’re in the way of our greedy ambitions, since we declared ourselves the Alpha Nation. Both the raccoons and the chimps would recognize the behavior, though I think they”d be shocked at the scale of our greed and our wantonness.

You can say we’re acting in our best interests, but without noble ideals it’s just the lowest kind of selfish behavior, serving Selves too low and mean to defend.

Yet there is something in our government’s deceptions about Iraq that is, in an ironic way, encouraging. Something deep in our leaders knew they needed to wrap their actions in noble talk about freedom and democracy because their real motives were so low that all decent people would have been ashamed and would have stopped them.

It’s that same noble part of us that I’m appealing to.

Some of our major cultural institutions today are being used to drag us down to the lowest and most self-serving of ideals. Just listen to Jerry Falwell praying that we blow away people in the name of the Lord, or that awful Baptist church that has taken to protesting the funerals of our soldiers, pretending that God is really killing them because he hates homosexuality – and not realizing that any god worthy of the name would hate their own bigoted and hateful actions far more. Or listen to almost anything from Ann Coulter. These people speak as Christians, so very well: they’re Christians. It is not the religion of Jesus – I think he would have detested what they are doing. But today these people are the best-known spokespeople for Christianity. This means that Christianity and its God have, through people like them, become so vile that they can no longer hope to offer adequate moral guidance for our nation. These people who loudly proclaim that they are Christians have become agents of a terrible selfishness that really is lower than the behavior of my attic raccoon or the wiley old male chimpanzee.

We come back where we begin, creatures with high and low possibilities, always needing to be called to the higher ones.

Yet, at home and abroad, in small or large actions of self-aggrandizement, there is an important way in which we are like those fifteen members of that dying little church: we are not on this stage alone. For millennia behind us, humans have worked, sacrificed, loved and cared about those higher allegiances and more tender mercies that help us become the best that we can be.

They have left these high commands to us, buried within every human institution. The warrior code of our soldiers is marked by some of the highest of human ideals, expressed in speeches like General Douglas MacArthur’s farewill address to West Point in 1962, in which he reminded them that those three words “Duty, Honor, Country” called them to their highest humanity, their most selfless devotion, their most courageous actions, made them heroes not just of war, but of our battle for higher humanity.

Religions at their best – no matter how seldom they seem to be at their best today – also call us toward our tender mercies, reminding us that whatever we do to the least among us we do to our own souls. And secular civic laws say we may not kill people in order to steal from them, and that lying is usually a bad thing.

So here we are. We have the better angels of our nature on one shoulder, and the lower and more selfish angels of our nature on the other. The lower angels say to take what we can, get away with what we can, and to the victor goes the spoils and to hell with the rest. The higher angel says we were meant to be formed in the image of God, not something less – but it’s up to us. The higher angel says when we act selfishly, to take what suits us no matter the harm it does to other humans, animals, and our environment, then we have disgraced ourselves, our race, and our calling – but it’s up to us.

We have selves, and can all act quite selfishly, and at times we all do. We also have souls. Souls are those repositories of all the highest hopes those before us had for what we might yet become, still beckoning to us, calling to us today with voices from ancient ages long past. But it’s up to us.

We have selves and we have souls, and if human history has shown us anything, it is that we can serve either level of ideals we choose, becoming either a low or a high model of what it can mean to come to our full humanity in this time and place.

Now it’s up to us. And the Good News is that we know, we really do know, exactly what we should do, don’t we?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

June 18, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We give thanks for fathers. For those men who have had the character and courage to grow through the tough transition from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks.

For our own fathers, whether or not we think they were the best fathers or not, we give thanks. We would not be here without them. And at their time, in their shoes, they almost certainly did the best they could.

We give thanks for fathers who have never met their offspring but have not forgotten them. And for those men who wanted to be fathers but could not.

We open our hearts to fathers who have lost children – to chance events, disease, accidents, to war. We open our hearts.

For all the many ways in which men grow from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks for fathers on this Fathers’ Day.

Amen.

SERMON: Father-Functions

When I was preparing to do the Mother’s Day sermon last month, I posted an invitation on the parents’ list for mothers to join me for lunch. All together I met with or talked to about fifteen women who were eager to share their thoughts, frustrations and suggestions on motherhood. Men are different. I posted the same invitation, but only three men responded, so we had lunch together, then I checked the Internet for articles and tips on fatherhood. If you Google the word “fatherhood,” you can turn up over six million sites.

The talks with the men were very different from those with the women. The women were often concerned with losing their Self, as motherhood defined them in a job without pay, without promotions, and without much recognition from society, or from other mothers.

The men talked about duties, tasks, functions. They still worked, and still had their professional Self, so were focusing on adding to it whatever new duties were involved in fatherhood. We even discussed, and agreed, that it’s about learning new functions.

This sounds radically different from what mothers want, but it isn’t. It’s just the way men approach the subject. All, I found – and almost all the books, written advice and tips I found – are after the same thing. They all stress how hard it is, how it has to be learned, nobody will master parenting, everyone must allow themselves to fail, to feel their way through, and to forgive themselves for not being perfect. All stress the need for more and better communication between the parents, so they can grow through this transition together.

But men seem to think more in terms of tips, how-to guides, and functions. That doesn’t mean they’re unfeeling. When I asked what the best thing about fatherhood was, every father talked about the amazing relationship with his child, and every father teared up while speaking about it, as I still do when talking about my step-daughters.

The transition from manhood to fatherhood is one of the hardest men will ever face, and not all couples can make it through the tough times ahead. One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 227) That’s also one of the several reasons that 39% of children in the US now live apart from their father. It’s hard.

And men don’t often get much credit for being good fathers, just as mothers don’t get much support from others. But for men there’s sometimes the added edge – or insult – that somehow being fathers is an optional activity. One mother told me a story about her husband, who is a devoted father, and looks forward to the days when he can take their daughter to the store to shop. What irritates him – and I suspect hurts him – is when women come up to him at the store, as they often do, saying “Looks like you got stuck baby-sitting!” When it’s your own child, it isn’t baby-sitting: it’s fathering.

But since men approach this differently, I want to frame it differently this morning. I want to talk in terms of tasks, tests, functions, and tips for fathers. And I want to say that this transformation from manhood to fatherhood is a kind of modern hero’s quest, and it fits the structure of mythic hero’s quests in almost every detail.

You’re in a wilderness, a strange new land, and you need help. You need more than the tools of a bachelor or a newlywed. And there is a fear that you can’t do this, won’t know how to slay the dragons that men must slay in their hero quests.

In mythic hero quests, heroes get help from gods, guides, mentors, and the wise people who are always a part of the stories. In the Star Wars movies, this was the role played by Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobe. In the Lord of the Rings, it was Gandalf and the elves. You need to know you’re not alone, and that you can do this. In the real world of learning to become fathers, the costumes aren’t as colorful, but there are still some special helpers and wise people. It may be your own parents, or special mentors you’ve known.

But in the Internet age, you can also pull up about six million websites just by Googling the word “fatherhood.” Almost all of the sites on fathering I checked are written by men, for men. Therapists, counselors, speakers bureaus, even a Christian man who homeschools his own seven children and speaks to your group for $1500 plus expenses, providing Bible citations as he goes.

There are sites with tips, how-to advice, one with Ten Tips for Fathers that even sells T-shirts with the tips on them. There’s a site of Tool Box Tips, and the Army has websites with tips for fathers, taken from some of the tool-box sites, telling them to take care of themselves, work with their wife to redefine their relationship as parents, to forgive themselves for not being natural or perfect at this, assuring them that they can learn everything they need to know, it’s within their reach..

Not all those who give advice are wise, just as great myths are dotted with tricksters and demons. But many of them are. And I was struck by the fact that men talk about this hero’s quest in very different ways than women authors write for mothers.

Men are being helped to “build” a new persona, one with increased communication, creating a new relationship with their partners, in a functional, step-by-step way. They want tips on what to do: tools.

And one advisor, a pediatrician who calls himself Dr. Bill, adds this very male bit of advice: “Watching a man nurture a baby really turns on a woman.” This sounds just like men talking, doesn’t it? But when I talked with the mothers, they said one of the sexiest things their husband could do was help with the baby or do the dishes. Same message, different style.

The notion of a hero’s quest came from Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure as a larger, more deeply authentic man. (Hero, p. 30)

This comes through the hero’s trials and tests, including the important trial of slaying dragons. What are dragons? They’re symbols of his fears, his past, his present world that must be transcended in order to grow into his deeper, more heroic stature: to grow from manhood into fatherhood.

The dragons to slay are tough dragons, as we’ll see. And scary.

But he doesn’t have to do it alone. As in classic myths, there are these helpers and guides, if he’ll look for them. There are the modern Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobes, elves and Gandalfs all around. By the way, there are over nine million sites if you Google “Gandalf,” and almost fifteen million for Yoda, the wise master of the Force and teacher of Jedi knights. I’m betting the overwhelming majority of the people who visit those sites are men.

Nearly all of the modern Gandalfs, Yodas and elves I read wrote in man-talk. Tips, how-to advice, what to do next, with constant reminders that they don’t have to be perfect, or even in charge. I don’t know that a man could make it through this transition without the help of some modern Merlins.

But the effect, the change, isn’t just functional. It is building a bigger character and a bigger man; it really is a hero’s quest, and it is transformative.

So I want to take you on this adventure, a hero’s quest, through the first twelve months of fatherhood. (Much of the following is taken or adapted from www.fathersforum.com, by Dr. Bruce Linton). There are functions to learn, and also a few dragons to slay along the way.

One of our Gandalf therapists begins by telling us that when the woman becomes pregnant with their first child, “There is good news and bad news. The bad news is the relationship can never go back to the way it used to be. The good news is with time and patience your relationships as a couple can become more intimate and satisfying.”

Men don’t like to ask for directions in fathering much more than they do in driving, because we”ve all been raised to believe that we’re supposed to be in charge, and that weakness is unmanly and unsexy. We’re afraid we won’t be able to do this. But there is research that shows that whichever parent spends the most time with the baby will become more sensitive to the baby’s needs. So it’s something we can learn. And men will need to learn some of it from their wife, which means scheduling times to talk this strange new world over with their wife, so they can go through this together. That’s like talking about feelings and intimate things. Ask any man: that’s a dragon to slay, and a tough one! It’s almost never the dinner conversation we would choose.

An Obi Wan Kenobe says, “We need to know we can’t be expected to know how to do everything. Allow yourself to work as a team with your partner on this adventure as parents. Teamwork is the key to getting through this first year.” I think all the women authors on mothering would agree.

Then right off the bat in the first month, dear little Yoda says “Do not, by what you don’t know, embarrassed be.” And Obi Wan Kenobe translates it as “Give yourselves permission not to know everything.” This advice often takes the place of swordsmanship lessons in medieval hero myths. These are the tools and functions we need to hone for these tasks.

Others say during the first month, learn how to comfortably hold your baby. See that you have a comfortable rocking chair for your wife to nurse the baby in – there’s a real “guy” thing to do! Also, says Gandalf, you can help your wife by cooking suppers. And don’t be embarrassed by what you don’t know.

In the second month, continue to hold your baby as much as possible. Find time when you can be with your baby without distractions. And with your wife, the two of you together give your baby a bath. Talk about what your baby seems to need to make him comfortable getting washed. Tell your wife what you appreciate about her “mothering.” Find time when you can take the baby and she can take time just for herself.

And try to find other new dads to talk with about the transition to parenthood.

During the third month, Yoda says, “Exhausted are you. Normal it is.” New dads need to recognize how emotionally weary they have become making all the adjustments to their new life style.

“I remember,” a therapist-father confesses, “feeling when we went out as a family; it was my wife, our baby and their pack animal, me…carrying all the stuff we now needed to take with us.”

What can you do during the third month? Take a walk together as a family. See if you can have the baby in a “front pack” that is on you. And talk with your wife about each of you getting twenty minutes to yourselves in the evening. Find time to walk with the baby by yourself. Use this time to appreciate how by caring for your baby you are making a very important contribution to her life. And see if you can leave work ten or fifteen minutes early and have a cup of coffee or tea by yourself. Take care of yourself.

During the fourth month, says Obi Wan Kenobe, you start to notice that there is a change in your sexual relationship with your wife. It is very normal for this to happen. So, if your wife feels sexually withdrawn but too concerned about your baby…things are going well!

