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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Hillary Hutchinson

May 1, 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Hillary Hutchinson

May 1st is also Labor Day, hence the topic of today’s talks.

Good morning. My name is Hillary Hutchinson, and most of you know that I have been a member of this church since 1987. This is my third Affirmation of Faith. Pretty soon you are all going to know the story of my life, like it or not!

Today’s sermon topic is “The Myth of the American Dream.” This is a scary topic for me, because it hits a little too close to home. I was raised in a family that believed very strongly that if you worked hard, acted responsibly by going to a regular job, and took your vices in moderation, you would eventually get ahead. Promotions would come, raises would come, and retirement would be possible at age 65. No one talked to me about institutional or social barriers. No one told me I would get laid off twice through no fault of my own, once with a three month old baby. No one mentioned how difficult it was going to be to save any money while putting a husband through graduate school and raising two daughters. No one told me that being female and pregnant means a lot of employers are just not going to invest in you. No one told me that, from time to time, I would actually be working two jobs to pay expenses. Finally, no one told me that I would find myself stuck in a series of dead-end jobs just to pay the childcare and the mortgage. (A mortgage, I should add, that I would not have even been possible, except that my husband and I inherited some money in 1985. It’s not like we were able to earn the down payment.)

So, we bought a 900 square foot house with one bathroom and no air conditioning in the barrios of South Austin. Counting Phred the cat who came with the house, there were five us living in this small space within two years. Through it all I came to this church, looking for answers about how to live my life.

Davidson is going to talk to you about the problems with our American myths, but I see myself as one of the lucky ones: We did in fact succeed in living principally on one income. I had a series of jobs with insurance (indeed, I stayed in some horrible jobs because we needed the health insurance benefits). The Eva St. house was a big and terrifying investment, but it did appreciate. If Jon had not died in 1997, we might now be living quite comfortably on two incomes. White, well-educated, employed, and with a solid net worth based on my own income and assets, I have been able to begin pursuing my own dreams. I no longer wonder with Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?” I am working toward a PhD in higher education administration because despite everything, I still believe in the value of a meritocracy. I still believe in the power of education. And I want to be in a position where I can help other people access education, and learn to think critically about the current state of human affairs.

Now that I no longer have to ask myself, “Is there enough money for food and shelter until the next payday?” I find my questions are more nuanced. I am more focused on whether I am doing the right thing, (a question Spike Lee left open for interpretation in his movie of the same name). I am more interested, like Martin Buber, in whether I am in “right relationship” with my fellow human beings. I look at my beautiful daughters, and I hope that they like me as well as love me. I hope that I am doing right by them in the choices I make moment to moment. I try to honor that by treating them with respect, listening to their opinions of the world, and laughing with them about the absurdity of some of our human actions. Teenage hormones are horrible and confusing (I remember it only too well!), so some rules for living are needed for guidance. In finding my own spiritual path at this church, I crafted a golden rule to teach my daughters when searching for guidance: “if your action adds love to the world, then its probably right; if your action adds hate to the world, then it is probably wrong.” Being good Unitarian Universalists, Kate and Clare tell me this is just another way of framing Buddhist compassion.

I think there is one other important element to compassion, and that is the capacity to imagine. This is where Davidson’s discussion of great literature comes in. To act compassionately we must first be able to imagine what it feels like to be someone else on the planet. Secondly, we must be able to imagine different outcomes than the ones we may have been taught. Karen Armstrong was just in town as part of the KLRU Distinguished Speakers series, and one of her comments was, “It’s quite possible to practice bad religion just like its possible to practice bad cooking.” So, since I haven’t the time or the skill to write a great novel with morality subtly built into the text, I’ll leave you with instead with this pragmatic ethics test, compliments of the Rotary International business club. It’s a great little shorthand piece to determine the next right thing to do. Ask yourself:

Is it true?

Is it fair?

Does it foster friendship and create goodwill?

Is it beneficial to all concerned?

How you answer these questions will help you to act with integrity at the next moment of choice. And maybe if enough of us practice this kind of faith, we can create a new American dream that truly does not leave anyone behind.

PRAYER:

Let us pray that we live within stories that can make us more whole.Let us have gods worth serving, rather than the flashier idols that use us until we are used up and gone.

Let us measure our lives and our worth in the right kind of currencies – currencies of compassion rather than control, empathy rather than empire, connection rather that separation, relating with people rather than using them for our own ends.

For there is something precious in the world that wants our attention – something sacred. If only we would serve those things most precious and sacred, they would return the favor, and might bless us.

We know those things. We are moved by them and warmed by their glow in the hearts where they live.

We pray that our hearts will be among the hearts in which the tender mercies dwell. We pray that our lives and our relationships might have that glow and that warmth. And we pray that our world may be the ally of these precious but fragile forces, rather than their enemy.

For these things we pray. But not only pray, not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON: American Myths

In one of the shortest sermons ever delivered, and one of the most famous, the Buddha said “All I do is sit by the river, selling river water.”

I think it’s one of the most profound revelations of the secret of nearly all wisdom: that nothing is hidden, that we just need to be reminded of things we already knew, so that perhaps this time we will awaken, and act.

We had two fairly large memorial services here this week. Both of them filled this room. And in both of them, I said something I say at almost every memorial service. I say I wish more people came to memorial services. Because if they did, and if they heard the memories and stories people get up to tell about the person who has died, they would realize that we know exactly what is right and wrong, good and bad. We know exactly how a noble life is to be judged. Not by might, arrogance, wealth or intimidation, but by the kinds of things every religion has always preached: compassion, understanding, peace, love. We don’t really fool people. That’s the river water, and every good preacher makes their living by selling it.

So as we’re going to talk a little about the American myths this morning, I need to say that we can talk about them, but you already know what’s wrong with them, and how life would look if we were living it more wisely. That’s the river water, and all I’m going to do here is bottle some for you to take with you. So let’s begin.

Every society has basic stories that define it, and it isn’t hard to list some of the deepest myths of America. I think there are four basic myths.

First is our fascination with newness. We have been the “New World” since at least 1492, but “newness” is a central part of who we are. To Americans, it has always symbolized an improved version of what came before. They called this the New World, and named their settlements New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New England. When they went west two centuries later, they named a patch of desert New Mexico.

If you read studies of traditional cultures, you find that all of them would regard this idea that “new” means “improved” as completely insane. Most societies look to the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of their elders, in a way Americans haven’t for a long time. If new means better, than old begins to mean outmoded and irrelevant. And if you don’t think old means irrelevant, ask a dozen people over seventy how they feel our society regards them. We don’t have elders to whom we routinely look for wisdom that surpasses our own.

The second part of the American story is about Success and Capitalism; and in America they are also tied to Salvation, for one of the most fundamental equations of American mythology is the simple formula that “wealth = worth.”

Our myth of success is probably the most important myth in American history. It was given its most powerful expression during the 19th century through the many stories written by Horatio Alger (1832-1898), the chief prophet of our American Success myth. Take just one of his stories, a story called “Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins’ Luck.” You have probably never heard of it. But a century ago, it sold fifty million copies in paperback and was read by millions more. That means that almost all of the adult population of the United States a hundred and thirty years ago bought or read that one little book. And Alger wrote over 134 books. I don’t think you can overstate the influence of a book read by virtually every adult in America, and don’t think we have had any book to match it since then.

Horatio Alger was a Unitarian minister in the 1860s. He was also a pedophile who took street children with him on his travels as sexual toys.

A third part of our American myth is our radical individualism. This is the country of Lone Rangers. The myth of the lone cowboy is one of our most powerful myths. We could talk about this for hours, but this is a point that hardly needs reinforcing in Texas.

The fourth part of our American myth that I want to consider is our imperialism.

From the start, the Pilgrims saw themselves as God’s chosen people, the faithful remnant come to the New Eden to create the New Jerusalem, with a mandate from God to extend the kingdom of Christ, to extend it across the whole new world, to bring civilization to this wilderness. In the 19th century, mythic heroes including Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill saw themselves as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west. Buffalo Bill believed he stood between civilization and savagery.

Officially, our imperialism goes back at least to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was quickly and repeatedly interpreted to mean that we could advance our economic interests aggressively in this hemisphere, which we have done ever since.

These parts of our script have been with us for a very long time. But things have not been good for the American Dream for quite awhile, at any of these four levels.

First, our addiction to the new has been frustrated at many points. We no longer have any new frontiers, no wildernesses left to take over or move on to. Forty years ago, the TV series “Star Trek” tried to satisfy our wanderlust by defining “Space” as “the final frontier,” sending our Lone Rangers off in space ships. But the frontier metaphor had already worn thin when we settled California over a century ago. And now the last of the Star Trek programs is being cancelled, and the last installment of the “Star Wars” movies has been finished – another series of cowboys on the space frontier.

Here’s an example of how completely we have adopted an imperialistic attitude toward the rest of the world. Think about this, if you will. Fifteen years ago, we essentially kidnapped the president of another country and brought him to this country to stand trial in a drug deal which had also involved agencies of our own government connected with the Iran-Contra affairs. We arrested him after a coup attempt we supported failed to kill him.

If you Google Noriega’s name, the third entry shows a mug shot of him after we arrested him. The caption underneath reads, “Manuel Noriega, former president of Panama, rescued by American marines for incarceration in the United States.” Now think about this. If Iraqis invaded the United States, kidnapped our president and took him back to put in an Iraqi prison for causing the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis in the past few years, how would you look at a caption of his mugshot that read, “George W. Bush, former president of the United States, rescued by Iraqi soldiers for incarceration in Iraq”? We have an attitude toward all other nations that we would find arrogant and criminal if they expressed it toward us. As almost anyone from other countries can tell you – even Canadians – this attitude is 100% American.

We have presumed the right to meddle in Middle Eastern oil pricing for eighty years, and assume that our actions must be justified because we want cheap oil. But think about this. Imagine Saudi Arabia or Russia sending troops into Kansas to regulate the price of wheat because they want cheap food. We have invaded half a dozen tiny countries in the past decade, taking armed forces there as though we had a divine right to do so. We have no such divine right. We never have.

Further, our imperialism is embarrassed by the growing awareness that we are not even the best at very many things any more, or anywhere near it. Our education is near the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world, our illiteracy rates are soaring, our cars are second-rate, we are barely in the running in televisions, stereos, and a dozen other items. Our family structures seem ineffective, and both in politics and in religion we have seen the norm moving steadily away from honesty and toward hypocrisy.

We murder fifty times as many of our fellow citizens as either the Swedes or the British do. We are a superficially religious society, but in 1989 a special edition of LIFE magazine conducted a survey showing that 70% of our citizens believed in an active spirit of evil they called the devil, and only 40% of them believed in a God. I’m betting that’s a far more honest and accurate poll than all the happy-face polls insisting that 90% of Americans “believe in God” (without ever asking people what they mean by the word ‘God’). The national mood increasingly favors not empowered citizens, but obedient ones. Well, this list can and will go on, but you can continue it on your own.

A third level of our American Dream has involved our radical individualism, which has led us into another blind alley, as our Lone Rangers have become mostly lonely rangers. There is an interesting medical syndrome that can serve as a metaphor for our predicament today. It is the syndrome in human babies known as the “failure to thrive” syndrome. It means that babies who are left alone without being picked up, held, and touched by others can die. They cannot live as isolated individuals, and neither can we. Our emphasis on individualism and our accompanying dismissal of the responsibilities we owe the larger society are way out of touch with the reality of human life, and we are paying the price for it. Psychological depression is ten times as common now as it was before WWII, and since the 1960s our dominant psychological problems have been narcissistic personality disorders. We too are failing to thrive, both as individuals and as a society.

In the fourth part of the American myth, our equation of financial success with personal value, of wealth and worth, there is really nothing new at all. The American philosopher William James spoke of Success as our “bitch goddess” a hundred years ago. But even then this was not a new observation. The ancient Hebrews worshipped the golden calf, and were scolded for it by their prophets. The prophet Amos accused his contemporaries of making people secondary to profits: of selling the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. Jesus was clear in his own teachings that you can either worship God or money, but not both, and that it would be easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven.

As individuals, we all know this. It isn’t news. And talking about it is like sitting by the river, selling river water. Most of that selling river water business has been done by our poets, artists and professional storytellers. When you look back into the first few decades of the 20th century, it is surprising just how accurately the failings of the American Dream were named, and in very famous books, all of which also became movies.

When Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, he focused on the fact that capitalism is about selling both things and people: that to be a successful salesman you must sell not only your product but also yourself. That is what his character Willie Loman did. He sold himself in pursuit of the American Dream, but on a deeper level he had put his faith in the American Dream to give his life meaning, to make him whole-or, in religious jargon, to grant him salvation. It could not do it, and Willy Loman’s suicide was the death of a lost and hopeless soul, abandoned by its god. In the end, at a funeral hardly anybody came to, his eulogy was really summed up in just two phrases: “He was the best-liked,” and “He never knew who he was.” I am reminded of Jesus’s asking what a man gained if he gained the whole world and lost his soul. Poor Willy never even gained the world.

A decade earlier, John Steinbeck wrote his powerful book The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s variation on the theme of critiquing the American Dream was different from Arthur Miller’s, but no less devastating: it is a capitalistic dream achievable by only a tiny percentage of people, he said, whose power and greed will impoverish the overwhelming majority of the rest.

This is even more true today than it was in the late 1930s. During the past dozen years, the gap between the rich and the poor has become a chasm, as we have become a two-tiered society in which the richest 10% of our people control well over 90% of our wealth, a proportion more lopsided than at any time in the history of this nation. The salvation offered by the American Dream is increasingly a salvation available only to the priests and priestesses of capitalism, carried on the backs of an immense number of the masses.

At the end of his book, Steinbeck offered his solution in a form so graphic and powerful it may always fill theaters with sobbing, as it did when I saw it. Here are poor and desperate people who were merely used as dupes by those few who controlled the American Dream, who have been driven against the wall with nothing and no one to care for them but each other. And so the final scene has a young mother whose baby was born dead, now offering her milk to a starving man: a man she did not even know, except to know him as another human being in need.

Here is the “milk of human kindness” in its most elemental and heart-wrenching form. Steinbeck is saying that the kind of salvation we most dearly need cannot come from the American Dream or from economic success. It comes only from reaching out to the strangers around us and offering them what we have to share. This is river water. Every religion has sold it.

