Dina Claussen

November 18, 2007

The winter holiday season is with us again. It starts out on a simple note with the rituals of Thanksgiving. We give thanks in the presence of community and celebrate with stories and food. It involves an incredible amount of taking care of business, on top of the usual tasks that we do. There can be a lot of stress and often unreasonably high expectations. For those who spend time with their extended families, it?s the extra closeness that reminds us of what we love and what we find challenging in those relationships. And this can hold true, whether we are with our family of origin or with non-biological families that we have found to take their place. The whole thing may remind us of painful realities, like recent deaths or divorces, or old hurts not dealt with. There is nothing like close encounters with families of whatever kind to stir things up.

Even for those who celebrate without that larger gathering, it can be a reminder of the difficult realities of how that came to be. I believe that we are compelled by a primal human instinct to reflect and give thanks whether we come from amazing abundance or from the simple fact of having survived terrible times. Despite whatever commercial, political, or religious agendas are served by these rituals, I believe that these rituals would wither away if deeper needs were not being met by them.Even with that primal instinct, reflecting on what we are thankful for and what that means in our lives can be a risky business. Our blessings are often mixed at best. Feelings can run high or we can retreat into numbing routines that will hold a lid on it.

Given all that, what are we to do with Thanksgiving? Do we simply go through the motions to do what is expected and count ourselves lucky to have made it through another intense task-driven experience? Some people do feel that way about any major holiday. In that mode, even sitting with people who you care about can be thought of as a task. It can be a relief to get back to our everyday life.

Now, I don?t believe that rituals are necessarily big affairs invented by ministers and rabbis, for instance, and intensely wrapped up in the Gross National Product Index. They can be private or done with a few others. It can be as simple as taking a breath and being thankful that you can breath, especially if you have memories of having experienced any difficulty in breathing at any time in your life, which is pretty common.

It can be enjoying washing dishes after a meal, with your hands immersed in warm soapy water, as it evokes fond memories, like mine of the times in my family when we sang rounds together as we did the dishes.

It can be glorying in the ritual of taking the dog for a walk, as you enjoy the cool crisp air of fall or winter and the excitement of the dog who revels in getting out. It can be passing on a simple, enjoyable skill to your children, like for instance tying special knots for fishing, and watching as they feel pride in having a new skill.

In a New York Times article, Susan Schnur wrote about a time that she witnessed her boyfriend?s father do an amazing private ritual of thankfulness. In the middle of the night, evidently unaware that she lay quietly awake rather than asleep nearby, this man came to the kitchen and cut a slab of rye bread. He stood looking out the dining room window for a while.

He then began to repeat the word ?bread? in many different languages as he thrust the bread into the air, held it to his heart, shook it, kissed it, and then took a bite. He continued this ritual until his hands was empty of bread and then returned to his bed.

She goes on to say, that even on an ordinary day, he appeared to be ?stunned by his own fierce happiness.? He met that with his extravagant ritual of thanks for the simple gift of bread. We have air to breath, water to drink and simple food like bread for our survival in this extraordinary thing called life. Surely that calls for some reflection and some gestures of gratitude, if not as dramatic as the man with his bread.

As for those who have lived with a great deal of trauma and difficulty in their life, it can stun us when they still manage to approach life in this way. I was working in a hospital where I met a young man who had cerebral palsy. He worked as a messenger before they had email. As he whirled around the hospital in his wheel chair, he made friends wherever he went. If you took the time to listen carefully, you discovered an intelligent, witty and warm person who lived with what he had with ease and laughter. He told me that it was good to be alive. He had the audacity to give thanks in the middle of what would look like woe to most of us.

What are the things that we live with that can make it difficult for us to feel gratitude? Is it our weight in this culture that is so obsessed with thinness? Is it that we are outside of the narrow models for what a male or female should look like and act like? Are we not interested in the kind of work that would bring us more money and respect?

Do we have mental or physical conditions that allow others treat us as less than fully human? Do our sexual realities, our race, or our gender make us targets for discrimination and violence?

As the world changes, do we feel we have lost the world that we came from? Or are we coming from a new sensibility, still not accepted widely in the world? Are we too young or too old?

Do we have to share our life with half-truths because of experiences that would make others fear or pity us? Do we have more passion than is accepted in our culture? There are so many to name. I?m sure that you can fill in those others.