Maybe it’s easier to hear Yoda talk about this: “Intimacy must more than sex be,” he says. “For many new dads the early months of fatherhood provide a challenge to expand their feelings about intimacy. Many new dads find it difficult to talk about sexuality with their wives. “I encourage you,” says Obi Wan Kenobe, “to talk about the sexuality in your relationship with your wife. As you go through life as a parent and adult there may be many conversations you have with your wife about the changing sexuality in your relationship.”

Now in case you hadn’t noticed, this is a huge Dragon! Redefining intimacy to expand it beyond the fireworks of courtship and early marriage is one of the hardest and most mature things for men to learn. It is hard for men to talk about. It will take a platoon of Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobe”s, Gandalfs and elves, because it’s not easy. It is probably the biggest dragon out there.

And then take time to get a message and sauna, say the elves. Take a walk with a friend and let him know what you have discovered about being a father.

Another fact to know is that during the first year of parenthood it is usual for a new father to reflect on how he was raised by his own father. Sometimes this is enjoyable; sometimes, it brings up other old dragons to wrestle with.

In the fifth month, Gandalf says, “Find 5 minutes a day to talk about how the day went for your wife and you. And you might plan a video “film festival.” You might enjoy comedies about family life, right about this time.”

In the sixth month, talk with your wife about the different “styles” of parenting you experienced as children. Conclude your discussion with a commitment to work out the way you will work as a team, together, in the family you have started. Or as Yoda puts it, “Better than one are two.”

Ask your wife to talk with you about what she loves and hates about being a mother for the first six months. Share the positive and negatives you have learned about fatherhood. More talking. This often seems unnatural, growing into a new and different role.

Then the elves say to make sure you are eating well and exercising. It is important to take care of your health and exercising will reduce stress. Stay active in your baby’s care; give him a bath, put him to sleep, Notice how you feel after you have done these.

The seventh month begins with this advice from Yoda: “To yourself kind be. Forget this not!”

The therapist says to find a Sunday morning to go out to breakfast and have a leisurely time together. Then come here to church. OK, I added that last part.

Find a baby sitter so you can be alone for at least two hours a week. Make sure that both you and your wife are getting time alone. You each need time to recharge.

At eight months, Obi Wan Kenobe says, you recognize how time consuming it is to have a baby. If you’re really quick, you may have noticed this earlier. Talk with your partner about what you feel are the biggest adjustments you each have to make as parents. See what you’re doing here? You’re learning to make this new role, the fatherhood role, learn to talk and relate to your partner in her new role as mother.

And take care of yourself. Are there one or two friends that you haven’t talked with in a while? Call them up and let them know how having a young baby makes “free” time or “hanging-out” very difficult. Reassure them that you are still their friend and ask them to understand that being a father is a big adjustment.

In the ninth month, the elves say to take a look at your body in the mirror. Are you taking care of yourself?

This is a dragon to slay, too: not to lose yourself in your role as father.

A tenth month tip is to take turns “sleeping-in” to try and keep up on your rest.

During the eleventh month, you are preparing for the conclusion of the hero’s quest, when you have redefined yourself as a father, and you and your wife have redefined your relationship as both parents and lovers. You may need to make time to see if you and your wife can quit being parents for a few hours each week and be a couple again, and get the habit started.

Moving back into a “couples relationship,” is the task of the eleventh month of fatherhood. You have defined yourselves around your child’s needs and now it is important to begin to look at your relationships not just as parents but as partners too. See if you can take the lead and ask your partner how she wants the two of you to grow as a couple as you approach your first year of parenting.

See if you and your wife can find a weekly activity to do together. Something that you can continue over time and that you both look forward to.

Begin to think about you baby’s first birthday and what friends you want to be there for you!

As the twelfth month begins, plan the first birthday party, and see that your baby’s first birthday is as much a celebration for you and your wife as for him. Gandalf says the first year of fatherhood is the most profound change you have gone through as a man. There have been many changes, you, your wife, and baby have gone through over the last year.

At the end of the hero’s quest, I want to go back to Joseph Campbell. “Wherever a hero has been born,” he writes, “the place is marked and sanctified. A temple is erected there”.” For this is the place where a man became a hero by slaying the dragons of his smaller self and helped give birth to a larger soul: a soul big enough to hold the new functions, and the new love. (Hero With a Thousand Faces, p.43)

What does becoming a hero mean? It’s the task, as Campbell put it, “of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life.” (Hero, p. 388)

The birth of a baby floods a mother and father with many new tasks, sometimes overwhelming them. The role of fatherhood seldom comes easily for a man. He must learn these new functions, build a bigger Self, learn to build a bigger kind of relationship with his partner.

But it isn’t about mechanics. It’s about building a bigger home for the spirit of life. It’s about building a soul big enough to hold the new love that grows with the birth of a child – the love that moves men to tears, even trying to talk about it.

A bachelor, a regular young married guy, couldn’t do it. Only a man who’s slain the required dragons can do this. He has become the kind of a man who can help save a new life, save a marriage, and transform our world, one father at a time.

Joseph Campbell says temples, markers are erected to mark the spot where a hero was born. And they’re present here, too. A baby just learning to walk, the mard miracle of a husband and wife who are beginning to reclaim their own relationship as lovers and partners – these are some of the markers. And people around you can feel this transformation. Like ripples in a pond, it carries the message, “Here something whole and courageous took place. Here, a father was born.”

You’re more than just men, guys; you’re heroes. Happy Father’s Day.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

May 21, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it.

We pretend, to our own amusement, that we’re not afraid of anything, that we’re certainly not afraid of anything that’s true, and that we want to build our lives on the foundations of those truths.

In some non-threatening ways, that’s true; in others, it is not, and we find a hundred ways silently to let other people determine what we should hear and know and do.

But we can live with second-hand truths and second-order visions for so long that we live second-hand and second-order lives. And nobody wants that.

And so. Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it. Here, now, today, tomorrow, always.

Amen.

SERMON: Where do we go from here?

Three weeks ago, I was the keynote speaker for the annual district meeting of the Ballou-Channing District in Southeast Massachusetts, and was asked to talk about where we go from here. It was a one-hour speech, on where liberal religion and liberal culture are today and how they got there, some critiques of the UUA – and I’m not sure many of you would be interested in hearing all that. If you are interested, you can read the whole speech on our website. But for this morning, I want to focus on some things that might be more useful.

The reason for asking questions like where we go from here is because, like all mainline religious denominations, ours has been losing members steadily for the past half-century. Though, since we’re much smaller, we’re more vulnerable. How small are we? Well, a recent Gallup poll showed that over fifteen times as many Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens than believe they are Unitarians. That’s small – though there may be some overlap in those figures. We might want to get a task force to study those aliens’ methods.

As to where we go from here, this has answers – very different answers – at three levels.

First, we can consider the largest, broadest context, and ask “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” Second, we can ask, more locally, “Where do we go from here as our local church in Austin?” And third, we can ask, “Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?”

A. First, where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?

One answer must be, “perhaps nowhere.” Everything seems to point to a commitment to denial and a contentment with just dwindling away, not with a bang but a whimper. It’s a very real possibility.

More than half the churches in the Unitarian Universalist Association now have fewer than 100 members, so couldn’t pay a full-time salary to a minister. Yet new ministers are graduating from seminary with an average of $40,000 in educational loan debt from just the three-year seminary education, and need fulltime employment. I spent seven years in graduate school to get a Ph.D., and graduated owing only $17,500. But times and economics have changed. Today, a Ph.D. could cost students between $80,000 and $100,000. The ministry doesn’t pay well enough to cover such debts and have a decent standard of living, so very few students are likely to get PhD’s rather than just the 3-year seminary educations.

Last year, men and women were preparing for the UU ministry in 75 different institutions. That means that virtually all of our future ministers will simply be educated in Christian seminaries, learning the metaphors, symbols, and thought games of that religion rather than preparing for the post-Christian, pluralistic world we’re living in. That doesn’t look promising. Without having educational institutions that actually educate our ministers, we have no means of teaching a unique perspective, even if we could articulate one. I don’t see any way past this. How long do you think Roman Catholicism would last if 95% of their priests were educated in Buddhist schools?

Even the quarterly publication called the UU Voice – easily the most candid and self-critical of all our publications – may have to stop publishing, after forty years, because it costs $6,500 a year to publish it, and subscriptions aren’t covering it.

For these reasons and more, I think one serious answer to “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” is, “Nowhere. From here, we just continue to fade away.”

B. Where do we go from here as a local church?

This is more hopeful. People who study churches say that, as money gets tighter, the most vulnerable churches are the mid-sized churches. Large churches that have learned to operate as well-run businesses usually have big enough budgets, not only to weather storms, but also to hire the necessary help (as staff or consultants) to react pro-actively. Small churches of under 150 that exist as “family” churches can have the “familial” cohesion to stick together, with or without a minister. But mid-sized churches no longer have the simpler “single-family” cohesion, and lack the budget of larger churches. We are at the very low edge of what’s considered the “large church” category, needing about 200 more members and $200,000 more in our budget to be in a safer place.

Another answer at the “church demographics” level is that white-haired congregations are visibly grounded in the past, as churches with younger hair colors are more likely to be invested in the future. There is much talk within the UUA of a “commitment to growth,” and all seem to mean by this a desire to attract more younger people. But younger church cultures are very different. Young people have different priorities than older people: spiritually, socially, and economically.

I think it’s fair to say that a church structured for the future will be more comfortable for people in their 30s and 40s than it will be for people in their 60s to 80s. Small churches operate a lot like social organizations, in which The Guardians define the boundaries of both thought and behavior to fit their own comfort zones. Unless they can grow past that, they’ll never be very good or very stable large churches. This is one of our challenges in this church.

C. Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?

Here, the picture can be as intelligent, informed and optimistic as the individual seekers are.

The search for a religious center doesn’t have to start from scratch. Even a cursory study of the world’s great traditions shows us that religion does have an enduring subject matter. Its insights measure the quality of our lives and our worlds, for better and worse, whether we “believe in them” or not. Most of these truths do not seem to have changed much in recorded history. They seem to be species-specific traits and norms that most peoples of most times have recognized as inviolable, and which we also recognize as inviolable – though we seldom articulate these facts:

— Religion is a human enterprise, and a human invention. It is one of the ways in which we try to learn and practice ideals that can help us become more fully human. We can do it in god-talk or without using God-talk.

— The Way we seek is older than the gods, as Lao-tzu said.

— We want to learn how to relish the transient pleasures of life without becoming limited and defined by them, and how to nurture our life-giving circles of friends – as the Epicureans taught 2400 years ago.

— We know that neither we nor any supernatural agencies can control what life brings our way, so we should learn how to control our responses to life – as the Stoics taught.

— Most of us believe in “salvation through understanding,” as the Buddhists have taught. This is another way of saying we don’t want to check our brains outside the church door. We don’t want to check our hearts there, either.

— We need to be reminded – in the Roman Seneca’s magnificent phrase – that we are all limbs on the body of humanity, and we must learn to act accordingly.

— We know, but want to be reminded, that if only we could treat all others as our equals, our brothers and sisters, as “children of God,” that we could transform this world into a paradise – as Jesus taught in his concept of the “kingdom of God.”

All this requires boundaries a lot bigger than anyone’s comfort zone. It isn’t easy. It takes personal work. And world religions all think it’s hard – that there are hard demands, and that few are ever willing to do the work:

— Islam teaches the path as the razor edge of a sword stretched across an abyss.

— Jesus talked about the narrow way that few entered.

— Hinduism also speaks of the path as razor-edged, and has so many stories about how many lives you”d have to live, in order to get it right.

— Buddhists teach how hard it is just to wake up, to outgrow the comforting illusions of “our kind of people.” It’s at least as hard today, especially when the illusions of our kind of people provide the only clear “home” for most in liberal camps.

— And for Jews, the notion of being God’s “chosen people” meant God demanded more of them than others, not that they were special.

That personal hard work is how those traditions raise our sights to see and hear what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

Salvation by Character

Another answer to “where do we go from here?” comes from understanding religion as the search for a healthy kind of wholeness, to become a blessing to a world not made in our image. And from the start, the salvation story of most of the best prophets and sages has been the story of salvation by character. We are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens, and believe that doing so will make life more worth living, for ourselves and those we love. We are trying to get reconnected with a healthy kind of wholeness. This is about personal authenticity, the kind of authenticity that rejuvenates the world.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” or “Darwin” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the personal work. The gifts of all the world’s great prophets and sages are free, but they aren’t cheap. They can cost us our artificially small identities, and the comfort that comes with them.

