Foster Child

by Posted in Audio available, Former Ministers, Guest Speakers, Jack Harris-Bonham, Sermons

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© Jack Harris-Bonham

July 15, 2007

Guest speakers:

Lawrence Foster, Sr., Lloyd Foster,

Kenneth Foster, Sr., and Nydesha Foster

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

Mystery of many names, mystery beyond all naming, anyone can be happy when things are going right, when blue skies and broad horizons lay before them. But it takes a special kind of person, a special kind of people to stay focused and on task in spite of the storm that looms on the horizon, in spite of the threats that bear down upon them, in spite of daily reminders that their lives are scheduled to end.

I received a letter recently from Kenneth Foster, Jr. The tone of the letter was confident and upbeat. I received a letter from Kenneth Foster, Jr., a man who is scheduled to die of lethal injection on the 30th of August. In this letter Kenneth thanked me for my concern about his case, he told me how blessed he felt that there are those on the outside of the machinery of death who care and are responding to his cause. He also explained about the bureaucracy behind the death machine to me, ten years of experience has taught him well. He blessed me in his letter not so much by the things he said but more by the tone in which they were said. Even though I am an older man than he in years, his years of being condemned have lent him a mantle of experience and age that comes from so many dark nights of the soul – one right after the other, after the other, after the other.

Kenneth and I will meet next month when the letter from our Board of Trustees of this church reaches the Warden, and I am given clearance. The meeting will be as all those meetings are between death row inmates and visitors. Kenneth will be behind glass like some specimen that has been separated from society so as not to increase the risk of infection. We will have all the visuals of people who meet, people who meet on opposite sides of thick glass, people who are forbidden to greet each other with a touch or even a holy kiss. We will meet and when we do, Kenneth says, “I hope that we can meet, so that you can hear my testimony personally – and I don’t mean legal wise. I mean me as the person I am.”

And this kind of talk just makes me think of the old time religion in which someone from the pulpit shouts, “Can I have a witness!?”

You see the death that Kenneth Foster, Jr. faces isn’t what he fears, the past ten years has been a mighty teacher – as Martin Luther wrote so many years ago “a mighty fortress is our God,” no, the death that Kenneth Foster, Jr. fears is the death of recognition. He doesn’t mind going down, but he does mind going down with no one paying attention. Can I have a witness?

The bread and circuses that this country has created in its out of control consumerism – the bread and circuses that keeps us occupied, but distracted, the 150 cable channels, the I-pods, and I-phones, personal computers, the gadgetry of modernity has kept us all informed, updated, and in the grove, but ultimately hanging out with ourselves. The community of humankind has been diminished in the process of our being entertained. The community of humankind cries out for more than food and juggling. The community of humankind awaits the new awakening of the human heart, the time when as Kenneth told me in his letter; people can look each other in the eyes and see that the other is ultimately themselves. Yes, as Kenneth says this looking does weigh heavily upon the human heart, but it springs from a place of truth and as Kenneth’s Master said 2000 years ago, ye shall know the truth and that truth shall make you free.

Kenneth may be locked behind the intricacies of multiple locks, sealed hermetically behind thick glass, family and friends may not be able to physically touch him, but there are Kenneth’s eyes into which we may gaze, and entering there we come away with only one feeling. Although the state may be about to murder this man, this man knows a truth and that truth is that from within him has sprung a fountainhead – he has bread that we do not know of, he has water from the living spring, he knows the truth of the Master’s words, lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age.

At the beginning of this prayer I said that it takes a special kind of person, a special kind of people to stay focused and on task in spite of the storm that looms on the horizon, in spite of the threats that bear down upon them, in spite of daily reminders that their lives are scheduled to end. I would remind us all that we, too, are under such a sentence of death – the only difference between Kenneth and ourselves is that within our deaths the method and time are unknown – the certainty, however, is still there.

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

Amen.

Foster Child

Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. And they had a notorious prisoner, called Barabbas. So when they had gathered Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release for you, Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ?” – And they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified.” And he said, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified.” So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

(Matthew 27:15-17;21-26)

The Hanging of the Mouse

An allegory by Elizabeth Bishop

Early, early in the morning, even before five o’clock, the mouse was led in by two enormous brown beetles in the traditional picturesque armor of an earlier day. They came onto the square through the small black door and marched between the lines of soldiers standing at attention: straight ahead, to the right, around two sides of the hollow square, to the left, and out into the middle where the gallows stood.

Before each turn the beetle on the right glanced quickly at the beetle on the left; their traditional long, long antennae swerved sharply in the direction they were to turn and they did it to perfection. The mouse, of course, who had had no military training and who, at the moment, was crying so hard he could scarcely see where he was going, rather spoiled the precision and snap of the beetles. At each corner he fell slightly forward, and when he was jerked in the right direction his feet became tangled together. The beetles, however, without even looking at him, each time lifted him quickly into the air for a second until his feet were untangled.

A large praying mantis was in charge of the religious ceremonies. He hurried up on t he stage after the mouse and his escorts but once there a fit of nerves seemed to seize him. He seemed to feel ill at ease with the low characters around him: the beetles, the hangman, and the criminal mouse. At last he made a great effort to pull himself together and, approaching the mouse, said a few words in a high, incomprehensible voice. The mouse jumped from nervousness, and cried harder than ever.

A raccoon, wearing the traditional mask, was the executioner. He was very fastidious and did everything just so. One of his young sons, also wearing a black mask, waited on him with a small basin and a pitcher of water. First he washed his hands and rinsed them carefully, then he washed the rope and rinsed it. At the last minute he again washed his hands and drew on a pair of elegant black kid gloves.

With the help of some pushes and pinches from the beetles, the executioner got the mouse into position. The rope was tied exquisitely behind one of his little round ears. The mouse raised a hand and wiped his nose with it, and most of the crowd interpreted this gesture as a farewell wave and spoke of it for weeks afterwards. The hangman’s young son, at a signal from his father, sprang the trap.

“Squee-eek! Squee-eek!” went the mouse. His whiskers rowed hopelessly round and round in the air a few times and his feet flew up and curled into little balls like young fern plants.

It was all so touching that a cat, who had brought her child in her mouth, shed several large tears. They rolled down on to the child’s back and he began to squirm and shriek, so that the mother thought that the sight of the hanging had perhaps been too much for him, but an excellent moral lesson, nevertheless.

Introduction:

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited he has the black man say, You want to help people that’s in trouble, you pretty much got to go where the trouble is at. You ain’t got a lot of choice.

The trouble seems to be everywhere. Pick up the newspaper, turn on the news. If it bleeds it leads. But sometimes you don’t have to go to where the trouble is at; sometimes the trouble comes to you. Such is the case today.

Consider, if you will, Kenneth Foster, Jr. who, ten years ago at the age of 19, was driving around with his friends. They were holding up people on the street and taking their handbags and wallets. There were three others in the car with Kenneth. He knew they were robbing people, but what he didn’t know was that one Mauricio Brown would exit Kenneth’s parked car walk eighty feet to talk to a woman who was seemingly flagging them down, and within a few minutes Mauricio Brown would kill the woman’s white boyfriend in what he claimed to be self-defense.

Consider now that Mauricio Brown has already been executed by the state of Texas – something the state of Texas has little trouble doing in these troubled times, but also, now consider that Kenneth Foster awaits a similar execution at the end of August.

Kenneth’s been prosecuted under the Law of Parties rule which means that Kenneth would have to have had prior knowledge that Mauricio Brown was about to commit Capital Murder when Mauricio Brown approached a woman standing by a car and even Mauricio Brown had no prior knowledge of that the woman’s boyfriend, one Michael LaHood, a prominent San Antonio lawyer’s only son, was even in the car.

Yes, it does seem like something from the Twilight Zone, a bizarre tale of medieval justice right here in 21st Century America. But it’s not a new pilot about a condemned man that continually escapes from jail, nor is it some farfetched novel about justice gone awry.

Kenneth Foster is 29 years old. He came from parents who neglected him as they both had their own drug habits to deal with. Kenneth’s father readily admitted that he was in jail when he found out that his son had been arrested for murder. Kenneth Jr.’s grandparents raised him, but Kenneth fell in with the wrong crowd. He lived outside the law, and now he is caught in the mechanism of the law itself as it inexorably keeps time on his deathwatch.

I’m not here today to convince you that Kenneth Foster is innocent of anything. For after all like 80% of those on death row Kenneth Foster, Jr. is guilty of being black. But, I’m here today to say that I’ve picked up many a hitch hiker, and I’d hate to think that I was somehow responsible for what they’d done before they got into my car. If that same misuse of the Law of Parties that was applied to Kenneth Foster was applied to us we would be responsible for whatever anyone, hitchhiker or friend, had done before they entered our cars.

Yes, Kenneth Foster drove the car that was riding around robbing people. But when that shot was fired it was Kenneth who started to pull away, and it was Kenneth that had to be convinced by one of the other riders to stay and wait for Mauricio Brown.

The moratorium on the death penalty was instigated by the ruling of Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled the practice of capital punishment was unconstitutional. Three men condemned to death by the states of Georgia and Texas appealed their sentences, arguing that their 8th Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment had been violated. The Court voted 5/4 to invalidate their sentences, ruling that the death penalty not only violated the 8th Amendment but the 14th as well, since it was meted out unequally to the “poor and despised.”

But that moratorium vanished when the Supreme Court overturned its ruling in Furman and executions resumed in the state of Florida in 1976 under Governor Bob Graham. Old Bloody Bob as we called him signed the death warrant for John Spenkelink. Spenkelink became the first person to be executed under the new statutes. There’s a bumper sticker that are the last words of John Spenkelink as he was strapped into the electric chair. “Capital Punishment – Those without the capital get the punishment.”

I was living in Tallahassee, Florida in 1979, and my then wife and I marched in the protest march around the state capital. I remember the end of the moratorium, and was up and awake on May 25th 1979 when they pulled the switch on Old Sparkie. That’s what they call the electric chair down Florida way – Old Sparkie. Inmates made it of Live Oak in 1923 and it belongs back in those horse and buggy times. It’s as appropriate today as carrying extra horse shoes in the trunk of your car in case you get a flat.

Cleaning up after an execution is something that’s rarely thought about. Those being electrocuted lose whatever control they had over their bodies. After Spenkelink’s execution it was revealed that guards had stuffed wads of cotton up John Spenkelink’s rectum to keep the inevitable from happening in the presence of Old Sparkie. I mean what’s more important keeping the execution chamber clean or maintaining the dignity of a condemned man”

The truth is the varying states administer the death penalty in a racially biased manner. There are a disproportionate numbers of African Americans on death row. In fact, the race of the victim provides a statistically clear indicator of whether or not a defendant receives a sentence of death or imprisonment. Thus, although nearly 50 percent of all murder victims in the

United States are nonwhite, 80 percent of all death sentences are imposed for the murders of whites.

