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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

July, 1, 2012

On the Sunday before the Independence Day holiday, let’s examine the idea of patriotism and its varying degrees, interpretations and practices. We like to think we are patriotic. How do we define patriotism? What does it mean?

One of your members recently sent these words that describe something of patriotism. I believe they are what many of us feel and think. Let me share them. “As July 4th approaches, I imagine most of you, like myself, will at some point pause to again honor and revere the courage and wisdom of our founding fathers. As I grew up, I developed a basic faith in the goodness of my country. And a deep, reverent loyalty to our country’s symbols, celebrations and institutions. And a trusting faith that our government would honor and enshrine in its actions the greatness of the universal principles embodied in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. This I essentially once took for granted. Over the years I’ve come to finally fully appreciate that our Constitutional Republic does indeed need a fully informed public to survive.” I’d like to add “and fully involved.” While the writer continues with concerns about the transparency of our government and our own willingness as a self-governing people to question our administration, let’s continue our inquiry into patriotismwith the symbol of our flag.

Have you noticed how much the Stars and Stripes are ever-present in political campaigns? Apparently to remind us of the candidates’ patriotism. The more flags showing the better: whole rows of flags, everyone in the camera’s view waving a hand-held flag. And heaven help the candidate who fails to wear the American Flag Pin on his or her lapel. Never mind that that pin was in all likelihood fabricated in an overseas sweatshop, along with the various decal ribbons proclaiming support for our troops. I guess the theory is that without the symbol, one can’t be sure the candidate, or anyone for that matter, is truly a patriot. This conjures personal memories for me of the Vietnam era “America…Love it or leave it” bumper stickers. Seems like some of those are still on cars in Texas towns.

The notion that patriotism consists of paying homage to symbols isn’t new. Governments have made this type of appeal throughout history. The Nazi movement in 1930’s Germany was fueled by symbolism. Stirring music, massive displays of uniformed men and military hardware…impressive and a trigger for mob mentality.

I think a person’s interpretation of the word “patriotism” tells much about that person’s views and era. Note that: Pro slavery was once patriotic; pro labor union was un-American. The latter sentiment is arising again along with a number of issues many of us thought long gone. Some in the media, public office, and other sources, tell us that one’s degree of patriotism is governed by the degree to which they believe our country is the only repository of good in this world. Many of these people harken to the good old days when America was the world’s beacon for liberty and success, and it just isn’t any more. How do we feel about that? If your religion is Nationalism, you’ll probably be very upset.

“Patriotism” wears many disguises in America. Some equate patriotism with religion. They have a goal of shaping every aspect of our culture in accordance with Biblical laws, especially politics. We have seen plenty of pressure from the religious right. Who would’ve thought that contraception would become an issue in 2012? Today, being for marriage equality is looked upon by some as, “godless, barbaric and unpatriotic.” Marginalizing people who hold minority or no religious views, is “patriotic.” The list continues.

So, how do we UUs define patriotism? The simple “my country right or wrong” brand is easy as are all simplistic answers. We UUs have a long history of Civil Disobedience as a more complex form of patriotism. How many laws did Thoreau or Dr. King break to further the cause of justice? Who made the full text of the Pentagon Papers available for scholars and libraries by publishing them in book form? When excerpts from the papers were leaked to newspapers, President Nixon used every tactic, legal and illegal, to suppress publication, forming the infamous team of “plumbers” to track down the leak. Such tactics eventually triggered the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon out of office. Patriotic UUs had a major role in that.

UUs find respecting unpopular points of view is patriotic, and threatening those views is not. Would wearing a flag pin make me a patriot?…or is patriotism believing in what that flag was meant to represent? So many who use that flag pin as a litmus test seem to feel that when I voice opposition to policies I believe are wrong I am unpatriotic. What would Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Thomas Paine do? Well. We KNOW what they did when they tired of paying homage to an unresponsive government.

I think most would agree that Jefferson was an American Patriot. Yet Jefferson opined that it was the right…no….the RESPONSIBILITY, of the citizenry to monitor the actions of our government, and when necessary, remove that government. I think we know that today there are whole media outlets with the mission of criticizing and removing our present government. Does that make them patriotic?

It might be nice to be considered “patriotic.” If only I could believe that my country ALWAYS did the right thing. If only I trusted our leaders or our Supreme Court to uphold constitutional rights. If I could believe that the lack of concern shown while New Orleans was drowning had nothing to do with a disregard for poor and powerless people. And if I could believe our leaders only went to war as a last resort, I might be considered patriotic. But I can’t do those things; if I did, it wouldn’t be patriotic. It would be an insult to the founding principles of America, and paying homage to the SYMBOLS of America, while trashing the idealism upon which it was founded. And that would be dishonest.

There are those who seem to assert a strong influence in politics now who now call themselves “social conservatives.” People like the American Family Association spokesperson Brian Fischer who has a favorite theme that homosexual behavior has always been a matter of choice. He quotes a scientific study that shows concordance of homosexuality between identical twins to be only 6%. He says: “If one of them is gay and it’s genetically caused, the other one ought to be gay 100% of the time.” Fischer is not only an extremist. He also ignores contrary statistics. For instance in 2003, psychologists at the University of London performed a meta-analysis of 6 studies involving concordance of identical twins and reported a range of 30-65%, far greater than the average occurrence of homosexuality in the population at large. They concluded their evidence strongly suggests a heritable component. Many UUs would resonate with this information. That’s why we are “standing on the side of love,” as a political action.

That’s a part of how we are patriotic. I don’t know too many UUs who take the position that blind obedience and displaying of symbols represent patriotism. Waving the flag doesn’t take much thought…just some muscle. Maybe that’s the difference between those who long for a country steeped in economic and military power as patriotic, as opposed to those who feel that it is the patriotic DUTY of each of us to examine and evaluate…and to oppose power when appropriate. We wonder about the difficulty of UU’s to proselytize. I think our lack of absolutes hinders us in that, as well as an inability to fit today’s definition of patriotism. Free thought and no dogma. That’s our mission. So be it.

Listen to those who promote “my country right or wrong”, and they’ll accuse anyone who questions our country’s stance on human rights as being un-American. And part of their view is the effort to merge religion with the government. They ask, why can’t we just have a national religion? To many it’s an integral component of patriotism. If you aren’t a Christian, can you be patriotic? Can an atheist be patriotic? Not according to Fox News. Simply inferring that a candidate is Muslim is enough of a smear. Remember John Kennedy’s Catholic faith 50 years ago. I wonder how much the presumptive Republican candidate’s Mormon faith will affect his campaign? Could our founders, who specifically stated that this country was NEVER to have a religious test for public office abide this? But then, the talk of repealing portions of the Constitution seems very patriotic. Could a UU pass the Presidential candidacy test today? I don’t think so. And while this country was clearly built on a secular foundation, reactionary voices now spout out the term “secular humanist” or “non-believer” as a curse. Most religions are based on some really wonderful suppositions. (Often called ‘facts’ or ‘truth.’) Each attempts to tell what is good and what is evil. How I should live and what I must reject. So many memorize these rules, while forgetting the central tenet shared by every religion. It starts like this ‘Do unto others….’

But as some polititions have perverted democracy, so have some clergy perverted religion. Rather than exercise the Golden Rule, they spend time judging others, and segregating them by whatever is at the time convenient: sexual orientation, political philosophy, and whatever self-serving interpretation of scripture is. Gays sex is an abomination…Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. will all burn in hell. It is my sacred duty to compel you to believe as I do. And if I fail to convince you, then I have to kill you. (of course, I do so for your own good.) In the name of God, they pervert religion. I think that philosophy makes religion a sham. Hindus and Buddhists preach universal love without judgment of others…which is more humane. But most of us haven’t evolved to the point where we can practice that.

Patriotism is probably a good thing. But maybe a sharper definition would help. Here are a few thoughts in closing. I’m certain you can add your own.

Believing my country can lead the world towards PEACE is more patriotic than knowing we can vanquish anyone in war: I think the many thousands of citizens who took to the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq were patriots in the true spirit of our founders. It is patriotic to recognize and HONOR the separation of religious belief from the governing of our country. Keeping in mind how many came to America to escape regimes where the line between government and religion was blurred, or simply ignored. The rights of the minority must never be compromised by the will of the majority…to do otherwise is un-patriotic and anathema to the constitution. I believe torture is un-American, as is the de facto repeal of the right of Habeas Corpus, and that this Nation was founded on the premise that it be ruled by laws and not by men. George Washington was offered the position of king. His wise refusal was a lesson: we do not benefit by mimicking that which we despise. And yet we hear constantly that “Well, they do it, so why shouldn’t we?” A true patriot would say that by mimicking that with which we disagree is surrendering. We do not spread democracy by ignoring democratic ideals. When we become what we purport to fight against, we are committing treason. And that treason is no less so when our leaders do it. And when we send our children off to fight and die in wars of choice, it may be hubris, or empire building, or result in material gain… but it is NOT patriotism.