We have never looked back with pride on religious liberals who didn’t go forward into new and uncharted territory during a crisis of religious expression. We don’t remember the names of the vast majority of Unitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists who stuck with “the old ways,” or got lost in their era’s religious fads. Those in the future will look back to assess us in the same way.

I consulted with some colleagues in preparing these notes, but didn’t get many promising visions from them. However, I did get a comment from the Rev. David Bumbaugh, who is Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, and it’s worth sharing:

“I believe we are confronted by three essential and inescapable questions: What do we profess? In whose behalf do we act? To whom or to what are we responsible? The first question requires that I continually seek to be as clear as I can be about the fundamental convictions that drive my actions and not settle for platitudes–either traditional responses or the seven principles. The second question drives me to broaden the scope of my concerns beyond the horizons of my comfort zone to include the lost, the marginalized, those who are least like me. If ministry is to be anything more than chaplaincy to those who can afford me, the answer to the second question – “In whose behalf do we act?” – must continually expand.”

David’s third question is the theological question, of what we are serving that transcends our own wishes, our own kind of people, our own time and place, and how we are to speak of it. Three hundred years ago, the reflexive answer would have been, “Well, religion is about God, of course!” But the world has changed. Now we are charged with trying to serve the spirit of life by once more looking not to the past but to the future, and offering a structure or style of religion that can build bridges to a bigger future rather than walls around old comfort zones.

Some have compared our times to living in The Wasteland, and that’s an interesting term. In the Middle Ages, when the Arthurian Grail Legend was born, they also described their times as the Wasteland. And what they meant by living in the Wasteland was living an inauthentic life, a second-hand life with hand-me-down beliefs and not enough information to know or even seek the truths we need. Their church and their ruler decided what information they could receive, which is one way to keep people powerless.

This is why heresy and courage are so important today. There can’t be any questions or inquiries that are forbidden.

I had breakfast and spent the morning with Norman Lear this past Friday. It was a treat because he’s been an idol of mine ever since he wrote and produced the “All in the Family” TV series 35 years ago. We talked about religion, and his concern that religion is failing us as a society. “So many devastating things are going on,” he would say, “why are all the pulpits so silent about it? Why are they all so afraid?” Bill Moyers and Bishop John Shelby Spong have all asked the same questions, and we don’t hear much from religious voices, unless you count Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

But it’s not enough to indict preachers. Not many people trust the media to tell us the truths we need to hear, either. And even fewer trust politicians or preachers to tell us unpopular truths.

We live in a time of fearful truths. Global warming, peak oil, our illegal invasion of Iraq built on stories we now know to have been lies, the reduction of our civil liberties, stories of our government eavesdropping on our phone calls, important questions about what happened on 9-11 and who was really behind it, stories about how fragile our economy is, how we are no longer respected by many of our longtime friends in the world: on and on. This web of unexamined truths is the Wasteland in which we live now, and it takes uncommon courage actually to want to hear some of these truths.

Yet the only hope we have for moving forward from here is having unrestricted access to all questions, all inquiries, and the courage to hear and deal with hard truths.

I don’t mean to point fingers, or to imply that we, of course, are all courageous and don’t fear anything. That isn’t true. We each have lines past which we simply become uncomfortable. And sometimes, we wish we could keep from hearing fearful truths. This is true for every one of us.

The religious myths of Western civilization are crumbling, and though scholars have written about it for over a century, it’s uncomfortable for many people to understand that the symbol God may not be useful or even coherent any more. Or that there’s no heaven, no afterlife, no supernatural magic as we were almost all taught as children. Don’t some of these things make you uncomfortable?

Maybe the Da Vinci Code doesn’t bother you when it suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married – and, as one scholar I know adds, that they had two children before they divorced and Jesus remarried.

But other stories can make you uncomfortable. This week, for instance, a respected member of this church sent me a news story about Morgan Reynolds. Reynolds was President Bush’s Labor Department Chief Economist and the former director of the Criminal Justice Center. He gave a speech to a standing-room-only audience of over 1,000 at the University of Wisconsin two weeks ago (6 March). He’s Emeritus professor of economics from Texas A&M, and doesn’t sound like a left-wing nut case. But he said that 9-11 was an inside job, and fingered Bush, Cheney and others for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9-11, as part of their plan to transform America to a command-and-control government, restrict civil rights, wage their imperialistic war in the Middle East, and the rest of it. (A reference link to milwaukee.indymedia.org was included here, but this linked page is no longer in existence (PR 1/19/2013.)

He said he believes some government insiders will come forward soon to tell their stories, that the information had been kept so compartmentalized that few had any idea of the scope of this administration’s plans for 9-11. If this proves to be true, it might be the most fearful truth in US history, and I think it would make every single American very uncomfortable and frightened. Though we may not find out whether it is true in our lifetimes.

Do you really want to know? Or would you rather be protected from these truths, if they do turn out to be true? Who would you trust to limit your access to this knowledge? The politicians? The media? Your neighbor? Anyone?

It was only five years ago that enough old government documents became declassified, including military communications from 1940 and 1941, to show pretty conclusively that Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack, that FDR wanted it to happen and helped it happen, sacrificing 2400 soldiers in Pearl Harbor, in order to rouse our country to enter World War II. That has made me very uncomfortable, and I can understand why the government and the media have not wanted to spread this story widely. (Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor [Free Press, 2001]).

But without these truths, we have no chance of understanding what is going on and how the strings are being pulled that move our world. Who would you trust to decide what you can’t hear, can’t know, can’t discuss? Anyone?

I hope not. Because where we go from here, as individuals, as churches, and as a society, can only have a hopeful future if we have the courage to hear fearful truths, and then together to figure out how to respond to them.

We really have a proud heritage, both as Americans and as religious liberals. We stand on the shoulders of giants who have pushed people to deal with truths they didn’t want to know, to cross over past their comfort zones when they didn’t want to. We look back to them with gratitude for the courage they showed when it was their turn.

Now it’s our turn. Where we go from here will depend on the quality of our understanding and our courage. As we move into the future, we need to spend less time worshiping history and more time making it.

Now see, you came here hoping to hear a safe talk about where other people might need to go from here. And now you find out that it was about you, all along. Welcome to our church!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

May 7, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. Mothers’ Day is next Sunday, when we have our annual Coming-of-Age and Bridging Services with our youth. And so today we are anticipating Mothers’ Day.

Let us join in an attitude of prayer:

We give thanks for mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;

For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;

And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

In anticipation of Mothers’ Day, let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

Amen

SERMON

This sermon came about because one of the mothers of young children in our church asked for it. At her suggestion, I arranged for a series of three lunches with a total of twelve mothers of young children, read one book I was assigned, and a long chapter in another book. Both the books and the live women brought up almost exactly the same subjects. Much of it was new to me, and some of it was almost painful to hear and read. (The books were Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner, 2005; and Naomi Wolf’s 2001 book Misconceptions, from which I read only the chapter “Calling it Fair.”)

Still, my sample – the live mothers as well as the book-mothers – is very limited. It’s only dealing with women married to men, even though there are many more kinds of motherhood. So this is a small start on a big and important subject. I’ll be mixing together the stories from live mothers and from book-mothers, which were all pretty similar, though the books went into more detail.

One of the most positive things in all the discussions was that there was almost no man-bashing. These women were grateful for their husbands’ love, care, and help. They all spoke of them as very good fathers.

One woman who couldn’t attend a lunch sent her comments by e-mail. “Having my first child,” she wrote, “filled me with a love I had never even imagined before, and it made me big enough to feel all that love. It opened me up to the whole world. And that big love is still with me. It didn’t disappear with the bottles and diapers. Many years later, it dawned on me that my own mother must feel that same love for me. (I still find comfort in this revelation.) I don’t think you have to have kids to get this “big love.” I’d like to think I would have gotten there on my own. But I do think having kids got me there a lot sooner.” The live mothers all shared this mother’s love for their children, the sense of expanded love it brought in them and a new appreciation for their own mothers.

Both the live mothers and the mothers reported on in the two books were mostly women born in the 60s and 70s. Some of them said one of the great things about growing up in an age of women’s rights with men who were sympathetic to the goals of feminism was that when they married, they felt that they married their best friends. It was an egalitarian marriage, where they were able to negotiate in a wider range of areas, both personal and professional, than their mothers or grandmothers had.

They developed a sense of Self, both in school and in their careers, that had been out of reach for most women before them.

Then the baby comes, and everything changes

One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Wolf, 227)

One woman said she could remember reading in all those books how some mothers in the first six weeks never got dressed and forgot to eat. She wondered what kind of women these were? How could anyone forget to eat, not find the time to take a shower or get dressed? It sounded as if these were some slovenly, preposterous women. “Then,” she said, “I had my first child and was completely overwhelmed by it, and didn’t find the time to eat or take a shower or get dressed.” (Wolf, p. 240)

Another said, “I always imagined that I would earn a graduate degree in early childhood education and begin teaching college or open my own day care after having my own family. In reality, I quit working a few months before my daughter was born. And I have never reentered the workforce on a full-time basis since that time. I found that earning enough to pay for day care was impossible.” (Warner, 50)

Many of the live- and book-mothers reported this sense that they might lose the dreams the feminism of their youth had given them. But the notion that motherhood can undermine personal ambitions isn’t new. I have a story of it from my own family – from my namesakes.

My grandparents, Grace Davidson and Clement Loehr, met as college students at the University of Iowa, around 1905. Clement was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry, but it was unusual to find many women in college a century ago. Growing up, Grace’s siblings (who were our favorite great-uncles and great-aunts) allowed as how, while both Grace and Clement were bright and good people, Grace had the quicker mind, the richer intellect, and was more ambitious.

My younger half-sister Grace once spent a year or so researching the life of her namesake, who died when Grace was a child. She found that after the birth of Grandma Gracie’s fourth child, she had a nervous breakdown. She realized that she would never be able to pursue her own ambitions: that she was simply going to be a mother, and a minister’s wife. She had seven children in all, pretty much ran the family, and – in her 60s by the time I remember her – a hard edge. At the time, I didn’t like her. Looking back, I see her hard edge as having been honed by spending all her adult life suppressing the anger – or fury – of losing the dreams that first drove her to graduate from college, and my heart goes out to her.

Author Naomi Wolf put it this way: “The baby’s arrival acted as a crack, then a fissure, then an earthquake, that wrenched open the shiny patina of egalitarianism in the marriages of virtually every couple I knew.” (Wolf, 226)

When the husband of one of Naomi Wolf’s friends’ started taking Fridays off to help with the baby, the women celebrated him as a demi-god. To the other husbands, she began to realize, the fact that he could afford to take Fridays off meant his job wasn’t that important. To the men – these egalitarian, pro-feminist men – he was a loser. (Wolf, 227)

The mothers all said it was a 24/7 job that at times just seemed overwhelming. They had no time for themselves; they lost themselves. Nursing an average of every two hours made them sleep-deprived. They had no idea it would be this all-consuming.

I thought of this last weekend while driving through New Hampshire, following a black SUV with a personalized license plate that said KIDLIMO, and a single bumper sticker that read, “Every Mother is a Working Mother.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising to find that “Mother’s little helpers,” by a few years ago, had become drugs, especially methamphetamine, or crystal meth, which in 2002 was named the drug of choice for supermoms. (129) Nobody can do it alone – it’s hard enough for a couple. Generations ago, many people lived within extended families, where grandparents lived nearby and were available when the parents needed some parenting, comfort, or reliable babysitting. What a blessing it could have been to have some people around who loved you, had been through all this themselves, and were able and eager to help out!

One woman said an image that kept coming into her mind was of a teapot, tipped over, with the last drop hanging from its lip: “Tip me over and pour me out”. Other times she imagined herself to be a little generator with another tiny appliance plugged into her, sucking energy. And yet her own power source had been disconnected. (Wolf, 247)

Both in the books and at the three lunches, women said they had little hands all over their body all day, and by night many found they were “all touched out” and just wanted their body left alone. “Being touched related to being needed, and I was giving all I had to give to the baby. There was nothing left for Daddy.” (Judith Warner, p. 127) All of this is often a very unpleasant surprise for their husbands. It redefined sexiness in unexpected ways.

For instance, one sociological study found that “Women find men’s willingness to do their share of the housework erotic.” (Wolf, 243) When I mentioned this at one of our lunches, the response was “You bet! You want some loving? Do the dishes! Do the dishes, put away the clothes I washed, and I’ll be all over you!” For men, this is a whole new, and strange, definition of foreplay!