In Albert Camus’ book, Reflections on the Guillotine he boils Capital Punishment down to this. People murder other people – true. But how many murderers tell their victims exactly when they will murder them” Even after the first announced date of their murder has passed and it looks like these folks have escaped their fate, they get yet another call from the murderer advising them of a new date of death. Finally, the day arrives and the murderer is escorted to the victim’s house where no one tries to stop them, and everyone watches as they take the victim to a place where they have always committed these crimes, and there in the light of day, in full knowledge of the informed public they put their victims to death. There is only one murderer who does it this way and that is the state. The same state within which we live, move and have our being.

Albert Camus was born and raised in French Algiers. His father was French and his mother was Algerian. Shortly before the First World War there was a particularly gruesome crime in Algeria in which a man had killed a farmer and his entire family – even the children. Camus’ father was extremely upset by the killing of the children. He followed the trial and when the day of execution came, Albert Camus’ father got up extra early because the place of execution was across town. But when he arrived back home he said nothing to anyone about the execution, and went immediately to bed where he vomited. The thoughts of the murdered children had been displaced by the sight of the murderer’s quivering body as it was placed upon the killing board and slid into position on the guillotine.

Camus argues that if revulsion is the response of a good citizen at the execution of a notorious murderer, then how is this act of execution supposed to bring more peace and order into the fabric of a society that needs healing?

There does seem however to be an argument here for using this repulsive act of stately murder to repel future murderers from taking up the ax, the poison or the gun. Yet, executions are no longer public. They are now secret affairs in which you have to have an invitation. How is an act committed in privacy supposed to make an example if, in fact, this example cannot be seen? Yes, we get stories in the newspapers, and the 10 o’clock news might say someone is to be executed shortly, but what the people are really waiting for is the latest weather update for the weekend.

In the narratives we have about Jesus – in the four Gospels – we have the story of a man who was conscious of the fact that the way in which he lived, moved and had his being was in direct contradiction to the Roman State. Eventually, charges were brought against him. They were fabricated, but witnesses were called and enough lying was done, sufficient at least, to get him the death penalty – crucifixion – essentially death by suffocation and a common form of capital punishment between the 6th century BC and 4th century AD.

I’m thinking now about the traditional verses in Second Isaiah that Christians say are prophecies that point to the coming death of Jesus on the cross. You’ve probably heard them a thousand times, but listen now and think not of prophesy concerning Jesus, but rather think how these lines could refer to any condemned person.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. How many people here hold Kenneth Foster Jr. in high esteem, how many people here before this morning even knew who Kenneth Foster Jr. is?

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did not esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

We must think now of the ancient practice of scapegoating. A tribe would take a goat and all the sins of that tribe would be placed upon the goat and that goat driven into the wilderness to die. This is the way ancient cultures cleansed their societies.

But are we any different from them? Ask yourself, What is the difference between what we are doing to those on death row, and especially Kenneth Foster, Jr. when we put them to death? Are we really punishing them for the wrongs that they have done, or are we using them as scapegoats for a society that is plagued with remorse, full of regret, and simply not living up to the standards that we have set ourselves?

We put other people to death so that we may keep alive the idea that we are without sin, without wrongs, without judgment ourselves. But this is the 21st Century, and surely no one would think that a goat could take away the sins of a society, so why is it that we continue with this ancient practice of scapegoating by using human beings? How can the death of Kenneth Foster, Jr. bring peace to any one? How does a democratic society, which purports to believe in the inalienable rights of all humans, believe that killing someone can even a score, heal a wound, or bring about peace?

My reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s allegory, The Hanging of the Mouse, might have disturbed some people. An allegory is a work in which the characters and events are to be understood as representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper spiritual, moral, or political meaning. I think all three are there in Bishop’s allegory.Elizabeth Bishop is using mice, insects, raccoons and cats to cast the events of capital punishment in a new and startling light.

The precision of the military beetles seems ludicrous when compared to the sniveling mouse and his entangled legs. The scene approaches comic absurdity at several points – the praying mantis, lost for words, and made uncomfortable by being with the condemned. Yet, the absurdity hits home when it’s the cat – the natural enemy of the mouse – who cries as the mouse is hung. Yes, it is ludicrous what the animals and insects are doing to the poor mouse, but no more ludicrous than what we are doing to Kenneth Foster, Jr.

I was told the story of a tribe in Africa that literally puts the condemned person in the same boat as the family of the murdered person. They row out into the middle of the lake where weights are placed on the legs of the murderer. The murderer is then pushed overboard, but as he struggles to live if one of the family of the murder victim wants to jump in and save him they can, and – they often do. Once the humanity of the murderer is witnessed thoughts of revenge are replaced with thoughts of compassion.

The following is from Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s Dissent on the death penalty. From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death – I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed – The basic question “does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants ‘deserve’ to die?” cannot be answered in the affirmative. The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

On the 21st of July – this coming Saturday – at 5PM on the front steps of the Texas State Capital there will be a rally for Kenneth Foster, Jr. and his family. Perhaps this will change nothing, but when thousands upon thousands of people show up who knows what effect this will have on the heart of Governor Rick Perry.

And now on behalf of the family of Kenneth Foster Jr., I’d like to thank you for being here, for listening with open minds and open hearts, for being the good people you are. Today you witnessed the suffering of his father, Kenneth Foster, Sr., his daughter, Nydesha Foster, his grandfather, Lawrence Foster and his great uncle, Lloyd Foster. Seeing that suffering I know that you will do what you can to alleviate it. This UU tribe is in the habit of suiting up and showing up, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed. Let us along with Justice Blackmun say that From this day forward, (we) no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

In one of today’s readings Pilate solved the problem of what to do with the condemned man, Jesus. He was a great believer in symbolism – Pilate. He had a basin of water brought out to the judgment seat and in front of the crowd he washed his hands. The executioner Raccoon likewise washed his hands.

There’s a washbasin and towel down front. Right there. What’s it doing there? That’s a question that you should be asking yourself. And rightfully, that’s a question that you should also be answering.

Asking the Next Question by Jim Checkley

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Jim Checkley, Sermons

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Asking the Next Question by Jim Checkley

I have always been a big science fiction fan. I even wrote and published some short stories way back in the dark ages of the 1970s when I lived up in New Jersey and was attending school at Montclair State College. I was, I think, in my last year at Montclair State when a friend of mine from school named Karl asked me if I wanted to go to a big science fiction and fantasy convention up in Great Gorge, New Jersey, a ski resort in the Pocono Mountains. I loved going to science fiction conventions and this one looked fantastic with lots of big name writers, a terrific program, and a fantastic dealers’ room. This science fiction convention had it all. And what was more, it was going to be held at the Playboy Club. What better place for a science fiction and fantasy convention?

Anyway, I told Karl that it would be great to go to the convention. So we made arrangements to drive up together and waited for the big day.

It was the middle of winter, back when we still had winter, and the night before the convention, it snowed something like three feet. I’m not kidding. The drifts were up over the parked cars on my street. But, I was a really big science fiction and fantasy fan, so I dug out my car and drove up to the college to meet Karl. I didn’t for one second doubt that Karl would be there, and so I was not surprised when he was—although his was the only car in sight. He, however, had been a little more practical than me and had called ahead to the Playboy Club to see if the convention was still going to be held. And, of course, it was or he would not have been there.

It was still snowing a little and standing there in the snow drifts, we had a momentary lapse of faith, but then decided, what the heck, what’s the worst thing that could happen—we fall off a mountain road in a blizzard. But we are all immortal when we are young, so away we went—driving, I might add, a Ford Pinto.

When we arrived at the convention, the place was deserted. I mean, there was nobody around. But we went into the club—it was very impressive—and found our way to the auditoriums where the main events of the convention were to take place. When we went inside we saw no more than a dozen fans and a handful of science fiction writers sitting around in conversation. Most of the people present had come in the night before and had stayed in the resort hotels. I think Karl and I were the only lunatics who had driven all the way up from the suburbs of New York City.

Anyway, the organizers saw no point to actually conducting the program—many of the guests of honor hadn’t arrived in any event. So, we spent the day hanging out in the mostly empty club, talking about science fiction, fantasy, and whatever else was of interest.

That was one of my favorite days ever. Yes, I was a geek, and on that day I was one very happy geek. Imagine being 21 years old and spending a day with a group of famous science fiction writers and some kindred spirits at a Playboy Club.

And this is how I met Theodore Sturgeon. How many of you know who Theodore Sturgeon was? Theodore Sturgeon was one of the great science fiction writers of the Golden Age of science fiction. His most famous novel is “More Than Human,” which won many awards, and he wrote two of my more favorite Star Trek episodes from the original series, “Amok Time” and “Shore Leave.”

But on this day, we spent hours talking, had lunch together—and yes, we had several bunnies as our waitresses (the first and only time that ever happened to me)—and we got to know each other pretty well. At some point in the afternoon, he signed the books I had brought up with me and in the process introduced me to his personal symbol that over the years I have taken on as my own. You see, Theodore Sturgeon signed all his books with his name and then he added a capital Q with an arrow going through it. Here’s what it looked like:

askingnextquestion

He asked me if I knew what that meant. I said I did not. He then said, “It means, ‘ask the next question.’ Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. And never stop asking questions.”

I immediately loved this symbol and what it stood for. After the convention, I asked a friend who was an art major to make me a stylized Q with an arrow going through it and I kept it framed on my desk for decades. I have tried to live my life in accordance with the attitude and vision engendered by always being ready and willing to ask the next question and being prepared to accept the answers wherever they may lead. That hasn’t always been easy, and there is more to it, actually, than meets the eye.

Asking the next question probably seems to you to be a natural state of affairs. After all, you—we—are Unitarian Universalists. But asking the next question is not a universally embraced attitude about life. There is a distinction between simply asking questions, which is a natural part of being human, and asking the next question. I don’t think that asking the next question, and the question after that, is actually an inherent part of being human. This is because, and this does make a difference, what most people want is answers. We hate uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. Human beings want answers so much that we will make them up if we need to—everything from the great myths that explain the world and our place in it, to the guy who says, “I don’t know,” but then gives you an answer anyway. And once people have those answers, and find them psychologically satisfying, they tend to stop looking.