Will history judge those who speak out against war as traitors or patriots? What of those in support the right of every loving couple to be married. Barbaric? And, is there any doubt upon which side of those issues many UUs stand? Is it patriotic, as many have in the past few years, to continually call for the failure of a President during his office? Blocking his appointments and stifling his ideas? That is antithetical to both democracy AND religion. I cannot believe in that.

So I’m acknowledging this symbol (pointing to the flag). I’m unwilling to cede this flag to those who subvert its ideals. It’s my flag, and I’ll honor it because of the principles it was meant to represent. When we decide that this nation must be a force for good, we deserve the title patriot. In the family of nations we will act as any good family member. Treating others with understanding when we have differences is patriotic. And I hope that those who would call themselves patriots will recognize that the kind of patriotism this flag was meant to represent is: respect and love, not swagger and torture. Airplanes dropping food and water and medicine, not bombs. A government that is committed to resolving differences thru diplomacy and discussion, not threats. I would hope that our efforts might be a beginning to show the rest of the world the America we were always meant to be. Patriotism will have prevailed. If we do this, all the world and all the world’s gods will join us in blessing America.

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

October 23, 2011

Widening our circle of compassion, opening our hearts, embracing life, living large…these are expressions of growing out, the theme of today’s examination of maturing. Most often, I think of it as unconditional love or attentive presence. This involves learning to acknowledge, allow, open to and inquire into the experience that each of us has of what is, without trying to have some other experience than the one we are in. This can be difficult.

Interestingly, there’s little in our Western experiences of community, religion, spirituality and psychology that helps us develop the capacity for unconditional presence. Most of what we learn in school, church and society sends us an opposite message — setting boundaries, isolating, developing caution and fear. These examples result in the tendency to turn away from aspects of our lives that are painful, unpleasant or threatening. They teach us that we must be strong — and that strength is about having power over. Yet from the East there’s a different lesson. The Tao Teh Ching reveals that genuine power is gentle and kind.

Chapter 8 begins: “The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.”

Chapter 13 concludes with this couplet: “Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things. Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.”

In Chapter 22 it says: “Yield and overcome.” And from Chapter 43: “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.”

Obviously, there is truth in both the teachings of West and East…and the both-and is a preferable balance to the either-or. Yet growing out, as the quality of maturing that we are exploring today asks the question: how can we expand our embrace into a quality of presence, awareness and equanimity that is able to respond with openness to unpleasantries, wherever and whenever they show up, most often in our relationships with family, friends, neighbors and our world?

Consider the idea of healing. We all have our scars. I have scars from various injuries, some more serious than others. They don’t go away no matter how much lotion, or massage or therapy I undertake. I have to learn to live with them. Part of this process is my recognition of how how I was affected. I’ve had to develop a different relationship to my wounds and because of them. Every time I see them and feel them, I recognize what they mean to me. My life has a different shape because of my scars. Healing does not mean the absence of suffering. It means learning from its presence. Recall the final words of the poem (The Cure by Anonymous) read by Eric (Stimmel, Lay Leader) before our time of contemplation.

And life is as natural as a leaf.

Have you heard of the practice of Tonglen? It’s described in some of Pema Chodren’s work. Do you know her? She’s a westerner who received training as a teacher of the Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the wild Tibetan master, author of Cutting through Spiritual Materialism and other powerful books, and who taught in Boulder, Colorado in the ’70s. He founded the Shambhala Training and the Naropa Institute. Chodron has written numerous books, including Getting Unstuck and When Things Fall Apart.

Tonglen is an integrative meditation consisting of a breathing practice with thoughts, visualizations and especially feelings. In Tonglen one vizualizes a real condition for which great compassion is needed, like domestic abuse, and inhales the feelings of pain, violence and anger. You breathe in and actually take on this issue physically, mentally, emotionally and consciously. One literally feels into the condition, making it as imaginatively real as possible. Then with the out-breath, one exhales compassion into the situation. This means one must access genuine compassion in the midst of distress, a beneficial exercise in itself. Tonglen is a practice of a Bodhisattva (translated as “awakened being”), a compassionate one, who willingly takes on and transmutes the energy of violence, hate, abuse, war, terrorism, overpopulation, genocide, environmental degradation and other forms of dis-ease. Tonglen is a very personal practice that can result in very transpersonal changes.

Pema Chodron writes: “If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that — then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone as ever taught.”

Can you imagine being that open and willing with your embrace?

Maturity begins when we can understand the basic distresses and blocks that are at the root of our immaturity, personally and collectively. I often speak from the pulpit about that which I find to be true and basic. Perhaps a most basic truth has to do with acceptance. No matter where you are or what the circumstances, come to terms and become friendly with yourself and with the present moment. Because if you do not accept the present moment, you’re not friendly with life because life is only now. Some call it “the eternal now.” If you’re not friendly with life, life cannot support you.

The nature of our basic distress as human beings is that we continually judge, reject and turn away from areas of our lives that cause us discomfort, pain or anxiety. We think that if we can just get rid of these areas then we’ll suffer less, we’ll finally be comfortable. What happens however, is that in getting rid of our problems, we simply trade these concerns for a new set of concerns that keep us just as distressed as before, lending truth to the aphorism that what you resist persists. Changing circumstances isn’t the answer. Changing ourselves is.

We are all involved somehow in an inner struggle. It’s the human condition and no one gets a free pass. This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided. This in antithetical to our nature as individuals; individual means undivided. We are constantly cutting ourselves off from the totality of who we are.

Of this totality, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote (in his essay The Oversoul):

“Within us is the soul of the whole,

This is a picture of our true nature. This is our goal. What we mostly experience is an emotional programming that contracts our bodies and minds, shuts us down, like a safety valve, keeping us from flowing when we perceive danger or threat. This is our way of survival, of protecting ourselves. Yet in cutting off our anger, our need for love, our openness, our sexuality, we form negative judgments against these parts of ourselves and of others. Hence we become disabled and disabling of others.

For example, say we didn’t get the love we needed as a child. One typical response is to contract our feelings when this need for love arises. We learned it is simply too painful to feel the rejection or unfulfilment. Hence we develop an emotional pattern or program, such that even as adults, when we continue to feel a need for love, we shut down our awareness of it. We become unable to function in areas of our life that evoke feelings we’ve never been able to tolerate. We contract and close off. This may be at the root of not asking for help and our incessant drive to do it my way. This is 180 degrees from opening our embrace as Einstein suggests (in a Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times 29 March 1972 and The New York Post 28 November 1972 and read by our Lay Leader today as our Call to Worship –

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”) or of the poetic description of Emerson of the soul of the whole.

This programming creates a false self, a personal self-image and identity based on distress. With such a pattern we are faced with the challenge of having to continually display this identity and prop it up like the mask that it is. We fuel it with stories about our reality, our parents, former or current spouses or friends. Stories like: men are emotionally unavailable, women are crazy, certain people can’t be trusted, etc. This petty and divisive false self system can lock us into a distortion of life and drain our energy that instead could be feeding our true nature, that of our larger self — the soul of the whole.

Hence, the call to maturing is a call to recognize this burdensome facade and to become a real explorer of the vast embrace of the Universe.

In order to grow out, to expand our embrace, to welcome what is we must expose our wounds which lie at the root of our disconnection from our larger being. We must engage our suffering directly. Of course, it’s hard to let ourselves feel our pain. We’ve spent our lives masking it, denying it, avoiding it. Our society, education and experiences reinforce the delusion of separateness. As in 12 step recovery work, the first thing we must do is acknowledge our distress, our human condition. That’s one of the reasons we meet here. An important component of our gathering is to connect with ourself and each other in honesty and humility.

There are many ways to observe life. There’s the view that we do make mistakes. We have failed to do as we would. We act and feel imperfectly. There’s also the view that there are no real mistakes, that all things work together to make life what it is.

Nisargadatta Maharaj says: “Nobody ever fails in Yoga. It is all a matter of the rate of progress. It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. When one is fully matured, realization is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right.”

Whatever our view, let’s get straight with ourselves and each other. We also need each other. We need to receive love — to give love.

And so I encourage us to develop an antidote to the emotional programming of our false self system, and that is in developing unconditional presence and a wider embrace. It starts within each of us. We must connect with that which shuts us down and accept what is. We must exercise our innate awareness to recognize (re-cognize) our dilemma.

I’m no expert in human behavior. Truth is, no one is. That’s because our true nature is unbounded and open-ended. We have yet to experience who we really are, who we fully are. As Unitarian Universalists we are committed by covenant to an exploration of our true and unlimited potential as human beings. We want to see evolution continue and to cooperate with it in every way possible.

I can say with confidence that if we wish to mature, we must learn to bring awareness to our false selves, to bring it out in the open, so that we can stop investing so much energy in propping it up. We must devote more and more of our energy and attention to the fact of our true nature. Our true nature may be seldom seen, but does not have to live for us as merely the poetic and visionary potential of an Einstein or Emerson. We are the people we’ve been waiting for!