When I asked our mothers here what kind of gifts they wanted for Mothers’ Day, the question didn’t get an immediate response. Then one woman said, “Time! Eight hours alone! Even four hours alone!” Another said the greatest gift she received in the first year after the birth of her child came from an older woman friend, who gave her permission to stop breastfeeding, and use formula!

Another mother had given a gift to herself. When she returned to work, she reclaimed the Self she had had before motherhood, as an attractive, competent, professional woman. She kept a pair of high-heeled shoes in her car, and when she left home for work, put them on, to help enter her other persona. At night, driving home, she’d change back into her low-heel Mommy Shoes.

And you can’t talk about mothering today without mentioning the word “guilt.” All the women spoke of feeling guilty, and of “competitive mothering,” of being judged by other mothers, other women. They were expected to be perfect, and they often felt that they were struggling just to be adequate.

And some of the books on child-rearing just add to the guilt, without empowering the mothers. There are books with terrible advice in any field, but it was a little shocking to be introduced to some of the “experts” in the field of child-rearing, where the “scientific” fads change with every generation.

T. Berry Brazelton, one of the country’s leading authorities on how to care for infants over the past thirty or forty years, wrote of mothers in the highlands of Mexico, who breastfeed up to 70 to 90 times a day. He added, “That’s being “there” for the baby!” And none of this – none of the going and cooing and crawling and bonding and talking and singing and Popsicle-stick-gluing – would work, would mean a thing, he and others wrote, if it was not done with absolute joy, with “great delight and pleasure,” at each and every moment in the day.” (Warner, 71)

Is it any wonder that 70 percent of mothers surveyed in 2000 said they found motherhood “incredibly stressful”? (Warner, 71)

Earlier, Perhaps Saner, Child-rearing Models

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, never before in America – not even in the much-maligned 1950s – has motherhood been conceived in this totalizing, self-annihilating, utterly ridiculous way. (Warner, 71)

The experts of the 1960s held that mothers should set limits on their children’s behavior and on their own level of maternal enmeshment. (79)

The experts (in the 1970s) agreed that unhappy mothers produced unhappy children. (Warner, 84)

The majority opinion in the 1970s was that the key to maternal self-fulfillment was work outside the home. Some experts even opined that working mothers were better mothers than stay-at-home moms. Child psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim, for one, said that the enforced selflessness of stay-at-home motherhood was ill-suited for educated women – or their children. (Warner, 85-86)

In the 1970s and 1980s, many mainstream baby boomer women prided themselves on breaking with the sacrificial roles that they saw their mothers having played. (Warner, 83) The 1980s were about “self-actualizing, self-fulfilled motherhood.” (Warner, 88) By 1986, a majority of all women with children under age three were in the workforce. (Warner, 89)

By the mid-1980s, mainstream women’s magazines were citing studies showing that working moms were happier, healthier, and less stressed than nonworking mothers. And then, somehow, everything changed. (Warner, 90)

Suddenly, as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the word “guilt” was everywhere in the magazine stories on motherhood. It was guilt about working, guilt about not being there enough for the children. Working mothers were no longer heroines. They were called villains, selfish and “unnatural.” (Warner, 91)

One woman writing in a 1994 book even compared leaving a baby in a daycare center to the trauma of a child whose mother had died! (Penelope Leach, Children First) (Warner, 99) Against the long history of child-rearing ideologies in our society, this reads – to me, at least — like irresponsible, hysterical, drivel.

Though leaving children in a daycare center is a far more expensive option than most couples can afford, and getting high quality childcare workers is even harder.

And that’s because the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230) The Family Leave Act we have lets women take off three months, but without pay. Not many families can afford to do that. You can’t talk about the pressures on parents without talking about the anti-life priorities of our economy.

And daycare is only the tip of an ugly iceberg. The women who provide daycare often do so by putting their own children in even cheaper, less adequate daycare – or leaving them behind, thousands of miles away. As Naomi Wolf put it:

Meanwhile, the children of the army of private and day care caregivers are watched by worse-paid baby-sitters, or by grandmothers, or by relatives in countries far away – in Ecuador and India, in the Caribbean and Central America and the Phillipines. (Wolf, p. 257)

I learned that if I sat in the park with our baby and chatted with an immigrant nanny who was wiping the drool of a white baby, or teaching a white toddler to share, within minutes she would show a photograph of her own children far away, whom she may not have seen for years. And her eyes would fill with tears. (Wolf, p. 258)

When it came to who would take care of the kids, capitalism happened to the women’s movement, and a real gender revolution did not. (Wolf, p. 260)

Last week, USA Today carried an article called “Till Debt Do Us Part,” about how the tensions created by debt may be the biggest single reason many marriages end. (USA Today, 29 April 2006)

And yesterday’s New York Times had a story that talked about a 38 percent increase nationally in home foreclosures in the first quarter of this year over the same period in 2005. Florida had the second-largest number of foreclosures in the nation during that period – 29,636 – behind Texas, which had 40,236. We’re Number One. (From NY Times 6 May 06, “Statistics Aside, Many Feel Pinch of Daily Costs,” by Jennifer Steinhauer.)

Once again, to repeat the quote we can’t hear enough times, the US is “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.” (Wolf, 230)

Maybe you think we”ve just never cared about families, or that figuring out how to support them is too hard. But in fact, we did all this during World War II. And we did it quickly – almost intuitively, it seems – and well.

In order to help women join the workforce, the government provided “services – from shopping to laundry, cleaning facilities, a catering kitchen, and child care centers – in each neighborhood clustered as close together as possible and supplemented by family health and recreation facilities.” There was even a mending service for the kids’ torn clothing; and on the way home, the tired mother could pick up a nourishing hot meal, prepared and packed for her at the center, to bring home along with her children! (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 232)

After the war, the men needed their jobs back” and this elaborate, smoothly-operating and highly successful solution to the work-family problem was simply shut down. Not even a memory remained in most history books to give women a blueprint with which to agitate for a comparable solution, nor to remind all of us that such a thing could be done. (Wolf, 232)

But we don’t have to wait sixty years to forget important facts. The current often hysterical crop of child-rearing gurus seem to have forgotten that there’s no proof that children suffered in the past because their mothers put them in playpens. There’s no proof that children suffer today because their mothers work. None of the studies conducted on the children of working mothers – in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – have ever shown that a mother’s work outside of home per se has any impact upon her child’s well-being. (The quality of care a child receives while the mother’s away, on the other hand, has a major impact on that child’s well-being, but that’s a whole other story.)

Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for themselves, their children, and their husbands. All of this research has been around for decades. (Warner, 133) So has research suggesting that women are happier and healthier when they follow their own needs, whether to work or to be at-home mothers. The message seems to be, if you feel that you should be a stay-at-home mother, then you probably should be. If you feel that you need to return to work, whether full or part-time, then you probably should.

It’s like the instructions in airplanes. When the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own mask first, then help others. Children need happy mothers, not obsessive ones. So do the mothers, and so do the husbands.

And so it’s the Sunday before Mothers’ Day, and we have a week to anticipate the actual day. What can we say, what can I say, to the mothers of young children in the church and elsewhere?

First, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Motherhood is harder than I knew, harder than many of us know, and because we live in the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy, the weight of raising children falls on parents, and especially on mothers. So thank you.

And about the guilt. The guilt that follows you like a buzzard because there’s too much to do, and you can’t do it perfectly, the guilt that’s always with you, either in the foreground or the back of your mind – my God, you’re forgiven! You’re forgiven! Don’t accept that guilt. Every mother I know is doing about all she knows how to do, and that’s enough! You are being treated like the scapegoats of a society that will not put its money where its mouth is, a society whose behavior and economic priorities show how brutally and completely it ignores the services needed to support a healthy and happy family life in our country. And so all the failings are often dumped on you, and they can drive you crazy. Don’t let them. You’re doing the best you can, and that’s enough. You’re forgiven.

Now we have one week in which to anticipate this year’s Mothers’ Day, a week to consider the high human costs of living in “the only industrialized country without national maternity benefits, paid leave, or a coherent day care policy.”

And a week to consider what gifts we might want to offer – to our mothers, our wives, our friends with children, and to the economic priorities of our greedy country.

So much to think about. So many mothers who could use a gift. So much time. In the meantime and in anticipation of that time – Happy Mothers’ Day.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

April 23, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Help us to love what we cannot understand. Help us stretch the largeness of our hearts to make up for the smallness of our comprehension.

Too often and too eagerly, we restrict our acceptance to the narrow limits of what we can understand, touching only small parts of the bigger world around us. Too often and too eagerly, we also restrict our love to our kind of people, touching only a tiny sliver of the need around us.

When the narrowness of our certainty stifles the certainty of our need for one another, we need help. We need help toward a greater understanding, but even more, we need help toward acting out of a larger heart.

And the good news is that where our heart can lead, our mind can learn to follow.

Let us seek the help we need, within and around us, to let our hearts learn to lead. For even more than the world needs understanding, it needs compassion.

Amen.

SERMON: Denial is Not a River in Egypt

I’m trying to do some very ambitious things with you this morning, so I need you to work with me. I thought that in the next thirty minutes, we might cover the nature of all human knowledge, religious and scientific certainty and denial, discrimination and bigotry, the degradation of the environment, and the nature of the kingdom of God. I’ve tried to cut this down from its original length of nine years.

As far-fetched as that sounds, those really are some of the themes that can be woven together here. So I’m talking about very broad patterns that I see, and think I can get you to see.

Here’s what I think we want in life. We want to believe we know and live out of truth rather than self-deceptions, that we stand foursquare behind justice, goodness and love, and that we, our beliefs and our actions help – in our small way – to make this a better world.

We do it by knowing what’s true and good, and trying our best to serve what is true and good.

However, built in to the very way we are built, and the very way we try to serve truth and goodness, are all of the ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, indifference to the political, social, military and environmental situations, nearly all the evil in the world – as well as all of the good – and the enduring enemy of the Kingdom of God. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound encouraging.

Here’s how it works; see if you agree. I’ll start kind of abstractly, then bring it down to earth.

When we find the truth, in any area, then we become certain. We want, we need, to feel certain about these things. And our attitude of certainty is like a kind of spirit or feeling that guides both our thoughts and actions. I don’t mean just narcissistically. I don’t mean that we each just go into a small room, decide what we like, then lurch out and foist it onto the world. We’re social animals, and we touch many more bases in deciding what is true and gaining our deep feeling of certainty about it all.

When we develop our picture of the world, which defines not only what is true and false but even what counts as reasonable or sane, it is like building a big tub around us, a big wooden barrel, with a lot of staves in it. You could think of it as a fence or as walls that define the boundaries of our world, but I have a poem later that describes it as a tub, so I want to get us imagining our world as a tub around us.

Think of the things involved that give you your most distinctive feelings of certainty. Here’s the list I made for myself; see how many other staves in this tub of reality you”d add. We get our picture of our world from:

Role models and charismatic figures. We”ve all had a few wonderfully life-giving people in our lives, and if you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself guided by what actions you think they would advise.

People we love and admire draw us toward their ideals and beliefs. We want to feel like we’re in their community, and their beliefs have a greater pull on us than the beliefs of people we didn’t really admire.

Parents and family shape the world into which we’re born, and which we take to be normative when we’re growing up – and sometimes for our whole lives. So they influence our picture of ourselves and our world – for better or for worse.

Clergy – also for better or worse – help give us our understanding of who we are and how we should live, or what sorts of “gods” we will feel beholden to.

Respected teachers and elders help shape our world. Some years back, I was talking about this in a sermon, and mentioned one of the really magical teachers I had long ago – a 9th grade English teacher named Mrs. Williamson, and talked a little about what a powerful and affirming presence her memory still was. After the sermon – which I delivered in St. Paul, Minnesota – a woman about my age came up to me and said “Did you go to May Goodrell Jr. High in Des Moines?” She was sure – and she was right – that there could only have been one such Mrs. Williamson, who she’d had a year or two after I did. The best teachers not only inform us; they also help form us.

Friends: we usually feel odd if our beliefs put us outside the circle of the people we like and admire, and will tend to stay near beliefs that leave us within a community we value.

Education forms us: not only what we learned, but also where and how we learned it. Those who learned civics during World War II probably got a very different picture of it than those who learned it during the Vietnam War.