You see, Unitarians always seem to be on the search for truth. And when you are searching, it makes sense to ask questions. But what happens when you have found the truth? The natural tendency is to accept what you’ve found, stop asking questions, and settle into a comfortable and satisfying place. Once you have found the truth, people who are still looking, who are still questioning, have a tendency to annoy you. So—on the bright side—we can all take some solace that we might annoy them as much as they annoy us. Be that as it may, however, once you’ve gotten to a place where you are satisfied, it’s entirely too easy to stop questioning.

And that attitude is understandable. I get it. We all get into our comfort zones with what we know and believe and we want to stay there. Having certainty, having answers, provides that comfort and lets us relax in a world that is terribly uncertain and is becoming more so all the time.

Many years ago, I had a secretary who would always interrupt me when we were talking about controversial issues such as evolution, global warming, or abortion. She’d tell me that she had her beliefs, that she was satisfied with them, and she was not interested in questioning them. She was saying, “Just leave me alone.”

The attitude displayed by my secretary can actually be kicked up a notch or two to the point where there is an active ban on asking questions. If you think about the way human beings lived for many centuries in Europe, free inquiry into the way the world worked, how to best live life, and so many other questions that confronted people was not just discouraged, it was punished. Thus, for a long time people were told that all they needed to know was Aristotle and the Bible and any deviation from that script was not just a sin, it was a crime.

This sort of attitude is still with us today, of course. The most obvious examples are the fundamentalists of Christianity, Islam, and other religions. But there’s more to it than that. At a mundane level, how often do we hear somebody say “TMI” meaning they are getting too much information about an uncomfortable or embarrassing subject and they want the speaker to stop? That’s a trivial thing, I admit, but TMI isn’t limited just to colonoscopies and locker room stories. TMI is symbolic of a strong current in our society that discourages inquiry into certain matters and areas of life. From the Frankenstein notion that there are things we simply were not meant to know, to the censorship and burning of books, a la Fahrenheit 451, to modern debates about recombinant DNA, stem cells, and cloning, there is a strong current of caution, indeed fear, about asking the next question and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, comfort, and our place in the world.

I, and I suspect many of you, reject these notions. You see, for me, asking the next question isn’t simply a matter of curiosity. For me, asking the next question is a way of life, it is an approach to the world and how we live in that world that for me is the only way to go.

Of course many—and I mean billions of people—have decided to live their lives and create their futures based on the authority of one of the mainstream religions, and in so doing accept as true and unchanging the values, laws, prescriptions, and choices found in sacred texts as interpreted by priests, rabbis, and mullahs. Those people have their framework of reality, their vision of life and how to live it, and they are done. They will each tell you sincerely and confidently that their accepted framework is the correct one, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or some other. Reason and logic tell us that all of them cannot possibly be correct—but that doesn’t seem to matter. After all, they will say they have faith.

Faith is supposed to provide answers, and with them, certainty. It’s a kind of forced certainty—although that’s rarely acknowledged—because people of faith simply choose to accept something as true—that’s the very definition of having faith—accepting as true those things that otherwise cannot be proved to be true. Faith works, of course, because, it provides a safe, certain, framework of reality, morality, right, and wrong that people can and do rely upon. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what kind of faith we are talking about. Whether it’s faith in one of the many religions or faith in a Twelve Step Program, that faith will provide a level of certainty, which will itself provide for the comfort, safety, and sense of place and belonging that people seem to require to feel at peace with themselves and their place in the world.

This reminds me of a study I read about years ago concerning young children and how they respond to their environment. It turns out that if you provide a child with firm and certain boundaries, that child will actually venture out farther in exploring his or her environment than one that has been given total freedom to do as he or she wishes. This may seem counter-intuitive, but there is an explanation that makes sense to me.

The first child—the one with the boundaries and the framework—comes from a place of comfort and familiarity, a place of safety and certainty, which provides it with the confidence and ability to take some risks and venture out a little into the world knowing that if something happens, he or she can always come back to a known and safe place. The second child, the one with complete freedom, however, has no such certainty or safety and experiences what an adult might think of as unlimited free choice as a frightening chaos. That child must always decide for him or herself what is safe and unsafe, what is good or bad, and how far to go before going too far. This tends to make most children more cautious and anxious about things and as a result, they tend to hold back more. What applies to children also applies to adults.

Now everybody, whether they have traditional religious faith or not, everybody has a view of the world and their place in it. I have one, Hillary has one, we all have one. That view of the world is one that we trust, that we act upon, and gives to us the same thing that boundaries gave to the young children: a sense of comfort, place, and security in the world. And if we are asking the next question, then we are challenging that view on an almost daily basis, something I think is really difficult to do, but is also necessary.

In this respect, asking the next question symbolizes to me living the responsible, conscious, and intentional life. It is a life with as much responsibility as freedom and a life marked by having the courage and the will to confront, accept, and address the important questions that challenge us both as individuals and communities.

Asking the next question is not so much doubting as it is realizing that most knowledge and most truths are incomplete or inadequate to deal with every situation, especially in our incredibly complex and every changing modern world. Yes, it is important to believe in something, to be invested in each of our world views to the point where we trust and act upon them, but it is also important to know that they could be wrong and that we may need to change our minds, and, in the process, change ourselves. Said another way, not only should you not believe everything you hear, but you must be prepared on a moment’s notice to not believe everything you think.

This is the key to it then: If we create a framework of life that is full of certainty, full of absolute answers, whether from god or from science or some other place, then we will become stuck, we will not grow, will not evolve, will not expand. There may be some comfort there, perhaps even a lot of comfort, but to me it is a sterile, cold, and lifeless place to be. On the other hand, if we choose not to believe anything, if we choose not to invest ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually in a vision of what life should be, and constantly doubt ourselves and our understanding, then we end up in a shallow place, a place of impermanence, of total ambiguity, with little comfort, little to rely upon, little safety, and little fun. We must somehow be totally committed to our view of life today, but be willing to change tomorrow.

We are creating ourselves and our futures every day. This requires us to act consciously and with intentionality. That’s difficult to do for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we have to actually pay attention and steer ourselves and our lives rather than simply letting ourselves follow the path of least resistance or some preordained path chosen by others or the path that our brains urge us to take as a result of evolution and our desire for comfort, certainty, and security.

In this regard, asking the next question is a symbol of our ability to rise above the animals that we are, that jumble of instincts, desires, fears, and other programs that evolution has provided to human beings for our survival. Those programs have worked remarkably well and we have not only survived, we have thrived. But now it’s time to change. Those survival techniques, including our incredible propensity for violence and war, as well as our ability to hate and denigrate based on irrational or meaningless distinctions, those tendencies simply are not serving us well any more and we need to do all in our power to lose them, both personally and as communities and nations.

Our ancient myths and mainstream religions contain the strong notion that humans were created by God at the top of the pyramid of life, that God has given people dominion over the Earth, and therefore, whatever we do is OK. This is a dangerous attitude, and one that needs to be lost, along with so much else from our old myths and religions. We need to instead accept that we are a natural part of the natural world, on a par with all life, and that for better or worse, we are the stewards of this planet and need to husband our resources and our home rather than believing that we have permission from God to do whatever we want.

There are two photographs that have been taken in the last 40 years that symbolize for me the new horizons and understandings that we all need to incorporate into our vision of the world and our place in it. The first was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by the astronauts in the Apollo VIII spacecraft as it orbited around the moon. They turned their TV camera back on the Earth and for the first time in history, the people of Earth saw their home as a small cloud covered globe hanging in space—a jewel in an infinite ocean of black. That picture taught us in an instant that we are all one on this world, our only world, a tiny, fragile world, for which we, and we alone on this planet, are the caretakers.

There was no crystal dome over the Earth separating our world from heaven, as those who wrote the Bible believed; there was no heaven in the blackness of the total vacuum of space. On hundreds of millions of television screens around the globe all that the people saw was a fragile and altogether tiny world, a world put into perspective by the second photograph, I mentioned. Called the Hubble Deep Field, this photograph taken a few years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope and it provides the deepest, most awesome view of the sky ever recorded. The Hubble Deep Field revealed thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars existing in an area of the sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arms length. The poet William Blake challenged us to imagine the world in a grain of sand: well here are trillions of them—an image so vast it is literally incomprehensible.

When the Apollo VIII astronauts read from the Book of Genesis on that Christmas Eve, it marked for me an important transition, a transition from the old myths, the old comforts, and the incredibly self-centered vision of humans and our planet, to the new vision with its very different place for us in the world, a natural place that was nonetheless fraught with responsibility and will require us to fearlessly, fairly, and honestly confront our future and the future of every living thing on this planet. But my youthful optimism has not been vindicated—at least not yet. I am a part of this church community and do these services in large part because I think that this transition—from the old myths to the new reality—is possibly the most important intellectual and spiritual transition a person can undergo and it is going to take lots of us to change the world.

And that, ultimately, is what asking the next question is about. It is about changing ourselves, our communities, and our world to make a better life for everyone. But before we can make changes, whether they are to ourselves as individuals or our communities, we need to be able to envision those changes and then make them so. To do this we must first and foremost change ourselves.

I therefore agree wholeheartedly with the notion of self-work and trying to make ourselves better than we are and to increase our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the world. In that sense, I am a firm believer in what is called positive psychology. Most psychology you hear about is concerned with “fixing” something, be it a phobia, a neurosis, or some other metal ailment. But there is so much more possible in evolving and becoming a better, more understanding, more complete human being than just correcting problems. Positive psychology is about finding ways for us to grow, to become more than we are, and to simply be better people. And one need not be lying on a couch for positive psychology to be a force in one’s life: it can and does happen in the pews of this and other, kindred, churches and many other places as well.

I will conclude by noting that virtually all choices we make about how to live our lives, and what provides meaning and purpose, are uncertain in the sense that we cannot be sure that this path or that path will lead to the best result or have any meaning except to ourselves. There are no certain paths to specific outcomes like happiness, success, meaning and purpose. There is only our own path and the courage to go down it.

My path has been the path of asking the next question, and the question after that, and never stop asking questions. I am grateful to Theodore Sturgeon for introducing me to his Q with an arrow going through it on that snowy winter day so long ago. I chose that path, and it has made all the difference.

Presented June 24, 2007

First Unitarian Universalist Church

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print

Copyright © 2007 by Jim Checkley

Covenant – The UU Glue – Mark Skrabacz

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Mark Skrabacz, Sermons

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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.

Acknowledgments to Heretics’ Faith by Frederic John Muir, The Unitarians and the Universalists by David Robinson, and One Hundred Questions by Steve Edington.

A Liberal Reclamation of Natural Law – Eric Hepburn

by Posted in Audio available, Eric Hepburn, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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© Eric Hepburn

June 3, 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.

Invocation

I’d like to open this morning with a passage from the Martin Luther King Jr. sermon Rediscovering Lost Values:

“The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations.” In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. I’m not so sure we all believe that.