Fact is, like the air that surrounds us and often goes unnoticed as a source of the life force in our breathing, unconditional presence is also already always here. It lies within, beneath the layers created by our busy and judgmental minds. Unconditional love and presence is accessible to everyone and is, in fact, our most intimate reality.

Whenever we open into our larger self and our unconditional presence, our conditioned self or our emotional programming tries to run away or else, says, “I know that,” and puts the experience in a familiar box. Fact is, our false selves can’t fix ourselves and neither can anyone else. Our natural opening, maturing and expansive embrace will only come when we can see and feel our truth. And truth shows up against the background of our sustained awareness of our facades, programming and dis-ease.

Sorry, no quick fix. However, like I’m find of saying, “You have to do your work, and you can’t do it alone.” We are a community in covenant to work out our lives together. As our awareness of unconscious patterns of our false selves starts to be seen, it becomes conscious. This awakens our desire and will to a new life. This new life is the life that is our real and present experience, that accepts our life as it is. It takes awareness.

This description may not fit the picture that our mind wants, just as those we are related to don’t always measure up. Folks, the world is in a mess and if you are paying attention, if you live from awareness, you’ll risk heart break. Yet our broken, open and fragile nature is the one that can open wide its arms in expansive embrace. We need to become vulnerable in order to be mature. “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.” Paradoxically we need to be vulnerable to be solid.

Understanding our false nature and the possibilities of our true nature is a start. It’s the beginning of self-awareness and self-acceptance. It provides compassion for ourselves and for others whom we may begin to understand are afflicted with the same human condition. We need to heal our separation from ourselves and those we meet everyday. We need to heal our separation from the life we know as our daily reality. This is true for us and for our whole world.

Let us join together in opening our arms in a wide embrace. Here’s a vision: imagine opening to all and fully accepting your present reality. Imagine transforming your identity into its full and unique part of the interdependent web of all existence. Imagine living so large that even the specter of death would appear as a friendly and fearless embrace of the Universe, which is not other than you. Our greatest difficulties provide us with our greatest opportunities.

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

August 29, 2010

Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have Dream Speech.” He gave his soul-stirring message to 200,000 on the Washington Mall in what has been called the crowning moment of the Civil Rights Movement. It was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address.

I suppose you know that yesterday Fox Network Commentator Glenn Beck held a Tea Party Rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches. He says social justice is a code word for communism and nazism. I don’t know if Beck is just strange, or just trying to be controversial, or just trying to make money. But in any case, what he has said attacks the very heart of Dr. King’s message and of the Christian faith, and I wonder how many Christians will express their faith by no longer watching his show, and even decrying his rally, since Beck denies one of the central teachings of the Bible, and Jesus and Dr. King — that of social justice.

Of course Unitarian Universalism is largely a social justice advocacy movement. The fact that we meet as a church and in a church building just might cause many of our neighbors to wonder exactly what it is our church believes. No doubt some of us have searched for ways to express our UU experiences and, hence, I continue to speak about our roots, practices and understandings. No doubt our UU views can appear as disperate as the contrast between Dr. King and Glenn Beck. Today, I’m going to entertain the notion of a controversial topic, that of salvation, salvation from a UU View.

Are you saved? This is a question that is usually only asked by evangelical Christians. What, if anything, might a Unitarian Universalist answer?

If we’re feeling facetious we might be tempted to respond with something like this, “Saved from what? or Saved for what? or Saved by whom, or what? ” But those answers might end the conversation. And if, like me, you believe that Unitarian Universalism has something marvelous to offer a tired and troubled world, you might want the conversation to continue. I would instead offer something like “Yes, I’m saved, but I’m not sure we mean the same thing. What do you mean when you say saved?” And I would ask the person to tell me his or her salvation story. And then I would tell mine.

Because you see, I am saved, just not in the same way fundamentalist Christians mean. That is the reason I am here in this pulpit today, proclaiming with enthusiasm the good news. So what do I, a Unitarian Universalist, mean by salvation?

Well, part of my answer has to do with theology, and goes back to our roots in Universalism and Unitarianism. In America, both began as reactions against the prevailing orthodox Calvinist doctrines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These said that human beings were “totally depraved,” with no free will and no ability to make choices that would bring good into the world. The God of Calvin and many Biblical literalists had elected from the beginning of time which humans would be saved and which would be damned to suffer in a fiery hell for all eternity. Jesus was crucified and died in order to pay the penalty for the sins of the elect. The way to know whether a person was one of the elect, who would be saved and resurrected in the new and perfect world that God would create at the end of time, was to read the “signs.” One of these signs had to do with how much material wealth a person had; prosperity was therefore a sign of election. Perhaps this theology describes part of Glenn Beck’s view of what a true Christian should be about? There would be no need for social justice if humans were merely pawns in God’s chess game of life. Besides who could possibly do good and just things for another when only God can effect such goodness?

Two of our best known Universalist preachers were John Murray and Hosea Ballou, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They could not accept the Calvinist conception of God. For them, God was a good and loving father. This God would no more condemn any of his creatures to an eternal fiery hell than a loving parent would place a child in an earthly fire. Further, a God who would require the cruel and tortured death of a beloved son as atonement for the sins of some of humanity was not fit for our worship. Ballou argued that God’s purpose was to “happify” people, sending Jesus to teach us by example how to live a happy, healthy and holy life. If we lived in accordance with God’s purposeÑto love God and God’s creation and one another, yes, and practice social justiceÑwe would be happy. If we did notÑif we lived, instead, separated from God and from each otherÑwe would be unhappy. We, ourselves, would create our own heaven and hell here on earth.

Now, here is what I think is the essence of Ballou’s theology, the part that rings as true today as it did two centuries ago. And this very same idea was argued by Unitarians William Ellery Channing and, a generation later, Theodore Parker. It is this: what we need to be saved from is not original sin, and not the fiery pits of hell. What we need to be saved from is the concept of the angry, vengeful God who redeems humanity through violence and divides people into the saved and the damned. Ballou, Channing, and Parker argued that since people model their own behavior on what they imagine God to be, this concept of a wrathful, bloodthirsty God results in earthly hell. It results in the division of people into the worthy and the worthless, and it sanctifies violence against and oppression of those deemed to be worthless. This theology causes people to live in and from fear. A theology of a loving God would enable people to live in and from love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “It behooves us to be careful in what we worship, for what we are worshipping is what we are becoming.” For Ballou, the critical thing was to liberate people from fear so they could live in love. And fear resided in what Ballou called the carnal mind, by which he meant in the body. Fear resided in the body. So Universalist thinking in the nineteenth century made salvation not about where our individual, personal souls go after we dieÑthat was a non-issue. Instead, salvation was a collective enterprise. In both Universalism and Unitarianism, this enterprise meant attending to conditions in the here and now, in this world. If we could liberate people’s bodies from fear of hunger and violence, they could live in love.

We North American UUs can proudly remember the heroes and heroines of our heritage of social justice, like Benjamin Rush and his timely defense of social equality in the late 18th century. And Theodore Parker’s passionate advocacy of abolition in the mid-19th century. We remember Adin Ballou and his critique of the industrial society, and William Ellery Channing with his abhorrence of poverty. Olympia Brown was ordained into the ministry in 1863, the first denominationally ordained woman minister in the US. We remember her along with Red Cross founder Clara Barton, women’s sufferage pioneer Susan B. Anthony, and Dorothea Dix, a social justice activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses.

The UU view of salvation is for life here and now, in love. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” Present-day Unitarian Universalism still reverberates with these ideas about salvation. While some of us believe in a personal deity and some do not, we agree in our covenant of seven principles that are underpinned by the following theological notions: the equal belovedness of every person, the importance of caring for this beautiful world here and now, the need to live in love and not fear.

This is part of my explanation of what I mean by salvation, but only part. Why do I say so joyfully that, yes, I am saved?

I grew up as the eldest son in a family whose Catholic roots were generations deep. Our image of God was that portrayed as the rule maker and law enforcer in the sky and of the fear of the final judgment. I began more than 20 years of formal Catholic schooling before I was 5, where I was taught that people are inherently sinful because Adam and Eve disobeyed God at the beginning of creation. Still I tried my best to be good and do everything right, but still I felt that God was angry with me and I was motivated by fear. In order to redeem myself and reach heaven someday, I must do all I could to be like Jesus. I must suffer, and forgive, suffer, and forgive. I was smart, and strong-willed, and I loved earthly things like Nature, and my friends and all things artsy, and it was hard for me to focus on getting to heaven. But I wanted more than anything to be good enough to be loved, so I did my best. I suffered and I forgave. Some fundamentalist Christians would say that this Catholic view of God is inaccurate and that basically all I have to do is accept the sacrifice of Jesus and his Lordship over my life and that all will be well, because God will only see Jesus when looking at me.