Religious scriptures and guiding stories – even novels, movies and television stories – shape our expectations more than most of us want to realize. That can be a fairly scary thought.

And logic. We all have a sense of how our beliefs relate, and for most of us there needs to be some kind of logic connecting the things we believe. We need to feel that what we take to be true is really connected with the way the world really is.

You may think of other staves in the tub that defines your world of truth and certainty, but I suspect it would contain at least these? And when a new idea presents itself, see if you don’t find yourself almost unconsciously doing a mental checklist to see if the people you most admire would respect this new idea, if you can see a compelling logic in it, if it fits with the other things of which you’re quite certain, and so on. In a way, we try to test each new idea against our community and our world to see if it should be admitted, because each truth we hold forms a part of the tub within which we live.

This idea of a tub isn’t meant to imply that we couldn’t leave it or think thoughts that didn’t fit in it, but why would we want to? There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, after all, and we try to keep our beliefs coherent enough that they have some family resemblances with the people and ideas that ground our notion of reality. You could think of our tub as a form of life, as some philosophers call it (from Ludwig Wittgenstein), or a form of living: the way we and our people have chosen to shape and edit what we include in our world and our awareness. But the point is that the picture of the world we live in – our tub – is always much smaller than the real world is.

Now if all this is too abstract, you can also think of this as the Davy Crockett School of Certainty and Action. In Texas, we know of Davy Crockett as one of the heroes at the Alamo, and don’t much think of him as a philosopher. But he had a very simple motto that applies to nearly all of us. Davy Crockett’s famous motto was “Just be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” You’re right, and you have that necessary feeling of certainty about it. And when you’re sure you’re right, you know it’s safe to go ahead.

Two areas where you could expect to find the most compelling sense of certainty might be among religious mystics and scientists. Mystics, because once they are certain that they are in touch or in tune with God, almost nothing can shake them. And scientists, because they have to ground their beliefs in empirical data and check them with the whole host of other scientists within their discipline. This includes checking the inherent logic of a new idea, whether it fits with what they are already certain about, whether the most admired scientists would be likely to agree, and so on.

This can mean that some bright young scientist may come along with a new idea that simply can’t pass the test, and they get their feelings hurt when their brilliant idea is rejected or even laughed at. But honest science isn’t about bending the truth to fit someone’s feelings. It’s about seeking facts and coherent, persuasive logic that fits the way the real world is put together.

One of my favorite stories from science is this kind of a story, involving one of the most famous scientists in the world, and a bright, assertive young man who tried to get an idea past him that couldn’t pass muster. It’s a story that contains most of what I’m trying to talk about this morning.

It happened back in 1935, in the field of theoretical astrophysics, and involved Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest mathematical minds in history. Eddington, at 52, was generally acknowledged as the world’s finest astronomer, and his book on the structure of stars was the classic in its field. The other character in the story was a very bright 24-year-old student from India named Chandrasekhar, or Chandra. He had been studying the structure of stars for only a few years, since he won Eddington’s book as a prize in a school physics contest – so you get a feel for the great distance between their levels of accomplishment in astronomy. But the young man was not shy, and had been discussing a radical new theory of his with Eddington for several months by mail. Eddington finally invited him to London, to present his paper before the prestigious Royal Astronomical Society at Cambridge. Eddington even told Chandra that he had used his influence to get extra time so the young man could present his work properly.

The day before the presentation, when a copy of the printed program was released, Chandra discovered that Eddington had placed himself on the program, following Chandra, and speaking on the same subject.

Chandra’s paper dealt with a fundamental question: What happens after a star has burned up all of its fuel? According to the prevailing theory of the day, the cooling star would collapse into a dense ball called a white dwarf. A star with the mass of the sun, for instance, would shrink to the size of the earth, at which point it would reach equilibrium. Chandrasekhar concluded, however, that the enormous gravitational forces at work in a large star (any star more than 1.4 times as massive as our sun) would cause the star to go on collapsing beyond the white dwarf stage. The star would simply keep getting smaller and smaller and denser and denser until” well, that was an interesting question, and Chandrasekhar delicately avoided it.

Then it was Eddington’s turn.

The point of his paper was that Chandra’s ideas had simply been absurd, and he proceeded to tear apart Chandrasekhar’s paper. The speech was frequently interrupted by laughter from the other scientists. Eddington couldn’t quarrel with Chandrasekhar’s logic or calculations. But he claimed that the whole theory had to be wrong simply because it led to an inevitable and outlandish conclusion. And one measure of Eddington’s brilliance was that he could see the logical implications of the paper better than Chandra could: “The star,” he said, “has to go on radiating and radiating and contracting and contracting until, I suppose, it gets down to a few kilometers radius, when gravity becomes strong enough to hold in even the radiation, and the star can at last find peace.” And no such object could possibly exist, said Eddington. A logical reduction to absurdity, he called it. And he added, in one of my favorite statements in the history of science, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Do you see what Sir Arthur Eddington had done? He tested the new theory against a whole line of staves in his tub, against all he knew to be true, the logic demanded in science as he understood it, the style of reasoning that was necessary, even the reactions of a room full of some of the most distinguished scientists in the world, who joined him in raucously laughing down this odd new idea.

But that’s how science, or any good search for truth, works. It is no respecter of people’s feelings, just the facts as understood by those who have authority and are certain: the Davy Crocketts of their sciences.

The argument with Eddington dragged on for years, ruined any chance of Chandra’s getting a tenured teaching position in England, and finally persuaded him to give up the subject altogether. So, shortly after being hired by the University of Chicago in 1937, he put the theory in a book and stopped worrying about it, and switched his research to other and unrelated fields, where the weight of Eddington’s authority had not poisoned the well. And he had a very distinguished career.

Then, in 1983, Chandrasekhar, still at the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, for the work he had done back in 1935, 48 years earlier. What he had discovered, that Eddington said couldn’t exist, were black holes. The greatest mind in astronomy had been wrong, and the force of his dogmatic but incorrect opinion set back research on black holes for five decades. He couldn’t quarrel with Chandra’s logic or calculations, remember: he opposed the results simply because, as he said, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Eddington, like Casey at the bat, had struck out completely – though it took nearly half a century to find out, and the Nobel Prize wasn’t awarded to Chandra until 39 years after Eddington had died; so Eddington had spent the rest of his life certain that he was right.

The year before he won the Nobel Prize, Chandra looked back and tried to draw some conclusions from the story for an interview in the magazine Science 82. How can scientists of Eddington’s caliber be so wrong, and in such unscientific ways?

“For lack of a better word,” Chandra wrote, “there seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature which people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science which must therefore be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.

“Take Eddington. He was a great man. He said that there must be a law of nature to prevent a star from becoming a black hole. Why should he say that? Just because he thought it was bad? Why does he assume that he has a way of deciding what the laws of nature should be? Similarly, this often-quoted statement of Einstein disapproving of quantum theory: “God does not play dice.” How does he know? I think one could say that a certain modesty toward understanding nature is a precondition to the continued pursuit of science.”

From inside a worldview or paradigm or set of biases – scientific or otherwise – we see a wall made of our certainties that gives us an island of what passes for reason and sanity in a world too big to comprehend. That’s that small world within which we know who we are and what is most true, and I’m not sure we could live without it.

But from the outside, that same wall is seen as our tub of denial: denial of the fact that the world is far bigger than our little certainties. Our tub closes the world out and shuts us up inside of our certainties. It defines what counts as true and sane for us, and also defines how woefully inadequate our little world is.

Here’s why I’ve wanted to think of our small worldview as a tub: because I have a poem to read you. It was written about twenty years before Eddington’s first disastrous meeting with Chandra, and describes what happened to Eddington, and what happens to so many of us.

It is taken from a 1916 book by Edgar Lee Masters called Spoon River Anthology. It’s a wonderful book, though an odd one. There is no story, no plot. The whole book is a collection of fictional epitaphs from the fictional town of Spoon River, in which the dead speak through their epitaphs about their lives, and life in general. One of my favorites was the epitaph of Griffy the Cooper:

“Griffy the Cooper”

from Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters (1916)

The cooper should know about tubs.

But I learned about life as well,

And you who loiter around these graves

Think you know life!

You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,

In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.

You cannot lift yourself to its rim

And see the outer world of things,

And at the same time see yourself.

You are submerged in the tub of yourself-

Taboos and rules and appearances,

Are the staves of your tub.

Break them and dispel the witchcraft

Of thinking your tub is life!

And that you know life!

This is one way of understanding the human condition, the human dilemma. We live within small pictures of a universe that is sometimes infinitely larger than we can imagine. Still, those world pictures give us our sense of order, of home, of who we are and how we should live and how others should live. From the inside, we call it creating order out of chaos, and the order we impose through our world pictures, our paradigms, our biases, lets us feel at home, feel certain, even feel sane.

But from the outside, our wall of certainties looks like a wall of denial, of willful ignorance, or an unwillingness or inability to be moved enough by the vastness of it all that we can react not only with our minds, but also with our hearts. Griffy the Cooper nailed it when he said that we can’t lift ourselves to the rim of our tub and see the outer world of things, and at the same time see ourselves and feel at home.

I can’t think of any field of human knowledge that isn’t built this way: science, religion, music, art, architecture – everything, I think.

In religion, orthodoxy is the tub, heresy is the voice from one looking over the rim of the tub, trying to make a home in a bigger world. And the very bigness of that world is what threatens the adequacy and the comfort of the small world of orthodoxy.

In society, our world pictures, our tubs, tell us which kind of people and behaviors are acceptable and which are wrong. Our tub tells us what roles men and women may play, what kind of people we can and can not love, what sexes, sexual orientations or races are superior to the others, and all the rest of it. And we’re so sure we’re right, that we’re often dangerous to those who lives go beyond our understanding.

Yesterday was Earth Day, and our understanding of our environment is limited or enhanced in the same way. Is the earth here for us to plunder and have dominion over, or for us to be good stewards of, as though our lives depended on it?

A growing number of scientists are warning us that our greedy and uncaring treatment of our earth may have consequences more devastatung than we can imagine. If the arctic ice caps melt, they say Florida and New Jersey may be buried under twenty feet of water. Can we see over the rim of our complacency about using the lion’s share of the earth’s oil and energy in time to make a positive rather than a negative difference? Before our tub gets flooded? Or maybe we can’t think that far, like Eddington couldn’t.

When we reach the end of our intellectual tether, and our understanding can’t include a world bigger than our mind can fathom, almost every religion in the world agrees that it is time to turn it over to our hearts.

Buddhists say when we are faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the compassionate thing, we should do the compassionate thing. Jesus said What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies. And of course the irony here is that if you love your enemies, they are no longer your enemies, and you may have found, together, the power to transform the world.

No matter what religion you turn to, I think you’ll find this same advice. Poets like Edgar Lee Masters were twenty years ahead of Sir Arthur Eddington; sages and prophets like the Buddha and Jesus were aeons ahead of nearly everyone. Beyond the tub of our certainties lie the much bigger worlds that need our compassion and protection. And the ability to love beyond our understanding is the path – many believe it is the only path – toward that idyllic larger picture of the world known as the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God: the state of affairs where we simply treat all other people as our brothers and sisters, as children of God, and treat the entire earth as the handiwork of God, placed in our trust for loving care.

Even more than understanding the world, we are called on to take care of it, so that our presence might bless it rather than cursing it. That may still be the only path toward what Jesus called the kingdom of God – and a great deal more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

April 16, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Easter of our hearts, speak to us. Tell us once again, when we need the gift of spring, that spring is here. Tell us once more, when we need to feel new life, that new life is moving, and can move into us if we will but open our hearts.

Tell us again the timeless story of Easter, about that magical bunny that lays brightly colored eggs of spring, and offers them to all who can find them as food for the spiritual journey as we begin our own Easters.

For it is Easter in our own hearts and lives that we need. Otherwise all these ancient stories are a bore and a nuisance. We want the good news that life can conquer death here and now, in our lives, in our relationships, in our society, and in our world. Bring us the flowers and the colored eggs that deliver that message, oh Easter spirit.

For it is again Easter. And once more we gather not to hear the same stories, but to bring the same needs, and to hope there will be stories to feed them, or maybe even a gift to take home with us – a gift, like a flower of spring.

It is Easter again, and we need an Easter. So we will open our minds and hearts to the possibility of the gift of renewed life. Then come to us, our Easter friends. Come. Amen.