We never doubt that there are physical laws of the universe that we must obey. We never doubt that. And so we just don’t jump out of airplanes or jump off of high buildings for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we unconsciously know that there is a final law of gravitation, and if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences – we know that. Even if we don’t know it in its Newtonian formulation, we know it intuitively, and so we just don’t jump off the highest building in (Austin) for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we know that there is a law of gravitation which is final in the universe. If we disobey it we’ll suffer the consequences.

But I’m not so sure if we know that there are moral laws just as abiding as the physical law. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure if we really believe that there is a law of love in this universe, and that if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences.”

Prayer:

Please join me in an attitude of prayer, as we share this reading from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking

so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,

we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,

our presence automatically liberates others.

Sermon : A liberal reclamation of natural law

When Dr. King argued in our opening reading that there are moral laws that are just as abiding as the physical laws, what laws is he referring to? In order to be clear in our consideration of an answer to this question, we must start by being clear about the nature of morality. Morality is the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil. So, what Dr. King is arguing is that just as there is a law of gravity that describes the inevitable relationship of attraction between two masses, there are laws of morality that describe the inevitable relationships between right and wrong, between good and evil.

Classical natural law was the first systematic attempt to explore these relationships. It was based on the idea that there is a human nature and a human essence which defines how human beings must live in order to have a good life. Aristotle’s formulation of the first principle of natural law was that one should do good and avoid evil. However, if we survey the history of natural law, we can’t help but notice some of the dogmatic and inhumane positions that have been taken in its name. We can look back to Aristotle and read of natural law used in defense of slavery. We can survey contemporary natural law thinkers and read of opposition to abortion, opposition to gay rights, and support for economic disparity. When we view this checkered history, we might reasonably assume that the idea of natural law is simply one more archaic holdover from a bygone past when humankind had little understanding of the world and relied on inflexible and absolutist proscriptions to govern social life. We might reject the very idea of natural law and embrace the relativistic ethics of postmodern academia. But I suggest to you, that tossing out the idea of natural law along with its substantial historical baggage is a case of tossing out the baby with the bathwater, because, perhaps more than ever, a reclaimed version of natural law could provide the very anchor that liberalism seems to be so badly in need of.

So, let’s start with a fresh look at the core concepts of natural law in light of our current religious and scientific knowledge. The basis for our revised concept of natural law is simply the idea that there are rules or laws which govern the operation of the universe. This proposition is generally accepted when we are dealing with the analytical categories of the hard sciences; with laws of gravity, laws of inertia, laws of ecology, laws of genetics, or laws of biology. But when we attempt to formulate what natural laws govern humanity, this is when things have tended to become more controversial. If there is natural law that applies to all living things or natural law that applies specifically to humanity, perhaps these constitute moral law as Dr. King spoke about. The question is: how can we discern these laws? It is true that we are not exempt from the laws of gravity, or inertia, or relativity, which effect all matter in our universe. It is also true that we are not exempt from the laws of ecology or genetics which govern all forms of life as we know it. But human natural law, moral law which applies exclusively to our species, must itself be rooted in those aspects that are uniquely yet universally human.

Aristotle’s analysis identified reason as the key human virtue that distinguishes us from other animals. Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the other major figures in natural law thinking have all followed suit. So, if it is reason, if it is our advanced capacity for logical and speculative thought, that differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, then it is here that we will find the core of a human natural law.

Our contemporary understanding of human biology and cognitive science, as well as the contextual issues of biological and social evolution, provide us with important insights that were unavailable to the classical thinkers. For instance, it is quite clear to us now that the human ability to reason does not develop much beyond the level of our primate cousins without the acquisition of human language and symbol systems. Language is the cognitive toolkit required for human level reasoning and we are not born with it, we must acquire it through learning. What makes us human is that we learn, and what and how we learn determines our humanity. The evolution of human knowledge and culture has become much more critical to our survival than our biological evolution.

Research in developmental psychology indicates that our worldview and moral development proceed in relatively linear stages, for example from pre-conventional, to conventional, to post-conventional. In addition, there is strong evidence that the average mode of moral development of a population is strongly associated with the types of social structures, institutions, and cultures that the population will have. Along these related arcs of individual development over a lifetime and social evolution over recorded human history, we find opportunities for a new take on natural law and a new story arc for humanity.

Just as most classical natural law has been rooted in the Christian theology of the Fall, in the presumption that humanity is imperfect and flawed, in the assumption that we are incapable of overcoming the taint of original sin without divine intervention; so our reclaimed natural law must be rooted in the ideology that humanity has awakened to an amazing capacity to learn, to understand, to act, and to create. We are here to learn about our universe and about ourselves, and as we learn, as we understand, as we act, and as we create, we are perfected. The ancient Hebrew understanding of the word perfect was not a state, it was not a condition, it was a process. It is this dynamic process of continually learning, understanding, acting, and creating that I believe is the fundamental human natural law.

The first corollary to this law is humility. Humility is the recognition that there is no end to this process of learning, no end to this process of perfection. Our perception of our place within this process may be accurate or it may be wishful thinking. We must be assertive about acting on our beliefs, but open about the ultimate rightness of those beliefs. Like good scientists we must remember that our understandings are only theories and that they may need editing or be disproved as we continue to learn and as our understanding grows. Developmental stagnation often occurs when we forget humility, when we cherish our current theories more than we cherish learning, when we believe we have already learned something, or don’t need to learn any more. These failures of humility happen when we forget that it is our essence to keep learning, when we forget that what we already know is just tentative, just a bridge to the next realization.

The second corollary to the fundamental human law is compassion. If humility is the recognition that we never stop learning, compassion is the recognition that the same is true for our brothers and sisters. Compassion, in this context, is remembering that it is more important to be peaceful than to be right. A focus on being right produces an emphasis on the other person being wrong, it short-circuits the possibility of constructive dialogue, where people can share their understandings and potentially reconcile their disagreements. It is failures of compassion that produce most developmental stagnation at the social scale. When groups and individuals in society become convinced that they are right, that others are wrong, that they have learned all there is, or all that they need to know, then they stop producing open and honest dialogue with one another. While this critique applies to much of the religious right in this country, it also applies to the dogmatic left. Dogmatism is, by definition, both a failure in humility and a failure in compassion.

As we engage successfully in this process of perfection, of learning and acting, then we progress toward enlightenment. These elements of learning, understanding, acting, and creating make up an iterative process of human engagement. In order to work effectively we must learn through observation, understand through abstraction, and apply what we have learned through action, thereby creating our best version of reality. Our moral development stagnates when this process becomes broken, when we fail to learn, when we fail to understand what we have learned, when we fail to act on our understandings, when we have these failures, we fail to create the best world of which we are capable. Because we are not powerless, our greatest fear has come true, we are powerful beyond measure.

Those who have realized their power, who have let their light shine out to the world, they are the prophets in our human story. They are the beacons of moral development who blaze ahead into uncharted territories, showing us the way. They taught us myths when we knew only of the hunt and the cave. They taught us to love all our human brothers and sisters when we knew only of the love of kinship or the love of the tribe. They taught us science when we had turned our myths into facts. They taught us compassion when our hearts were filled with greed. They taught us humility when we knew that we were right. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed- Martin Luther King Jr., Tenzin Gyatso the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Mohandas K. Gandhi- and how many others whose names are lost in the past, and how many more who will bless us in the future? They are out there among us as we speak, waiting to teach us the next lessons. They are the outliers on the bell-curve of moral development, those who have managed to evolve further than their peers, the bodhisattvas of humanity, hoping for the chance to lend us a helping hand as we labor to live up to our status as the radiant children of god.

If we reject the story of the Fall and its implication of our inherent imperfection, if we embrace the idea of awakening, if we embrace the idea of our perfectibility, then we must embrace the open ended nature of our own story. Once again we have the benefit of knowledge and insights of which the classical thinkers were unaware, we know, even though it is very difficult to understand, that our universe is old beyond imagining, that it is vast beyond our comprehension, that countless species of life have come into being and passed into extinction on this very planet we call home, that the timescales of our human civilizations are but blinks of the eye in the history of life on this planet. We have learned these things together, we struggle to understand them, and one day we must act on this understanding to continue the creation of our story. Right now our story is but a tiny chapter in the tale of this universe. How large a part we will ultimately play is up to us, for we are powerful beyond measure.

We learn, we apply what we learn to our universe, to our societies, and to ourselves, we recreate the universe as we go. This is the nature of our gift, the nature of our humanity. When we apply this gift to the betterment of ourselves, to the betterment of our brothers and sisters, to the betterment of our environments and ecologies, to the betterment of our governments and institutions, then we do good. We promote the fullest version of humanity that is possible in that moment. Then, we are powerful beyond measure. Then, we are the radiant children of god.

One Inch at a Time – Emily Tietz

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© Emily Tietz

May 27, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Prayer

There are voices that would call us to remember to see what is valuable in each other and ourselves. To act in ways which add life to life. This takes more courage and more consciousness than one might expect.

And there are voices that would call us to take the easier and less conscious path. The one on which we don’t take care to notice or acknowledge value in whomever or whatever is before us.

The voices are within us and without.

Let us listen to the higher ones.

Because when we don’t it is all too easy to imprint another with fear. It is all too easy to be the heavy foot that silences another’s hope. And it is very easy to live out of whatever fear we ourselves have been imprinted with.

But life doesn’t have to be like that.

Let us create a world in which even the smallest of us can trust that our words will be heard and welcomed. Let us create a world in which no one around us – not even us – has to be afraid even in silence.

Let us listen to the voices of our higher selves.

Amen.

Sermon: One Inch at a Time

A few months ago Davidson told a Hindu story about the god, Krishna as a boy?

One day his teacher saw him chewing in class and asked what he was chewing. Kids weren’t allowed to chew gum in class. “Nothing,” he replied, and kept chewing.

You can imagine this made the teacher a bit irritated. It was very clear that he was chewing. She marched to his desk, commanded him to stand up, then said, “Now open your mouth and let me look inside!” The boy opened his mouth and when she looked in she saw a thousand million galaxies. That got me to thinking, what would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies inside of each other.

When I was in college I took a class that dealt with domestic violence. One afternoon, the professor cited a study that really stuck with me. The purpose of the study was to determine what factors made a difference in how the life of a person who was abused as a child played out.

The researchers interviewed two groups of adults. One group was adults who had been abused as children and who continued destructive patterns in their adult lives – self-destructive or otherwise. The other group was adults who had been abused as children and were able to step outside of destructive patterns.