Perhaps this next part will sound familiar to many of you because this is your story too, and I have heard it from you many times. When I first began to attend a UU church in Midland during breaks from college I was overwhelmed that people cared enough to listen to me…and I didn’t have to worry about towing the party line. I found I was encouraged to develop my own ideas. This was in the late 60s and I was upset about the conflict in Vietnam and the continuing racial prejudices supposedly righted by integration, yet when I went to the UU church, I could express myself and be heard. That meant a lot to me. Sometimes I’d go to church services and just sit in the back and cry. There was a lot of stuff in my life to process, much of it from my Catholic upbringing. Then I started participating around the edges a little bit, joining demonstrations and small groups to discuss and act on social justice issues.

Finally, years later at the same Midland UU church, after my father’s death in early 1986, I started a men’s group, in which we gathered around and talked with each other and listened to our real stories. When it was my turn, I couldn’t resist being open. The other men had shared deeply, and their stories were riveting. No one had been judged, no one had been rejected. So I told my truth. And instead of turning away from me in disgust, the men leaned in and listened, nodding in recognition of what they heard. It was the first place I had ever been where I felt I could be my whole self, and be accepted for it — truly loved. My community looked into my face and saw light there, and reflected it back tenfold — a hundred fold.

In this way was I saved. Unitarian Universalism taught me that I have inherent worth and dignity, and that I am a beloved member of the interdependent web of all existence. The community that embodied this theology liberated me from fear by gathering around me in love. It gave me the ability to break out of the cycle of codependence and violence in which I was trapped for so long. I finally developed the strength and courage I needed to pursue my dreams and clarify my intentions. I also had the help I needed: my community showed up, with meals, work, rides when my car broke down. People visited me in the hospital when I had surgeries and held my hand when the stuff of life appeared bleak. This was redemptive.

Learning I was inherently lovable helped me to accept the profoundly generous love of others. Knowing all people have inherent worth and dignity helped me share my life in ways that bring me closer with others and to get upset when their freedom is limited. My community helps me create a life that is worth living. This is what I mean by salvation. This religion saves lives. And I think it can help save the world.

At this moment in time we are in the midst of economic, ecological, and political chaos that is unprecedented in our life’s experiences. We know that the sheer scale of change means that nothing will ever be the same again. We have no road map for the future. Some of us have lost many of the securities we were accustomed to. I’ve learned that whenever the human organism is confronted with sudden, potentially life-threatening change, its first response is fear. This is automatic. And right now fear is rampant in our world, as the religious fundamentalists and persons like Glenn Beck and others in many countries and many religions skillfully use apocalyptic rhetoric to manipulate people into acting from their deepest fears rather than from hope or love. This strategy has and is working very well in American debates on health care, immigration and economic reform, as people are manipulated into thinking their individual lives are endangered by changes that may actually benefit the whole.

But shall we have a little compassion for these people who ask us if we are saved? Their God would cast them into the depths of a fiery hell for all eternity if they do not believe just the right thing. They are sore afraid. They are alone and far from home; salvation for them is so individualized, and involves going to a world that is not this one. But we can offer something different in this time of crisis. We can offer real liberation from fear, and a fall into love. We can offer a theology that recognizes our interdependence with each other and with the larger community of life, in which salvation is collective and involves healing this world. We can embody this theology by doing what we do best: gathering together, and listening to each other’s stories. Singing songs, speaking words that matter and making life and art that give us hope and courage. Let’s help each other imagine what might come next. Then, show up to help.

My friends, we have here a religion that could be the salvation of the world, if we will but claim its power and take it to the streets. The stakes are too high for us to hide our light under a bushel. What do we say in the face of a culture that preaches salvation from hell and damnation? We could echo the words of John Murray, “Give them not hell, but hope”

I hope today’s message will encourage you to think, what will you say? I hope today’s message will encourage you to act, what will you do?

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

August 15, 2010

Elwin Hope Wilson is 73 years old, lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina and suffers from severe diabetes. Last year he became something of a celebrity because, after a lifetime of racist rhetoric and activity, he had a change of heart.

As a young man, Wilson assaulted civil rights Freedom Riders. Later in life he threatened a real estate agent who had sold a nearby home to a black family, and another he time vehemently protested the desegregation of the local cemetery where his parents were interred. On yet another occasion he hung a black doll by the neck in his front yard and dared his neighbors to remove it. He regularly embarrassed his children and grandchildren by loudly repeating racial epithets in restaurants and other public places.

But then, last year, all of that changed. Having decided that his previous behavior had been horribly misguided, Wilson began the painful process of issuing apologies. He traveled to Congressman John Lewis’ Washington DC office to personally apologize for punching and knocking down the former Freedom Rider in 1961. He has visited black churches and offered public declarations of repentance. He has sought reconciliation with black citizens in his community.

Many have greeted Elwin Wilson’s apologies with surprise and pleasure, but others have been more skeptical. As one Freedom Rider allowed: “In the back of my mind I just keep thinking, ‘Why now?'” Why now, indeed. Although it’s always hazardous to render judgments about another person’s motives, one thing is clear: Elwin Hope Wilson, beset with serious health problems, was scared. “I’m going to hell,” he despairingly told a friend, to which his friend replied: “The Bible says that ‘If you truly ask forgiveness and you mean it in your heart, you can be saved.'” At that moment Wilson felt that perhaps he could escape the hellfire he believed was awaiting him.

So, what are we to make of Elwin Wilson’s attempt to reconcile himself to his victims? How legitimate were his apologetic gestures?

There can be no doubt that the man had a great deal to be sorry about and that a sincere and heart-felt apology for his egregious offenses was in order. And there can also be no doubt that Elwin Wilson went the extra mile. Like those medieval penitents who were ordered by Catholic confessors to undertake lengthy, arduous pilgrimages in order to atone for their sins, Wilson has made a strenuous effort to demonstrate remorse in many places and before many people, including members of his own family.

Elwin Wilson’s apologies have made him the object of considerable attention, and now he receives regular requests to speak publically about his conversion Ð a role he doesn’t really relish. He isn’t interested in publicity and, having said he was sorry, just wants to be free of a painful past and gain some measure of hope for the future.

This brings up at least one issue having to do with forgiveness. If the injured party senses that the apology is not an expression of empathy and compassion for their suffering, but only an attempt to assuage the perpetrator’s pain, it may fall on deaf ears. A genuine apology focuses on the feelings of other people rather than how the one who apologizes is going to benefit in the end. The words must communicate the desire not so much to be ‘saved’ but to be in right relationship, which is why Elwin Wilson’s apology to people of color, though powerful, still feels unsatisfying.

“Genuine” or “authentic” apologies include these essential elements:

A clear admission of fault or blameworthiness for specific injuries and, without excuse of justification, an unambiguous acceptance of responsibility; A sincere expression of remorse and regret for the damage our words or actions caused; An appropriate offer of reparation or restitution for said damage; A commitment not to repeat such behavior in the future.

Yet if the apology is half-hearted or seems inauthentic, how might it be reflected? The victim might simply say, “I’m sorry, but I need a better apology than that” which invites the offender to engage in more self-scrutiny and deliver a new message in which all or at least more of the important elements are present.

Now, you can say anything you want to yourself or to other people about forgiveness. But we’ll probably all agree, saying doesn’t necessarily make it so.

True forgiveness requires much more. It requires mourning, transformation and insight — some (as in the Jewish tradition) would add restitution, too. For while forgiveness may be freeing, it isn’t cheap. One way to misconstrue forgiveness is to promote a cheap and easy version of it.

You see, forgiveness is not the same as forgetting. Past experiences and the pain they cause have a great deal to teach us, so that we can try to avoid those patterns, and better yet, change them in the future. For forgiveness to function in a life-enhancing way, it more often requires remembering rather than forgetting.

Forgiveness is not approving or condoning. Forgiving someone often involves making some effort to understand them, but even if we come to fully understand them, we do not thereby conclude that their actions were acceptable. True understanding cannot occur when I in any way deny, minimize, justify, or condone the actions that harmed me.

So let’s be clear about a few givens. Forgiveness is not cheap, it’s not easy. Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting, or condoning, and it is not a form of self-sacrifice.

As we move into considering what forgiveness actually is, I’d like to invite you to get in touch with a situation or a wound that still has a hold on you; that diminishes you. I’d like to move this sermon out of the abstract and into the practical. I’ll give you a moment of silence to go within. (Pause)

What wound still has a hold on you? Some of you may have chosen yourself as a focus. Which brings up a good point: we all need our own forgiveness, for things we have done. And looking at it from another perspective, we need to forgive ourselves also about the situations in which WE have been hurt. We need to forgive ourselves for not having been able to stop whatever happened — for having limits to our control. For not having more information or making different choices. We are often reluctant to admit just how much pain we have and how much our life has been altered. In the aftermath, we have to engage our own feelings of vengeance and so on. This requires bountiful compassion for oneself, even as we hold ourselves accountable for our past actions.

I imagine that some of you chose another person or set of people who hurt you. We are in great need of intra-personal forgiveness. Showing compassion for the perpetrators of injustice or pain is a tall order. It’s a natural human response to ask, “Why should we be concerned about compassion for the perpetrators?” We feel we must focus our efforts on those who have suffered the injustice, not those who’ve caused it. But there’s no such thing as wholeness for me or wholeness for you or wholeness for “The Deserving”. Either there’s wholeness for everyone, or there’s no wholeness. Compassion that has to be earned by good behavior isn’t compassion.