SERMON: Doing Easter in 2006

I have a friend who is a professor of New Testament, who tells her classes each year in early spring that the way they can tell when Easter is coming is that the media will run some new and strange stories about who Jesus really was, or suggesting a new shocking story showing that the Christian story shouldn’t be trusted, or just run weird stories about religion in general.

So last week, right on schedule, three different stories appeared. There was the verdict in the plagiarism case against Dan Brown which we’ve all been breathlessly awaiting, in which the jury decided that he did not steal illegally from other authors (who stole from an Australian religion religion scholar named Barbara Thiering) the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married, and had at least two children before Mary moved to southern France.

Then there was the National Geographic story about the newly translated Gospel of Judas, suggesting that Jesus and Judas were good buddies, and Jesus told Judas to turn him over to the authorities, so that the Christian story could play out and God, by God, was in charge of everything. I’ve read it. It’s a boring little gospel, quite late, with a strong dose of homophobia, but nothing at all to offer in understanding Jesus, Judas or anything else that happened in the first century.

Third, an author named James Tabor, in excerpts from his forthcoming book, The Jesus Dynasty, writes in breathless prose about raiding two first-century family tombs enclosed under a Jerusalem apartment complex. He suggests they may be the tombs of Jesus and his family, and wants the authorities to do DNA testing to prove it, however that would work! The authorities have declined.

Here in town, as part of keeping Austin weird, there was a special showing of the 1979 Monty Python movie “The Life of Brian,” the mocking farce about Brian, who happened to be born on Christmas in the stable next door to Jesus and spent his life being mistaken for a messiah. That played Friday night and last night, as run-ups to Easter.

And on the way to church this morning, one of our couples passed a billboard which simply said “Way to go, Jesus. Rock on, Dude!” It’s beginning to look like when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

So. A titillating court cast, a scandalous, goofy gospel, a cemetery raid on the tomb of some hapless first-century Jerusalem family, a farcical movie about baby Jesus’ non-messianic baby neighbor, and a billboard that may have been about Brian rather than Jesus, but which is pretty much off the charts in any case.

That’s how we do Easter in 2006.

But there’s something odd here. Can you think of other holidays that are preceded by media stories mocking them or belittling their importance? I’ve never seen Veterans’ Day preceded by programs and cover stories belittling the sacrifice of veterans or making light of the number of them dying in our current war. You can’t even imagine it. It would offend almost everyone in the country, in the world.

Could you imagine, Mother’s Day being preceded by stories making fun of mothers or motherhood, or making light of the work they do? There are the “Mommy Wars” about the best way to be a mother, but there aren’t any attacks on the idea of motherhood that I know of. If there were, there would be riots demanding the head of the publisher and boycotts of the sponsors. For that matter, can you imagine stories mocking romantic love before Valentine’s Day? Or stories in mid-June ridiculing fathers before Fathers’ Day?

We don’t do this, we don’t allow this, for holidays we really take seriously. There may be some anti-US-policy protests around the 4th of July, but the protestors would say they are doing it because they do believe in all that America can be, but not because they want to make fun of the very idea of America.

When you look at the stories behind some of our holidays, some of them stand out as decidedly different. Almost all are about real things that happen in the real world we’re living in. All but two.

Valentine’s day celebrates romantic love between couples

Mothers’ Day recognizes the work and sacrifice of mothers all over the country.

Fathers’ Day does the same for fathers.

Veterans’ Day expresses appreciation for the sacrifice of our war veterans.

Memorial Day recognizes the ultimate sacrifice of the loss of our soldiers’ lives in our various wars.

The 4th of July celebrates the gaining of independence in 1776 through the bravery and dedication of the soldiers, families and citizens of this country.

Thanksgiving is some people’s favorite holiday, because it’s always appropriate to give thanks for our blessings in life, even for the simple blessing of food – today as much as at the first Thanksgiving.

And we don’t mock those holidays. They’re about real things going on in the real world, and we genuinely value and believe in them.

Now Christmas has two unrelated stories, but only one we seem to care about, judging from our behavior. The religious story says once a baby was born of a woman who had never had sex, whose father was a god up in heaven and who would be what some people in one religion call the savior of everyone, though nobody else believes it. Judging by the advertising and decorations each Christmas, and by the kinds of presents we but and expect, almost nobody believes or cares much about the religious story.

The story we love each December, however, is the story of the real center of Christmas: Santa Claus, who travels all over the world in his sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer so he can bring presents down everyone’s chimney – even those who don’t have chimneys. He gives a lot of presents to everybody and has children sitting on his lap in every shopping mall. That’s the real story of Christmas; the story of baby Jesus has virtually no effect on the observable behavior of the overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of religion.

Easter is also made up of two unrelated stories. The religious one is the story of a man who died and then three days later came back to life and then went up into heaven. Once again, looking at the advertising, decorations, gifts and cards we buy and send, almost nobody seems to care much about the religious story. But the other story, the real Easter story, is the story about a bunny who lays colored eggs, and about people dressing in spring colors, hunting for colored eggs, buying lots of chocolate, and taking flowers home from church, as we’ll do here today.

The very way we treat the religious stories under Christmas and Easter shows that really, in this world, we don’t believe them. They’re different kinds of holidays about a different and imaginary world. Of course, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny also come from make-believe worlds, and we don’t believe them literally, either. But they’re better stories, and do a better job at communicating with us messages we want and need to hear. The religious story, not so much.

We’re taught that Easter is a Christian holiday, but it isn’t true. It isn’t even close. And the place where you’ll read this in the angriest prose is on a whole host of evangelical and biblical Christian websites. If you go online and consult evangelical and fundamentalist Christian sources, they are clear and unanimous that Easter is a completely pagan holiday with absolutely no relation to Jesus, dating back thousands of years to the Babylonian and Chaldean goddess Ishtar – which, they say, was pronounced “Easter.”

Ishtar was a mythological character of the Babylonian or Sumerian religion which existed thousands of years before Jesus lived. She was the goddess of spring; she had rabbits that laid eggs. The eggs symbolized a new life and the colored eggs signified a wish for a bright new year ahead. Both the rabbit and the egg are pagan symbols of sex and fertility.

Sunrise services go back to these ancient practices of welcoming the spring, too. And some say coloring eggs in bright spring colors is also an ancient practice, and related to wearing bright spring colors today.

Many Christians agree that Easter isn’t Christian, and say people obviously don’t take the Christian story as seriously as stories of spring, life, bunnies, colored eggs and flowers. They say it as though it’s a bad thing.

But it isn’t a bad thing. The story about sunrise, spring, bunnies, colored eggs, flowers and having spring in our hearts – this is the story people prefer to the one about a man who died and came back to life.

What is the Easter message? Ironically, it is very traditional; it just isn’t religious. It’s the natural and psychological story of spring coming back in our world and in our lives, a victory of life over death, spring over winter, tender flowers and colored eggs and magical fertility symbols. It looks like that’s always been the message of Easter.

Why? Because these must have been the symbols of these spring festivals from the first time rabbits and eggs became part of it. And with similar props and symbols, the messages people have heard at this season must have been very similar for thousands of years. Messages of spring, the return of life, symbols of sex and fertility, the gift of life offered free to all of us – these have been the Easter messages since before recorded history. Both preacherly sermons and personal meditations on these symbols must always have run in orbit around these themes, both as natural events outside of us, and as psychological possibilities inside of us. And these are the stories we believe: the real, the original, Easter stories. They’re older than all religions in the world. They’re the stories we’ve always loved, and it looks in 2006 like we still prefer them to the religious stories that have tried to cover them.

Why? Perhaps because the Easter stories are just better stories with more relation to the world we’re living in. We look to religions for good news, life-giving news. We’re not all that fond of getting heavy messages in church, though it’s what all religious prophets have done. But they’re seldom popular until they’re long dead. We come to church, especially on high holy days like Christmas and Easter, to hear good news. And we choose the stories that give it to us, and shrug off stories that don’t, no matter how liturgical or pontifical they pretend to be.

The Easter story has been covered by the stories of a dozen gods and goddesses, maybe more. From Ishtar to Jesus, we have covered the Easter story with all manner of gods and goddesses. But they can’t cover it, can’t match its appeal, and can’t hide it for long, neither Ishtar nor Jesus.

As a society our behavior around this holiday shows that we don’t take the religious story of Jesus very seriously, as so many evangelical websites seem to be screaming too.

And how we do Easter may be a symptom of the fact that our official religions have really lost their power to hold the imaginations of even a majority of our citizens.

After all, only a bit more than 20% of Americans regularly attend religious services of any kind. (See books and essays by Rev. Kirk Hadaway, who has written about a dozen books in this area.) The stories of religion seem to be about such important things: life after death, eternity, a god so powerful he created the whole universe, knows everything we think, and can punish or destroy anything or anybody he chose. If we believed it, these stories would occupy our thoughts nearly all the time. Just think of the amount of time we have spent thinking about AIDS or Bird Flu because we really believe that they might kill us. But perhaps we don’t believe our traditional religious stories in any deep way at all any longer, and the evidence is on display every Christmas and Easter. Perhaps these are just background stories, things we say the way the ancient Romans used to bow to Jupiter and then go about their business like he was just a statue after all.

If a Roman were to just snicker as they passed the statues, or write popular books saying the gods were quite human after all, or put on plays that made the kind of fun of Jupiter that Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Brian” makes fun of the Jesus story, then the pretense would be over, and it would be fair for one Roman to ask another what the heck they were doing pretending to care about those old gods. And eventually, of course, that happened. Now hardly anybody remembers that old Jupiter was the same god the Greeks had earlier called Zeus, because both those gods are pretty much dead, like Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte and a hundred other gods and goddesses that have come and gone. Meanwhile, and throughout all these centuries, our favorite stories, like the Easter story, remain as popular as ever. .

If we were really serious about the stories of our supposedly official religions, I don’t think the media would routinely play off of the holidays with the kind of goofy stories we’ve all become used to, or that movies like “The Life of Brian” would still be played, 27 years after it came out, as Austin’s run-up to yet another Easter.

So I do wonder if the way we treat these two holidays in particular doesn’t really show that the stories have already lost their hold on the vast majority of people in our country, and if we’re watching the very slow-motion decline and death of Christianity as a noble religious – as opposed to merely political – force.

If so, then we should try to reclaim the stories we love and their symbols, from the religions that have been piled on top of them.

And this brings us to the flower communion we celebrate here each Easter. It was created by Unitarian minister Norbert Capek for his church in Czechoslovakia in 1923, when he observed this same antipathy toward traditional religion in his members. They lived in overwhelmingly Catholic surrounding, and most of Capek’s members had no use for the practice or idea of Communion because the idea had been so badly tainted by religions they didn’t respect. Yet at its best, the idea of “communion” is that you are communing, connecting, with the powers of the universe that created us, and bunnies, eggs and flowers and everything else. And that’s a powerful kind of energy to forego communion with. So Capek created the idea of a flower communion. He asked members each to bring a flower to church on a certain day, and the church bought some extras. The children arranged the flowers in baskets during the worship service, just as our children are doing today. Then before people left, they were each given a flower – not the one they brought, but one brought by somebody else. And they knew that there was a link, a communion, between them all, and with the powers of nature that had produced both the fragile flowers, and their own fragile selves.

Capek’s flower communion caught on immediately, and it was brought to this country by his wife in 1940. Our northern churches usually celebrate it in June on the last Sunday before they close their church for the summer – many of the Eastern and northern churches still base their church year on the old academic years. Since we don’t close our church, we do the Flower Communion at Easter, where the flowers can rejoin the other symbols of spring.

Norbert Capek died in a Nazi concentration camp. But the flower communion survives him, and offers us a kind of communion that we need as much as his own church members did.

The good news about Easter is that no religion has ever been able to tame it, claim it or cover it. Because we may not need stories of this or that goddess or god, but we do need to hear that story that life is more powerful than death, that it’s beautiful, and all of nature is offering it to us for free.

The good news about the Easter story is that it seems indestructible. Cover it with stories of Ishtar, Inanna, Eoster or of Jesus and God, but the real Easter story can’t be kept down because it’s true, and because it’s written deep into our own hearts. We need a springtime in our lives, today as much as ever. We need for life to be exuberant with its gifts of new life for old, beauty, spring, sunrises and flowers. We need some of those flowers, for they carry with them the message that life will triumph, in our world and in our hearts, and that if only we can take the spirit of this Easter inside of us, it can grow there, so that we might keep Eastering on our own, so that long after the flowers have faded, their promise of the fragile and beautiful gift of life will still be alive in us, resurrected from the stories into our hearts, where they can live for another year as the good news of the Easter Story.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

April 9, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Sometimes when we seem to hear too many voices in our lives, we wish they’d all go away except for just the one most comforting voice.