After interviewing all of the participants, the researchers found that it wasn’t the severity of the abuse, or the kind, or the duration that noticeably made a difference in the trajectory of the individuals’ lives. What made a difference was this: the people who had been able to move beyond destructive patterns could all point to at least one person whom they believed – really believed – in them. The individuals in the other group could not.

It could have been a teacher, best friend, a neighbor, or even just a one-time and brief encounter. It didn’t matter who the person was or how long they knew each other. It simply mattered that someone had shown them that they were whole and valuable.

That’s powerful stuff.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?How we choose to live in relationship either adds life to life, or diminishes it. Throughout human history we’ve explored questions of how to see each other and how to see ourselves; how to treat each other and how to treat ourselves. We call the endeavor sacred. We attribute holiness to whatever is at the core of the quest. On our innermost level we recognize that recognizing the holy brings life to a higher level. So we incorporate into our religions codes for higher living. To be admittedly simplistic, we say that if we get it right, we spend eternity in heaven; if we get it right, we achieve nirvana; the more we get it right, the higher a being we come back as in the next life.

It’s powerful stuff.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?

Robert Fulghum offers some thoughts in his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

He writes “In the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can’t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.”

Ah, those poor naive innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad they don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve even been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines – especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.

Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.

There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at time.” I think it’s also true that we chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time.

What would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?

One night I was flipping through television station and landed on PBS for a while. The motivational speaker whom they were featuring, and whose name I didn’t catch, told a story about a certain tribe somewhere in Africa. When a person commits a crime, large or small, they bring the person to the center of the village. Then all the rest of the villagers surround the person. One by one, they begin to tell the person things they love or admire about them. The session is not over until everyone says at least one thing. This can go on for a long time. When they are finished, the person is welcomed back to the community. The speaker finished by noting that the need for such interventions is rare.

Notice that this is not a practice of “turning the other cheek” or letting destructive behavior go. The tribe takes immediate action. They directly acknowledge what the person has done and that it must not continue. They then address it by calling the individual back to his or her higher self.

And the need for such interventions is rare.

We may chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time. I think we also help restore it one inch at a time.

What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other? I’d like to find that out.

Patient Warrior, Passionate Artist Tai Chi and a Spiritual Journey

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Nell Newton

May 20, 2007

The text of this sermon is unavailable but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Portions of this service have been abridged. During the service Tai Chi exercises were performed by Nell Newton, Jerry Moore and Phil Joffrain.

Love Makes You Do The Wacky

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Jim Checkley, Sermons

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© Jim Checkley

April 15, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

I wish I could take credit for the title of the sermon. But I can’t. The title comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I liked so much I did a service on it a few years ago. What’s going on is that Buffy is in love with somebody and is complaining that he is acting all jealous, but won’t admit it. Buffy is talking to her friend Willow and when Buffy complains to Willow that her boyfriend is being totally irrational Willow says, “Love makes you to the wacky.” To which Buffy responds: “That’s the truth.”

I agree with Buffy. Love does make you do the wacky. I’ll bet everybody in this sanctuary has at least one story of wacky behavior caused by being in love. Which begs the question, why? Why does love make us do the wacky? Why do we risk our jobs, our friends, our futures, our very lives in the name of love? What is it about romantic love that not only does it have its own holiday, but it provides both the greatest joys and the worst agonies imaginable, because truly, what can be better or worse than the total agony of being in love?

I was looking for a definition of love and found several I want to share with you. The first is from Ambrose Bierce and states that love is a type of insanity curable by marriage. You laugh now, but file this one away for later.

How about this one. It’s from a conference of sociologists back in 1977. Listen carefully:

Love is the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feeling by the object of the amorance.

I dare you to try to turn that into a poem. In fact, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with the person who came up with that one dating my daughter. There are, of course, long dictionary definitions, but I think part of the problem we have in defining love is that in our culture, love is required to be all things to all people all of the time.

We love our spouse or our partner, certainly. But we also love our cars, our kids, our favorite colors, our food, our jokes, our art, and on and on. The word “love” has as many meanings and covers as much ground as the word “God.” Eskimos have 20 words for snow and we have one word for love. At least the Greeks had four words for love: Eros, or romantic love; agape or spiritual love; philia or Platonic love; and storge or natural affection, like that of a parent to a child. But we English speaking people, with a language that has by far the biggest, most encompassing vocabulary, we only have one word for love. Why is that? I think part of it is that our culture is very schizophrenic about love and there are enormous sensitivities around it, especially romantic love,

For example, you may have heard of the late Leo Buscaglia who once taught a course on love at UCLA called Love 1-A and wrote many books on the subject. Dr. Buscaglia taught that love is something we need to learn about and that understanding and dealing with love isn’t something that just comes to us by osmosis. As a matter of culture and social behavior, I think we can all agree with that. As you might imagine, however, Professor Buscaglia’s course created some controversy as people complained that university is no place to teach about love – seriously – university should be reserved for important stuff like history, language, science, and engineering. Besides, love is, well, a delicate subject, one that should be kept in a brown paper wrapper and only spoken about in hushed whispers behind closed doors or on the streets or under the covers.

I don’t know about you, but I think all of that is just ridiculous. I agree with, of all people, Benjamin Disraeli, who said “We are all born to love. It is the principle of existence and its only end.” Disraeli was right on at least two counts: first, as I’ll explain in a minute, we are born to love. The mechanisms of romantic love are hard wired and we are bound to that drive, those desires, like nothing else in life except eating and drinking. And second, I believe that romantic love, sex, and reproduction are the very purpose of our natural existence, the focus of life, and the only inherently meaningful thing about life itself beyond simply being.

I have a book called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is a very clever book written as if Dr. Tatiana were answering letters about sex, reproduction, and other related issues from a wide variety of members of the animal kingdom. Talk about wacky. I’m telling you, insect reproduction in particular is bizarre and often deadly. Males in several species literally die for the opportunity to mate and pass on their genes. If life on this planet is the design of some intelligent creator, then he or she was on serious drugs when they came up with the myriad methods of sexual reproduction extant in the animal kingdom. If you want to get educated and blown away at the same time, I highly recommend reading Dr. Tatiana.

Now, insects don’t have the capacity for rational thought. At least we don’t think they do. Their behavior is thus controlled by their genetic code and is hard wired into their very being. How else can you explain the sometimes suicidal and often dangerous behavior indulged in by a whole host of critters in the animal kingdom? For a long time people believed that humans were immune to that sort of hard wiring, that our big brains removed us from the ranks of creatures who were programmed for certain responses and behaviors in the world of romantic love sex, and reproduction.

It is becoming crystal clear that we were very wrong about that. Very wrong indeed. Study after study has shown that desire and what we call romantic love is the result of chemical processes in the brain that are not only hard wired, but result in brain activity that is virtually indistinguishable from being on hard drugs, and in particular, drugs like cocaine. Now think about that for a second. Being head over heels in love results in or from, take your pick, brain activity that is indistinguishable from being on hard drugs. Robert Palmer was right: we are addicted to love. Is it any wonder that people routinely behave insanely when they are in that stomach wrenching, sleep deprived, dramatic phase of love? The poets who wrote about love didn’t know the half of it.

It turns out that the brain is, in fact, the most important organ related to love, sex, and reproduction. At every turn, genetic programs, working through the brain, guide humans in their dances of love. And, I know it’s not exactly politically correct to say this, but the scientific truth is that men’s and women’s brains are significantly different in the programs they run, the systems they create, and the desires they generate when it comes to romantic love. This is true about almost every aspect of romantic love and reproduction, including sexual orientation, desire, and how the sexes view their role in the courtship dance. And the most recent studies show that socio-cultural influences are less important on these very fundamentally hard wired programs than anybody suspected. Thus, while it is true to there is a large variation in what signals and stimuli people respond to in actualizing romantic love impulses, those impulses and the genetic programming underlying them are resistant to socio-cultural influences.

Here are a few specific (and I think amusing) results to ponder:

In a study of the effect of pictures of beautiful women on the brains of men, researchers found that the pictures activated the same reward circuits in the brains of heterosexual men as did food and cocaine. Here is proof – as if we needed it – that men truly are visually stimulated. As co-author of the study, Dan Ariely of MIT, said, “This is hard-core circuitry. Beauty is working similar to a drug.”

Another study showed men a slide show of random women, each being projected for several seconds; but the men could extend the viewing time for each picture by pressing keys on a keypad. You can guess the result. The men worked frantically to keep the beautiful women on the screen, on average pressing the keyboard more than 4,700 times over a 40 minute span, prompting one researcher to observe that “these guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.” As far as women are concerned, studies have demonstrated, for instance, that a woman’s choice of which men she says she finds “sexy” changes depending on how close she is to ovulation.

When close to ovulation, women tend to prefer the almost stereotypical tall, dark, rough-hewn guys, while selecting more round faced “nice guys” at other times. Women are also thousands of times more sensitive to musk-like odors than are men, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

When it comes to studying romantic love, there is one person who stands out beyond all the rest. She is Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Dr. Fisher is a leader among the army of scientists who are studying the biological bases for romantic love.

Dr. Fisher has written two popular books on the subject, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love and The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. And in 2002, she published a landmark study on what is happening in the brains of people who claim they are head-over-heels in love. I cannot possibly do justice to her work here, but let me talk about Dr. Fisher’s theories on how human beings fall in love.

Dr. Fisher has proposed that human beings fall in love in three stages.

Stage one consists of simple and generic lust – that undifferentiated general sense of desire. Studies show that lust is mediated in the brain by the hormones testosterone and estrogen, with testosterone having been shown to play a large role in women. These hormones appear to function to get people out looking, so to speak.

The second stage is attraction to a specific person. This is that truly love-struck phase where each instant apart is a lifetime, where you call each other 20 times a day, and where you can’t eat, can’t sleep, and can think of nothing else. In the attraction phase, a group of neuro-transmitters called “monoamines” play an important role. These include dopamine; adrenalin’the chemical of fight or flight; and serotonin, which plays a role both in romantic love and depression – big surprise there, right?

Dopamine is the “reward” chemical and its production is what we are after when we desperately need to be with our beloved. It’s also the chemical that is made in bucket-loads when are brains are exposed to cocaine. Serotonin is the tricky one in that it can actually induce temporary insanity. Thus, many of the millions of people who do crazy things for love, who swim rivers naked, jump out of airplanes with friends to hold up gigantic signs of proposal while they parachute into a lover’s back yard, and all the other stuff you’ve ever heard about, many of those people may actually qualify as temporarily insane.