And a decade before John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald offered an even more fundamental criticism of this American Dream in his book The Great Gatsby, which many have called the greatest American novel of the 20th century. As Steinbeck saw that the salvation held out by the American Dream is an illusion for all but a very few, Fitzgerald saw that even for the very few, it is still an illusion, for it can not save anyone.

Gatsby had it all, and he had nothing of value because he had lost his soul: he had lost his integrity, his authenticity. That is the reward for worshiping false idols, as it has always been. That is the reward for spending a human life in the service of values and ideals that cannot grant life. As Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman ended with a death and a funeral, as Grapes of Wrath ended after the death of both a baby and the dream that the baby had symbolized, so The Great Gatsby ended with a death and a funeral – a funeral to which nobody came.

The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called “Two Old Men” about salvation, about wholeness, about where the sacred dimension of life is to be found, about the way in which life is given its most enduring meaning. Tolstoy’s story is not well known, but it is full of river water.

In this story, two old men decide to go on a pilgrimage to worship God at Jerusalem. On the way they meet a poor family near starvation. One of the old men goes on to the Holy Land the next morning, the other stays to do what he can to help the family. Emergency help becomes long-term aid, as he stays with them for months. He helps them plant crops, cooks meals for them, and spends all his money buying them what they need. Finally, months later, the family has recovered and the old man, his money gone, returns home.

The first man, now back from the Holy Land, swears he saw the other man in Jerusalem, surrounded by a halo-like glow and crowds of admirers. The second man, whose money and energy were spent helping the poor family and who never made it to Jerusalem, just changed the subject. The first old man, you could say, visited the Holy Land as a tourist; the second man had become holy. The first sought the sacred as a separate thing, the second reached out to others, gave of himself, and turned the place in which he found himself into holy ground.

This is like the last scene in The Grapes of Wrath: someone reaching out to offer the milk of human kindness to a stranger. Like the two old men in Tolstoy’s story, Steinbeck’s characters found nothing at the end of their journey but people like themselves: alone and in need, with little to share but their humanity. And so they reached out and turned a small spot on this earth into a momentary shrine where kindness overflowed and strangers were nourished. Jesus could not have said it any more clearly, nor could the prophet Amos, nor Mohammad.

This has been the message of the best prophets in all times: that we are the agents of salvation on this earth. And the measure of the gods we serve, the measure of our own spirits, is the measure to which we have overflowed, have reached out to strangers outside of our family, outside of our religion, outside of our race, to share with them the milk of our own human kindness.

This is the river water that is sold by every religion on earth that’s worthy of the name. It isn’t news. You don’t really come here to learn this; you come here to be reminded of it. Perhaps what we come to church for is not the river water. Perhaps, instead, we come to church hoping once more to learn how to be thirsty for it.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

10 April 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech – words taken from Marianne Williamson

HOMILY: Life Shrinks and Expands in Proportion to One’s Courage

A thousand sermons have been written on the sentiment in that saying from Anais Nin, that “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” And one of our most persistent dreams in life is finding the right kind of courage needed to help our life expand in the right ways. It isn’t easy.

There are a couple Buddhist stories about this. In one, there was once a mouse who went to God to ask for a favor. “What is it?” asked God. “I am only a mouse,” came the answer, and I live in constant fear of cats. Can’t you do something about my fear?”

There was a loud “Poof!,” a puff of smoke, and the mouse was turned into a cat. For awhile, this sufficed, but before long the cat was back to ask another favor of God. “And now what?” asked the Almighty.

“I’m still afraid,” came the answer. “Perhaps I’m still not big enough. Maybe if I were a very large dog . . .”

Again the “Poof!” and the cloud of smoke, and the cat had become something that looked like a cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Saint Bernard, weighing in at 250 pounds.

In a week, the dog was scratching at God’s door.

“Now what?” said God – who, though he had infinite power, did not have infinite patience.

“I’m still afraid. Perhaps if I were an elephant,” said the dog. “Or a lion. Yes, that’s it, a lion, the king of the jungle! Let’s try that.”

A loud “Poof!” and a cloud of smoke. And when the smoke cleared, there stood, again, a mouse – who, realizing that it was again a mouse, began squealing for God.

“It is no use,” said God, “there is nothing I can do for you, for you have the heart of a mouse, and as long as you have the heart of a mouse, you might as well be a mouse.”

I’ve been thinking about this subject because courage is in right now, as you know. Arnold Schwarzenegger has informed us that men who would rather talk, negotiate and understand than take premature action are “girly men.” By this measure, some of history’s great girly men would include Jesus and the Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Our invasion of Iraq, whatever else you say about it, involves some kind of courage. We have killed over 100,000 Iraqis, and more than 1,500 of our soldiers have died there so far, plus another 20,000 or so who have been wounded. That is some kind of courage.

But there are different kinds of courage, and not all of them are admirable. It depends on where the courage is coming from, what it is serving.

That word “courage” comes from an old French word for “heart.” You could say that life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s heart. I would define courage as a heart’s effort to make the world in its image. So if it is a good heart, the courage can serve good ends. And if it is a bad heart, the courage – no less courageous – is likely to serve bad ends. It takes courage, after all, to strap a bomb under your shirt, board a crowded bus and kill yourself along with as many others as you can. But a heart that reduces innocent people to pawns in your own deadly chess game – that’s a bad heart, no matter how courageous.

One of the confusing things today is that some of the worst hearts, some of the voices calling for the worst kind of courage, are coming from the fundamentalist versions of our major religions. Some Israelis say God gave them their land, and reclaiming it is doing God’s will, no matter how many Arabs they kill.

Fundamentalist Muslims give their religion a bad name by urging them to kill Americans in the name of Allah. And in this country, far too many conservative ministers have preached war and justified violence, even if they haven’t gone as far as Jerry Falwell’s saying we should hunt down terrorists and blow them away in the name of the Lord. These are voices pleading for courage. But they are pleading from bad hearts, so the courage serves bad ends. And when you serve a bad heart, life expands in unhealthy, deadly ways, like a cancer.

In your own life, you can think of stands you have taken that served both good places and selfish places, can’t you? And you can remember the effects that taking those stands had – on you and your relationships. But sometimes it’s easier to see these patterns in areas where we can paint with broader strokes. So you can also tell the quality of our heart by looking at the form life is taking in our society.

Last week, I read an article by a local man, an editor at the Austin Chronicle named Michael Ventura. I know Michael; he’s spoken here at least once. I want to read you a little from the picture of America he paints. And remember, we reap what we sow; bad effects come from actions serving a bad heart. So listen to these things – some of which you probably know – and ask what kind of a heart our country seems to be serving, and if it is the kind of heart you want. All of these conditions are the direct result of the priorities we are serving. And our priorities come from the active heart of our society:

The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

“The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens” (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a “developed” country? Anyway, that’s the company we’re keeping.

Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That’s six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)

“U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower” (The European Dream, p.81). Been to Mexico lately? Does it look “developed” to you? Yet it’s the only “developed” country to score lower in childhood poverty.

Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).

The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004).

“Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the [past 25 years] (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.

“In a recent survey of the world’s 50 best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European” (The European Dream, p.69).

Three million six hundred thousand Americans ran out of unemployment insurance last year; (NYT, Jan. 9, 2005).

One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).

“Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined” (The European Dream, p.28). It’s the only hope many see of ever realizing the American Dream.

Forty-three percent of Americans think torture is sometimes justified, according to a PEW Poll (Associated Press, Aug. 19, 2004).

“Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available” (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004).

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-01-21/cols_ventura.html

The bold actions that produced these figures took courage, skill, determination and a kind of leadership. But behind the courage, I believe that we have been serving a bad heart. We could add to the sorrow of figures like these by going down a similar list showing the number of killed, wounded and reduced to poverty in the more than one hundred countries where our country has soldiers stationed.

But I would rather tell you the second Buddhist story about courage. It’s one some of you have heard before here, because it is one of my favorites.

A notorious bandit came to the Buddha one day and informed him that he was the most fierce and brave bandit in all the world, and was going to demonstrate it by killing the Buddha. “Ah,” said the Buddha. “If you are that powerful, you can grant me two wishes before I die.”

“All right,” said the bandit, “but be quick. Time is short, and I have many more people to kill.”

The Buddha pointed to a young sapling tree growing nearby, and said “Cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughed, and with one quick swipe of his sword, it was done and the tiny branch fell to the ground. The Buddha picked it up.

“Now, old fool,” said the bandit, “what is your final wish?”

The Buddha handed the tiny branch to the bandit, pointed to the tree, and said, “Now put it back on.”

Legend has it that the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Victoria Shepherd Rao, Ministerial Intern

27 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER: Victoria Shepherd Rao

May we understand redemption and self-sacrifice in life-enhancing ways.

Maybe it is not by the death on the cross that we are saved but by the death of our need to always be right, or to have the last word, to always have our own way. Perhaps we may be afraid that if we do not strive to be heard our voice will be drowned out by a thousand different noises, that if we do not stand up for ourselves, we will be overlooked by others. These are real fears.

May we redeem them for trust. May we trade our worries for ourselves for broader, more expansive concerns and by them feel the universality of human need. Need for enough food, for clean water, for shelter, for personal acknowledgement, for enough love. May we be moved by such universal needs – the needs we all share.

Our needs may be met or maybe some of our personal needs are not being met. May we have the honesty to accept ourselves just as we are and the strength of character to do what is necessary to take care of ourselves, so that we may each, in turn, care for others.

Easter is the high holiday, the day when Christians celebrate the supreme self-sacrifice of the one who called the Creator God so familiarly as “Dad.” Christians believe the whole world of possibilities changed in that sad act. Let us also seek to appreciate the unimaginable possibilities an attitude of self-sacrifice ushers into our world.

Let us recall the little parrot in the Jataka tale the children heard*. She shows us how the heart can be powerfully stubborn when it sets itself on the well-being of others. The promise which motivates the one who is self-sacrificing is not only the well-being of others but the possibility of an ultimate kind of satisfaction not with the self but within the self, the sense that there is truth in the statement, “I did everything I could.”

May we here today grow in our capacities to act and be with others in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and may we learn a new meaning for redemption, trading the confines of our self-interest for the expansive realms where concern for the well-being of all humanity, even all beings can bring meaning into our lives abundantly, hope into our outlook irrationally, and joy into our hearts unexpectedly.

* The story of “The Brave Little Parrot” is part of the Buddhist tradition of Jataka Tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives. In this particular story, a parrot does everything she possibly can to put out a fire which is destroying the forest home she shares with many other creatures, regardless of the danger and the seeming hopelessness of the task. Her efforts move a god to tears and his tears become a saving and restorative shower that puts out the flames.

SERMON: Eastering

Religion is a funny thing. On the one hand, we insist that our religion is about dealing with our deepest and most important questions: matters of morals, ethics, even life and death. Nothing in the world is outside the reach of religious concerns and questions.

On the other hand, we expect all our worship services to be rated “G.” There are animated children’s cartoons more risqué than the average sermon. This makes it hard to tell the truth, if the truth is too challenging, unorthodox, or just plain disturbing. And nowhere is this more true than in Christmas and Easter sermons! I have Christian colleagues who say these are often their least favorite sermons, because there is so much pressure to offer nothing more challenging than a Hallmark card with a Happy Face on it.

I’m not a Christian. But if I were a Christian minister and this were Christmas, the first words in my Christmas sermon would be “You know there was never a virgin birth, don’t you?” And for Easter, I’d begin by saying “You know that no corpse ever walked, don’t you?”

There is a saying that the first word in religion must always be NO – NO to the nonsense, so there is room to say YES to the more profound insights of the best religions. But it’s hardest to say No to the two central myths of Christianity – that there was something supernatural about either the birth or the death of the man Jesus.

There wasn’t anything supernatural – not because I said so, but because the world isn’t built that way, either now or then. Christianity was born in the first century, couched in the first century scientific picture of the world. They believed the universe was a local affair, with three levels. It’s the view of the world you can still see by going outside on a clear day; it was one of the most intuitive and common-sense pictures of the world we’ve ever had, even if it wasn’t within a billion light years of being true.

In the middle was the earth, which was flat sort of like a big pizza. The sky above was a dome made of rock – they called it the “firmament,” and the Greeks had their strongest god, Atlas, charged with holding the heavy thing up. Good gods and angels came from up there – either above the cloud layer around Mt. Olympus, or above the higher clouds in Christianity. And below the earth was the place of fire and brimstone, as you could see by looking at what volcanoes brought up from beneath. This was the home of the bad gods and demons.

That’s the first century scientific world picture you have to have in mind to make sense of a lot in the Christian scriptures. When the gospel writers say that the heavens opened and a voice shouted down “Behold, this is my beloved son in whom I am much pleased,” it demands that old picture of the world, where the top of the sky just wasn’t that far away. Or when they say that Jesus descended into hell or ascended into heaven, you need that same ancient picture to make sense of it.

That’s the way the world has to be built in order to have gods mating with humans, corpses ascending to heaven, descending to hell or going anywhere at all. And the world isn’t built that way, either now or then.

But it takes some courage for ministers to tell the truth on Christmas Sunday, or Easter, because in the opinions of most people, Christianity is about supernaturalism.

That’s because for two thousand years there has been this awful contradiction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. The religion of Jesus is found in the things he taught people about how to live, how to treat one another. The religion about Jesus is the magical religion of the baby and the cross, in which the teachings of the man Jesus are often completely overlooked.

The religion about Jesus has always been the religion of literalistic and fundamentalist Christianity. It is about believing a certain story that few people would even know how to believe, with the promise that if you do, you’ll be saved some day after you die. Jesus would have hated that story. But then, Jesus never heard of either Christmas or Easter. They weren’t created until long after he had died.

The religion of Jesus is not supernatural at all. It is about how you can be saved, be made more whole, here and now, and how you can help make the world more whole here and now.

The message of Jesus was a message of liberation and empowerment; the messages from the religion about Jesus are too often aimed at frightening people into obedience to agendas like hating gays or independent women, or sanctioning a war against people in Iraq that look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. These are political and military agendas that Jesus would have seen as wrong or hateful.