That seldom happens. We might be better off realizing that we aren’t made of just one solo voice. We’re a chorus of voices and wants and preferences, each speaking up at some time, the whole lot of them seldom agreeing.

And we live as part of this sea of voices, trying to find a good path through the clatter. Sometimes we can just decide and do something whether the other voices like it or not. Ideally, we can be creative enough to do it together, bringing the whole choir along. That takes great talent and great patience. But if the Buddhists are right in saying we’re more like choruses than soloists – and I think they are – then we need a home in our soul and in our world for all the voices within us. The brave, clear-thinking ones, the compassionate voices that want to do the caring thing more than the right thing, voices that need to understand, and those wishing they could love even where they can’t understand. And so many more voices within and around us, looking for a welcoming home.

In the meantime – and it seems a long meantime – we stand where we are, silently praying Oh God, Life, the Universe, let us find a home where all of us, all of us, can live together in creative compassion. Just that. Just that.

Amen.

SERMON: Many Voices

This was the first time I’d heard the Chichester Psalms. But when Brent told me about the music, and then when I read the Psalms from which Bernstein took his lyrics, I recognized one of Bernstein’s greatest and most unusual gifts as a composer. He made a space for a huge variety of voices in his greatest works. The voices don’t agree and aren’t squeezed into a forced and phony kind of harmony. Instead, they are presented as a slice of life without a simple and clear solution.

Here’s what I mean. When I read through the six Psalms from which he took the lyrics for this piece (2, 23, 100, 108, 131, 133), I wrote down the different voices and moods I found.

There is the voice of God as conqueror, sounding very triumphal. The voices of his people cover a huge spectrum, from excited, devoted and loved, to fearful, rejected, abandoned by God, and inadequate. In the next lines, they are joyful, praising God, sounding comforted and fearless. Then they are very angry – you heard this in the music, when the men’s voices came in under the calm and peaceful sound of the women’s voices.

There is also a voice of self-righteousness, eager to condemn outsiders. This is a voice speaking for a wrathful, furious, vengeful God, one that is offering dominion of the earth, granting power to break opposing nations with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.

And these lines are followed by voices that are thankful for God’s goodness and mercy, which are followed by despondent voices.

Then there’s a withdrawn voice saying it’s just not concerned with high and hard demands, but is satisfied to be calm, self-contained and quiet. Finally, there is the voice of simple happiness, happy to be dwelling in unity with others. You could get whiplash three times, switching moods to keep up with the many voices in just these six psalms, even though you suspect they reflect the real human condition in all times and places.

There’s a normal human tendency to want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, or at least to harmonize all the voices to our own voice, our own beliefs, our own style. And that’s what most musical settings of the Psalms do.

But one of the characteristics of Leonard Bernstein’s music that’s most appealing – or troubling – was his ability to create a musical space within which many voices could co-exist without being homogenized.

He did this in West Side Story, that marvelous musical of violence, murder, love, and surprising vulgarity in the “Officer Krupke” piece sung by street gang members.

But he did it most dramatically and best in his greatest stage work, the “Mass.” The piece was commissioned by the Kennedy family for the dedication of the Kennedy Center. Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, hated what he wrote. Cardinal O’Connor wanted it banned as a heretical work. I saw the touring company production in Detroit around 1976, and could see why they might have hated it.

How many here have seen a stage production of the “Mass”? Here was a mass, but – with music by the 53-year-old Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by 23-year-old Steven Schwartz – it was not a Catholic mass. While it did go through the traditional parts of the mass, it contained scathing critiques of both the Church and the mass, for being irrelevant and incoherent.

Showing a wonderful knowledge of history, Bernstein included “tropes” as solos inserted into the mass, to make his critiques. In medieval times, the tropes inserted into the masses could even be to the tunes of drinking songs, so there was the precedent for bringing very secular elements in, and Bernstein exploited it brilliantly.

One soloist interrupted the “Credo in Unum Deum” to sing “I’ll believe in one God; I’ll believe in three; I’ll believe in thirty if they’ll believe in me.”

Another interrupted the priest during the Gratias Deo, to say that she once thanked God. “But now, somehow, it’s strange,” she sang, “though nothing much has really changed, I don’t sing Gloria, I don’t sing Gratias Deo. I can’t say quite when it happened, but gone is the Thank You.”

In a choral piece called “God Said,” the choir only sings the real lyrics after the priest leaves the stage. These include the chorus “And it was good, brother, and it was good, sister, and it was good, brother, and it was goddam good.” This isn’t your grandmother’s mass, unless she was one heck of an outspoken woman!

Also in that song, the lyricist Stephen Schwartz wrote these words:

“God said take charge of my zoo, I made these creatures for you. So he won’t mind if we wipe out a species or two. God said that sex should repulse unless it leads to results, and so we crowd the world full of consenting adults. God said it’s good to be meek, and so we are once a week. It may not mean a lot but oh, it’s terribly chic. God made us the boss, God gave us the cross. We turned it into a sword to spread the word of the Lord, we use his holy decrees to do whatever we please. And it was good, Yeah! And it was good, Yeah! And it was goddam good.”

Finally, the protestors torment the priest to the point that he flings the chalice down, smashing it, tears his robe off and throws it at them and leaves the stage. Then all the protestors, who have been harassing the priest throughout the Mass, fall to the stage like puppets who have had their strings cut. They really didn’t have a message, just complaints and needs, and needed the priest to play off of. A child takes the guitar and plays the Simple Song with which the Mass began, then the priest returns to the stage, in blue-jeans, takes the guitar and leads them in the song – it seems, after all, that they need to be led. Oh, maybe it will be a happy ending after all – but no. One of the protestors is disgusted by this and won’t join. He goes upstage in his fury. At the end of the Simple Song, the priest says, “The Mass is ended, go in peace.” But the lone protestor gives the priest and the audience the finger and exits. And that’s the end of the Bernstein Mass.

Many voices, given space to coexist: brought into proximity, but not harmony. Just like in real life.

You can understand why Rose Kennedy might have hated it. Leonard Bernstein gave her a masterpiece that was more than she’d bargained for. He gave her not an orthodox mass, but many voices, brought together on the same stage, to sing their very different songs in their very different passionate voices, and to be heard – perhaps even revered – but not resolved.

Cardinal O’Connor thought that was bad. Most churches would think it was bad. But not any real liberal church worth its salt, and not any Unitarian church in touch with its history.

The range of voices we have in Unitarian churches is immense. And like the voices in Bernstein’s works, they are not resolved: they’re in proximity, but not necessarily in harmony, on a huge range of topics.

A couple months ago, we learned what a wide range of opinions we have on 9-11. I believe our government either let it happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. Some others agreed. Still others thought that was an absolutely crazy idea, that our government could do such a thing. Others were somewhere in between, and others – perhaps the majority – don’t spent time thinking about who did 9-11 or how, because there are just too many other things going on in their lives that demand and deserve more attention.

But the whole range of voices exists here, as it does throughout the country and the world. No matter what you believe about 9-11, you know there are people sitting around you who don’t agree with you. And those different beliefs aren’t going to be harmonized. They exist here in proximity but not in harmony, and that’s one of the frustrating things about liberal churches – or any honest church. We live in a world with people who sometimes disagree violently with us on really important matters, and the challenge of civilization is the challenge to learn to live together creatively.

But the different political beliefs in this room absolutely pale compared with the differing religious beliefs here! We have members for whom Jesus Christ really is the son of God, at least in deep symbolic and poetic ways. We have members for whom religion is and will always be about God, by which they mean the God of the Bible. Others have bad memories of that god, but find inspiration through stories of some of the ancient goddesses.

We have others for whom the whole idea of gods or goddesses is somewhere between useless and repulsive: people who might say we’re called to be decent people and to make the world a better place, but who do it without ever thinking about Jesus or God. We have some for whom the structures of Hinduism are their center – with its rich tapestry of stories, its rich array of so many imaginative figures symbolizing the many aspects of the creative, sustaining and destroying forces in the universe. And others who, if asked, will identify themselves as Buddhists – though not all the same kind of Buddhists. Some here believe in an afterlife, and some don’t. Some believe in reincarnation, and believe that they are not now in either their first or their last incarnation. Others think that’s just crazy, that it all starts, happens, and ends here in this life. And if you haven’t heard your own belief yet, you can add it, then add another fifty or so to cover all the permutations and combinations of beliefs sitting right here in this room, all around you, in proximity but not in harmony.

That’s the world that Leonard Bernstein kept putting in his music: that world of many differing voices in proximity but not in harmony. So I think some of Bernstein’s greatest pieces were practically written for liberal churches.

But this is not only for us. Our whole country would be better off if they had that ability to tolerate profound differences. Like they were to Rose Kennedy and Cardinal O’Connor, too many divergent opinions on important matters like religion are very upsetting to a lot of people. The truth is, most of us would be more comfortable in a world created in the image of our own beliefs. And during the past few years, we have all heard some of these strident voices insisting that America fall in line behind the one set of right beliefs – which always, coincidentally, just happen to be theirs. They want harmony in our country, and think that can only come from getting all voices to sing the same song.

They’re wrong. That would be boring music, as well as a foolish and dangerous society. We need to learn something, and Leonard Bernstein could teach it to us.

He could teach us that the real art, in music and in life, doesn’t come from trying to stamp everyone with the same cookie cutter, to make them as alike as dead interchangeable machine parts. The real art lies in the ability to create an atmosphere in which all God’s children, all the wonderful and crazy variety of Nature, can live in creative proximity.

The kind of harmony we need in life isn’t that of pretending that all opinions or all people can be made to fit the same mold. They can’t. The kind of harmony we need in life comes through the art of creating the atmosphere that lets our many differences exist together in creative proximity. It’s a much higher art than just stomping on people with cookie cutters. It takes grown-up people secure enough in their own beliefs to welcome people who don’t share their beliefs, though they share our humanity, and our need for peace, understanding, justice and compassion. And in this great mix of life, no deep harmony is possible unless we grow past the clamoring for shallow harmony, which can never exist anyway.

That’s the vision needed, and the art – to see past superficial differences of thought and belief, into that deeper and more enduring level where all God’s children got a song to sing, and it’s our collective job to provide the chorus that can cradle all these many voices in its heart and accompany them with the music of the heavens, the rhythm of justice, and the beat of the human heart – all our human hearts – trying to find our way back home together, trying to find our way back home together, and to know the place for the first time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

March 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being fully compassionate.

Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed too low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and mean ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our failures. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to settle for lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We will all fail at some things. But let it not be a failure of vision, a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let our failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

SERMON

Today’s sermon is really prepared as a companion to the program I’ll be doing here in two weeks, “Being Human Religiously,” which is a look at the soul of what the liberal style of religion – as opposed to literal religion – has been about for more than 2500 years.

I’m also continuing to think about the idea of Spirit that I started last week with the sermon about bringing the horse in the house. That story has now been written out for the first time, and posted on our website – along with the photograph.

Last week the treatment was partly in fun. There is a spirit of life that can appear without warning and break through our boundaries like all the trickster figures in all the world’s religions, opening us to some unexpected and life-giving possibilities. And since we can find stories about it everywhere, we can call it transcendent, enduring, maybe even infinite and eternal.

But religion is about deciding to live in relation to that transcendental spirit. Religion is, as one great Hindu mystic put it, “the whole soul becoming what it believes.” (Vivekananda)

This morning, I want to think about what on earth that means, why anyone would want to do it, what we could get out of it, and how we do it. That’s a lot of area to cover; I have tried to cut the sermon down from its original length of nine days.

Many would say that being human religiously is about standing before God, and that’s one way to put it. You could also say that Well, that would depend on what sort of a god you meant; and that’s also true. If you think of the God of Western religions – at least the version that makes the world media most often – this could be a pretty unattractive idea – frightening, even.

That God so often seems to be about judging and punishing, even wiping out whole peoples who displease him. And the thought of being judged by the God who created the whole universe and has these terribly high standards and this fearful punishment – it’s no wonder so many people don’t want to go to church or take religion very seriously. A lot of what passes for religion, and for God, doesn’t deserve to be taken very seriously.