The third phase in Dr. Fisher’s scheme is called attachment and it involves becoming bonded with and attached to a specific person. It is marked by the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner and is driven by the brain chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Crazily enough, oxytocin and vasopressin seem to interfere with the production of dopamine and adrenalin, which is why the madness of the head-over-heels attraction phase fades as the attachment phase progresses – a finding that actually provides a basis for the otherwise cynical definition of love I quoted earlier as a type of insanity curable by marriage.

In fact, studies have shown that vasopressin is responsible for monogamy in a critter called the prairie vol. Once vasopressin is triggered in the brain of the prairie vol, that vol is faithful to its mate for life. Block the vasopressin and that very same vol becomes promiscuous. These are very powerful chemicals. Things are obviously much more complicated in humans – history teaches us that vasopressin does not work nearly as well in people as it does in prairie vols – but, Dr. Fisher nonetheless cautions that you should never mess around with somebody you do not want to fall in love with, because if you generate enough oxytocin and vasopressin, you very well might fall in love despite yourself.

As a result of her’s and others’ studies, Dr. Fisher has drawn the remarkable conclusion that romantic love is not actually an emotion like joy or sadness. Instead, she claims it is a motivation system, a drive, a need that compels people to go out and find a partner and is more akin to the need to eat than being happy or sad. Romantic love, the attraction phase, says Dr. Fisher, is an even stronger desire than simple lust. “People don’t kill themselves just because they don’t get sex,” she says. But they will and do kill themselves over failed romantic love adventures.

There is so much more going on in evolutionary biology, but I don’t have the time to go into even a fraction of it. What I will say is the discoveries of how deeply hard wired we are for lust, attraction, romantic love, and attachment are not a surprise to me. Put simply, reproduction is much too important to leave to the whims of consciousness and culture.

And it makes sense that humans would be subject to the same forces that other higher animals are since we share common ancestors and evolved together on this planet. Said another way, before there was consciousness, there was reproduction and all the drives and hard wiring that nature provided to insure the continuation of life. For the last handful of millennia perhaps, humans have been able to cogitate about love and sex and reproduction. But a million years ago, those things just had to happen for the species to continue and nature had to insure that they would by hard wiring in the proper mechanisms. And nature was obviously successful since we are all here today. Science has and continues to confirm that we have inherited those mechanisms and we call them romantic love.

My point in telling you all this is not to pretend to be able to fully explain

why or how we fall in love, or even the biological basis for romantic love. It’s much more complicated than this, of course. Rather, my point is to simply suggest that there is in fact a powerful biological basis for romantic love, that it matters, and we should openly and fearlessly take account of it in our lives.

But these revelations do not sit well with many people, who bristle at the

thought that humans might be subject to instincts, hard wired instructions, and that something as sacred in our culture as romantic love and all the trappings of courtship, marriage, and the like that go with it, might be the product of brain chemicals that mimic the actions of drugs. As unsettling as the scientific discoveries may be, I think the truth is that we humans are a natural part of the natural world and are certainly a product of evolutionary biology. But we are also conscious beings with the ability to make choices that either compliment or reject the signals, motivations, and desires that our DNA has made part of our experience of life.

This is why it is useful to think of ourselves as both a “what” and a “who”.

The what is the primate creature that Mother Nature created out of the raw materials of life and that is subject to the same laws, the same forces, and the same desires as the other higher level creatures on the planet.

The who is a relatively new entity, a conscious being who seemingly at least,

can make choices about how to proceed with existence and at present, seems to be a little bit confused about what life, the universe, and everything is supposed to mean. These two aspects of humanity coexist in one body. Both matter.

This is also the reason I think people are often confused when they ask the

question, “What is the meaning of life?” Life is a process that goes on all around us, has been going on for millions upon millions of years. Humans are included in the process of life, but so is a snail darter or an elephant or a wasp. So when we think of life in the broadest sense, it is clear that the purpose and meaning of life is survival, reproduction and all that goes with it.

But when they ask the question,”What is the meaning of life?”, many people use

the word “life” to substitute for consciousness and sentience. And that, as they say, is a very different question and not one I have any desire to tackle today. Well, actually, I will say this. Whatever purpose or meaning there is to human existence, as opposed to life generally, has to been created, invented as it were, which is the role of culture, religion, and other philosophical enterprises that seek to imbue our conscious existence with meaning. But the meaning of life itself, the purpose of life, that is clear: it is to survive, today, tomorrow, and always.

Up until thirty to fifty years ago, most educated people saw a human baby as a

tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which anything could be written without the pesky influences of instincts and other hard wired instructions, or drives. Virtually nobody who studies these things today thinks of a baby as a tabula rasa. That concept has been relegated to the same graveyard as phlogiston and the ether.

Having said that, I must emphasize that just how much has been pre-programmed

or hard wired and how powerfully is subject to debate, some of it fierce. Still, it is clear that we are born with hard wired drives, call them instincts, call them predispositions, call them an inborn style, but they are there. And probably the most powerful, the one that dominates so much of our lives, is the need for romantic love. Like every other creature on the planet, human beings modify their behaviors to accommodate those incredibly powerful desires – or as Willow says, “we all do the wacky.”

Can these drives and desires be overcome by the who that we are – our conscious

selves? Of course they can. People routinely choose to do behaviors that conflict with the urges and desires brought about by romantic love and its chemical addictions to a person. It happens all the time. It’s one of the things that distinguish us from insects and the rest of the animal world. A praying mantis will go ahead and get its head bitten off in exchange for the opportunity to mate. Even the most testosterone and dopamine driven man, however, is most likely to decline that offer.

But does the fact that we can control our behaviors mean we should not acknowledge the drives and desires that are making our lives both wonderful and miserable? Shall we pretend that we have conscious control of who -and what gender – we find attractive and that any feelings we experience that are not sanctioned by the dominant culture are to be labeled as sinful and wrong?

My answer is an emphatic no. I think it is time we looked at these feelings,

these desires, without embarrassment, without shame, without feeling defensive that we are, after all, the product of evolution and are children of the Earth as much as children of our conscious souls.

While the idea that romantic love is a hard wired mechanism might spoil some of our notions of romance, it is also liberating. I suggest that if people would let go of the notion of the tabula rasa, would let go of the notion that falling down the rabbit hole of romantic love is a conscious choice, and realize that all those powerful feelings and urges are perfectly natural and are deeply imbedded into the essence of our natural being, perhaps we could all relax a little and not be so harsh with each other and ourselves.

Moreover, once that admission is made and the feelings themselves brought out into the open without embarrassment, they are much easier to deal with. Suppressed feelings and desires have a way of growing in the dark, just like mushrooms, but tend to lose their almost preternatural hold on us once we put them in the light of day.

Preachers routinely, and for thousands of years, have taken nature to be sinful. Western culture definitely assigns passion to the dark side, the night side, the female side of life, the side that is opposed by the light of reason, the cold hard facts of rationality that is ruled by the day and the male sky god. But when you pull all of nature over into the side of sin, you degrade the deepest and most fundamental parts of what we are as living creatures and deny the

importance of millions of years of evolutionary biology.

Our behavior matters, of course, and I am not advocating or justifying rampant

infidelity and wackiness just because we are hard wired for romantic love and all the feelings and desires that go with it. But I do think our ancestors and our Western religions got it totally wrong. I think that the world being split into male and female with romantic love and sexual reproduction, however those drives and desires may manifest in any individual, creates most of the pure joy

and happiness we experience in life.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that when we accuse a young man or woman of being “superficial” because they are attracted to somebody because that person is beautiful or sexy, we’ve got it backwards. There’s nothing superficial about it; rather such attraction is one of the most deeply rooted aspects of our natural existence. It is not only not sinful, it is part of the very essence of the inherent meaning of life.

Let me conclude by reaffirming that Willow was absolutely right when she told Buffy “Love makes you do the wacky.” We understand why that is so just a little better now than our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers did, but the feelings, the desires, the power of love remain undiluted and are eternally ours. No matter the cultural spin we put on them, love, sex and reproduction are simply fundamental to us and our beings. We truly are born to love. It is our birthright, our purpose, our meaning, and our glory.

 Presented April 15, 2007

Revised for print

Copyright – 2007 by Jim Checkley

Heeding the Advice of a Unitarian Friend

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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© Bren Dubay

December 3, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Jack R. Harris-Bonham

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, we joyfully gather here this morning in the presence of new friends and old acquaintances.

We’re thankful for the many and varied blessings that have been bestowed upon us. We hope that in the coming weeks we can be reminded of those who have less, who are impoverished both physically and spiritually.

May our thoughts turn into actions as the season of giving rapidly approaches. This morning we also hope and pray that the war, which rages in Iraq, will come to a peaceful and equitable end. So many have suffered and some many more will suffer until this war is over. We pray for that end.

Help us to listen carefully to the message of community that is being offered to us this morning. Remind all of us that community starts with risk and continues through risk and, if it is to be successful, the risking simply never ends. If we can’t risk, then we can’t have community. Also engender in us today the feeling of tolerance for those who do not hold the same opinions. Let us make room in our hearts for everyone – especially those with whom we have had problems.

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

Amen.

SERMON

Thank you for your warm welcome. It helps these trembling hands and shaky knees. Every time I approach a podium I think of an exchange with our daughter, Jillian. I’d been invited to deliver a commencement address and she had recently graduated from St. Edward’s here in Austin. So I thought, with her graduation fresh in her mind, I’d ask her for advice about speech making. What she told me was “Be funny, be clever, be brief.” Then she looked at me as only a twenty-two year old can look at her mother and said, “You don’t stand a chance.” It’s fear and trembling all the way to every podium now.

But you’ve made feel welcome and the hands and knees are a little more calm. Thank you. I especially want to thank Jack Harris-Bonham. Jack, it’s been a pleasure exchanging phone calls and e-mails with you. And I, of course, want to thank you, Mary. Because of you and people like you, Koinonia was able to survive some dangerous times. We’re grateful for your support over all these years.

I hope all of you will return this evening to see the documentary about Koinonia, Briars In the Cotton Patch . You’ll see what I mean about dangerous times – about those times when Koinonia was being shot at, dynamited. About the boycott when no one in the county would sell anything to or buy anything from this small group of people living together on a farm in southwest Georgia. You’ll learn of how Koinonia started a mail order business to survive. That same mail order business continues today and remains our main source of income. Among other things, we grow pecans – when that mail order business began in the 1950s, co-founder Clarence Jordan came up with the slogan: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.” And we’re still shipping the nuts out of Georgia today. I’ve brought catalogues.

When you see the film, you’ll get a glimpse of how some impressive organizations were born at Koinonia? the most famous being Habitat for Humanity. And of how we continue today to serve others, of how we welcome visitors from all over the world. I hope you will want to come visit.