And the religion of Jesus isn’t about Easter. It isn’t a noun. It’s a verb; it’s about Eastering. It’s about the miracle of new life coming from old, life out of death, right here and now. Nothing supernatural, though it feels so magical when it happens, you know? “Do you have a light?” Jesus asked; “Don’t hide it under a basket.” Have you been given a gift of life? Don’t hide that, either. Share it, give it to others. Life is about honoring that spirit of life that comes and goes as it likes, but when it comes our way it can make all the difference between feeling dead and feeling alive, you know?

Literalistic religion promises a Garden of Eden, which would be an awful place. A place where only obedient, unquestioning, uncurious people are welcome, a garden where no one is allowed to grow into their full humanity. It is not a garden at all, but a trap. It’s a trap in which your spirit can die, because living spirits, like living people, always question, always grow and change. In less than three days, the Garden of Eden would just bore you to death.

Literalistic religions say you can’t save yourself, it can’t happen now, and it can’t happen here. Liberal religions say “If not now, when? If not here, where? If not you, who?” And we answer, “New life can come to you. Here and now.”

If this were Christmas, I’d say that honest religion is a manger made ready for the birth of the sacred within our midst. The Easter Bunny doesn’t need a manger – actually, I’ve never really wanted to know how or why that rabbit lays colored eggs and foil-wrapped chocolates.

Liberal religion – and the religion of Jesus was a liberal religion, not a literal one – offers not a Garden of Eden, but a Garden of Eastering. A fertile place where new life is welcome because we trust the future more than the past.

That’s how I think of this church: as a garden of Eastering. A couple years ago, I overheard our current Board vice-president tell someone that this church was a “Do-ocracy,” where those who choose to do something give the place its character and direction. That’s a Garden of Eastering, a place giving birth to the future.

Before you leave today, we’re going to give you a gift, a symbol of this Eastering spirit, to take home as a reminder. But more about that later.

When you think about it, our annual budget is really just paying the costs of providing that Garden and the staff to tend it, but not the new life that grows in it. We never know what or where that new life will be, because it comes through you. For instance:

I’ve never seen another church with the range of high quality music we have here. Think of the weekly offerings from Brent, Bryan, John, our choir and our many guest musicians. Almost every imaginable style of music is here, from a choir singing Bach to a soloist singing a song by Joni Mitchell or the Beatles, or the wonderful music from “Pieces of East” we have this morning. There’s almost nothing we won’t try, as long as it can carry a spirit that can move us – that’s the key. And that’s why the music program is great: it’s a garden in which the Spirit can grow and flourish. That’s a garden of Eastering.

Or think back a few months and ask why we had such a super Christmas Eve pageant. Why was it so nice? Well, because Vicki Rao, our ministerial intern, took charge of it. Because a few members who had experience in set design and theater direction offered to lend their talents. Because a lot of parents drove a lot of kids to rehearsals, and four or five hundred of you came to be here for it. Eastering doesn’t have a season; it can even happen at Christmas.

Have you walked through the lovely landscaped garden we have in back? Five years ago, it was a playground filled with dangerous junk that had been condemned. Then a few members decided we deserved and needed something beautiful instead. They talked with me and the board, consulted with landscapers, researched top-quality playground equipment, had professional plans drawn, raised money, put in a lot of work, and now a condemned dump has been transformed into a place of beauty for all ages.

And this church has been designated a Natural Habitat by the State of Texas, and a Green Sanctuary by the Unitarian Universalist Association. It’s the only church in Texas with that designation. Why? Because a handful of members who were more sensitive to the grounds than the rest of us felt called to transform it, worked at it and did it. That’s how Eastering works.

Very soon, out in the foyer, we will have a huge twelve-foot long credenza, custom designed and built for us. Why? It wasn’t in the budget. But one member got so sick of the look of the foyer he decided to do something, got some others to help him, talked with me and the board, collected money, and soon there will be a new locus of beauty in our foyer, born of the imagination and care of ordinary people right here in this room. Eastering.

And our new Friday Movie Nights. Several months ago, I thought we needed more opportunities for community that had nothing to do with fundraising, and thought that well-chosen movies might be a way to do it. I solicited donations from several members, who generously contributed a total of over two thousand dollars, and we bought a projector and eight-foot screen. Then some members came forward who wanted to help, decided we should have soda and popcorn for a more complete movie experience, and put it together. We had our very first movie night two days ago, this past Friday night. The members who had put it together told me that if we ever had forty people show up for one of these, they’d call it a success. Friday night, we had eighty-five here. That’s Eastering. New life, appearing where before there had been nothing but a big room, a big garden waiting for something new to be born in it.

This summer, some of our high school kids will be taking part in a Freedom Ride organized by the UUA: a long bus ride retracing some of the steps of the freedom marches in the civil rights movements of forty and fifty years ago. Why? Because one member thought it would be neat to have some such trip, and after more heads got involved, this trip emerged, money was donated, and our kids will have a trip this summer they will never forget, to reconnect them with some terribly important parts of what it means to be an American who cares enough about freedom to make personal sacrifices for it. Eastering.

The church budget, as essential as it is, can’t create the magic that brings new life to this place. All it can do is pay for the garden and hire the staff to tend it. But whether the garden will give rise to new shoots of life – that is really up to you, to the spirit that dwells in you, that makes you aware of little things about this place that need new life, and that moves you to help with the miracle.

And if you think about it, life is like this too. You work to pay the bills, to provide a garden where Eastering might happen, and you work to create a relationship that can give life to you.

Because besides the kinds of institutional Eastering that help make this church so alive and healthy, there are those more down-to-earth, personal gifts of life and grace that come to us.

Last year, a member of this church was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually awful. She went through tests and the ordeals of treatments. This week, she sent me an e-mail saying there are no signs whatever of any cancer cells, and her prognosis is now for a normal life of another few decades. That’s Eastering.

And just last night, I received an e-mail from Cathy Harrington I want to share with you. Many of you know that Cathy was our ministerial intern two years ago, who is now the settled minister in Ludington, Michigan. And many of you also know that last November, her 26-year-old daughter and youngest of three children was murdered in California. It was about as devastating as anything a parent can ever go through, and it devastated Cathy. Her church gave her time to heal, and even arranged all the Sunday services in December. She spent time with her family, went to Nicaragua for ten days – a place that had some magical healing powers for her. And last week, she went to San Francisco to take part in a four-day street retreat, living, eating and sleeping with some of San Francisco’s homeless people in the Tenderloin area.

Here is her Easter e-mail:

Davidson:

I just returned from a week on the streets of the Tenderloin with the Faithful Fools. I went in search of God and much to my surprise found Her.

I ran into a homeless man named Will, who I met last year. He said the Lord put it into his heart to give me a gift. It was a magnificent silver cross [that had belonged to his mother], a gift of grace that has moved me from despair to the realm of healing and wholeness. It was one of many glimpses of the divine this past week. Finally, grief has released its deadly grip on me and I am able to breathe again. I think I can actually walk through the valley [of the shadow of death now], instead of staying forever in the shadow.

Happy Easter, Cathy.

We all live in the valley of the shadow of death: that valley where death, disease and despair can rear their ugly heads at any time, without rhyme or reason. It can be scary in that valley; it’s no wonder so many people live in fear rather than trust and hope.

But there are more than shadows in this valley of life. There are also gardens: amazing gardens in which new life can and does grow. For us. Here. Now. It may not be supernatural, but it surely feels miraculous. Let us go seeking those miracles, and seeking to be part of those miracles for the world around us.

Happy Eastering!

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© Davidson Loehr

Sally Miculek

20 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Miculek

Ten days from now, I’m going to turn 27. Most people would say that 26 isn’t really a major year, as far as growing up goes. It’s not 18, and “adulthood,” or 21. It’s not a decade change. It’s just 26. But, for me, 26 has been a big year. I’ve gone through three important life events, coming-of-age kinds of events, if you will. And their varied nature just reinforces the notion that you never know when or where some new growing up experience is going to come from.

The first event was the most recent – Sunday, January 16, of this year. With two new friends, I signed up to run a 12 mile leg on a relay team for a 50 mile ultrarun through Big Bend National Park. I’m sure many of you have completed marathons or ultramarathons, or had equivalent achievements in other sports, but I hope you will not scoff at me too much. My first 5k, or 3.1 mile race was in April of last year. By November, I was able to run six miles at a go, and that’s when I decided to sign up for the Big Bend run. I put myself on a training regimen more grueling than any exercise plan I’d ever tried before, and within eight weeks of deciding to make the run, I was ready and able to conquer this task I’d set for myself, and I had a great time doing so.

The second event was my wedding. On June 5 of last year, I met my fiance in my parents’ garden, and there we said our vows in the company of many of our friends and our families. The day was the perfect culmination of months of plans, preparations, negotiations, and stress, and I feel lucky to enter the married phase of my life with such an amazing fellow.

The first event was of a more sobering nature. As it happened, the day I was sending my wedding invitations, my OB-GYN called me. He had confirmed that, after follow-up tests, some unwanted cells had returned to my cervix after a procedure 18 months before that had been intended to eradicate the problem. Though he told me many times that this was not cancer, he did refer me to an oncologist, and that fact, coupled with the word “carcinoma,” which was used to describe the wayward, was enough for me. I am happy to report that, after a day surgery a few weeks later, and after many follow up visits throughout this year, the cells have not yet returned. Still, cancer remains a specter for me, and I cannot hear a woman say she is overdue for a routine exam without feeling obliged to tell her some part of my story and then urging her to see her doctor.

So here I am, at the end of my 26th year, embarking on a still new phase in my life. I have a new husband and a new fitness hobby that I hope to keep for a long time, and an ongoing medical concern that will forever color my attitude towards women’s health, and that I hope will never become more than a mere concern for me. As I prepare for my next birthday, I feel confident that whatever growing up experiences 27 brings, I’ll be able to handle them. I’ve got some stuff at the core of my being that I can hold onto when I need it, and that offers comfort, solace, and jubilation through all of my triumphs and challenges. First, I have a family that loves me, and that I love in return. I know I can always go to this group of people to share all of my growing up experiences, for the good or the bad. Also, I have always held the belief that I am a lucky person. To this, I owe my good fortune in having a family I love, finding a mate I love, having a good job, and being able to relish the highs in life, and recover my happiness and joy after things go wrong. No matter what challenges I face, what good or bad decisions I make, I know that I’m lucky enough to be able to come through these growing up experiences stronger. Now I ask you two questions: what have your growing up experiences been this year? I think, if you examine it, you’ll find that maybe you’ve had a more important year than you might have expected. Second, what is at your core that will help you overcome the challenges and embrace the triumphs? I think I did pretty well with the stuff at my core, and I hope that the stuff at your core is just as strong.

PRAYER:

Let us remember who we love and who loves us. for those invisible threads are the ties that bind us together, that help to weave the web of our larger and better selves.

Let us remember and honor those high ideals we have served, and which have served us. They are a part of the image of our greater selves, the image of God.

And let us remember, and draw into our hearts, those most tender mercies that help make us blessings to ourselves and others.

As we make our way through life and life makes its way through us, it is these invisible, slender threads of connection that make up our greatest strength and our most heartfelt hope.

We are not alone. We are never alone, if we can remember those few invisible and precious things that live within us.

And so let us remember who we love and who loves us. Let us remember and honor the high ideals that give us our most noble profiles. And let us remember and pass on to others those most tender mercies that help make us most fully human, and most fully divine.

If we can remember and honor just these few invisible things, these things that form the bedrock of our character, we will be all right. We will be all right.

Amen.

SERMON:

This morning’s service is really about how to deal with change, and the role played for us by those “still, small voices” I was talking with you about last week. When we speak of change, we are usually talking about disposing of something: changing clothes, jobs, cities, partners. Change is usually a kind of “out with the old and in with the new” sort of thing. So it usually means to drop one thing and get a new thing. We speak of it as though we stay unchanged, but just change some of our accessories.

But even with that simple kind of change, we have in mind some image of ourselves, of what doesn’t change. So we change clothes because we are going to a party or a wedding, and want to be dressed right to honor the people and the occasion, because that’s the kind of person we want to be. We change what’s visible to serve what’s invisible.

In the Christian scriptures, there is this famous sentence that says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) “The evidence of things not seen.” Invisible stuff. Important stuff. And Roman Catholics have defined a sacrament as an outward manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s presence. That invisible holy presence is one of the most important things about us, especially when we have to go through hard changes.

With every physical change we make, there is an invisible thing that usually directs or guides the change.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian who created the discipline of comparative animal behavior – humans and other animals, that is – once said that there is one time in our lives when we are so receptive to our environment that it could almost be compared with “imprinting” in young geese. That is that time in our late teens and twenties when we’re struggling to find an adult identity to replace the one assigned to us by our parents. We are so oversensitive to stimuli at that time, he said, that the music that is most powerful for us at that time usually remains the most powerful music for the rest of our lives.

And we may change a whole slew of things in this search, depending on the fads of the day. We want to mark ourselves as individuals, but we want to look like the right kind of individuals – like all those others in the group we run with.

When I was a teen-ager, boys who wanted to look a little wild combed their hair with a duck tail in back. Boy, does that ever not sound wild any more! And I’ve never understood just why we wanted the back of our head to look like a duck’s behind, anyway.

Today, young people get more dramatic changes done: piercings, tattoos, theatrical things done with their hair. Those are the visible changes. but they are driven by the invisible desire to look the part of someone trying to declare independence from an old role, looking for a new one.

Or think of people getting married, and putting wedding rings on. That’s an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual. Though most people who get tattoos will tell you they are also an outward and visible sign of an inward movement.

Almost all of our actions are outward signs of inward dispositions, beliefs or concerns. This is true of social movements as well as individual ones. Something like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement created a lot of outward signs: parades, protests, banners, petitions and the rest. But what gave these movements their power were the invisible and inward changes in attitude that they symbolized.

What’s the point of all this? It is to draw your attention to an irony. And that is the fact that in life, most of our visible actions are really acting out invisible inner or spiritual states that are more important.

This may sound kind of obvious, but it’s one of the most important things in religion and life. I’ve thought for a long time that the biggest reason that religious literalists seem so frightened of change, or those who are different, is because they’re stuck in the visible world, and can’t find that deeper faith that the holy spirit is present everywhere, in everyone.