What are some rituals that you do now to help move you out of being caught in all the negatives? Do you do them fully present or are some of them done now as routine, forgetting the original feeling that they arose from? I have a ritual from my childhood that involves peanut butter. I take bread (the vehicle is unimportant actually) and lay down slabs of butter (no thin layers here), gobs of peanut butter, and gobs of jam. This is definitely comfort food for me. I now understand that this ritual reminds me of those rare times when my mother would feed me in between meals and I would feel especially cared for. Now that I understand this, perhaps I can move into thinner layers for my health?s sake. Are you naming and reclaiming old rituals? Or are you and your loved ones finding new ones to take their places?

As a community, we also have rituals. We gather here every week as a congregation, looking to renew our sense of who we are, what we are grateful for, and what we feel our work is in this world. May our rituals here live up to the task of doing that for us. If they no longer do that well, I trust that there will be a process in which the congregation will be moved to come up with new ones that will. Since I have found my spiritual home in Unitarian Universalism, I have felt gratitude every day that I can be a part of communal rituals that help to sustain me. Thank you for being one of those sustaining congregations. Gracias! [thrust] Danke! [to the heart] Wah Do! [shake] Merci [kiss] Thank you![hands open wide]

Susan Schnur, Hers; Susan Schnur, New York Times (www.nytimes.com search), July25, 1985.

© Dina Claussen

November 4, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

While working on this sermon, I had a vision. I saw a huge boxing ring with thousands of people gathered to watch the match of the century.

The announcer began “In this corner, we have those elegant, linguistically sophisticated, technologically savvy bipeds: Human Beings: Masters of the Universe!”

The crowd goes wild. He continues.

“Now in this corner we have that fascinating and dangerously unpredictable force: the bringer of fire, flood and upheaval, the ancient enemy of mankind – Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nature, ruler of the Earth!” There is only a smattering of applause; the animals, after all, have not been invited. It’s home ground for the humans, so hisses and boos predominate.

Meanwhile, technology reigns supreme: the stadium is climate controlled and large television screens bring the ring up close and personal to everyone. Everything is accompanied with canned music.

Isn’t that how we like it – nature as entertainment? Meanwhile, we leave the stadium in our cars, increasingly sealed in, having less and less contact with the world around us.

I have been meditating on that “sealing in” process since I have been here. One day, early in the morning, I stepped out onto the porch of my home, and let the Austin environment wash over me. I have read many accounts of “sultry” days before that sounded wonderful, but that was the first day that I had really experienced it. The humidity clung to my skin, giving me the sense of being enveloped in the warm air. The many overhanging limbs of large trees in my neighborhood felt inviting and comforting. The cicadas were at it serenading with their almost buzz saw like sounds as they went about their business. Even the birds made some sounds that were different than I was used to.

I was experiencing a language of the land that was different than the familiar West Coast places that I have lived. It could be said that I really began to hear Austinese, the language of this land, for the first time. As I walked to church, I could smell, feel, hear, and really see the details of things around me. Even the walk along Lamar Blvd had its own language, though it was much more a language of technology – the buzz of electricity, the sounds of the vehicles, and the smells of pollution, along with many others.

On the other hand, recently, I have been gifted with the use of a car for a month: a wonderful Prius with all its lovely technology. I began to notice how different an experience it was. As I glided down the street, I felt powerful, less vulnerable, less likely to pay attention to the needs of the people around me. I became impatient with even the smallest delay on the road and I even began to forget that I actually liked walking. I didn’t really notice much of the landscape as I moved along either, as I was focused on when to stop and go and turn in order to reach my destination. I mostly heard only muted technology sounds. I wasn’t hearing the full spectrum of Austin’s language anymore – I could have been anywhere.

As much as we love the comfort of the technology, it’s inescapable that we are in trouble with it these days. So, how did we get to this place anyway? After all, for millions of years, human beings lived in concert with the land with minimal technology. They knew the land because they had to in order to survive. There are many accounts now of the lives of current indigenous people, so we have some idea of how it used to be. These people know their land thoroughly and have respect for its abundance and poverty, as well as for its dangers and safety. They have a habit of thrift in the use of its resources so as not to endanger that which sustains them. They don’t need a scientist to tell them this. It’s part of the grammar of their full language of being embedded in this world that they learn from birth.