Many people think it would make a lot more sense to reverse it and try to be religious humanly, to take religion down to a human scale, to reduce it to what we understand, even what we like.

And there is a lot of that going on. God and religion are dragged down to echo and endorse what we come up with, including some of the worst of what we come up with. Then religion is used not to expand us, but to strengthen our own biases and dangerous behaviors.

Sadly, you can see this by looking at almost every single instance where religion has become combined with the power of the state, both at home and abroad. Again, it’s enough to turn people completely off on the whole subject of having anything at all to do with religion, and you can’t really blame them.

Think of the Muslim women in Iran who have been shot in the face by men for refusing to cover their faces with a veil. Or what may become several states following South Dakota’s lead, criminalizing women who get abortions, while also cutting social support programs, pre-natal care, post-natal care, and health care. It’s good to be pro-life: I think it’s even a sacred command.

But to be pro-life means to honor and be willing to pay for all the social structures and services that are needed to support, nourish and honor human life. These include sex education, because it is so much easier to take advantage of ignorance than of knowledge. They include pre-natal care, post-natal care, universal health care, day care, and a host of things that are done much better in some European countries who have a much higher notion of serving human life than we do.

The programs are expensive, and have to be provided for all, especially for those who need them the most. But without them, criminalizing abortion is little more than a vindictive policy that turns some of our poorest and most defenseless girls and women into just breeders. And that isn’t pro-life. That’s an anti-life program, wrapped in misleading religious rhetoric, and we should all be ashamed of it.

But in any country where the power of religion is combined with the power of the state, we see people dragging religion down to the lowest level of human greed and bigotry, rather than trying to be human at a level of high and loving ideals.

So let’s put it another way. If religion is about choosing to live in a commanding kind of relationship with very high ideals, why do it? What do we get out of it? Isn’t it like sailors following the North Star, even though they’ll never reach it? Why torment yourself with ideals higher than you’ll ever be able to satisfy?

Once we ask it this way, the answer is kind of surprising. I’m going to say some things this morning that may seem surprising, and you may want to check them out against your own life this week. Here’s the first one. The reason we put our lives in the service of the very highest and most demanding ideals is that it is the only way to become fully human, and we know it. We choose this route over and over, whether we care about religion or not – I’ll convince you of this. For example, let’s take a few secular professions.

Lawyers, I’ve been told, are really supposed to be committed to serve three different levels of responsibilities. First, but lowest, is the responsibility to serve their client’s wishes. Second is the responsibility to serve the law, and the quality of law. They shouldn’t act in ways that will weaken the rule of good laws. And that leads to the third and highest level of allegiance, which is to the good of society. They shouldn’t take cases that can set precedents that are likely to weaken our civil boundaries or make our world a worse place.

The popular conception of lawyers is often that they only care about doing what their client wants. And there are some like that. But I’ve never talked with any of those, and am not sure I’d enjoy it, though it could be interesting to challenge them on this. However, I have found a lot of very high idealism in the lawyers I’ve known. They believe that if they serve the highest of these ideals to the best of their ability, it is a noble profession that will make the world a better place and fulfill them both as professionals and as people. And I think they’re right.

Teachers also hope to serve different levels of ideals, but are the most fulfilled when they feel they have served the highest ideals. At the lowest and perhaps least satisfying level, they teach students to pass the tests that will rank their schools.

But good teachers also have a love, a passion, for education, learning, growing, expanding their own horizons and the horizons of their students. They love the pursuit of truth in one form or another, and give their lives to serving it, one one class at a time, one student at a time. I’ve not met many teachers of whom this wasn’t true.

If there are teachers who don’t care about anything but getting students through the tests, I can’t imagine that teaching is a very deeply fulfilling profession for them. At the highest level, teachers hope and believe that they can be positive influences in forming the character of their students, helping to make them better people, partners and citizens. I’ve had teachers who absolutely did that. So have you. And we will never, ever forget them, will we? So this too can be a noble and fulfilling profession, but only when it is striving to serve very high ideals. Nobody gets much credit for just putting in time – they don’t get much fulfillment from it, either.

Doctors have the same kind of ideals that drew them to give their lives to medicine. Not pushing pills, but serving health, being part of a profession that cares for the quality of the lives of their patients, one patient at a time.

We could go down the list with more, but the most important things in life – things like justice, truth, health and character – must always be served by holding ourselves responsible to these terribly high ideals. The higher the ideals we serve, the more gratifying we can find the act of serving them. See if this isn’t true in your own life.

And all this is true on a more personal level, too, in our personal lives rather than our jobs. All weddings, oaths of office, all professional and personal standards we make a big thing of or dress up to do, are always committing us to serve only the very highest ideals. If they weren’t, it would feel tacky, and we wouldn’t be interested.

I’ve never officiated at a wedding where the couple swore to more or less like one another for awhile till they got bored, then to split. There was a hit song in the 70s that sold millions of records, where the lyrics said “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day; we’ll sing in the sunshine, then I’ll be on my way.” I never heard it sung at a wedding.

At a wedding, couples make bold and daring promises, amazing promises. These two people who really don’t know anywhere near as much about each other as they think, stand in front of all their best friends and families and all that is holy to them. They stand there and promise to love, honor and cherish, keeping themselves faithful to the other for as long as they both shall live. Without aspiring to a commitment of that quality, it wouldn’t even be worth attending a wedding. If all they aspire to is to sing in the sunshine then be on their way, most of their friends and family would suggest they just get on their way. But nobody does that.

Without the transcendent promises that call us to become more, the whole idea of a wedding loses its magnificence of spirit, its nobility of human aspiration, its magic and its blessing.

Still, why do we do it? These aren’t even religious examples I’ve been using, but any time we do something that feels deeply important to us, we seek out the highest ideals we can find, and swear to put ourselves at their service. If that isn’t a religious commitment, I don’t know what is. But why? What do we get out of it? Why bother?

This isn’t just a rhetorical question; there’s an answer to it. Here’s the reason for being human religiously. It’s because – and see if this doesn’t ring true for you – the highest satisfaction and deepest comfort in life come from being committed to the highest and most compassionate ideals, because it is the act of commitment that transforms and blesses us. This is expressed in so many ways in different religions.

It is seeing ourselves as being beloved of God, knowing Jesus loves us, feeling engulfed in the compassion of Allah, the Buddha or Kuan Yin. Just trying to serve these things blesses us, even if we don’t do it perfectly. Because perfect ideals, and perfect gods, have forgiven us in advance for being merely human, as long as we’re trying to be the best kind of humans. This sounds all poetic and foofy, but it is absolutely true. Compassion, acceptance and forgiveness are key attributes of every god worthy of the name.

You may know Christians, as I do, for whom one of the most profoundly loving facts in their lives is the fact that they can say “Christ has accepted me just as I am.” If they hadn’t felt that, they would probably have just kept looking. It’s ironic. We can fail at trying to serve high ideals and still feel blessed by our aspirations. But if we just try to get by, get away with what we can, drag religion down to our lowest expectations so it will be easy to meet them, then when we look back on it there is no blessing for us at all.

When a Buddhist tries to see all others through the eyes of the Buddha’s or Kuan Yin’s boundless compassion, it rubs off. They also come to see themselves through the eyes of that boundless compassion; it rubs off. They have become what they tried to serve, and it transformed their lives. A Jew, Christian or Muslim who tries to serve the God of Love in honest and earnest ways, lives a far more loving and beloved life than they might otherwise. As the Hindu mystic Vivekananda put it, “Religion is – the whole soul becoming what it believes.” Not what it achieves, what it believes. We become what we most truly believe. If you believe the search for truth trumps lesser concerns, you become a person with more truth about you. The magic of serving high ideals – truth, justice, health, compassion and the rest – is that in part we become what we serve, even when we fail to serve it perfectly.

We say this to ourselves in so many ways. “At least I tried; it was worth trying; Well, I did my best”.” Think about this. There is some deep magic here, in the fact that just choosing to serve high ideals is transformative. We’ll never do it perfectly. I suspect no marriage has ever quite lived up to the poetic vows of the wedding day, and no professional ever really finished a whole career without being able to remember several times, maybe a bunch of times, that they failed, even failed pretty miserably, to live up to what mattered so much to them. But in the long run – and hopefully even in the shorter runs – we don’t condemn ourselves for the inevitable failures that come with being human. We are blessed by the ideals to which we give our lives, the compassion to which we give our hearts, the gods in whose service we enlist our souls. Think about it this week, and see if it isn’t true for you too.

It is one of the greatest miracles in life, really.

It is kind of like that picture of sailors steering their courses by following the North Star. No sailor will ever reach the North Star. It isn’t possible. But just following it changes their course completely. And when we align our hearts with the promise to love till death do us part, it changes our course as far as you can get from just wanting to sing in the sunshine then be on your way.

And it doesn’t take great wisdom; we don’t have to be saints, or like Mother Theresa or Gandhi – almost nobody can do that! We just have to try to be human in the best way we know how, try to follow that path, like steering on the North Star. Just that is transformative. And that is one of the greatest miracles in life.

I’ll tell you about a young couple I met during my first years in the ministry. They weren’t members of the church, didn’t have a church, but asked if I would marry them. They were both eighteen years old. I asked them to write their wedding vows, as I ask all couples. We don’t have to use those vows – many couples prefer more traditional vows, and sometimes what they are promising each other is really too personal to share in a public ceremony. But I want them to know what their vows are, what their promises are.

All couples find this is harder than they thought, but this young couple found it to be nearly impossible. One or the other of them phoned at least three times, asking more questions. Finally, they asked to come back in and talk about it. They were completely frustrated! “We can’t do this!” he said, and she agreed. “We don’t know enough to write anything good enough for a wedding.” In fact, they agreed, they hardly knew anything. “Well,” I said, “this does sounds serious. But you must know something. Tell me, what do you know about yourselves and what you’re bringing to this marriage?”

Between them, it started tumbling out. “We don’t know anything about the future. We don’t know what we’ll be doing for work even in two years, let alone in forty. We don’t know yet if we’ll have children, or even if we want children. We don’t know where we’ll live. We just know we love each other like the other half of our own souls, that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives, that together we can figure out anything we need to, and by God, that has to be enough!”

Yes, that’s what they decided to use for their wedding vows, and I suspect nobody who was there will ever forget it. I don’t know what happened to that young couple. He had just enlisted in the armed forces, and they were leaving in a week for some military post. But I hope they’re still together, and still know those wonderfully profound lessons they had already learned as 18-year-olds in love. High ideals bless and transform us, even if we serve them haltingly.

But when we reverse it, and drag religion down to the level of our most undeveloped parts or our greed, bigotry or the rest of it, then we’re not serving anything big enough to cherish us, or cradle us, or forgive us our sins, since we”ve not tried to forgive the sins of others, or serve them. That’s when God becomes a fearful and capriciously vicious judge and punisher. Because it isn’t God at all, but only our own smallest untutored biases, writ large. As contradictory as it sounds, we rise or shrink to the size of the ideals we serve. Just serving high ideals is transformative.

It’s all about living more wisely and well here and now, not elsewhere and later. As you’ll learn when you come to the program at the end of the month, almost all of the best religious thinkers from all religious traditions for the past 2500 years and more have tried to help us become human religiously, by orienting our lives to ideals as high, as luminous, and as beyond our reach as the North Star. When religion is taken seriously, as I think all the best styles of liberal religion have done, it is never about pie in the sky. It’s about pie here. And love here. And justice, compassion, truth and salvation by character here. It’s what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom of heaven isn’t coming, isn’t in the future, but is within and among us. It’s here, or it’s nowhere. The magic, the miracle and the transformation are also here, or nowhere. There’s really quite a lot at stake for us.

The attraction of becoming human religiously is simple, and I think it’s powerful. Understood correctly, it is saying, “Here’s the deal. If you will believe in very high ideals, the kind that make high demands on you, and if you use your life to try and serve them, you will be blessed, accepted, and forgiven for your failings. You don’t have to earn salvation. You just have to enlist in the service of the highest ideals of truth, justice, love, health and character, and let them direct you. Even when you fail, you will be blessed for trying, and you will feel it.

The power of faith, and living that faith, can transform you, and your whole soul may become what you believe. And that may be the greatest miracle of all, now or later, here or anywhere.

I can’t guarantee to persuade you. I can only testify, which is what I’m really doing here. The rest can only happen inside of you, as you turn these things over in your heart and mind. If it happens, you might experience it as a kind of miracle. And those kinds of miracles, luckily, do happen: every day.