I’ve had a brief, if strange, e-mail correspondence with a professor from Bob Jones University recently. At one point, I tried to engage him by raising some good scholarly questions that anyone teaching religion should know about. But his response was simply to say that we probably couldn’t communicate, because he was convinced of the absolute depravity of humankind. You know, you can’t say something like that about other people: you don’t know them. But he and many other literalists say that these are confessional statements, they know they are true by looking within. And I don’t think you can argue with that.

But my god, what a sad, miserable kind of faith! Of course we have some original sins – taking our beliefs too seriously is one of them. But we also have many original blessings that are with us still. And we tilt toward the good, not the evil. How dreary to go through life with fear driving you to such horrid beliefs that you miss the gift of so much that makes life rich and good. I think one of the ironies of people stuck in literal religions is that their only answer would be to find a better kind of religion: one with a healthier and more whole picture of our human condition.

This is the kind of thing Sally was talking about with that “stuff” at her core: that invisible center that has sustained her through some of her recent big changes. Things like knowing that your family is stuck with you and you can count on them, or counting on the fact that you’ve always been lucky enough to be able to frame changes in hopeful ways rather than frightening ways.

The supremacy of these invisible things – these still, small voices – has been seen by the greatest thinkers in all times and places. I want to introduce you, or reacquaint you, with a few of them, a few people saying the same thing in different ways.

1. Aristotle wrote, “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. [and] small though it be, in power and worth it is far above the rest.” All this talk of invisible powers and voices sounds kind of spooky or supernatural. But it isn’t supernatural. It’s natural, and super.

2. In the Bible, when the ancient Hebrews left Egypt and wandered through the wilderness for forty years, all the outward and visible signs were just awful. Those with the shallowest faith even wanted to return to Egyptian slavery because at least it was familiar. But they carried something with them on their wanderings, that gave them a kind of center, a center that moved with them. They called it the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box about three feet long by two feet square, and the Hebrews carried it with them everywhere. It was thought to have great power – you may remember the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? That was the outward and visible thing.

But its real power came from the fact that it was a sign to them that their God was with them, that everything holy that gave them significance and purpose was with them, always, even as they wandered through the wilderness. Now don’t just think of this as an old story about people who have been dead for over thirty centuries; it is, as all good myths are, also about us, about a dimension of ourselves we usually haven’t learned to see.

3. There is a stronger version of this business of carrying your god with you, in ancient Greek mythology. It’s one I find both more profound and more useful. It comes from a little-known myth of a little-known god named Proteus. If you read Greek mythology, you won’t find many lines devoted to this god. His chief claim to fame was his ability to change shape.

Sometimes he was a tree, sometimes sea foam, or anything at all. A lot of Western thinkers have attacked this as a sign of people with no soul, no core: “protean” people. But they have missed the point. The god Proteus should be seen as the patron saint of change. Because, while he changed form quite often, he was always a god. Think about this. What was most important, most sacred, about him, had nothing to do with the form he happened to be in at the moment. He was always holy, always a god. You understand that in the language of mythology, this is a story about us, don’t you? It is a story telling us that for us too, when we change form, place, change almost everything, there is still that invisible something about us that is sacred. If there is one single truth I wish more people really believed, it is this. It’s both natural, and super.

4. And a beautiful expression of this same insight comes from the Qu’ran from the religion of Islam, where one of its most famous sayings is that Allah is closer to you than your own jugular vein. Now what can be closer to you than your own jugular vein? Only something that is an inherent part of you. God inside of you: the holy spirit as an invisible but essential part of you that goes with you wherever you go.

5. One last image comes from an old story the Greeks used to tell about Socrates. He was this wonderful and very irritating old philosopher who taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle. He was a stonemason by trade, and all the stories about him indicate that he was, that his face was – well, ugly. And this was in a Greek culture that idolized beauty.

Sometimes in the plays the Greeks would put on, an actor would portray Socrates – usually to make fun of him – by wearing a big mask he held up in front of his face, a mask made to look like the face of Socrates. Now the face was so ugly that people laughed, sometimes because they didn’t believe anybody could actually look like that. And when Socrates was in the audience and this happened, he used to stand up and turn around so everyone could see that yes, by golly, someone really can look like that! His heart, his soul, weren’t owned by the visible world, but by something inside of him no one but Socrates could really see.

That may have been the source of the story that compared Socrates to some common little wooden statues Greeks would make that were plain on the outside, but when you opened them they were filled with gods. How else could Socrates be so unconcerned with his looks, unless there was something inside, invisible, that was more powerful than his misshapen face? Plain on the outside, with gods inside. You see, that too is a story about us, if we’ll hear it.

Sally called it the stuff at her core. When I hear a story like Sally’s, I don’t much care what you call this invisible and holy part of you, as long as you can call it forth. Aristotle called it forth by one name, the old Greek mythmakers called it forth by another, the ancient Hebrews called it forth by still another. And for Socrates, like Proteus, it was closer to him than his own jugular vein. But can you see they were all talking about the same thing, the fact that there is something about us that is incorruptible, that is always there, always with us, and that it is the strongest ally we have as we go through the changes that life brings to us.

This invisible, natural, super thing at our core: what is it? I think it’s an ability to frame life as trustworthy, because you know you are supported by a core, anchored in a soil, deep and fertile enough to ground you as you grow through the changes life brings.

This invisible thing, this faith that believes the evidence of things not seen, that believes there is a holy spirit within us, within our core – this is what determines whether in our lives time will bless us, or will just pass; whether we’ll grow up, come of age again and again, or just get older.

You know there’s a story about this, too: about someone who never got it, who was never transformed by life, who never came of age, and whom time simply passed by. It is the story of Rip van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree for twenty years, and woke up with nothing to show for it but a long beard. We can miss it. Life really can pass us by.

St. Paul once wrote that when he was a child he thought like a child, but when he became a man he put away childish things. That’s what we need to do when things change and we become afraid. We need to put away childish things – like believing that we’re alone, or that our meaning and purpose were tied to a certain form, job, or identity, or that there is nothing we can count on to carry us through. Those things are childish, and are not true. They are profoundly faithless.

For we are not alone. We may look plain on the outside, but we are filled with gods, filled with the holy spirit. The evidence is closer to us than our own jugular vein. You just have to have the eyes to see it, and the faith to believe it. It is not supernatural. It’s natural, and it’s super. It is the truth that can set us free. Try it, for a lifetime, and see.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

Cuileann McKenzie

13 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Cuileann McKenzie

We participate in an unending chain of conversations. But despite all this practice talking, I think most of us have trouble finding our true voice, let alone using it. We chatter, but are we really reflected in our words? Often not. Sometimes for necessary reasons – like portraying a particular image for an employer at a conference, or not telling the bride how much you dislike her gown on her wedding day. But holding back or changing our comments to suit the expectations of another can be taken too far. Like too many of us, I have had times in my life when I’ve allowed my true voice to erode to nearly nothing, completely following another’s lead, and all the while continuing to “talk” like there was nothing wrong. It’s a costly trap, for as the voice fades so does the spirit. But I can assure you, from experience, it’s possible to get your voice back.

What about those of us who haven’t found our voices yet, or those who have been categorically dismissed as not having much of value to say? I loved working with one of these groups, high school students, particularly those in alternative education. After some classroom teaching experience, in one of my teacher’s college assignments, I asserted that we should give high school English students an opportunity to write down their personal thoughts and feelings and allow them either to keep the notes or to use a shredder at the end of the class. The intent was to give them a private and safe space to explore their minds, to vent, to ponder, to hope or pray, and through the writing process, to start to find their own unique voices. The idea was received well by the professor, but that was pre-Columbine, pre-911. Things are different now. Today, I doubt there’d be much support for such a suggestion, and I’m not sure I’d chance voicing it. In the current climate of fear, I think we’ve really lost something – without a sense of safety, voices become quieter.

When I first thought of the shredder, I identified more with students and less with adults in the trenches of career and family. But time has a way of shifting perspective. Indeed, it now seems to me that age can bring more restrictions on voice rather than fewer. Before we speak, we consider partners’ feelings, company cultures, and the little ears of children. Perhaps we’re the ones that need some paper and a shredder. Maybe instead of feeding that machine our bank statements, using it to protect our identity, we can use it to help us find one. Writing to purge the mind and heart can be seen as healthy for the spirit as well, for the Dalai Lama ritually writes his concerns down on a sheet of paper each evening and throws it into a fire. Hey, if it’s good enough for him, maybe we should all try it!

A great way not only to begin to find your voice but also practice using it can be found right here at the church. I’ve had the opportunity to be both a participant and a leader of Evensong, and I’ve benefited greatly. I tend to be reserved when it comes to discussing personal matters. That might seem odd since I’m a writer and am also up here speaking right now, but when I’m writing fiction, I get to don a mask and have great fun, and when I’m up here, I fulfill a clearly defined role and follow my script. When on my own, though, in the everyday world, I often become quite shy. In the welcoming atmosphere of Evensong, however, my reservations soon faded away.

The series of eight weekly gatherings is a wonderful place to learn not only how to speak, but how to listen. After having a week to ponder a topic, you are given the chance to set your true voice free and talk without interruptions, without questions, in an accepting atmosphere. Each person has a chance to speak, while the rest of the group silently and supportively listens. And truly listening to another person is valuable — not only is the speaker’s voice strengthened by the acceptance and validation, while listening, we learn that we’re not alone. THE PRECEDING HAS BEEN A PAID PROMOTIONAL MESSAGE FOR EVENSONG AND RELATED just kidding, I’m just a big fan! But seriously, consider joining Evensong. A new group begins on March 23, and you can sign-up in the Gallery after the service.

Of course expressing our voice is not limited to speaking or writing. People caring for those who need their help are saying so much. And expression through music is wonderful – as we hear each Sunday. Some people also show their regard for others by cooking a beautiful meal. Related to that, to the friends I met last fall in Evensong – at our holiday potluck, I swear that my store-bought frozen lasagna was not saying anything! In whatever form of communication we choose, each one of us has the potential to speak with our own unique and valuable voice. Let’s take the time to find it and then, Speak Up!

PRAYER:

Let us listen for voices that bless us, and call us toward a higher kind of humanity.

There are so many voices we do not want to hear. Voices that belittle and demean us. May we let those bitter voices go by like echoes of bad ideas.

Voices that say we can never be enough, or that we are damned, or too sinful ever to be acceptable – these are usually the voices of tormented people. Let us move out of their way, as we move toward the light.

The light has voices, but they bless us, and call us into our fullest humanity. They help us become human religiously rather than fearfully.

The voices coming from the light bless us, because they know we are children of God, children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and that we are precious.

Let us know that we are precious: that we are precious people called to share our gifts of life with a world that desperately needs to hear life-blessing, life-giving voices. Let us hear those voices, and let us be those voices of life and love, of challenge and encouragement.

If we must hear voices – and we must – let us listen for the good ones. And let us strive to become some of the voices of blessing, affirmation, challenge and empowerment so that we too, as we pass through life, may bless the world with our own gifts of life and of love.

Amen.

SERMON: Finding Your Own Voice

I have a kind of confession to make: I hear voices. Don’t worry; the voices I hear are a comfort to me. And striving to be in their company gives my life much of its meaning and purpose.

Cuileann spoke of finding your individual voice, and when we talked about this service, I told her I was going to use the old Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to frame it. Now if you haven’t been coming here for long, you might think a “myth” is just an untrue story. But that’s not right. A myth is something that never happened, but always is. The good myths have insights into the human condition that seem relevant even two or three thousand years after the myth was first told. So the truths contained in myths aren’t like those in science. They’re deeper; they last a lot longer, and they’re always symbolic and metaphorical, never literal.

Little Echo was a nymph who was very pretty but couldn’t shut up. And once after talking to Zeus’s wife Hera to distract her while her husband Zeus escaped from another of his many local affairs, Hera got so angry she put a curse on Echo, and said that from then on she could never have a voice of her own, but could only repeat what others said to her. That story is the source of our word “echo.”

Now Narcissus was a beautiful young man who was unkind and indifferent to all the women who loved him. So one of the avenging goddesses put him under a curse. She decreed that he too would have the experience of deeply loving someone who would never return his love.

So Narcissus and Echo will make an interesting match. Echo sees him lying by a stream, but can’t call out to him. He, in the meantime, has seen his own reflection in the stream, fallen madly in love with it, and cries out “I love you!” “Love you” calls back little Echo. But Narcissus loved no one but himself, and gazed narcissistically at his own reflection until he finally wasted completely away. And little Echo also wasted away, with neither a love nor a voice of her own, until nothing was left of her but her voice, still repeating back whatever is said to her.

Boy, there are a lot of keen psychological insights in that story! Narcissists who, no matter how attractive they may be to others, are capable of loving only themselves. And their partners, who are only permitted to echo back whatever Narcissus says until they too waste away.

We really can lose ourselves if we never find our voice. Haven’t we all experienced this at least once? Not having a voice, playing the role of Echo to someone who really didn’t care?

The role of Echo is one with which a lot of women identify, but it isn’t always the woman who is the echo. Family counselors tell me they’ve seen it both ways, including couples where the woman is the narcissist and the man is assigned the role of echoing back whatever she says.

But however the roles are cast, it’s a plot in which nobody can win. Echo and Narcissus each had half the answer, but only half. Echo could only love others from a distance. But she couldn’t love herself, and wasted away without having a voice of her own. Narcissus could love no one but himself, and wasted away because that’s not enough.

Today we probably wouldn’t call her Echo. Maybe we’d say she’s just doing Karaoke: singing words to somebody else’s tune. But spiritual Karaoke is not satisfying, as you know if you’ve tried it. And when we see someone doing it, we always want to say “Oh, just be yourself, will you!”

But you know it isn’t that simple, either for women or for men. There can be something scary about speaking in our own voice, being known. What if it isn’t enough?

This reminds me of a short comedy skit I saw on television probably twenty years ago. It starred Rich Little, the gifted impersonator. It was sort of the opposite of the Echo and Narcissus story. He played a husband, whose wife was angry because he would never show her his true self. He kept talking to her like Humphrey Bogart. And after doing Bogey, he’d be John Wayne or Sean Connery. Finally, she got so frustrated she said if he didn’t start being himself, she’d leave. Then suddenly this whiney, wimpy, snivelling little voice came out of him. She stopped, looked, and said “Is that the real you?” “Yes,” he whined. She thought about it, then said “Do Bogey again.”