But this morning rather than focus on the story you will see in the film this evening, I wanted to share with you three stories, some thoughts about language, about labels, titles, what’s in a name.

Koinonia – it’s a Greek word found in the Christian Scriptures. It means “community,” “fellowship.” Truth is I had never heard the word and certainly had never heard of the place before visiting Americus, Georgia in May, 2003. Koinonia. I had never heard of it. Couldn’t spell it. Wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce it for months after I first saw the name. It was a chance visit. I was in a hurry to get back to Texas. I only stopped by Koinonia because I was being polite – at least outwardly. Someone had asked me to stop. Inwardly, “I don’t have time to stop at some farm. I’ve got to get back to Houston.” Eight months after that first brief visit, I was asked to be the director, twelve months after that first visit, I moved to Georgia. I wasn’t looking to leave Houston, to leave my home, my life, my work in Texas. But I did. And I had to face some things. One of the people that helped me to do that the most was my Unitarian friend, Carla.

Koinonia is an intentional Christian community. It started in 1942; about 25 of us live there now. We’ve pooled our talents and resources, we live simply, each according to need and together we take care of the farm and do whatever we can to help our neighbors and each other; we work for causes of social justice. Everybody is welcome at the farm – Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, Christian of any stripe though our fundamentalist friends seldom have much patience with us, seekers, non-seekers, Unitarians – all our welcome. I was and am comfortable with all that. But what I had to face when moving to Georgia was this word “Christian.” I never used it. Never called myself by that name. It would stick in my throat. I didn’t have that same problem with the label “Catholic.” I am a Catholic. I cut my teeth on the likes of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, on the likes of the Jesuit social justice activists Dan and Phil Berrigan, of Mother Teresa, Saint Frances of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Hildegarde of Bingen. I attended a university where serving the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, the orphan, the widow, praying, meditating, learning to think, appreciating other traditions and attending Mass were all on equal footing. I saw priests, nuns, brothers, lay people whose names will never be known give of themselves unselfishly, untiringly to others. When I said the word “Catholic,” these are the people that came to mind not the crazies who also bear that name. But “Christian” crazies, definitely the crazies. All that was lousy, awful, disgusting about them and that history – that was the image that made the word stick in my throat.

Then I moved to Koinonia. Founder Clarence Jordan, who died in 1969, was a New Testament Greek Scholar and a Baptist minister. A Baptist? Now that name conjured up some images for me. But from the beginning, the people at Koinonia have been a diverse group of people. That’s what I saw when I got there. What I also saw was a reluctance to use the word “Christian.” This intentional Christian community choking on its own name? Why? When did this happen? What made it so? And here I was coming to join Koinonia and I had the same problem. Then that Unitarian friend I mentioned helped us. I read from an e-mail she sent.

[Bren,] you said something at Mama’s [Caf] over breakfast that caught my attention, I didn’t want to let it go, or forget. And it seems more important now. Something about not letting people forget, or blow off, Koinonia’s Christian underpinnings, its foundation in the Gospel. And I wanna say, as a second generation Unitarian with a deep suspicion of anything that comes with a cross on it, YOU GO, GIRL!

It matters. Language matters, and calling yourself Christian, if you are, matters. Language – names, labels, they carry identity, and we’ve seen a genuinely creepy, sad and dangerous thing happen over the last 50 years or so – our names get stolen and corrupted, and we’re left without our identities, confused and robbed of the power our names held.

Remember “feminist?” It used to be a very simple word that meant a person who believes that the world should be run as if women matter. Then the Opposition stole it and twisted it. They took women’s anger with domestic violence, and called them “man haters.” They took women’s efforts to be heard and called it “strident.” It went on and on, even as essential feminist ideas became the law of the land. And the Opposition was really, really effective. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a woman say, “I’m not a feminist, but?” then proceed to proclaim a perfectly ordinary feminist philosophy. But the Name, the Word, “feminist? is ickyickyicky and they won’t claim it. If you can’t describe yourself, can’t identify yourself – well – people like that have no power. Notice any feminist movers and shakers, and politicians or writers in the last ten years?

And “liberal.” Every great political effort that moved us a little closer to the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had liberals behind it. But the Opposition got their teeth into the word. Have you heard it said without a derisive sneer any time since, oh, – 1975? And by the sheer force of repetition it worked. Now even the most dyed in the wool liberals struggle with words like “leftist” or”moderate” or “progressive” or any number of things that don’t quite fit. Because “liberal” sounds ickyickyicky, weak, wishy washy. But there were no liberals [that fit that description] marching in Selma, going to jail during Viet Nam, getting women the vote, or running the Underground Railroad. Not only do liberals lose the power and cohesion that comes from a name, they lose the great history that goes with it.

The same thing is happening with “Christian.” With the rise of the Radical Right, a small vocal camera-hungry group of extremists took over the label “Christian.” They identified their narrow, angry views as Christian views, claimed to be the voice of Christian America, and dagnab it if a lot of people didn’t believe them. Even my most ditzy apolitical friends associate “Christian? with hostile, ignorant, hateful people. Just like the women who mumble “I’m not a feminist, but?” liberal Christians have a fumbling discomfort with the word. And why wouldn’t they? The Christians of Leviticus are in charge of the name, and the Christians of the Beatitudes are homeless.

So, yeah, the Koinonia folks need to reclaim the name from the Nasties who grabbed it, and clean it up a bit, and wear it proudly on their sleeves. Otherwise the Nasties get to define you for the world, and you lose the great power, and the great history of the name.

Carla wrote this first part prior to the presidential election of 2004. She continued on after the election – I’ll have to wade a bit into her politics here – but you’ll see the point she wants to make. She finished the e-mail with this:

Now it’s after the election. I don’t know where my brain has been, or why I’m feeling so blind sided by it. This sudden revelation that many ordinary people voted for Bush because he seems better fit to be a “moral leader?” A moral leader? Since when is our national CEO supposed to be our moral leader? There are countries where they do that, but they’re not democracies, and the CEO isn’t called a president. So what inspired this vision of George Bush as Desmond Tutu – what has he identified as a key moral issue? Not poverty. Not hunger. Not illiteracy, social alienation, despair, addiction, violence. No, the great moral issue that he used to bring his voters to the polls – gay marriage. That is his idea of a great moral problem. And what’s scarier is that so many people agree with him. We desperately need to start a loud conversation in this country about what’s really important, and why. And we really need progressive Christians to reclaim their name and their history, and take the lead. They have history, they have credibility, they have the language, they can be heard by people on both sides of the Divide. And they can recognize a moral issue when they see one. Tell your hesitant Christians at Koinonia that we need them to save the country, and be snappy about it – Onward through the fog. [Your Unitarian Friend,] Carla.

Thank you, Jesus, for Unitarians. That’s what I really wanted to title this talk today, but I was afraid none of you would come.

What Koinonia went through in the 90s was perhaps more frightening, and certainly more insidious, than the bombs, bullets and boycott of the 50s. We grew “embarrassed?” about our name and slowly, over time, not at an instant death, but a slow eating away of our soul? Some of us forgot who we were. But not anymore.

Claim your name, live your name, embrace other names.

Claiming the name may be the easy part, but it is living it … By living it you become secure in it and if you truly are, you reach out to all other names, embrace them, learn from them. You don’t fear them. If you don’t fear them, you don’t harm them. I don’t have to tell you that Christians continually get into trouble because their actions don’t match their name. What happens though when they do? Remember recently, the attack on ten little Amish girls? Remember the response of the Amish? They went to the family of the killer and said, “Stay in your home here. Please don’t leave. We forgive this man.” That more than the senseless killing shocked us. It was the Christianity so many profess but which the Amish practiced that left us stunned.

Part of what you’ll see in the film tonight is the story of three Koinonia children. To our knowledge, they are the only white children in our nation’s history who had to go to court to win the right to be allowed to attend a public school. And, oh, my goodness, what they suffered at the hands of their classmates – but what may shock you more is their response to it. Greg Wittkamper was one of those children. He graduated from Americus High School in 1965. Forty-one years after his graduation, he was invited, for the first time, to his class reunion. Living your name matters. Finally, a group of Greg’s classmates reached out to him, apologized for what they had done to him. Greg sent us copies of the letters he received. Perhaps if there is time this evening, we can take a look at them, but for now I want to read you a story written by one of Greg’s classmates. It was sent to him along with a letter of apology asking him to come to the reunion. [ Greg & TJ ]

“What’s going on over there?”

“TJ’s fixing to whip Greg!”

“Naw!”

“Yea! He claims Greg called him a bad name in Mrs. Bailey’s government class, and he’s gonna beat his butt!”

TJ and the crowd caught up with Greg just as he reached [the baseball stadium parking lot] – Since we all knew he parked his car beneath a colored friend’s house a block beyond the park, it was not difficult to determine direction he would take after the dismissal bell rang. He was not dim-witted as to leave his vehicle on campus in the morning and expect to be able to drive it home.

Our class of 1965 was not the only class to study with “white sympathizers,” but we were the first to have colored students pictured in our annual. LBJ had just said they could go to school with us. We cussed them. We sneezed on them. We wanted to hurt them.”

[As teenagers in Georgia in 1965], we knew what was expected of us. We were to be seen in church regularly, we were to be at the football games in the fall whether on the field or in the stands, we were to look forward to voting for Democrats when we reached eighteen, and we were to have no use for people different from us.

Greg looked like us, yet he was drastically different from us. His family had taught him from the same Scriptures where we memorized verses, yet – but – well?

Well, Greg lived toward Dawson on a farm where Negroes and white folks lived and worked together. Back then the notion of whites and blacks living together was wrong! Caucasian teenagers approaching voting age in Sumter County in the middle of the 1960s were reared to believe nothing else. Some say this communal living is still wrong.

There must have been fifty of us standing four deep around a ten foot circle on this particular day. TJ challenged Greg to hit him first.

“Thomas, you know I did not call you a name, and you know I do not want to fight you,” Greg calmly replied.

“Knock hell out of him, TJ,” someone sneered.

Each witness knew Greg did not talk ugly, nor was he belligerent, but we wanted to see a fight. We wanted a victory.

History books will say Selma was worse, but there were not many newsman with cameras in Sumter County like there were near the Edmond Pettis Bridge during the Freedom March. Americus had beatings, shootings, and killings “

“Kick the crap out of him!” came another taunt.

TJ eventually threw the first punch – the only punch – landing it high on Greg’s face.

Greg winced and staggered backwards, maybe five steps. His knees buckled. He reached back with his left hand to cushion his fall. Greg did not fall. Nothing ever touched the ground other than his two feet.

Over the past forty years I have often recalled Greg’s inconceivable counter.