Over the past 40 years, I have read a great deal about the environment, about anthropology, and about body wisdom (whether in movement or in the healing arts). Because of those interests, I read something recently that ordinarily I would never have picked up. For one thing, it has a great deal of philosophy in it and I am not a real fan. I go for the Cliff notes versions you find on Wikipedia these days. And then there is the very long title. It starts out well: The Spell of the Sensuous (could be a body thing). But then it continues: Language and Perception in a More than Human World. Still it sounded intriguing and it had been highly recommended by someone who knew me, so I read it. The author, David Abram, is a philosopher, an ecologist and, fortunately for me, a compelling and lyrical writer. His is one of the many important voices these days writing about the intersection of humans and the environment.

We don’t know what came first, but he asserts that language changed along with a change in attitude away from the clear connections with the land that humans started with. The oral languages and even the first written languages were still tied to the land. I recommend reading about the Aborigines in Australia with their dreamtime stories for a modern day feel of that. It is quite compelling. As western languages came to be written down in symbols not referencing the land in any way, there was also a move into thinking of the environment as something to exploit, to control, to own. Abram suggests that Greek thought especially, was the beginning of the idea that our minds and souls were considered separate from the sensing body and religion played a part as well.

Certainly we do know that by the time of the Enlightenment, we were on a clear track to thinking that our minds (souls) were separate from our biological body and our humanness in general was separate from everything else. And that view persisted despite Darwin’s work that pointed us to being part of the animal kingdom. The jump to the sense of entitlement over the environment that has come to dominate western history since was not a huge one.

Now, we are so out of touch with nature as a culture that regularly we have people wandering off even on snow covered mountain trails and getting lost with out having taken adequate clothing, food and water, because they just wanted to take a bit of a walk. In Austin, I understand that 3 students got lost exploring a cave that was really only for advanced spelunkers and it took 11 hours to rescue them. They at least took the precaution of telling someone to call for help if they did not return in 13 hours and that may have saved their lives, as they had run out of water before getting rescued.

On a more communal note: There is an island, very close to the Massachusetts mainland called Plum Island. It’s really just a large sand spit. When I was there, there were a number of people who lived on the north side of that island who were up in arms about what they felt was a property rights issue. The winter storms were regularly eroding away the sand on the north end and sending it to the south, where there was a nature preserve. People thought that the government should do something about that. The government should either stop the sand from moving somehow, or they should have some government program that would ensure that the sand was brought back to the north end.

Now I thought that that was an incredible story when I heard it, but recently, I heard from someone that in Southern Florida they are moving the sand back after storms to ensure that the huge resort buildings have their beaches intact. I can totally empathize with them, and at the same time, be appalled.

These are stories of a people not knowing and not accepting the reality of the land where they were living. This earth is a living earth. It moves and changes by understandable processes, but over the centuries, we have come up with some pretty hair-brained ideas of how to control these, rather than trying to figure out how to be with the earth as it is.

If you want to read a textbook case of the basic insanity of this approach, a good one is that of the Imperial Valley in California, a desert sink area that used to be flooded by the mighty Colorado River every couple hundred years or so, and thus had rich silt deposited and re-deposited on the desert floor. That rich soil drew people to begin to dam up the river for irrigation canals and so that the river would not flood anymore. Then big business agriculture (the only ones who could afford the technology needed) came in to exploit the soil for as long as it lasted.

If you check online under “Imperial Valley,” you can begin to get a taste of the incredible and unending story of more and more expensive technology being proposed to get around the increasingly sterile soil for agriculture since it is no longer replenished by the flooding.

If you check under “Salton Sea” you can read about the build up of salt in the Salton Sea, which is destroying the sports fishing resource and the wildlife refuge for migratory birds. The technology that has been seriously proposed to deal with that is truly bizarre. There are many stories in other places with issues of increasing technologies to deal with the consequences of the original technology.

Abram writes that we probably cannot go back to the ancient way of living in small groups, totally in tune with the environment. Certainly a completely oral culture has its own problems. He suggests that what we can do is to use the language that we do have in new ways; to use our cool reason and our more sensory ways of knowing to root us in the particular and the local as we work on solutions using more sensitive technologies; and to write, speak and think of ourselves, not as masters of the Universe, but as fully responsible citizens of this planet. Let’s return to our birthright and know it in this new way.

On the other hand, why should we? It all sounds nice, but we can fool ourselves a bit longer couldn’t we? What would really do it for us to move ourselves out of the current technological comfort that we are enjoying at an already high price? Do we need to have a messy, violent revolution to get it? Do we need to wait until our technology leads to complete breakdown of our whole system of living?

I don’t know about you, but going over all of this, tends to make me hyperventilate a bit, and begin to go into evangelical mode: “The End is Near” and Repent and Be Saved!” Fortunately, I have another impulse that so far has won out. I would rather look at what is actually happening in the world that might reverse that whole trend.