So part of finding our own voice lies in believing that we have a voice that’s worth finding, and that anybody even wants to hear it.

One of the problems is that we all have more than just one voice, and sometimes have to choose which of our voices to use. The Greeks really made it easier for us to understand that we have many voices. They had all these gods and goddesses, and Greeks understood that several of them resided within them, often giving them conflicting advice. Several years ago, I read a book by Arianna Huffington on The Greek Gods, and learned that she also grew up thinking of her competing voices as the voices of goddesses. She has said that her adult life has been a balancing act between following the voice of Demeter the mother to her two daughters, and Artemis, the ambitious and driven woman.

Maybe you think it’s odd, talking about having several voices. But everyone in this room has done it. You’re on a first date, or cruising a bar or party, and meet someone you want to impress. A woman might decide whether she wants to come across as strong Artemis, sexy Aphrodite, mother Demeter or Hera, the archetypal wife. Meanwhile, the man is choosing between being sexy Dionysus, cool and competent Apollo, tricky little Hermes, or Big Daddy Zeus.

We all hear voices. Sometimes our voice needs to be a blend of the several things that are most important to us, and we gain our integrity through integrating our different voices into complementary expressions of our core, or soul. So finding our voice is less like a discovery and more like an achievement.

It is so important for us to do this work, to find our voice and offer it to others, to our world. Because we are the only ones who can do it. And what a shame it would be if the world never got to hear our voice because we forgot about them while we were singing spiritual Karaoke. Finding and using our own best voice is how we are born into our adult roles.

Now let’s take it up a level. Once we find our voice, it’s clear that what really matters is what our voice is serving, what it represents. You know if it’s a whiney sniveling voice, nobody will want to hear it. And if we can only focus on ourselves, nobody wants to hear that, either.

One point of religion is to help us find voices worth serving with our own; to help us find ideals worth following with our lives. That’s what I meant when I said that I hear voices, that they are a comfort to me, and striving to be in their company gives my life much of its meaning and purpose.

You know some of this. In fact, you make judgments on it every week. You don’t really come here to hear me. You come because you hope I’ll be a voice for something beyond me, beyond us, for a perspective big enough to give you something to take home, something you can use in your own life. If you think back on it, I’m betting you have judged every preacher you’ve ever heard on what they served with their voice. Did their words just draw attention to themselves, or were they serving a perspective and a spirit big enough to give some life to you?

Christians say – and I do love this saying – that it isn’t so much who we are that counts, but whose we are. That’s what they mean: what are we serving? What gods are we incarnating, what spirits? Are they spirits that bless our world, or bore it, or even curse it?

Abraham Lincoln once said that we seek “the better angels of our nature.” The word “angel” means “messenger,” a messenger from the “gods.” Any Greek would understand that he means we want to serve the better gods. And like the Greeks, Lincoln knew we have many angels in our nature, both good and bad, and that they all come calling on us from time to time – as you know, too. But we should just listen for the better angels of our nature. They need to be the tune our voice is singing, if we’re to have a voice that blesses us and our world, a voice the world needs to hear.

So spiritual Karaoke is using your voice to sing someone else’s tune, like little Echo. And religion is using it to sing God’s song, to put it poetically. It’s the voice of God we’re seeking. Or if you’d like that put into other words, it’s the voice of wisdom, insight, compassion, love, and connection. That’s what the symbol “God” stands for. That’s the tune we want to sing, the tune that gives our voices the power to give life to us and to others.

Where do you find that voice? The voice that can give grounding to your own voice: the good gods, the better angels – where do you find them? From politicians? Beer ads? Movies? Soap operas? They’re all trying to sell us voices and roles to play, you know. Do you listen for the strongest voice, the loudest voice, the scariest voice? Where do you find the voice that’s most likely to be coming from those better angels of our nature?

This is like asking where do you find the voice of God, isn’t it? So where do you find this “voice of God”? Do you find it in the shouting bible-thumping preachers or the self-righteous politicians or arrogant friends who have made God so simple that they have him all locked up and want to tell you what to believe? No. No, I don’t think you ever find the voice you need in the loud and arrogant places. Listen to this wonderful poetic passage from the Hebrew scriptures:

“And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:11-12)

A “still, small voice.” That’s the kind of voice our better angels have, I think.

I had an experience like this that always comes to mind when I read this passage, and which you might find useful too. I have never liked public spectacles much, and have avoided almost every graduation ceremony of mine that I could. I didn’t attend the ceremony for my undergraduate degree, or for the Master’s Degree, and had no intention of going to the ceremony to get my Ph.D., either.

But a classmate told me I must go. “Why?” I asked him. He just said there was a line there that would be spoken by the president of the university, that I must hear it and would never forget it. All right, that’s pretty seductive.

So for the first time, I rented a gown and hood and bought the hat, and took part in the graduation ceremony. I was sitting right next to my classmate, and kept wondering when and what this great line was. It came near the end.

After all the undergraduate degrees and Master’s degrees had been granted, she called up onto the stage all of us who were receiving our Ph.D.’s. After some brief introductory remarks, she turned to face us, and said – this still chokes me up! – “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” I’ve never heard such empowering and intimidating words in my life. We weren’t just students who finally got through the grueling degree program. No, we were now and forevermore members of an “ancient and honorable community of scholars.”

I hadn’t even realized that such a community existed. I’ve spoken with others who got their doctorates at the same university, and the line has kept its power for all of us. One woman told me that sometimes, when she’s preparing a lecture, she want sto cut corners because the class is only for freshmen.

Then she’ll hear voices. At least that one voice, reminding her of the ancient and honorable community of which she is a part. And she says it feels like Aristotle is there looking at her, saying “You don’t really intend to cut corners on this lecture, do you?” Like me, she hears voices, and those voices are a comfort to her. And striving to be in their company gives her life, as it gives mine, meaning and purpose. You realize that this is the same message religions give in their different ways. It is like saying “You are a child of God, and God loves you,” or that your soul is part of the whole universe’s soul, or that you are made of stardust.

So when you serve a transcendent ideal, can you really say it’s your voice you have found? Yes, it’s just a voice that you cared enough about to educate, to let it rub up against others who aspired to high ideals. And the ideals we serve with our lives – those ideals bless us. And people around us can tell. They may not know just what inspired us, but they know we are trying to be true to something important, something enduring, perhaps even something eternal. And it makes all the difference.

For we have heard the voices of the better angels of our nature, and they always bless us, by initiating us into that ancient and honorable community of people trying to come into their full humanity. And there is no higher or more ennobling aspiration.

I don’t mean only for us as individuals, but also for groups of people. This was what happened with black people in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: they found their voice and claimed their place at the table of humanity.

It is what happened in the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the gay rights movements since gays fought back against police harassment at the Stonewall bar in 1969.

These moments were among the miracles of the past half century: miracles, because new life was born, as new groups of people found their voices, connected those voices with timeless tunes of freedom, equality and justice, and raised their voices to bless both themselves and the world around them, whether the world was ready for that blessing or not.

Those people heard voices. Not the voices of the loud bigots around them, not the loud voices of abusive policemen, not the voices of everyone telling them to get back in their place and be little Echoes again. They heard the “still, small voice” that contained the voice of God, the voice of the better angels of their and our nature.

This is a sermon that can’t really end, because it’s a sermon about beginning to take ourselves seriously, trying to become fully human, religiously. So here’s how I want to begin. I want to begin by welcoming you, all of you, into the ancient and honorable community of people seeking their full humanity. You are all part of it, and I hope when you leave here, you hear voices too: voices that know your name, know your soul, voices that give you the power to speak, to bless yourselves and to bless your world, our world.

Perhaps nothing in all of life is more sacred than hearing those voices, and knowing how to answer them.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

13 February 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

In many ways, we know so little. Yet we guide our lives, and our actions toward others, based on the little that we know. And sometimes we do harm, because we hadn’t understood, because we hadn’t cared, because we didn’t know the right little things.

Let us try to take an honest inventory of the little things we know, and test them with both head and heart:

When we judge and condemn others, have we understood that they, no less than we, are children of God?

If we are alienated by those who love differently than we do, have we remembered that it is often a gift to the world when we can love at all?

When we see that another’s values would not feed our souls, can we also see that means that our values might not feed theirs?

If the god of understanding were watching the way we treat those with whom we disagree, would that god say that we have really understood them?

If the goddess of love were watching, would she say that we had added to the amount of love in the world, or detracted from it?

And if all the people we most admire, those with the clearest understanding or biggest hearts – if they were watching us, would we feel ashamed, or proud?

We know so little, yet must guide our lives by the little we know. We seek ways of being and living that can make us better people, partners, parents and citizens.

Let us pray that our actions may make us agents of a deeper understanding and a broader love. For the world needs those gifts, far more than it needs our little certainties.

When we can’t respect others enough, when we can’t love them enough to bless their best intentions, let us pray for the character to treat them as we might if only we could understand them better or love them more.

We offer this prayer with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for this amazing gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

This starts and ends with stories.

One day the devil and one of his little helpers were sitting on a cloud looking down at the humans below, when they saw a man walking down a road who stopped, picked up something from the road, put it in his pocket and walked on.

“What did he find?” asked the devil’s helper. “A piece of the truth,” chuckled the devil.

“A piece of the truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”

“Stop him? Oh no,” said the devil. “It’s only a tiny piece of truth. Before long, he’ll turn it into an orthodoxy. And then he’ll be doing my work!”

There are ways in which that story sums up the history of almost all religions. It’s like the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, but with a vengeance. In the Hindu story, different blind people came upon different parts of an elephant. The one who had grabbed the ear said “Why, an elephant is like a big leathery leaf!” The one who had hold of the trunk said “You fool! It’s nothing at all like a leaf. It’s like a long, thick snake!” The one who had bumped into a leg said “You’re both crazy! I have a firm hold on this elephant, and it is like a strong, rough, tree trunk!” And from behind, the one who had grabbed the tail called out “You’re all idiots. Either you’ve never experienced an elephant at all, or you’re lying. It is not a large thing at all; it is like a small, stiff rope!” And so on.

Both of these stories are immediately recognizable because they’re both about the human condition and human nature, and that hasn’t hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

One of the original sins of our species is that we will never have more than a few pieces of the truth, but we always want to pretend that we have the whole truth. It gets us into most of our problems with each other, doesn’t it?

I spent several years studying theology back in graduate school. At its best, theology is the study of those deep and abiding truths that can set us free. But mostly, it is the study of how each religious thinker managed to find one tiny piece of truth, then turn it into an idol that became the enemy of honest religion, and too often the enemy of both truth and humanity.

So the question of religious toleration is a tricky one, because there is a lot that should not be tolerated, and part of the art is learning which is which. When I went on the Internet and Googled “religious toleration,” I was drawn to two fairly dramatic sites. The first was the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia. They pointed out that we only tolerate things we think are wrong but don’t want to speak out against. So we tolerate evil. No one will say: “We must show toleration towards courage or love”, for these are both traits that we don’t tolerate, but encourage.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church is against “freedom of belief”, which asserts the right of each person to believe what he pleases. And they quote Pope Leo XIII’s writing on this, from 1885, where he wrote: “The gravest obligation requires the acceptance and practice, not of the religion which one may choose, but of that which God prescribes and which is known by certain and indubitable marks to be the only true one.” “In the domain of science and of faith alike,” the Encyclopedia article continues, “truth is the standard, the aim, and the guide of all investigation; but love of truth and truthfulness forbid every honorable investigator to [tolerate] error or falsehood.”

In other words, for the Catholic Encyclopedia, freedom of belief is only freedom to choose the truth, and the only religious truth is, coincidentally, owned by the Catholic Church. Well, there’s that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth, and the devil watching with delight.

Then I also came on a website called biblebelievers.org. The headline read,

“The Cult of Liberty is the Recipe of Moral Breakdown”. Beneath the headline, they said the only thing conservatives can hope for is a moral reawakening of the United States.

They were encouraged by the fact that the conservatives in power are going to “dismantle the welfare state.”

“Bravo,” they wrote. Then they asked, “But what about dismantling abortion? Gay rights? Birth control pills and devices? Sex education? Dirty movies and TV? Women’s liberation? Secular humanism in the schools? These are the true plagues of American society,” they wrote, “not high taxes or welfare, and these diseases are the effect of the general breakdown of the morals of the people. And the problem is that these infections cannot be eradicated legally and logically except by some ‘principle, a principle which restricts human freedom only to those objects which are good’.” (http://www.biblebelievers.org/)

Both these websites are variations on the stories of people grabbing tiny pieces of truth, and the myth of the blind people and the elephant. And they show why the United States of America has had freedom of belief for nearly all of its history. Each of these religious groups has picked up a tiny piece of truth, smothered it in a ton of arrogance, and each has confused truth with their own small biases.

The Catholics would be embarrassed by the hateful bigotries of biblebelievers.org, even though they share many of them. And when biblebelievers.org speaks of goodness or truth, they do not mean the kind the Catholic Church has. Back when we had British colonies here, before the Revolutionary War that gave us the right to make our own laws, almost all the colonies were examples of what can happen when these tiny pieces of truth are given the power of law.

For example, the colony of Maryland published something called An Act Concerning Religion, on 21 April 1649. In that act, they said that anyone who denied that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or denied the trinity, or said anything bad about them, was to be put to death, and their properties would all be seized by the colony.

That’s what it means to say that when people find a tiny piece of truth and turn it into an orthodoxy, they are doing the devil’s work. In fact, I would say that orthodoxies are the devil’s work, because they are always that guy picking up the tiny piece of truth wrapped in reams of arrogance, then turning it all into dogma.

The truth that can set you free

Still, I’m with the biblebelievers.org and the Catholic Church when they say that we should encourage truth but not tolerate untruths masquerading as truth. And I’m with them when they say that liberals have far too often been willing to bless anything, including things that shouldn’t be blessed. Sometimes we liberals have had such open minds that some of our brains have fallen out.

But what is this truth business – especially something like the kind of truth that can set you free?