Injustice and lack of forgiveness wounds the perpetrator as well as the target. And our compassion isn’t like some scarce medicine that we have to hoard lest we run out. Compassion begets more compassion. Every time we show compassion, the doors of our hearts swing open wider.

And this is not about condoning oppression or going easy on those who are hurtful. Everyone has to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. We can insist on that and at the same time show compassion toward the perpetrator.

And I imagine some of you chose a Higher Power, however you experience it. Many of us have anger at the larger structure of things because of unfair personal losses we have experienced. I know that it was this sort of forgiveness that was most on my mind as I wrote this sermon. I remember when I lost my father as a young man. It was almost unbearable, and I was so angry. I wasn’t done with the relationship with my Dad. I cried and raged and cried and raged for a year. Eventually, I got the lesson that I had to forgive. I had to, once again, let go of the way I thought things were supposed to be, how things ought to work. I had to come back into relationship with Life itself. So some of us may haven chosen the Universe itself as what we need to forgive.

We know that letting go is a difficult practice. Yet for those who have let go, isn’t it amazing to know how that experience makes room for something new to show up. We have to let go of something that may be killing us in order for new life to emerge.

As I come to the end of my remarks, I want to emphasize what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is a turning to the good in the face of a wrongdoing or injustice. It is a merciful restraint from dwelling destructively in resentment or in thoughts of vengeance. Not that resentment or thoughts of vengeance are always bad . . . Anger need not vanish for forgiveness to be real; it need only cease to prevail as the main focus of our attention. Forgiveness involves the overcoming of injustice with good. We must come to wish ourselves, or others, or the universe well. In spite of everything, we wish betterment and flourishing of the subject of forgiveness. As we give the gift of forgiveness, we ourselves move toward healing.

Forgiveness is a process. In fact, the Institute for Forgiveness Studies in Madison, Wisconsin, has determined that forgiveness is four-phase process with twenty steps! I won’t go over the twenty steps, but their four phases are actually quite helpful.

The first of the four is the “Uncovering Phase.” In this phase, the individual truly encounters the pain that has resulted from a deep injury. Feelings of anger or even hatred may be present. Confronting these emotions and honestly understanding the injury is emotionally distressing, but it is the beginning of healing. So when we are experiencing the pain of an injury, we are often more assisted by a friend who helps us engage the pain and understand the injury than by one who initially encourages us to forgive.

The second phase is called the “Decision Phase,” and when I think of this stage, I think of an old story from the people of our First Nations. In this one a grandfather is speaking to his grandson. He says, “There are two wolves fighting inside all of us – the wolf of anger and vengeance, and the wolf of compassion and forgiveness.” The grandson asks, “Which one will win?” Grandfather replies, “The one we feed.”

In the Decision Phase, after coming in touch with the pain, the anger and vengeance, the individual realizes that to continue to focus on the injury and the injurer may cause more unnecessary suffering. The individual entertains the idea of forgiveness as a healing strategy. The individual, then, commits to forgiving the injurer who has caused such pain. Complete forgiveness is not yet realized, but the injured individual has decided to explore forgiveness and to take initial steps in the direction of full forgiveness. He starts weaning the wolf of vengeance, and actively nurturing the health of the wolf of compassion and forgiveness. In so doing, the individual enters the “Work Phase.” Feeding the urge toward forgiveness may involve forming new ways of thinking about the perpetrator.

An adult I know who was abused by her mother as a child went from seeing her mother’s abuse as malevolent and powerful to seeing it as weak and pitiful. She strove to understand her mother’s childhood and the suffering of abuse at the hands of her father, and put her own injurious events in context by understanding the context and pressure her mother was under. This new perspective did not excuse her mother, but helped the daughter see her as a member of the wounded human community. Some significant amount of empathy and compassion was generated.

In the “work phase,” this woman also did the work of accepting the pain she bore as a result of her mother’s actions. She had no sense that she deserved the pain, and knew it had been unjustly given. Still, she decided to not pass the pain on to others, nor very importantly to pass it back to her mother. Eventually this woman began to offer goodwill directly to her mother, and there was some reconciliation. In so doing, this woman moved toward growth and toward embracing life again.

The fourth phase is that of “Deepening.” The individual realizes a gain of emotional relief from the process of forgiveness. They may be able to find some kind of meaning that has emerged through their bearing of pain. They may discover a renewed purpose in life and an active concern for others, which they did not fully realize was missing. “Thus, the forgiver discovers the paradox of forgiveness: as we serve others by giving them the gifts of mercy, generosity, and love, we ourselves are healed.” This inspires today’s sermon title: “Forgiveness is for Giving.”

In closing, forgiveness is hard work and a long process. Forgiveness is free, yet it is not cheap. It may be a good idea to visit our injuries and resentments regularly to see if forgiveness is in order. I invite you to choose one area in the coming week in which you’d like to walk a little further on the path toward forgiveness. A sage once prayed, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Indeed, may our trespasses be forgiven by those we have harmed, and may we be the first to do the difficult and whole-making work of forgiveness. May it be so.

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

July 4, 2010

A Government by the People – Reflections on the responsibilities of our freedom

About patriotism George McGovern said, “The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.” Thomas Paine’s plea to move beyond the pale of a Sunshine Patriot in “The Crisis” is about as eloquent as it gets. He wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

What do we do with our freedom? Many of us question the influence of our liberty at any cost on the world stage. Who here has concerns about our covert and overt operations in our attempts to bring freedom and democracy to countries in areas where we stand to lose our access to natural resources and political clout?

Recent polls declaring our population’s dissatisfaction and distrust of our government are very interesting. I wonder how you feel about our present government and situations that have come to the fore in the last 18 months. How about the 8 years before? Did anyone poll you to ascertain your level of satisfaction and trust? Are you in agreement with these current polls? This distrust in government seems a bit odd given the evidence of people’s disinterest in and lack of knowledge about our system of government. A succession of opinion polls have revealed that a majority of Americans are unable to name a single branch of government – not legislative, not judicial, not executive. Nor can a majority describe the Bill of Rights, which helps explain why the Patriot Act was so easily swallowed by most Americans. More than two-thirds do not know the substance of that landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade – perhaps the most polarizing judicial decision of the last 40 years. Nearly half of all adult Americans do not know that states have two senators, and three quarters do not know the length of a senate term. More than 50 percent of Americans cannot name their representatives; 40 percent cannot name either of their senators.

American educator and author Mortimer Adler, wrote that citizenship is the highest office in our government. All other offices – president for instance, or chief justice of the Supreme Court – are the instruments by which we, the people, govern ourselves. The government of the United States resides in us, “we, the people.” What resides in Washington D.C. is merely the administration of the government. We recognize this fact when, after a presidential election, we say that we have changed one administration for another. When the administration changes, the government does not change. That’s because the principle rulers of our nation, the citizens, are the permanent rulers, whereas the administration of the government is only temporary.

This is the meaning of our freedom. That “we, the people” have become our own rulers, the power behind the administration of our government. I remember traveling in Europe in Autumn of 2004 at the time leading up to the Presidential election. My European friends continually questioned me as to why I and we Americans were keeping the federal administration in power. In answer to their queries as to how this could be, I could only retort with examples of our two party system gone awry and how politics and lobbying and money had their influences far beyond the pale of the single citizen and his or her one vote. I felt the frustration that perhaps some of you did, especially when November 2 rolled around and the administration was given another 4 years. That motivated me to work during the next few years, attending my precinct caucus in 2008 and personally contributing money and time to elect someone I felt more connected to and whose policies more closely reflected my own.

Regardless of our political preferences, it is sometimes difficult to remember that in our system of government the president is not a dictator, but actually works for the citizens and is limited by the Constitution. Today we must be reminded that we, the people are the ruling class! “Citizen” is the highest office under the U.S. Constitution. All other offices are secondary. Perhaps some of our citizenry are asleep at the wheel when it comes to accountability for what “our government” is doing.

This brings to mind the slogan, “My country right or wrong!” Remember seeing it on bumper stickers and hearing it shouted in the early 70s? This simple phrase was used to polarize a generation during the Vietnam Conflict. History reveals that it was probably first stated as a toast by Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jr., who was an American naval officer notable for his heroism in the Barbary Wars and in the War of 1812. He was the youngest man to reach the rank of captain in the history of the United States Navy, and the first American celebrated as a national military hero who had not played a role in the American Revolution. Decatur said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, but right or wrong, our country!” There’s another saying from Carl Schurz, who was a Union Army general and later served as U.S. Senator from Missouri, and then as Secretary of the Interior. Schurz said, “My country right or wrong: When right to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right!”

As citizen-patriots we love our country, and when the administration is leading the country in the wrong direction, we need the humility to admit it, and the courage to put it right again! As citizens we have the duty to do so.