In 1962, Rachel Carson brought the conversation about the consequences of our technology out into the community, with the publishing of her book, Silent Spring about the evils of the pesticide DTD. Carson also described in other books, the complex web of life that linked mollusks to sea birds to the fish swimming in the ocean’s deepest and most inaccessible reaches.

Though she never used the word ecological, it was what she was describing. There are more and more people who have made a commitment to that conversation by learning the language of their particular area and sharing their experience and knowledge.

There are writers, activists, inventors, ecologists and scientists working on this already, some of who are in Austin, as well as in this congregation. In our congregation, I know of Margery Adams, a nature writer, who has shared with us the stories of the birds of this area. Dale and Pat Bulla, who are National Wildlife Habitat Stewards, have a home that is built to be environmentally sustainable. Don Smith has built an environmentally sound home as well. Elizabeth Gray has spearheaded turning our grounds into an accredited wild life habitat.

Our church also has a Green Sanctuary Committee, which is giving a program this next Tuesday evening that you might want to check out. I also discovered that Austin is a mecca of wildlife preserves, which gives us other places to get a feel for the land and of that special language.

I for one, am going to put my efforts into assisting the move forward in that conversation, as we utilize a full dance of ideas, information, stories rather than relying on scripted rhetorical bouts, like the ones that would go in the stadium in my vision. This would be a conversation that included more of the kind of people who I have already mentioned and a place of respect for all at the larger table of society. This would be a conversation that included the larger educating of all our children and a willingness to let them take the lead in it more and more.

There are actions to be taken and we need them badly. We need the same kind of actions that labor activists did in the 1930’s that gave us whatever work benefits we have now. Our world needs us to wake up and to live out what we believe in as fully as possible.

It is a challenge, especially for those of us who have gotten really comfortable in our technological cushion, but it is one that can use the best of our traditions’ liberal ideals and efforts. If we can move out of guilt and into action, we can then have a cheer, a roar come up that has, alongside our voices, the sounds of the wolf, the crocodile, the birds, and the rush of the wind and the rain through the trees, as we speak the language of the earth that includes us no longer as a major menace, but as once again true partners.

© Dina Claussen

September 2, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave, Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Sermon

The blizzard of the world

 has crossed the threshold

 and it has overturned

 the order of the soul.

Leonard Cohen

The joy of the music that we have been singing and the bleakness of that quote may seem out of place in the same sermon. But I believe that a life of integrity, a life worth living holds all of that and more. I’ll even go so far as to say that it may even be imperative that our lives be lived in that dynamic, uncomfortable, but ultimately creative state in order to be more fully ourselves and more fully useful in the world. And I believe that we are compelled as religious liberals to just that kind of life.

The blizzard of the world – surely we can understand that one. The onslaught of bad news of the dangerous state that our world is in is can be overwhelming.

It is so easy for cynicism, depression, increase in some of the illnesses of body and mind, and the loss of the will to reflect and then act in the world to be the responses to this. Parker Palmer, a noted educator and writer, in his book: The Hidden Wholeness writes that on the Great Plains farmers used to run a rope from the house to the barn when a blizzard was likely to happen, so they would not get lost and die mere yards from their house in the whiteout conditions that blizzards produce. He suggests that we need an equivalent measure in this time for the impact of the blizzard of the world on our souls.

First, he gives us a definition of “soul”: Other names from many traditions that can and have been used are: identity and integrity (humanism), spark of the divine, true self, inner teacher or inner light, original nature or big self are some of them. Palmer further suggests that the soul is that quality of ours that refuses to define human lives only as “biological mechanisms, sociological constructs, psychological projections, and/or raw materials for whatever society at the moment. As useful as these concepts can be to us in working with the complex reality of being human, I believe that to see only through those lens is to diminish what and who we are and to diminish our potential impact on this troubled world. For me the soul is that which has never given up, even when it has appeared to me and to others that I have done exactly that. It cuts through all the posturing that I ever did in various times of my life when I “knew” exactly what I was doing.

In my childhood there were plenty of reasons to deny my original nature or soul. I lived in a small rural town in the California desert in the late 40’s and early 50’s, especially before rock and roll came to shake things up. The restrictions of that time and place were doubly hard on the extroverted, exuberant self that I was born as. When I was about 8 or so, a schoolteacher was leading us through some dances. To my delight she was bring movement from the outside to the inside, where it was usually not welcomed. The one I remember distinctly was the one where you had to go “Put your little foot, put your little foot.