The short answer is that that’s what all great religious teachings have always been about. The best religious and philosophical thinkers have tried to help us understand what this greater truth is like, the kind that can set you free, the only kind that should really be encouraged. But few read them.

Aristotle, as the Catholic Encyclopedia noted, taught that wisdom consisted in choosing the middle road between extremes, because extremes can be either too permissive or too narrow and brutal. The best religious teachers and prophets have always known this.

In the Qu’ran of the religion of Islam, there were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as self-indulgent guesswork about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 143) The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions. (Armstrong, p.152)

And behind Christianity was the figure of the man Jesus, who would have hated Christianity. Jesus said don’t judge. He said to treat others the way you’d want to be treated. He even said to let the wheat and the weeds grow together – which sounds far more permissive than even the cult of liberty.

The Buddha taught that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the compassionate thing, we should always choose the compassionate thing. Why? Because what we think of as the right thing will almost always happen to coincide with our own biases, the little bits of truth we picked up.

Taoism has an even more subtle kind of teaching. They say everything is always in movement, either coming to be or passing away, either moving from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness. So certainty is a very weak place to be, because your next move has to be down.

And Jews have such a way of taking some lesson that sounds rigid, then soaking it in such human warmth and wit that it melts into understanding and compassion.

One of their many stories about this concerned a small village, which prided itself on enforcing the strictest kind of obedience to the Law – like that 1649 Act of Religion by the Maryland colony. The village was losing so many people it was on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t understand how they could be dying when they were so right.

So one of their elders traveled to a large town nearby, to see a rabbi who was known far and wide for his wisdom. He told the rabbi their strange plight: that they were dead right but nearly dead as a village. The rabbi nodded, and said “Your sin is the sin of ignorance. You see, the Messiah is among you, and you are ignorant of this fact.” The man returned home, hardly willing to believe this. He knew everyone in the village – after all, there were fewer and fewer of them every day – and there wasn’t anybody there who could possibly be pure enough to be the Messiah. When he told the other villagers, they didn’t believe it either.

Still, the old rabbi was famous for his wisdom, and nobody wanted to say he was a fool. So they began wondering if maybe he could be right – if old Goldberg over there could possible be the Messiah, or Mrs. Robbins. Impossible! Still, just in case, they began treating everyone as though they might be the Messiah, which means they began treating them a lot better than they had been.

You can see the end of the story coming: the village flourished, because they had let go of their tiny little truthlet and found the more difficult and more full truth, and it had set them free of their certainty, and free of their smallness.

The truth worth serving, the truth that can set us free, must first set us free from our own narrowest certainties, those certainties that would shrink the world to the size of our biases and habits. That’s the irony of places like biblebelievers.org or those passages in the Catholic Encyclopedia: while willing to fight or even kill for the truth, they don’t realize that they are among its greatest enemies – and that they make the devil laugh with glee at his newest disciples.

I don’t think any church or any religion can be trusted to know the truth when they see it, because that story of the man who picked up a tiny piece of truth and made an orthodoxy out of it – that seems to be a story of human nature.

That’s why the insights of the founding thinkers of great religions are almost always the enemies of the religions founded on them. The religion about Jesus has almost nothing in common with the religion of Jesus. Of all the people who might hate Islamic fundamentalism, none would hate it more than Mohammad. The Buddha would be at least saddened to see the rank superstition that 98% of Buddhists mistake for Buddhism, and on down the line.

You don’t let Budweiser choose the drinks, or all you’ll have is beer. You don’t let Christians define truth or no one else is safe. And when the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It simply takes more and better tools to serve either truth or life.

Yet behind it all, there is still this thing called truth that is still worth pursuing, and can still set us free. But today, it seems that it must first set us free from the religions that identify truth with their beliefs, from the nationalisms that identify it with their borders, and with every other example of people doing the devil’s work by beating others to death with their tiny little truthlets. Their name is legion.

One part of the truth is that none of us will ever have it all. We are all that person who picked up a tiny piece of truth. You could say both the gods and the devils are watching to see what we’ll do with it, whether we will use it to serve the demons of our lower nature or the angels of our better nature.

So another way of looking at which kinds of truth we should encourage, which kinds we should tolerate, and which kinds we should actively oppose is by asking whether the ideals we are following make us a curse or a blessing, whether our presence here has increased or decreased the amount of understanding and compassion in the world.

There is a wonderful story about this, which comes from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Unitarians want to claim him, though he didn’t think much of them, and once called them “corpse-cold.” But I don’t care what club he belonged to; I only care whether the tiny bit of truth he picked up seems worthy of the best we can be. Here is the story he wrote:

“The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” — “Look at our pictures, and books, they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?'” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

Here is someone who worshiped something very different from the biblebelievers.org or those who wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia. The wise old rabbi would have smiled, though the devil would not. We become what we worship. If all we will ever have are tiny pieces of the truth, let us choose very carefully what we make of them.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

6 February 2005

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 gather up our souls.

1. From personal interactions, let us gather up our souls:

— from relationships where we have accepted duplicity rather than integrity, let us gather them.

— from those places where we have promised to be true, but have not delivered on our promise, let us reclaim our integrity.

2. From our roles at work and in business dealing, let us gather up our souls:

— from those days when we return home grateful that we can have higher standards in our personal lives than we do at work, let us reclaim what must be ours.

— rather than playing mute and compliant roles in businesses we know to be cutting ethical corners, let us speak up, however we can, to wonder whether we can’t all do our work with more integrity, so we don’t all have to check our souls at the door.

3. And from our nation’s actions at home and abroad, let us gather up our souls, rendering to Caesar only what is Caesar’s, and keeping for our own souls what is most holy and inviolate.

— When we find high words being used to achieve low ends, let us look into our hearts and find a way to speak out.

In all that we are and do, we need to come from a place of integrity and authenticity that is only available to people who have taken care to own their own souls. It is that center from which we need to live, and which we seek.

So let us gather up our souls from all the places where they have become misplaced or dissipated, like strangers to us. Let us gather up our souls.

Amen.

SERMON: God

Let’s start simplistically, almost at cartoon level: The body politic doesn’t have elbows or kneecaps. And Lady Justice doesn’t have breasts, even though our former U.S. Attorney General spent several thousand dollars to cover them. Cupid is a myth, too. There isn’t any little baby flying around shooting people with arrows making them fall in love, even though falling in love sometimes feels almost that capricious.

You can learn a lot about the kind of creatures we are by the way we put together our myths and stories. We make everything seem human, even when it isn’t. We do it because we relate to it better if we think of it as human-like.

Look at our cartoons. We have all these cartoons with mice, cats, dogs, and an occasional goblin, and they all seem to think and talk just like we do. So they aren’t mice, cats, dogs or goblins at all.

They are projections of parts of ourselves, playing out plots familiar to us. We project those life situations out like movie projectors project images on screens in front of us. Then we study them as though they came from somewhere other than us, and we can be caught sending e-mails to people quoting a line from a cartoon character that seemed really wise. Isn’t this funny?

It’s not that we think all cartoons are wise. Most are just funny or goofy. Only a few seem wise, and we know the difference. When we cut out a cartoon and put it on our wall or refrigerator, most people can figure out why we would put it up. They see what it’s about. We are the ones who judge whether it’s useful or not. Cartoons that aren’t useful we finally just stop reading.

But most of our projections are useful. They let us back off to get a better perspective on ourselves. We do it in movies, too. And music. If you want to hear what’s on the minds of people between about 15 and 40, listen to the lyrics of popular music.

I don’t know why we do it this way. I’m reminded of a famous definition of religion by a sociologist of religion about thirty years ago, when he said religion is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant.” (Peter Berger) It’s audacious, but it’s just what we do in our religions, isn’t it? No matter how they do it, all our religions manage to propose some scheme for reality, and find us a special place in it.

Hindus say we are parts of the infinite and eternal powers of creation, maintenance and destruction. They made that up, but it’s a good story.

Buddhists say no, we’re not, but we can rise above the whole indifferent mess of the world and find a perspective that transcends even the gods. Taoism has its story about the coming and going of everything, the eternal flux where everything is either coming to be or passing away, and they say we can find a kind of comfort in imagining ourselves as parts of that story.

When we make stories for fun, we might call them cartoons and expect people to laugh. But when we’re really serious, when we think the stories we have made are really about the way things are, then we don’t create cartoon characters. We create gods. Those are our most serious stories, the trump suit of stories. That’s where we project our grandest ideas. Sometimes, our worst sides get projected onto our gods as well – like the times we have our gods sanction smallness, violence or hatred.

We seem to be walking projectors, casting on the wall both our insights and our shadows.

Plato once said life for most of us is like people sitting in a cave watching the shadows cast on the wall ahead of them by people and animals walking by outside. Something about that seems right, doesn’t it?

Still, we confuse ourselves with all these projections, because we can’t seem to remember that all our stories, all our religions, all our gods, came from the imaginations of some of our ancestors. Then the gods get passed down to us without that story about how they really began.

But think of Lady Justice. Well, no; let’s take a closer example. Think of Lady Liberty. You can see her standing on top of the capital building in downtown Austin. And she looks like a large woman. But we know we couldn’t take Lady Liberty out for some coffee – free-trade coffee, of course – and ask her what this “liberty” business is about. She doesn’t exist except as a projection and personification of our own dreams of justice, and our certainty that justice, at its best, is one of the ideals that all decent people must try to serve. Sometimes we need to gain independence from our projections, to gather up the ideas and ideals they are supposed to serve, and reclaim them.

I was rereading Karen Armstrong’s classic book called A History of God this week, and had forgotten how candid she is in talking about this. For those of you who don’t know who Karen Armstrong is, she is an English woman who used to be a nun, then left the order and became a religion scholar. She has said that she still lives within the discipline, but now her discipline is spending eight to twelve hours a day in London’s libraries, doing her research. She has written books on God, the Buddha, and Mohammad, among others I want to read you a few paragraphs from this book she wrote in 1993 which has become a kind of classic in religious studies. She begins by talking about growing away from the Church:

“Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so…. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. (xviii-xix)

“Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines…. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years. (xix)

It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality “out there”…. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world. (xx)

Karen is really telling the whole story here, but it sounds like I’m revealing secrets, telling you that the best religion scholars are quite candid about saying that of course God doesn’t exist, or course it’s a projection the way we project other stories. But they also want to say that “he” is the most important thing in our world.

The reason that “he” is in quotation marks is because what is so important isn’t God, but the high ideals we have projected onto him for safekeeping.

And what it means when someone like a Karen Armstrong grows away from God as one of the “childish things” she has put away, is that she doesn’t think the symbol God or the stories our ancestors created about him do justice to our high ideals, and she can honor them better without the projected pictures and stories of God flickering on the screen.

I want to talk with you about God, but the two most important things you need to know about God, about all the gods, are that, first, they were invented many centuries ago as vehicles to carry and guard our highest ideals. That’s why scholars say it’s the most important reality in the world. But the second thing you need to know is that the reality is not God, not any of the gods; the reality is the importance of our highest ideals.

And they don’t have to have the symbol of gods to carry them, as Karen Armstrong found, and as I suspect many of you have also found.

In the Golden Age of Greece – those centuries that produced their great playwrights, that produced poets and philosophers like Pindar, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – they did what Karen Armstrong has done. They reclaimed their highest ideals from the myths of the Olympian gods. Neither Socrates, Plato nor Aristotle cared much about the gods, and Plato tried to write myths that would replace the Homeric myths of Zeus, Apollo and the rest of them. Plato and others believed the stories about the gods had become like cartoons. People weren’t served by worshiping them any more, and needed to reclaim the treasures the gods had been created to guard. The priests controlled the stories about the gods, and used those stories to empower themselves more than the people.

But they were not about to give up their highest ideals. Instead, they rescued them from the gods, and made them the sacred center of society during Greece’s golden age. They called them the paideia – the word just means the highest ideals of the culture. They said they were the most sacred property of their society, and that all people had a sacred duty to live, teach, and honor these high ideals, just as former ages had honored them indirectly in the form of the gods the more ancient Greeks had imagined and projected.

And the biblical prophets made the same kind of move that the Greeks were making about the same time. They began attacking the low meanings the priests were loading onto this concept of God. They rejected the distant God who demanded only sacrifice and obedience, and insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. (Armstrong, p. 44) They were gathering up their souls.

The prophet Amos said that the people had misunderstood the nature of their covenant with this God. The priests were saying it made them the special people, the chosen people. Amos said No, being associated with this God meant responsibility, not privilege. (Armstrong, p. 46)

What Amos was doing was what all the prophets were doing, including Jesus. They were reclaiming the high ideals as things which must be written in our hearts and lived out in our lives, not hidden in a temple to be bowed down to as we listened to bad priests misrepresenting them.

I want you to understand what this means. It means that they all saw – even if they didn’t put it this way – that God is a part of us. God is the vehicle our ancestors imagined, on which they projected our highest ideals. And the gods are only useful as long as the represent the highest ideals. When they are kidnapped for low and mean purposes, we need to reclaim our ideals from them.

Still, there’s something audacious about thinking we have the right or the authority to reclaim our highest ideals. We project them out onto Lady Justice or Lady Liberty, onto idealistic visions of America, onto God, and then it feels that they are out of our hands, entirely above us, things we could never aspire to reclaim.

Yesterday I read a story of just this sort of thing happening that is worth sharing with you. Last night in California there was a special ceremony with a lot of very old Japanese Americans, to pay tribute to some even older white Americans. The story goes back sixty years, and most Americans don’t know about it.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, a kind of racist frenzy seemed to spread through our country, and over 110,000 American citizens with Japanese ancestry were arrested and imprisoned in detainment camps until the war ended in 1945. The part few know is that several hundred white American teachers volunteered to follow them to the camps, to continue teaching their children.

Their little-known stories took center stage last night when the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo honored more than 200 of the camp educators. Among them, museum staff tracked down 53; more than half were expected to attend the dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Glenn Kumekawa, a retired professor who was sent to a detainment camp in Utah at the age of 14 was one of them. Speaking of the teachers, he said, “They gave to us the link to the America we knew: the sense that not all Americans were racist, not all of them saw us as a threat but saw the potential we had as individuals.”

“Inside the camp, when every public indication was that we had no future, you had these teachers saying, ‘Yes, you do matter. They were the best of America,” Professor Kumekawa said. “They gave us assurance and hope by believing in us.”