Citizens come in all shapes and sizes, colors and preferences. One complains that our government officials are proceeding along the worst course of action, flies a flag on all national holidays and sports a “Support Our Troops” ribbon on his car. Another donates to her political party, never passes up an opportunity to vote and sports a “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” bumper sticker on her car. The relative patriotism of either is pretty much dependent upon your sympathy with their points of view. They have equal claims to patriotismÉ up to a point.

If we hope to gain more out of being an American than patriotic fervor, and seek to be more active Unitarian Universalists, than we must step outside of the “club mentality” and engage in an endeavor Emmanuel Kant emphasized with his students two and a half centuries ago. It was absolutely integral to the development of his philosophical views. Kant said, “Think for yourselves!” “Have the courage to make use of your own understanding.” This speaks to our motivation, that quality which most of us have little ability to understand in others, much less in ourselves.

Let’s look at our two patriots again. Many of us might assume the first gentleman is the worst sort of patriot. But let’s assume he questions the course of action of our government officials because he has been following developments closely from a variety of sources, reading up on specific history and spent a great deal of time agonizing over what the right course of action is, and only after such reflection, he complains.

The second patriot supports her chosen political party and always votes along party lines because that’s the way she’s always done things. It doesn’t matter who is on the ballot so long as she checks off the right box concerning party affiliation. Voting to her is a privilege without any correlating responsibilities.

I don’t want to judge others without some understanding of their motivation. I want to look more deeply and ask what makes them tick.

Beloved community, we may celebrate our freedom today, but there is much to do to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For example, we still have not achieved justice for the First Nations of our land. And we are in the midst of a passionate, yet unofficial, Immigration debate about people who are sometimes referred to as “undocumented workers,” and by others as “illegal aliens.”

And we face another threat – the power of corporations that have all of the rights of “citizens” but apparently none of the limitations. With massive wealth, they are able to purchase “free speech” through the media to such an extent that they have far more power to influence the outcome of elections than real citizens have. Now the Supreme Court, with newly appointed members, has decided that purchased speech is “free speech” and cannot be limited.

The promises of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal, and possess certain inalienable rights – are difficult promises to fulfill. Yet this is the promise of our America. Our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. We have, simply because we are human beings, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As citizens, we are the rulers of our nation. We believe today that these promises are not just for white male property owners, as they were at the time of the early American republic. These are promises for all women and men. It is our hope that in time such rights will be seen as the natural rights of all people the world over. In the meantime, we still have work to do to fulfill these promises right here in our own land.

One last thought. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” entitled people to these inalienable rights. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Adams all believed in God. The folks on the Religious Right are correct when they remind us of this fact. At the same time, they were not fundamentalist or even orthodox Christians. They were all deists, dissenters, or religious liberals of one sort or another, by the standards of most Americans of their time. A few, like Patrick Henry, were fairly orthodox; a few, like Thomas Paine, were so radical as to be anti-Christian. Jefferson, a deist, declared himself to be a Unitarian. John Adams was a member of a church that became Unitarian during his lifetime, and he is buried in that church, the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Quincy, Massachusetts – as is his wife, First Lady Abigail Adams, and his son, President John Quincy Adams, and his wife, First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams. Two presidents and two first ladies all buried in a Unitarian Universalist Church – and no other church in the United States can say that. Likewise, Washington, Franklin and Madison also held deist views. They believed in God. But they often preferred terms like “providence,” or the term Jefferson used in the Declaration, “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” That is not a biblical phrase; it is a deist phrase.

Yet the Founders were not as secular as some on the left like to think, and they were not as orthodox as some on the right like to think. As a group its fair to say that they did believe that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” had endowed us with inalienable rights. They thought religious faith was important, that it gave us morals and ethics, and that these things were necessary for good government.

But they did not want a test of faith to be required to hold political office. The Constitution makes this clear. They did not want a national religion – the Bill of Rights makes that clear. And, as the Treaty of Tripoli clearly states – it was negotiated during the Washington administration, signed by President John Adams, and ratified without controversy by the Senate in 1797 – they did not intend the United States to be a Christian nation. Rather, they wanted our nation to be a land of religious liberty and tolerance.

And while they mentioned “the laws of nature and nature’s God” and the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, they left God out of the Constitution.

In one of the last letters of his life, Jefferson wrote of America’s hard-won freedom from kings who used church and state together to reign over others, acting as if only monarchs could draw strength from God. On June 24, 1826, 10 days before his death, he wrote, “All eyes are open, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

For the Founding Fathers, God’s grace was universal, not limited to royal blood. We owe a great debt to our Founders. They were not gods. They were not perfect. They believed in liberty, but many kept slaves. They believed in virtue, but most lived very complex private lives. All believed in the general idea of religion as a force for stability, but most had unconventional faiths.

George Washington refused to kneel to pray, and was not known to take communion – in fact, when a clergyman admonished Washington for not taking communion, Washington responded by ceasing to attend church. Still, he explained the American victory in the Revolution as “the hand of Providence,” going on at great length about how God had defeated the British Empire.

These complex and self-contradictory people laid the groundwork for much good. We hold these truths to be self evident! We have many promises to live up to. May we have the wisdom to fulfill the promise of the Founders, to achieve the blessings of liberty, justice and peace; and may we have the strength to pass on these blessings to future generations.

Being an American can help us live our UU principles and being UU can help us achieve what James Bryce expresses so beautifully. “Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”

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Mark Skrabacz

Pastor – UU Church of the Hill Country

April 18, 2010

One morning, long, long ago—in fact, 120 million years ago, something incredible happened here on Earth: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opened up to receive the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event, the planet had been covered in vegetation for millions of years but none had ever before flowered. I imagine that this first flower probably didn’t survive for long, since conditions were not quite yet favorable for a widespread flowering to occur. One day, however, such conditions came about.  A critical threshold was reached, and our planet became filled with an explosion of color and scent.  It was an evolutionary transformation in the life of plants and all life.

Much later, flowers would come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of another species: us!  Think about it: over the years, flowers have provided inspiration and insight to countless artists, poets, teachers, and mystics.  In the New Testament, for example, Jesus, himself, tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live. And the Buddha is said to have once given a “silent sermon” during which he held up a flower and simply gazed at it.  After a while, one monk began to smile. It is said that this monk was the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (which has been interpreted over the years as “awakening”), that smile was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and became the origin of Zen.

So it is no accident that flowers are included in so much Buddhist art.  Seeing the beauty in a flower can awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of our own innermost being, as the Buddha called it, our original face — our true nature.

This is one of the reasons why many of us like to garden and work with plants. They are serene and their energy is infectious.

This is all described by Eckhart Tolle in his book, A New Earth.  Tolle raises the possibility that important religious teachers like the Buddha and Jesus were some of humanity’s “early flowers,” so to speak. That is to say, they were our precursors. They were rare and precious beings who were as revolutionary in their day as was that first flower 120 million years ago.  And when they appeared on Earth, conditions were not yet favorable for widespread comprehension of their messages.  This, argues Tolle, is because humanity wasn’t evolved enough, hadn’t yet reached a critical threshold of understanding to grasp the teachings.  Thus, these great teachers were largely misunderstood by their peers.

This raises the question:  are we more evolved now, some 2,000-2,500 years since the Buddha and Jesus were alive?  How many of us think that we are?  Although this evolutionary growth of consciousness has seemed to come in fits and spurts—and even seems to regress at times.

In these days of population growth and climate change, of industrialization and shrinking natural habitats, the question becomes whether or not are we evolving quickly enough to preserve life as we know it?

I want to be clear: this is not going to be a doomsday Earth Day sermon.  Rather, I want to share with you this morning why it is that I am feeling hopeful in spite of the many problems threatening the health and future of our Mother Earth.

Let me start with the assertion that we already possess the technical knowledge, the communication tools, the ability to educate our fellow humans about population control, and the material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet the rational energy needs of all of us.  We have everything we need to survive and thrive for generations to come. Everything, that is, except for the required shift of consciousness that will inspire us to implement changes on a global scale.  Many of us are still plagued by the old habits and understandings that have caused the mess in which we now find ourselves.

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Thus began the famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s majestic 1980 television series, Cosmos. The epic grandeur of Sagan’s Cosmos—suffused with “billions upon billions” of planets, stars, and galaxies—captivated the imagination of viewers everywhere. But despite the almost sacred reverence for existence that permeated the series, some still took issue with its strictly scientific bias, finding little room for the numinous or the transcendent in Sagan’s naturalistic worldview.

Fifteen years later, the integral philosopher Ken Wilber issued an 800-page response to concerns such as these. Titled Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber’s grand tome argued for a more holistic conception of the universe—one that would honor the profound revelations of science and religion alike. He called the Universe “the Kosmos” (with a “K” from the Greek). So when some use the term “Kosmos,” with a “k”, it’s not only to affirm our appreciation for Sagan’s extraordinary universe but also to restore the spiritual depth and transcendent mysticism that the ancient Greek philosophers, who coined the word, duly acknowledged and revered.