Some of you may know the one. (Sing and demonstrate with turns) I was having one of my increasingly rare extroverted moments when I declared that that was so boring, and then demonstrated some wild and exuberant dance to show what could be done. (demonstation). I was quite pleased with myself.

The teacher was a kind one, but still firm in that tradition of what was right to teach so I was promptly put in my place and the dance as it was continued. There it was in a nutshell. We were being taught to put away the whole of ourselves. Some of our most prized possessions of selfhood had to be denied. They had to be grown out of. Even at 8 years old we had to “grow up.”

For years, as an adult, I occasionally dabbled in dance classes, always doomed to be not able to follow the forms and declared myself useless and even worse, stupid for having this impulse to move freely to my own dance that never really went away. Eventually, there came a time in midlife when I really could not stand it any more. I began to free dance anywhere that I could get myself to do it. At first that was only in the safety of my own home. Later, I frequented street fairs and happily danced away. I remember seeing a woman once who was about my age watching the dancers. It seemed to me that she was watching me in a very wistful way and the seed was planted for a ministry: why should we give up activities that are precious to our soul, our true self, if they hurt no one? And is it possible that we may have more impact on the blizzard of the world if we do keep more than our culture allows for?

I understand now that there are difficult places for all of us no matter where or when we grew up. And each of us has our own selfhood, our own combination of precious gifts that we have to share with ourselves and others. One important question for me has been: how do we know what to keep and what to let go of from everything that we got from our childhood, from our families, from our culture, and, these days, from the relentless onslaught of media information that is nearly impossible to escape. Even impulses from within may be anything from fearful overreactions from the past, to addictions of body and mind (for myself, I include caffeine, chocolate, and online mahjong solitaire to that list), as well as the authentic voice within which has valuable wisdom to share. So how do we navigate this confusing reality?

One of the things that has helped me a great deal in my life have been the special people who reached into whatever self absorption that I was in and shook me up by going against all my assumptions about how the world worked and who I was. One of the first was my mother’s mother, a staunch Southern Baptist, who told me that I should avoid all those “tent meetings” where everyone got all emotional and went down to get saved. I should just sit down and figure out for myself what I believed and then live by that. I was stunned that a conservative Christian woman would say such a thing. It stayed with me since. It may be that it helped me hold to what I believed when my father’s Mennonite family took me to see the greatest tent show evangelist of the time, Billy Graham. When the call came on Youth Night to “Come on down for Jesus and be saved”, my oldest brother and I resisted the family pressure. I figured the that I had been baptized as a child, so I did not need any more saving, thank you very much. I have since been doing a great deal of sitting down and figuring out what I believe in and attempting to live by that. I don’t know what she would make of all of what I did with her advice, but I believe that being true to yourself was a value that we held in common.

I went on to read widely and talked a good game about what I read, but somehow, for some years, it didn’t translate into a life living by any of that wisdom. I was disconnected from myself, attempting to live a life that I thought a college educated, and thus middle class, life ought to be. I had no way to process what was valuable in myself, in my growing up. My family didn’t know how to do the kind of transition that I was attempting either. I felt that I had no wisdom of my own, but distrusted any community that I tried out. It all sounded hollow to me. Eventually, after trying self-medication as a path, I threw myself on the mercy of a therapist. Sometimes, you can need a guide for a period of time. That process brought a great deal into focus and I left eventually with a great deal more tools to make the next steps.

One of the important things that I learned was that I could not throw out anything of who I was. I had to own all of it and move from there. Palmer calls this the move to wholeness. He tells us that wholeness is not some mystical state of Buddha-hood, but a state that “means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” He considers devastation happening in a life “as a seedbed for new life”. This doesn’t mean throwing out grieving or expressing anger in the moment, for example, when devastations happen in our lives, as they inevitably do, but, when we are ready, moving into the next part of our lives to remember and experience joy and gratitude again. To me this means to live whatever life brings fully. I am still working on that one. I have problems with transitions for instance. My summer has been a process of many transitions one after another and occasionally I could hear myself getting a little whiney. I have surrendered to my whiney state when alone to delve fully into all that irritates the part of me that really just wants everything to be totally comfortable. It helps then when I remember that those transitions are exactly what I had hoped for. Even fervently hoped for.