When it came time to teach about U.S. democracy, teachers like Margaret Crosby Gunderson told her students at the Tule Lake camp not to give up on the Constitution; that the nation’s flawed political leadership was to blame for their unjust internment, [but that most Americans still honored the high ideals their leaders were betraying].

Another former teacher being honored was Mary Smelzer, who is now 89 years old. She is short and round with a cap of silver hair framing her face, and her memory remains sharp. As a member of the anti-war Church of the Brethren, she and her now-deceased husband, Ralph, opposed the internment. She taught math at the camps, her husband taught science.

The couple’s real goal, however, was to help people leave the camps. After six months of teaching, they set up a hostel in Chicago and later in New York through their church networks. They figure they helped resettle 1,000 Japanese Americans inland, away from the West Coast military zones.

Later in life, Mary Smeltzer went on to distribute relief aid in Vienna, join the Peace Corps in Africa, run a friendship center in Hiroshima and broker race relations in Illinois. Today she does volunteer reading with juvenile delinquents. Asked why she reached out to the internees, she replied with a laugh: “It’s just part of me. It’s just part of being a Christian, being a peace person, part of doing what I think is right.” (By Teresa Watanabe, LA Times Staff Writer, 5 February 2005)

These teachers reclaimed the high ideals they had projected onto America when America no longer honored them. That’s what Plato did with the ideals formerly projected onto the Olympian deities. It’s also what the biblical prophets did when their own ideals were higher than those their priests were giving to God, and what Karen Armstrong did with God. They gathered up their souls and owned them in a way we can’t do without that courage.

You can’t tell the story of God without telling the story of us. For the truth is that in the beginning, we created our gods in our image, or at least in the image of our highest and most life-giving ideals, like the compassion those teachers showed in the Japanese detention camps sixty years ago. And unless we remember that our highest ideals are only on loan to God as long as those who speak most loudly for him continue to serve them – unless we remember that, then we will see God’s corpse turned into a hand puppet by our worst preachers and politicians: a hand puppet to serve their agenda at the expense of our souls, and the soul of America.

It’s easy to think of other examples where we reclaim and reframe our high ideals from institutions that can not be trusted to serve them. Lawyers challenge the idea of Justice in the practice of sending mostly poor people to death row – the poor who can’t afford clever lawyers like Ken Lay and other higher-level criminals. We challenge the idea of “God’s will” and “Love” when we set up shelters for battered women. Their battering husbands often come to the shelters, accompanied by their ministers, demanding that this beaten and bloody woman be returned to the man who “loves” them because it’s “God’s will.” We know better. And we reclaim the concepts of love, respect, responsibility, and justice when we convict a Catholic priest of child abuse that has been covered up by the Church – sometimes for decades.

The history of religion, like the history of politics, is punctuated by those times when people rescued their high ideals from religions, politicians and nations that were no longer interested in serving them. When we look back, it is those people whose courageous actions we admire – just as I suspect you did when you heard the story of those teachers in the internment camps.

The story of God, like the story of America or the story of Justice, Compassion, Love and the rest of our high ideals, is a story about us. It is about whether we recognize those times when the most precious treasures we have, our highest ideals, need to be rescued from those who are violating them, no matter what kind of costumes they wear or political and judicial offices they hold. We do this so we can gather up our souls and be more whole – as people, partners, parents and citizens.

I said these things to remind myself, and hoped you might like to listen in.

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

30 January 2005

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 find gods worth serving. There are so many powerful voices calling out to us, trying to become our gods for a day, a year, or a lifetime. And so few are worthy. Let us find gods worth serving.

Let us ask, “Does this god cherish me, or manipulate me to benefit others? Does it offer understanding and compassion, or only judgment and condemnation?

We pray from a place that includes all the gods, and seeks to transcend them. For all that is human is in us, and we pray to harmonize it, and tune it in the key of decency, compassion, a quest for truth that stretches us, and a commitment to the courage demanded by this quest for truth.

We yearn to become better people, better partners, better parents and citizens. We want dearly to be a blessing to the world as we pass through it. And we want to feel blessed, to feel cherished.

These are prayers worthy of those better angels of our nature, in whose company we want to feel at home.

May we grow to become the answer to our prayers. May we grow that true, that courageous, that loving. These things we pray with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for the gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

Each time I revisit the ancient Greek myths, I’m more struck by how modern they are. The Greeks saw their Olympian gods as personifications of the natural and psychological forces within and around us. So you didn’t have to “believe in” them the way Western religions have always taught. Instead, you could just look within and around you, and find the powers, the voices, the passions and urges from which the gods were made. They’re still a good way of getting a different kind of understanding of who we are and why we often seem so confused about what to serve with our lives, even from day to day.

I want to talk about four Greek gods, and will start with the one you’re least likely to know about: Hephaestus, the crippled craftsman, whom the Romans called Vulcan, and whose Roman name was taken to describe the kind of person Dr. Spock was on the original Star Trek series.

Hephaestus was rejected by everyone: his father and mother rejected him and his father threw him off Mt. Olympus. He loved Athena and she rejected him. He married Aphrodite, she was never faithful to him and bore him no children, though she bore children to her other lovers.

Hephaestus threw himself into his work, lost himself in his work, and invested all of his passion in his work. He was the only god who worked, and he created many beautiful and useful things for others. But he had no passion left for his wife, no warmth left for people, no tenderness or mercy. Here too was passion that was intense without being integrated, even though it produced things of value for others.

Here is the modern man who throws himself into his work at the expense of his family and friends. Here is the surgeon – and I lived with an uncle who was one of these when I was 20 – who spends twelve to eighteen hours a day at the hospital healing others but never attends to himself or those who love him. It is a passion for work that becomes short-circuited that has lost any unifying vision of the whole person, the whole life. Here is the intense, introverted person who can not express feelings directly, and can become an emotional cripple unless he finds a way to blend his passions into the rest of his life, instead of simply turning them into work and giving them away to strangers.

There is something admirable, noble, even godly, about being able to convert personal sorrow into productive work. It’s a dramatic example of that old saw about making lemonade when life gives you lemons. So I don’t want to ridicule it. But it isn’t the highest goal we’re seeking, is it?

Part of Hephaestus’s myth has it that he made some golden maidservants – robots – to do his housework. What an insight! Hephaestus husbands and fathers can mold both wives and children into golden servants too, dehumanizing them by turning them into machines to do housework and wait on men, ignoring their own needs for love and the companionship of a human being instead of just a provider.

And for all his hard work, life can be frustrating for a Hephaestus man, because in our culture the Olympian heights of success are not filled by those who work with their hands, but by the owners, the dealmakers and investors, by those who work above ground with their wits and clear thinking to control those who earn a living through work. Hephaestus is no match for Apollo, and is still out of place in a Zeus world, as he has been for thirty or forty centuries.

Hephaestus is worth a whole series of sermons on his own, but I want to move on to another god.

Ares

Ares, whom the Romans called Mars, was the god of war, and a son whom Zeus rejected, though you might think he would prize him. But Ares, unlike Zeus, was a creature of immediate passion: he, like Poseidon, was a shadow side of Zeus. He fought spontaneously, without a clear view of the over-all war to be won, and so he was of no use to Zeus, for whom passions must be brought into the service of a clear long-range goal.

What is wrong with Ares is that it is a style of intense power but not integrated power. It is aggression cut loose from any decent or civil purpose. Ares will fight viciously for a cause without the ability to back off and judge whether or not the cause is worth it, or whether in stooping to brutal methods, he has become like the enemy he hates – the Abu Ghraib prison abuses come quickly to mind here, don’t they?

It is this lack of integration that makes Ares dangerous. A 20th Century example of Zeus rejecting Ares occurred during WWII when Eisenhower – who was even called “the Supreme Commander – relieved General Patton of command because his unpredictable verbal and physical attacks crippled the over-all war effort.

Dionysus

But if we’re going to talk about passion, we need to talk about the most passionate of all the gods: Dionysus.

Dionysus is pure passion, liberated from any need for integration. A passion so powerful it acted like a magnet in the ancient world, drawing people into Dionysian festivals of eating, drinking, and fairly uncontrolled behaviors. One Greek myth tells of a mother who, under the influence of this god, in the frenzy of a festival, killed her own son.

We have never been able to integrate this god, then or now. Instead, the overt expression of powerful passions is usually done during what you could call “time-out” periods of life, like the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the German Oktoberfest, or some of the festivities every weekend, right in downtown Austin on Sixth Street. Thousands of people leave the more calm, rational, Apollonian lives of Monday through Friday for some mostly mild Dionysian festivals, then on Monday return to work.

This is so similar to the way the Greeks handled Dionysus it is almost eerie. The two gods who were most different were Apollo, the cool and classical one, and Dionysus, the wild and frenzied one. Even in music and the arts, we still speak of the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian styles. In music, Classical music is sometimes called Apollonian, while Romantic music is called Dionysian.

Yet though Dionysus was pretty pure and powerful passion, he was also a favored son of Zeus’s. And in the temple of Apollo, the most famous of the Greek temples, Apollo was worshipped only nine months out of the year. The other three months were reserved for the worship of Dionysus.

Even the American religious movement known as the Shakers, who were completely Apollonian, even celibate, had periodic ceremonies where they would dance, whirl and shake to the point of exhaustion or unconsciousness. And it was these wild dances, rather than all of their other activities that gave these mostly quiet and Apollo-like people their name as “Shakers.” Dionysus is a powerful spirit, no matter how little time you spend under his spell.

Hermes

Now on to one of the most popular and powerful gods in both ancient Greece and modern America: the god called Hermes, whom the Romans called Mercury. Hermes is the messenger god. He is even the symbol of the Greek Post Offices.

Last time, I talked about Apollo, the high-level functionary who serves the wishes of the Father or Boss, and who sees people not as people but as parts of whatever scheme he needs to manipulate to reach the boss’s goals.

In pursuit of these goals, almost any means seem to be acceptable, including clever persuasion and its darker side, outright deception. In the terms of Greek mythology, these are the realms of Hermes, the messenger god. He could travel between all the realms, was the god of clear and persuasive speech, and often had trouble telling the difference between honest persuasion and dishonest persuasion, as long as it got him what he wanted.

In literature and religion, the field of hermeneutics is named after Hermes. Here too, the idea is that if we interpret great literature or religion properly, we will be finding the kind of wisdom that’s associated with the gods.

The gifts associated with Hermes are behind the brilliant orator, teacher, and preacher, but also behind crooked lawyers, deceptive advertising, and hypocritical preachers. He is clever and persuasive, but he is a trickster, and will do what he needs to get what he wants. This too is something Americans admire: Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, Robin Hood and Peter Pan are modern incarnations of Hermes, but so are rascally politicians who say anything they need to say in order to get elected.

Hermes is the power of persuasion, linking high, godly ideals with action. But persuasion is the goal, not the quality of the ideals, so neither gods nor humans can trust Hermes – or any other trickster figure.

Apollo and Hermes make an effective, if dangerous, pair. Apollo doesn’t see people as people, but only parts in a scheme to serve “the father,” the boss, or “God.” He links with Hermes, who knows how to trick them by using high words to serve low aims.

And the manipulation of us masses has been a constant part of American politics for a very long time. Until recently, it was talked about quite openly, going all the way back to the 1920s. The name from that time, one of the most important Hermes figure in the art of bamboozling the masses, was Edward Bernays. Bernays had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency. Bernays wrote “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the (First World) war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” (Noam Chomsky, p. 54 – I think it’s from his book on Manufacturing Consent, but have lost the notes and book.)

Here are more words from this most influential American who was such an influential incarnation of Hermes in the mid-20th century: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” This process of “engineering consent” – a phrase Bernays coined – is the very “essence of the democratic process,” he wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949. (Chomsky, 53) It is also the essence of the power of Hermes. And now, like then, his people are tricksters whom nobody can really trust. Their thrill and fulfillment lie in the power of persuading people – not in the quality of the things they’re persuading them of.

Another member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda committee, and another avatar or incarnation of Hermes, was Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential and respected journalist in America for about fifty years. The intelligent minority, Lippman explained in essays on democracy, are a “specialized class” who are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” They must be free from interference by the general public, who are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” The public must “be put in its place;” their function is to be “spectators of action,” not participants, apart from periodic electoral exercises when they choose among the specialized class. (Chomsky, 54) Again, Hermes would be so proud!

Hannah Arendt once described totalitarianism as the triumph of politics over truth. She was intimately familiar with both the Russian revolution of 1917, and the rise of Nazi power in Germany. She would recognize many of the patterns of contemporary America immediately.

This visit to the Greek gods can give us a new way of understanding both ourselves – especially men – and the world that men are running: namely, our world. One thing this means to me is that all the griping among political liberals about G.W. Bush is a little misdirected. As the Greeks would see, he isn’t unique; he’s just the puppet, the instrument, of the rise to power of the gods Apollo and Hermes, with Ares operating our Army and soon, perhaps, our domestic police. They are in the service of the voice they have taken to be the voice of their Zeus: the voice of the privileged class who feel entitled to money and power taken from the “ignorant and meddlesome” masses.

Our four gods now are Apollo, Hermes, Ares and an ersatz Zeus. Zeus is played by the large corporations, directing both our domestic and foreign economic policies. Nothing godly there except their power and arrogance. Apollo is all the functionaries serving these demands, including (at least) our past four presidents. Hermes is Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, the speechwriters and advertising companies who wrap the agenda in deceptive language and images, to sell it to those of us who have been put in our place as spectators of action.

And Ares invades Iraq for its oil and strategic military location, soon to be followed by Iran in the imperialistic scheme of the corporations and wealthy individuals who form the collective incarnation of our weird modern version of Zeus. But when the public is told our motives are to find “weapons of mass destruction” or the “liberation” of Iraq, while published papers by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney from 1992 say we need to invade Iraq to control their oil and military location, and when Wolfowitz gives an interview last year candidly acknowledging that the reason we invaded Iraq but not Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil” – then the agents of Hermes are at work, lying to America’s ignorant masses to serve the low and greedy agendas of the corporate interests that comprise their make-believe Zeus. These are the gods behind the action, not something nobler.