Perhaps a more realistic synthesis of the two comes from renowned systems thinker Gregory Bateson,

“If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.  And as you arrogate all mind to yourself (Arrogate, from the latin arrogatus defined as claiming or seizing without justification.) Continuing with Bateson: as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.  The environment will seem to be yours to exploit.  Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables.  If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.  You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or simply of overpopulation and overgrazing.” Sounds daunting and all to familiar.

Here is the good news: although still relatively small, there is a rapidly growing percentage of humanity that is experiencing a shift in consciousness that many deem necessary if we are going to survive as a human species.  Some associate the shift to the theories and proofs of quantum physics.  Others attribute it to the emergence of the internet—which has brought connections and ideas into our homes from all over the world — our global village. Still others see it as a natural result of the end of imperialism or of the 2500 year epoch of the dark ages.  I personally think that all of these things are having their impact.  Just go to any bookstore and you’ll to find a number of books on the subject, some written by notable scholars such as Joanna Macy and David Korten.

These two writers differ greatly in their fields of expertise—Joanna Macy is a Buddhist scholar, and David Korten is an expert in business and economics.  But both are currently telling us the same thing: that we are now living in a defining moment in the course of our history. That the era of cheap oil is ending, climate change is undeniably real, and economies can no longer rest on the unsustainable foundation of financial and environmental debt.  Out of necessity, they tell us, we are collectively entering a new era.  We are moving away from the life-killing political economy birthed by the Industrial Revolution and we’re moving towards a sustainable, life-enhancing political economy that exists in harmony with the Earth.  They both refer to it by the same name.  They call it “The Great Turning.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

Simply put, this concept of The Great Turning encompasses all the actions currently being taken to honor, care for and preserve life on Earth these days—and there are lots of them.  But it is more than these, too.  It involves a new understanding of who we are and what we need to be happy.  In large numbers, people are learning the falsehood of the old paradigm that there is an isolated, competitive, solid self.   In its stead, we are beginning to embrace a new paradigm in which our selfish and solid separateness is seen for what it really is: an illusion.  We are discovering our inter-connectedness to everything, our mutual belonging in the web of life.  So despite centuries of mechanistic Newtonian conditioning, we are slowly learning to name, once again, this world—and everything in it—as sacred, as whole.

Whether these understandings come through Gaia theory, systems theory, chaos theory, or through liberation theology, shamanic practices, the evolutionary theology of UCC minister Michael Dowd, engaged Buddhism,or even Unitarian Universalism, such insights and experiences are now freeing growing numbers of us from the grip of the industrial-corporate-growth society. They are offering us nobler goals and deeper pleasures. They are redefining our wealth and our worth, thus liberating us—finally—from compulsions to consume and control everything in sight.

To me, I view this trend as a natural emergence of the Feminine (or Yin) Principle in a world that has been strongly skewed toward the Masculine (or Yang) Principle.  But however you view it, there is no denying the fact that something is sparking a transition around the world and it is giving me hope!

That’s because one of the best aspects of this shift is that there is less room for panic or self-pity.  No, with these new understandings of who we really are, it is gratitude that generally arises, not fear.  We become grateful to be alive at this moment, when—for all the darkness around us—blessings and awakenings abound. The Great Turning helps us stay mindful and steady, helping us join hands in community to find the ways the world self-heals — like our Sanctuary Garden and Hands on Housing.  The present chaos, then, doesn’t doom us but becomes a seedbed for a better, more sacredly connected, future.

This is a very exciting time to be alive: we have so much potential; we can make such a difference!  Of course that’s not to say that these coming years will be easy.  One can always expect resistance to change, especially when it affects profitability and patterns of dominance.   No, we are now encountering times of great suffering and uncertainty.  And at times our grief will seem overwhelming—like the type of grief so many of us are currently feeling about war, and genocide, and natural disasters, and over-population, of species extinction, and so many more disasters.

But like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So today — this Earth Day — we offer some balance to the paralysis of analysis and its intense anguish that we might be feeling these days.  These responses arise from the depth of our caring and the truth of our interconnectedness with all beings. After all, “to suffer with” is the literal meaning of compassion.  And this world could use a lot more compassion.

What if we were to understand our relation to nature and our environment in sacred terms or poetic terms or, with Emerson and Thoreau, in good old American transcendentalist terms, but there is no broadly shared language with which to do this. So we are forced to resort to what is, in fact, a lower common denominator: the languages of science and bureaucracy. These languages have broad legitimacy in our culture, a legitimacy they possess largely because of the thoroughness with which they discredited religious discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But many babies went out with the bath water of religious dogma and superstition. One of these was morality. Even now, science can’t say why we ought not to harm the environment except to say that we shouldn’t be self-destructive. Another of these lost sacred children was our very relation as human beings to the mystery of existence, as such. As the philosopher G. W. Leibniz famously wondered, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

For St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, this was the fundamental religious question. In the place of a medieval and renaissance relation to the world that was founded on this mystery, we have a mechanical relation that is objective and data driven. We no longer have a forest; we have “board feet.” We no longer have a landscape, a world that is our own; we have “valuable natural resources.” Avowed Christians have been slow to recall this sacred relationship to the world. For example, only recently have American evangelicals begun thinking of the environment in terms of what they call “creation care.” We don’t have to be born again to agree with evangelicals that one of the most powerful arguments missing from the 21st century environmentalist’s case is reverence for what simply IS. One of the heroes of Goethe’s Faust was a character called Care (Sorge), who showed to Faust the unscrupulousness of his actions and led him to salvation. Environmentalism has made a Faustian pact with quantitative reasoning; science has given it power but it cannot provide deliverance. If environmentalism truly wishes, as it claims, to want to “save” something—the planet, a species, itself—it needs to rediscover a common language of Care.

Here’s a valuable learning: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is, in fact, internal to you, when its life is your life.  The truth is, these so-called external threats are actually a great convenience to us. It is convenient that we can imagine a power beyond us because that means we don’t have to spend much time examining our own lives. And it is very convenient that we can hand the hard work of our resistance to these so-called externals over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers.

Environmentalism should stop depending solely on its alliance with science for its sense of itself. It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of flowers and plants and existence) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion are “the principles by which they live.”

I’ll close with this: The establishment of these principles by which we might live would begin with three questions. First, what does it mean to be a human being? Second, what is my relation to other human beings? And third, what is my relation to existence as such, the ongoing “miracle” that there is something rather than nothing? If the answer to these questions is that the purpose of being human is “the pursuit ofhappiness” (understood as success, which is understood as the accumulation of money); and if our relation to others is a relation to mere things (with nothing to offer but what they can do for us); and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” (that we should exploit for profit); then we should be very comfortable with the world we have. If this world goes to perdition at least we can say that we acted in “good faith.” But if, on the other hand, we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human, more justice in our relation to others, and more reverence for existence as a sacred Whole, then we must either live in bad faith with market-driven capitalism and other systemic “givens,” or begin describing a future whose fundamental values and whose daily activities are radically different from what we currently endure. The risk I propose, as our choir sang, is for us to rise to the nobility of a star. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on living a new story, one that re-cognizes the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from flowers to frogs to forests to our fellow humans, simply because they are.

Happy Earth Day!

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© Mark Skrabacz

June 10, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

In December, our choir was invited to sing in a showcase of choral groups at a large Catholic Church in north Austin. The church was brimming with holiday decorations and a packed sanctuary of well over a thousand dressed in colorful Christmas regalia. In attendance were 15 church choirs, each presenting two holiday songs. The choirs sang traditional and non-traditional Christmas carols, mostly in English, accompanied by piano or organ.

Being our different selves, assembled under the leadership of our creative and talented Director of Music, we chose to sing an a cappella chorale in German from a JS Bach cantata with a segue into a Nigerian folk song accompanied by djembe drum and rattles. On the way back to our seats after our performance, I heard several people in the audience remarking about our unique pieces. By the way, they WERE beautiful!

After the concert, a choir member from one of the Episcopal churches struck up a conversation, saying: “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve never really understood just what it is that Unitarian Universalists believe. Since you are part of this Christmas event, are you Christians?”

I replied: “Not exactly. We were – and some still are, yet most of us are not.”

He replied: “How does that work? Do you believe in Jesus or not?”

I said: “Not in an orthodox way. Many of us value his teachings, but few, if any, believe in the orthodox view that he is the only begotten Son of God and of the resurrection on the third day.”

He asked: “Well, if you don’t believe in the resurrection, what about your own immortality.”

I replied: “You’d have to say we’re pretty diverse on that one, too.”

Finally, he said: “Y’all believe in God, right?”

Again I replied, “Not exactly. Many of us do, each in his or her way. Others of us don’t find the concept of God a useful one.”

This kind of conversation stirs up in me curiosity about what UUs present to the world. And not only WHAT, but HOW we present it to the world.

Along the lines of the WHAT, let’s look briefly at Unitarian Universalism: It’s a fact that we do not believe that any religious precept or doctrine must be accepted as true simply because some religious organization, tradition or authority says it is. Neither do we believe that all UUs should have identical beliefs.