I am not the only human being in the world that has any kind of transitions that they are dealing with. I am sure that you can think of a few or even many in your own lives. The act, joyous as it is, of having and raising children, for instance, has transitions built into it, constantly. Ageing, one of those non-optional realities of life, has its own transitions built in. Just to mention a few.

One of the other important things that I learned is that community, in some form or other, is essential, certainly for me. We may all have our own personal reasons for being in community, but I mean here the need for something even besides receiving and offering support, and acting together for common causes, for instance. I believe now that reading and reflecting on great minds and compassionate souls is the backdrop that informs my experiencing life, but that the experiencing of life in relationship is where the learning comes that can be made a real part of my life. If I see myself as a loving person, in community I can see the growing edge of that for me. Do I love only people who have roughly the same political beliefs that I do?

Do I treat myself in the loving way that I think others should be treated? What do I do when there are people who are difficult for me to love, for whatever reason? How do I let the inner life inform the outer life and visa versa?

Palmer talks about the dance of being in solitude and being in community as the optimal way of having a life of integrity. The inner life informs the outer life and the outer life informs the inner. He compares it to being on a Mobius strip. This is a mathematical form that can be created simply by putting the two edges of a strip of paper together, but with a twist in beforehand. This causes the strip to be continuous, without any inner and outer. Thus the inner and the outer continually recreate each other. Our choices come in whether we will, “walk that strip wide awake to its continual interchanges, learning to co-create in ways that are life giving for ourselves and others or sleep walk on the Mobius strip, unconsciously co-creating ways that are dangerous and often death dealing to relationships, to good work, to hope.” I want to add a caution against the either or character of his statement. I feel that it is more likely that there is a complex reality of being awake and being asleep that most of us inhabit. The world of habit, of comfort is not that easily gotten rid of. We need some balance to make sure we have some comfort, as we make those transitions in life.

But we can make progress on moving more into the creative interchanges, if we dare.

The payoff for moving out of our comfort zones can be a big one. I began to get bold enough to start my own business, an unthinkable action for a person raised to believe that having a job was the only thing that I could ever do. It’s true that I folded within 5 years, the usual expectation for many new businesses. But I would not have missed it for anything. And it got me ready for the next transition, when I realized that I was going to do an even more unthinkable thing: enter graduate school to become a minister. I had no idea how that was going to happen, especially financially. But doors opened – that is another way that I know that I am on the right track, the doors keep opening.

I tell people that my intention is to become an associate or assistant minister, but the truth is I really don’t know if that will be the specific ministry that will happen. A friend once suggested to me that when a door opens for us, we may find ourselves in a corridor with many other doors there. We may be in that corridor for a time before the next door will open. It’s evidently not my job to know everything, but it is my job to walk thru that next door and do what needs to be done there.

As for being religious liberals, we have the history and tradition to point us in the general direction of what we need to do in this world. In the May 2005 UUA Commission on Appraisal document: Engaging Our Theological Diversity, there is a call for us to become more embodied, more mindful and more prophetic. Palmer reminds us “When we live by the soul’s imperatives, we gain courage to serve institutions more faithfully, to help them resist the temptations to default on their own missions.” I can’t think of anything that is more needed these days than that, both in our institution and others.

Meanwhile, do we need to get bolder and bigger in our actions? Do we need to hook up with more allies? I don’t know that I have the answers to those questions, but I do look forward to sharing some further thoughts with you as the year progresses.

Meanwhile, on the personal level, dwelling in that creative dance can give us more room for community, more room for the deeper levels of relationship in so-called ordinary life, and a deeper appreciation for that life. I can’t see myself doing good work in the world without the grounding of that life.

I look forward to exploring that realm with you in our time together this year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that can so easily be found of devastations so large that there is no hope, I have also experienced these last three years the evidence, not as easily found, of thousands upon thousands of people world wide who have gathered into multiple organizations and other groups to work on the job of recreating the way that this world functions toward a saner and more life-giving way of being on this precious earth that is our home.

I gladly join in partnership with them all to do my small part, while attempting to not underestimate the impact of one more increasingly awake life. They and this congregation are part of my network of ropes that keep me grounded in the onslaught of the devastations of our times.

What I can say for the present day is that it comes down to doing whatever works well for each of us to stay awake. Despite the blizzards and devastations of life, let’s be kind to ourselves and to one another. Let’s freely offer and accept support from one another. And let’s increase those times when we can feel gratitude and joy for this wonderful and precious life that we have been given.

Palmer, Parker J., A Hidden Wholeness: the Journey Toward an Undivided Life, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.