No one could argue that the gods America is serving in its treatment of our poor, or the citizens of other countries, have anything to do with either Jesus or the God of the Old Testament, whose prophets routinely attacked the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor.

What the Greek gods can help us understand about the biblical God whose stories are more familiar to us is that each god is only partial. Our task is coordination and integration in search of what Joseph Campbell called the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It’s never done completely, for the gods represent passions and allegiances that are always shifting, always beckoning to us, and sometimes persuading us.

The art of coordinating the voices of the gods is the art of coming to our full humanity, of growing up and growing whole.

I’ll continue this theme in two weeks when we think about religious tolerance. If there are so many gods, are they all to be encouraged, or even tolerated? The Greeks didn’t think so, and neither do I. But if not, where do we find our center? What is the authority for choosing among the gods?

Those questions are more profound than answers. But live with them for a couple weeks, will you?

I said that as though we really have a choice!

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

16 January 2005

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 that we can find a way to fit all our parts together into a coordinated whole.

We are such complex creatures. We have so many voices inside telling us what we should do or be.

One says, “Work harder; earn more; provide for your family.” Another counters, “Spend more time with your family, your partner, your friends.” One voice says “Obey authorities, serve your nation.” Another says, “Question your leaders to insure that they are serving your nation.” One voice wants us to get to know ourselves better, to go deeper into who we are and what we should do. But another voice urges us to be sociable, to look outward rather than inward, to become working parts of a larger world than just ourselves.

Socrates once said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and we still try to examine, to know ourselves, to know our souls. But the unlived life is not worth examining! And so we are pulled outward again, to spend time and energy experiencing rather than just contemplating.

And there are many more voices than these. We each have our own personal pantheon of gods, giving us orders, as we struggle to pull them all together into a whole. Our quest is for nothing less than the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

It is the quest that makes us most fully human, most nuanced. We pray for the insight, the vision, and the will to listen to the best voices, and learn to blend them all together.

It is a noble goal. Let us persist. And let us be patient with ourselves.

Amen.

SERMON:

“Myths to Live By,” Part Four: The Gods of Men and Societies

This is the third sermon I’ve done on the Greek gods and goddesses, and it’s such a rich field that each time I’ve been led to places I hadn’t expected. This morning is the first of two sermons on the Greek gods – the second one will be in two weeks, on January 30th.

This business of gods is more complex than you might think. For instance, when we talked about the Greek goddesses, I was just using them to see different archetypes of behaviors that are still familiar to most women in our culture. But we could have used them to understand the values of many families or public schools or good nursing, since these are areas often defined by women. So you find more feminine values in these areas, concerned with relationships, nurturing, treating everyone with respect regardless of their status, and so on.

When we study the male gods, we have to talk about how they define the areas of the world that men control, because it’s most areas of the world.

But first, if we’re going to talk about Greek gods, we need to take some time to understand what gods are. Different cultures have produced very different kinds of gods. The main Hindu god, Brahman, is the biggest and most abstract of all gods, I think. Brahman is a symbol for all the creative, sustaining and destructive forces in the universe. Then all the different gods the Hindus have created give form to one or more parts of these universal forces.

Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the bible, was created in the image of ancient Hebrew tribal chiefs, and was given the powers of tribal chiefs. So Yahweh sets the rules for behavior, promises rewards to the good and punishments for the disobedient, just like a powerful tribal chief. Biblical scholars have found that the covenant between that God and his chosen people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between a sovereign and his subjects, for instance. Yahweh told us what we could and couldn’t do, and those who spoke for him were always writing commandments they insisted that this God meant for us to follow – as they still are. Yahweh also had a lot of sexual hang-ups compared with the gods of the Hindus or the Greeks, and those hang-ups have tainted almost all of Western civilization – you think gods aren’t powerful?

But where Yahweh was an autocratic rule-giver who didn’t much like sex or independent women, the Greek gods could hardly forbid many behaviors, because they did about everything themselves. They were certainly much more comfortable with sex than old Yahweh was. The Greek gods were made as imaginative images of the psychological dynamics they saw within human nature. So, while the ancient Greek gods and goddesses aren’t worshiped any more, they are still worth studying because they are about us, about human nature, and that nature hasn’t changed much in the past ten thousand or hundred thousand years.

You could spend years of study just on the four gods I’m talking about this morning. These are about men, but since men control the power of states, armies and most organized religions, they also show us a picture of our world, the world of Western civilization that has half its roots deep into the soil of the ancient Greeks. It also shows us the kind of balance – or lack of it – that we have, both individually and as a society.

One more word about gods, since it’s hard for most of us to understand what gods are. The study of gods is not like a manhunt or the search for a missing person. There are no fellows, no critters, no Big Guys hiding somewhere behind a cloud or up a mountain that we’re planning to find, then sit down and talk with. That’s not what gods are. The study of gods is a discovery of the human soul in some of its most powerful and imaginative projections. We create our gods to preserve and teach our vision of who we are or aspire to be, and the powers or mysteries we see as most significant in life.

There’s a Theology 101 course in just one paragraph.

So. We’ll take two weeks for the Greek male gods. We’ll talk about four of them today, and four more in two weeks.

While most of the gods are psychological archetypes of styles we men can still find in ourselves, the three most powerful Greek gods were quite profound psychology about styles of being that apply to both men and women. I want to begin with those three gods, who were brothers. I’ll back into it.

Think of our world as having three different levels, three different realms, and three different styles of living. The first level emphasizes clear thinking, cool and impersonal rationality; it takes the long view, sets goals, and works to achieve them. You could think of bright sunlight on a clear day for this level. The job of the god at this level is to harness all of our different gods into an integrated and productive whole.

The second level is as deep as the ocean, and as turbulent. Here it is not clear thinking, but powerful emotions that rule. There is no long view, no overall plan, though both desire and rage may last a long time, and a grudge can be carried forever. There are deep feelings here that would frighten most people, but to those who live in this realm, the deep and powerful feelings are home. They are seldom, however, a comfortable home: their turbulence short-circuits nearly all efforts to put a life into order, and you are tossed about on the waves of an overwhelming sea of powerful feelings.

The third realm is in the underworld. Cool, dark, dispassionate, removed from the worlds of both the first two levels, this is the realm of the suppressed and the unconscious, of convoluted ambiguities and dark doubts. This is the underside of the bright and clear world, its other half. It is always beneath us, this underworld, though few can live in it, or would want to.

You could call this third level the realm of Hades, for that is what the ancient Greeks called it – or you could call it Hell, after the Norse goddess of the underworld. The Greek mythology is very telling here, for Hades was almost never seen, though he was always there. He had a cap of invisibility, making him an unseen presence, just as modern psychologists have shown us that the realm of the unconscious and of the shadow sides of our psyches is an unseen presence within our lives and our world. Hades people can often be found leading lives of quiet desperation, aware of the shadow sides, but unable to integrate them into a well-rounded life.

And that second level, the style of living where deep and turbulent emotions rule, you could think of as the realm of Poseidon. Like Hades, his was the realm of inner realities rather than outer ones, but here they have a terrible force. They carry grudges, they seek vengeance, and like the sea they often have a calm surface hiding a terrible power raging underneath. To take the most violent examples, think of the number of times that mass murderers have been described as calm and quiet people. And those of you who have spent time studying the Greek classics will know of the awful power, rage, and grudges carried by Poseidon. The whole book of the Odyssey was driven by Poseidon’s rage at Odysseus for killing his son Polyphemos. He pursued Odysseus for ten years, until Athena – always the protector of the great male heroes – intervened to let him go home.

Neither Hades nor Poseidon ever accomplished much that was constructive. Poseidon was as much a victim of his fury as everyone else was, because he could not escape its pull on him. So Poseidon remained mostly trapped within the depths of his feelings, as Hades remained mostly in the dark depths of his shadows and abstractions.

Both ancient myths and modern experience say that few people would want to have to live in those depths, and those who do are not people you would want to invite to a party. Both in Greek mythology and in our western cultures, which have been so heavily shaped by that mythology, we choose to live above the ground, in a world of clarity and light. That realm reigns supreme now as then. And that first level, the realm of clarity and light, was the realm of Zeus, the number one god of the Olympians. Zeus’s job was to coordinate our passions into a working and integrated whole. He was so different from Yahweh, who tried to deny or suppress our passions. Zeus embraced them – they were also gods, after all, meaning they are enduring parts of human nature and the human condition. But he wanted a clear rationality to rule the whole.

I was struck several times while working on this sermon just how much our world really does echo the old mythic realm of Mt. Olympus. The world that they and we recognize as normative, healthy and sane is the realm of Zeus’s clear-thinking, of rational behavior and a life where dark doubts and powerful emotions are kept in line through the training and education of unclouded, well-ordered minds. As individuals and as a society, we are not comfortable with introspection or deep doubts. And, since we insist that everything lies on the surface, knowing what to do is just a matter of gathering the necessary facts and then taking decisive action. This is the style of life that the Greeks exalted in their myths, and that western culture has exalted for more than 3,000 years.

Zeus was the god of lightning; his symbol was the thunderbolt. And to this day, when we dare to go against an authoritative prohibition handed down from above, we speak of “waiting for the lightning to strike.”

These first three gods – Zeus, Poseidon and Hades – show us the major parts of our psyches, all of our psyches. Women can recognize them as well as men. But I want to go back to the Alpha Male, the Main Man, the top God, Zeus, and his Number One Son.

Zeus was like the CEO of the Olympic deities, or at least tried to be. And in our own culture, CEO types operate much like Zeus. They give the orders, they have the vision, and their anger can make heads roll. But they need lesser people to get the work done. Not these highest-level gods, but slightly more subordinate ones. CEO’s don’t hire people who will go after their job. They hire people who will follow orders: brilliant functionaries. So around them, these Zeus people will assemble a string of second-in-command people. Not the ambitious kind who will be fighting them for control, but the auxiliary kind, who work toward the goals the leader has set, with the same kind of clear-thinking and dispassionate genius that the leader displays. I think of generals’ aides or presidential press secretaries here: public spokesmen whose job and whose talent is to diffuse or redirect all criticism of the boss, to dismiss doubts, to look only on the optimistic side of things, to be can-do men who act like the favorite sons of their leader. These are people acting as functionaries. They are people in the mold of the god Apollo, who was the second most important god of ancient Greece, after Zeus.

Others say of these people that they are emotionally distant, and have little real personal passion. Their ex-spouses say they are lousy lovers, technical and impersonal; that they can’t express feelings and don’t care to get into the murky depths where doubts live, or into the shadow sides of their bright optimism. Others may say that their focus and their clear vision are achieved at the cost of being stunted in other areas, and while they attract admiration, respect, or envy, these people seldom inspire love or passion. They are clear-sighted and far seeing like eagles flying high above it all, and will often sacrifice their children, their friends, and their personal lives to get power, consolidate it, and keep it.

But while people may admire or fear Apollo types, they seldom love them. The Greeks noticed this, too, and you can see it in the stories they told about Apollo. Women didn’t like him. You might think if you’re a god, that’s like even cooler than being a rap singer or a pro athlete, but it isn’t true if you’re Apollo.

One of the most famous stories about Apollo shows just how much women didn’t like him. It is the story of Cassandra, one of my favorite characters.

Apollo was trying to seduce Cassandra, who wasn’t interested in him, even though she was a mortal and he was a god. So he tried to bribe her by giving her an amazing gift. She would be able to see clearly into the future. She alone could know in advance what was going to happen. After he gave her this great gift, he tried again with her, but she wasn’t interested. She liked the gift, but not the giver. Apollo couldn’t take back the gift – this must have been some rule of godly etiquette – so he added a strange curse to it, which gave Cassandra her unique character. She would be able to see what was coming, and to tell people about it in advance – but nobody would ever believe her! Something essential is lacking in Apollo people, and women sense it immediately. I’ve had several discussions with women in this church who say that when they’re in a bar and see a guy who looks to good to be true, it gives them the willies. Apollo was the handsomest of the gods, and in his mythic days he gave women the willies, too.

We train these Apollo people in our schools, where clear-thinking and dispassionate rationality are prized, where knowledge is quantified and those who best learn the rules and have the self-control needed to play the game are the ones who get the best grades, earn the respect of their classmates, are elected class presidents, win scholarships, and go on to college, where they continue to shine. In fact, the most common image of the Good Life held out for children by their parents may be this image of an efficient, orderly and successful life where both doubts and passions are controlled or suppressed so they can not sabotage our long-range plans.

It is no surprise that Zeus’s symbolic creature was the eagle, for that far-sighted and dispassionate view is still the ideal in our world. It is still what our education trains us for, still the path that leads to success in business and politics. It is also reflected in Freud’s psychology, where sanity and health are achieved when the rational ego can control and organize the passionate and potentially destructive forces of our Id, like a well-trained rider controlling the more powerful but more primitive horse that he rides.

What we consider both reality and sanity are models of this kind of rational control, of “delayed gratification,” of working together, following the legitimate authority passed down from above. It is the world of modern commerce and competitive markets, where only the most efficient and far seeing will survive, and the others will be dictated to by those at the top. Our dominant American myths are inextricably bound up with this picture of being number one, being on top, controlling the weapons, controlling industry, and having the most clout. Apollo reminds us of America.

But there’s a human dimension that’s absolutely lacking, isn’t there? Where is warmth, compassion? We could perhaps admire or fear the kind of impersonal and objective power that our American leaders are modeling, but could anyone really love it? Something is missing. And what’s missing is essential, if we are to try and become more complete human beings.

And, since these old gods also show us what we are worshiping as a society, there is something terribly essential missing in our society now, and it feels a lot like what’s missing from Apollo. It’s all very efficient, quite powerful, but without relationship, without compassion, without warmth. You can admire or fear it, but you can’t love it. And this is what so many writers in the foreign press have been saying about America for several years now.

The goal, both in the ancient world and in our own, wasn’t to be the most powerful, angry or intimidating. The goal was learning to become a whole person and a healthy society, able to integrate all the varied voices of the many gods that are always a part of us.

When people are out of balance, it’s usually because the wrong gods are running the show. The wrong gods are running the show when a society is out of balance, too.

Joseph Campbell was the one who said that the task of modern people is the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It is also the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated and humane society.

Suddenly, these old Greek gods seem very modern, don’t they?