The fact is UUs have different beliefs. Since individual freedom of belief is one of our basic principles, it follows that there will be differing beliefs among us. Found in today’s churches are humanism, agnosticism, atheism, theism, liberal Christianity, neo-paganism and earth spiritualism, to name a few. Interestingly, these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible to hold more than one. While we are bound by a set of common principles, we leave it to the individual to decide what particular beliefs lead to these principles.

There’s a perception among many, that Unitarian Universalism has no beliefs, especially none in a God. It is much more accurate to say that we do not have a single, defined concept of God in which all UUs are expected to believe. Each member is free to explore and develop an understanding of God that is meaningful to him or her. They’re also free to reject the term or concept altogether.

Diversity in a system is a sign of life. Rich eco-systems, for example, are not monocultures. The multiplicity of expressions found in UUs is a healthy sign. Unlike diversity, divisiveness is a real issue that separates many religious adherents, like the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. There’s divisiveness among Jewish and Christian sects as well. This issue may be fueled by beliefs, especially those reduced and codified into creeds. The way most people state “I believe in” creates a position that must be defended or expanded at the expense of others. Creedal religions suggest that humankind’s spiritual and religious growth have reached a conclusion. Creeds, rather than encouraging more searching and curiosity, can tend to freeze and halt one’s pilgrimage of faith. Creedal religions forego much of the process and the celebration of new insights, which have been referred to theologically as “continuous revelation”. Creedal worship, as many of us have experienced, is akin to saying: here’s the answer, let’s affirm it in unison.

Unitarian Universalists find comfort in a creedless religion. Although many question that UUs have no center, and without a significant unifying element, some are concerned that we, too, will simply become more fragmented and individualized like our society. To those who are anxious about too much diversity, I say, relax, no one needs to ask whether the forest of many trees has a center. It’s a zone of life to be entered. Just be here, breathe and pay attention. Center or no center, I propose that there IS something that binds us together. As I visit many UU congregations, I have discovered that what keeps participants interested, curious and coming to church is the community, fellowship, each other. That’s a description of our covenant, the commitments and promises that we voluntarily make to each other. For UUs, it’s our covenantal relationship, not creeds, that binds us together.

Being a covenantal faith also has to do with the primacy of freedom, especially a free mind and the freedom of religious belief. For centuries, freethinking religious liberals have been persecuted, ostracized and put in harm’s way because they wouldn’t relinquish their free mind to the prevailing view. So, to protect, celebrate, support and nurture the free mind and the freedom of religious belief, our faith remains a covenantal and creedless religion.

Without professing a creed, it IS more challenging to express who we are and how we interact. Perhaps that’s part of a public relations and marketing issue UUs face.

Today I am drawing attention to something that UUs share, something unique in the vast play of religious expression on our planet, in our quest for an effective faith here and now, and that is our covenantal relationship. In the study of theology, much is made of the covenant between God and humankind. The way UUs covenant makes us unique. Sure it may involve an active relationship to Divine Mystery, and again, it may not. It is, however, a promise we make with each other.

Covenant is the commitment that empowers our mission and vision, and it fuels an extraordinary bond, a solidarity, which makes our experiences Unitarian Universalist, expressing itself in creative Sunday worship, religious education, the annual pledge drive, mindfulness meditation, social action, earth-centered ritual, landscaping or building maintenance, volunteering on the board or singing in the choir. Everything we do is grounded in covenant. We are a covenantal faith.

What does this mean? It means that our individualized searches for a theological center need to be understood as a search for the solidarity and mutuality that can carry us through an increasingly individualized lifestyle, energizing our devoted action as a smaller committed community on behalf of the larger global community.

How can we mature in our individualized and collective search to new levels of effective faith? How about by re-imagining the way we speak of religious individualism and dissent. We are right to extol the lone, courageous voice that holds out against the follies of groupthink. We celebrate the dissenter who begs to differ when the crowd is gung ho for a course of action that will cause untold harm to life. Behind the lone prophet who speaks up, there is a group ? WE celebrate the lone prophet because there is a WE here ? there is a whole movement of us who hold to values that are fragile, dissident, and life-giving.

Theologians suggest that it is always a mistake to imagine that lone prophets are really alone. Take Martin Luther King, Jr., for example. He galvanized a movement ? yes ? but his power did not come from the singularity of his vision, or a mere exercise of individual conscience. He voiced the conscience of a whole body of people, a community that shared the experience of racism and had a long legacy of resistance and hope. He wasn’t singing solo. He was singing from the midst of the choir.

It might be helpful to think of Jesus this way, as well. It is a mistake to see him as an isolated, heroic individual. It is more accurate to see him as the crest of a wave, the sparkling foam breaking brightly from the force of a whole ocean moving and swelling up from underneath. I sense among Unitarian Universalists these days a deep desire to affirm the ocean, and our covenantal community, that is welling up within the voices of individual conscience that we celebrate.

As meaningful as our mission, principles and purposes are, these are only as good as our covenant to embody them. They’ll only be seen and make an impact as we gather together in “covenant to affirm and promote them”. We also make another commitment (and I quote again) “We enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.” Our community is grounded in covenant. We rise and fall together.

One deeply radical implication of this is that it is impossible to be a Unitarian Universalist alone. In the Men’s work I’ve been doing for many years, we have a saying: “You have to do your work, but you can’t do it alone.” This holds true for UUs, too. We must do our work in relationship with other Unitarian Universalists! The only way to be a UU is to be part of a UU congregation and to make and receive promises and commitments to our collective vision, mission, principles, purposes and, yes, most importantly, to each other.

About the HOW that Unitarian Universalism shows up in the world – it is an issue of intent. How does the congregation intend to grow and respond to the of influx new members? What are the agreements and boundaries? What are the action steps? How do we do this as UUs? Unitarian Universalists do have a very contemporary and timely message, yet how safe do we feel in our own container of mutual trust and support to step up and shine our lights from the hilltop?We must integrate our diversity as a covenant people, addressing our deepest concerns in an atmosphere of acceptance, love and commitment. Then getting the word out will happen naturally. We must mature to a deep, real and believable level of community that naturally overflows into and communicates with the vast ocean of life.

Cultural trends indicate suspicion of religious communities. So most people opt for the admission of being spiritual rather than religious, because of the implied institutional aspects of religions. Many people today in Austin choose to follow their own unique and individualistic path instead of a community one. Many of these people might find a supportive community among us.

Individually, we, as UUs, are each finding our own way. Yet this message is designed to call our attention to the little wonders created for us to find together as a covenant community ? as diversity in unity. Are we undervaluing or dismissing the opportunities provided in the corporate and collective contexts,

like our church, as a shared experience of curiosity, grace and presence?

For me, and maybe this is why I do what I do, I have experienced my most empowering and grace-filled moments as an individual in community, in congregational worship, in sharing as a covenant group, on weekend retreats or week-long social action projects, where we are gifted with the opportunity to work side-by-side, to cooperate, to collaborate, to bond.

Our covenant community is bound by common principles and promises that empower us to share lives together in the promise of mutual trust and support. How are you participating? What talents and concerns do you bring to our table? How are you serving and being served?

We can be devoted to a specific religious practice – Christian prayer, Buddhist meditation, or pagan ritual (to name a few) – but as UUs we do not hold the view that there is one religion that encompasses the exclusive, final truth for all times and places, not even Unitarian Universalism. UU-ism is confident that revelation is a continuous process and is not sealed for all time.

The sacred impulse towards justice, compassion and equity moves in us, like an ocean, in many times and places, in myriad ways that call to us and teach us. We can see this world as tragically flawed, wondrously gifted, or both of the above, but we cannot hold the view that salvation is to be found solely beyond this world – in some life after death or a world other than this world.

While remaining open to mysteries that may be revealed beyond the grave or in realms beyond what we know at present, Unitarian Universalism is clear that the Ultimate is present here and now, and can be experienced, even if only partially, within the frame of our mortal existence. This means we do not hold to a hope that is only attained in the sweet by and by. We hold that this world, this life, these bodies are the dwelling place of the Sacred. This is the essence of our covenantal bond. Now is the time. Here is the place for our action, for our interaction.

Here’s a vision for us, an image of expanding the continual growing process of our covenant, the continuous revelation of our calling as divine-humans. We might describe our current level of maturation as a congregation as a pool of water. As we continue to affirm our trusting and supporting covenant among ourselves, and we endeavor to reach out to others and connect with all beings, welcoming them into our hearts and lives, we expand the boundaries of our pool so that it becomes a lake.

As we choose to honor life, especially as it is most challengingly revealed in all our familiar circumstances, and to live fully with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength ? as we do everything in our power to assure that our covenant embraces life and matures in practice and depth, our lake begins to flow like a river. And as we together seek our life of curious faith, we will find naturally that the flow of our river reaches the magnificence of a grand collective of all beings as great as an ocean, diverse, expansive and vast in its influence for good, for ourselves, for all, for Life.

Amen.

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Lessons in the Practice of Faith

Mark Skrabacz

December 31, 2006

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