He hastily recovered and repositioned his full stature within arm’s length of the seasoned football player. Without one word, Greg clasped both his hands in the small of his back, jutted his chin forward toward his opponent and waited for the inevitable.

The inevitable did not happen. A coach came and the crowd dispersed. Greg whipped all fifty of us that afternoon without throwing a punch! I did not realize it until years later though.

I saw a sermon that afternoon. Because I did, I understand the Scriptures better today – one verse in particular.

As a boy, I, that day, went home feeling embittered about life and a miss opportunity to get even with someone I violently disagreed with. As a man, I admire a young man whose actions matched his words. I want to thank him for what he taught me.

Claim your name, live your name and if you do, you will embrace other names.

Over the past two years, several of us from Koinonia have traveled with an interfaith delegation to meet with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace in that troubled part of the world. There are peacemakers there though it’s not their stories that are often told by the media or by the politicians.

I share, in closing, a story from my recent trip as an example of embracing other names.

“I am Palestinian,” he said. “I will tell you about four of my friends. When they were young boys, just children, the Israeli Army came into their home and killed an uncle right in front of them. They tried to move his body, but before they could, the bulldozers came and knocked down their house. They grew up with hearts set on revenge. One of them often brags to me why he’s here, in prison. But today I heard him and all his brothers. They were weeping. There was no bragging today. It was a letter that made them weep. They showed it to me. It was a letter someone had sent to their mother. I will read it to you.”

“My name is Sarah Holland. I am the mother of Micah who was killed by your son. I know he did not kill Micah because he was Micah. If he had known him, he would never have done such a thing. Micah was 28 years old. He was a student at Tel Aviv University working on his Masters in the Philosophy of Education. Micah was part of the Peace Movement. He had compassion for all people and he understood the suffering of the Palestinians. He treated all around him with dignity. Micah was part of the movement of the officers who didn’t want to serve in the Occupied Territories. But nevertheless, for many reasons, he went to serve when he was called up from the reserves.

What makes our children do what they do? Do they not understand the pain that they are causing – your son for having to be in jail for many years, and mine whom I will never be able to hold and see again, or see married, have a grandchild from him. I cannot describe to you the pain I feel since his death, nor the pain of his brother or his girlfriend or all who knew and loved him. All my life I have spent working for the causes of coexistence, both in South Africa and here. After Micah was killed, I started to look for a way to prevent other families, both Israeli and Palestinian, from suffering this terrible loss. I was looking for a way to stop the cycle of violence. Nothing for me is more sacred than human life. No revenge or hatred can ever bring my child back. After a year, I closed my office and joined the Parents? Circle, Families? Forum. We are a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who have all lost immediate family members in the conflict. We are looking for ways to create a dialogue with the long-term vision of reconciliation.

Then your son was captured. Afterwards, I spent many a sleepless night thinking about what to do. Could I be true to my integrity and the work that I am doing? This is not easy for anyone. I am just an ordinary person, not a saint. But I have come to the conclusion that I would like to find a way to reconcile. Maybe this is difficult for you to understand or believe. Yet, I know in my heart that this is the only path that I can choose, for if what I say is what I mean, it is the only way. I understand that your son is considered a hero by some. He is considered to be a freedom fighter fighting for justice and a viable Palestinian State. But I also feel that if he understood that taking the life of another may not be the way, if he understood the consequences of his act, then he could see that a non-violent solution is the only way for both nations to live together in peace. Our lives as two nations are so intertwined.

I give this letter to Nadwa, a Christian, and Ali, a Muslim, both members of Parents? Circle, two people I love and whom I trust to deliver it. They will tell you about the work that we are doing and perhaps it will create in you some hope for the future. I do not know what your reaction will be. It is a risk for me. However, I believe you will understand as it comes from the most honest part of me. I hope that you will show the letter to your son and that maybe in the future we can meet. Perhaps you will want to join the Parents’ Circle. Let us put an end to the killing and look for a way through mutual understanding and empathy to live a normal life free of violence.

With respect and hope, Sarah Holland”

When he had finished, the Palestinian prisoner neatly folded the letter then stared out the window as he spoke.

“This was the letter that my friends gave me to read. If everybody signed this letter, perhaps there would be peace. If governments would read? To me this Sarah Holland is wise. What she writes – this is the essence of what we must do, this process of reconciliation and dialogue, this sense of forgiving. Without them, I don’t care how many peace agreements you sign, without dialogue and reconciliation, without forgiving, without serving one another there will not be any quiet in this country for any of us.”

Thank you, Jesus, for Muslims and Jews – and Christians. And thank you for allowing this Christian to speak to you this morning. Thank you.

Listening to the Whispers- Emily Tietz

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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© Emily Tietz

November 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mary Oliver wrote:

To live in this world

 you must be able

 to do three things:

To love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing 

your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go,

To let it go.

We pray for the wisdom, the courage, and the heart for all three.

Amen.

SERMON

As I sat in my living room to write this sermon, I found myself looking out the window at a canopy of trees. The chilly wind was blowing through the leaves and I could see some leaves already changing colors.

I smiled.

I love this time of year.

The air seems to be energized with promise.

Soon the leaves will flutter down and blow around our feet. Tree limbs will be bare and the soft sunlight of winter will stream through them. It’s a time energized with promise because it’s when nature intentionally lets go of things it needs to let go of. It seems to snuggle into the earth to rest. And then when the time is right, it will wake up, stretch its limbs, and flood with new life.

The new life couldn’t come, though, if the trees weren’t willing to let go of the leaves they need to let go of. And it wouldn’t come if nature didn’t then find time to rest from the labor of producing and sustaining leaves.

Plant life recognizes this need.

Humans know of this need too, though we don’t always recognize it.

Maya Angelou writes:

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

And skies sated

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dawns

Roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black

for comfort.

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.

So many great mythologies have stories about the need to let something end before a new beginning can come.

The Christian story is the one told at Easter time. There is a death and then a resurrection. The resurrection could not happen without the death. New life cannot come unless or until something dies.

Trees and shrubs make an annual habit of willingly letting their leaves die and letting them go. Or they simply die to the ground or beg to be pruned back. They seem to trust a promise that new, vibrant life will come in time.

Plant life does its “Spring Cleaning” in the fall.

I did some this summer.

I didn’t set out to do it. I was planning a landscape design for our backyard and wanted some inspiration for the design’s structure. I recalled some things that I’d heard about feng shui and the art of placing things such that they feel good and have meaning. I thought that sounded nice, so I picked up a book in hopes of sparking some creative ideas. I ended up getting all kinds of ideas – only a few related to the landscape design which, months later, is still in process.

Something that stood out to me was the suggestion to take a good look at your stuff and clear out the clutter.

There are a number of things that qualify as clutter:

Stuff that is unused, unloved, unnecessary or just plain messy; like stacks of junk mail or old magazines.

Stuff that just gets you down, consciously or unconsciously; like disheartening books or unfinished projects that you know you’ll never get to so they make you feel a guilty sense of obligation every time you see them.

Then there is the stuff that depletes you; like photos of people who disapprove of you, objects from past relationships, gifts you’ve kept only out of a sense of obligation.

And, of course, there’s the stuff that was relevant at one time in your life, but just isn’t any more so it takes up space and keeps you rooted in the past.

My husband and I thought, “You know, it’s really time to do this.” We decided to take on the whole house – every cabinet, every closet, every drawer, every shelf, every room.

Now, this is really not as straight-forward a task as one might think. There is a reason why every object stuffed in its place is stuffed there. And in order to decide whether to keep something or clear it out, you have to look at why you’ve got it in the first place! The answer is almost always an emotional one. Fortunately, the book warned us about this?

There’s the stuff we keep because we love it, we use it, it makes us feel good, or it has an enriching memory attached to it.

Then there’s the all the other stuff.

The stuff we keep out of fear that we, or someone else, will need it someday; or aunt so-and-so would just die if we didn’t keep it; or it’s associated with a past memory or identity that doesn’t serve us anymore but we just can’t let go.

So, with all this in mind, we rolled up our sleeves and began one room or cabinet at a time.

Over the course of two months we took carloads of stuff to Goodwill or Half Price Books, sold stuff on Craig’s List, or simply threw it away. Finally what was left was stuff that we love and use and know why we’ve kept it. The house seems to be breathing a sigh, “Thank you.”

It seems a simple task, but what happened was absolutely profound and could not be predicted. Each bit-of-stuff asked me to examine what I hold onto inside my heart or mind that enhances life and what I hold onto that really drags life down; what associations, what thought patterns, what values, what identities serve me well, and which ones keep healthy growth at bay. It was a gift; one that I’ll be mulling over for a long time.

Now for the rest of this sermon, I need to own up to the fact that I’m going to try to persuade you of something. I’m going to try to persuade you that it’s good, even essential, for human beings to regularly let go of things in order to let new life in. And I’m going to try to persuade you that we know that already. See what you think. It’s up to you.

The plant world lets go so gracefully with an innate trust that after a time of rest, vital life will come.

Humans, though, we have trouble with that. We tend to hang on to so much stuff both literally and figuratively. It eventually weighs us down or stagnates; and still we hang onto it out of fear or habit or pride or unconsciousness. It makes it darn near impossible for fresh life to find a place to root inside of us and grow.

What would happen if we followed the plant-world’s lead and regularly took inventory to let go of the things that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know we need to let go of? What would life be like if we trusted it to know what we need and return to us fresh new vitality? I’m really not talking about physical objects here – that’s just a means of finding out what’s deeper. I’m talking about our minds and our hearts and our souls.

I think that human nature and the culture we live in make that hard to do.

Our culture values productivity – or at least busyness. We call it the “American Work Ethic,” and there’s a lot of pressure to live up to it. But it takes a seriously intentional slowing down to be able to take an internal inventory.

Notice the messages we get just from television commercials. I remember a commercial from a couple of years ago with a business woman on a subway. She looks tired but satisfied. The time is printed on the screen – 10:30 pm. The voice-over says something like, “Always make sure that your investment banker is familiar with the last train out.” Then the name of the company appears on the screen and the narrator boasts about how much their employees work for you.

Any time that I saw that commercial, I found myself thinking: If their investment bankers are regularly working from dawn to beyond dusk, what’s happening to the rest of their life?

It’s easy to think that we need to keep moving so fast that we don’t have time to pause to figure out what to let go of. So we keep accumulating. We accumulate stress, fears, guilt, resentments, stubborn pride, grief, judgments.

Of course, we accumulate joy and laughter and enrichment and delight as well.

But think about a body of water that has no outlet. Fresh water may have entered the pool, but with no outlet, even that water stagnates and becomes toxic. In the Ancient Near East, people called flowing water, “living water.” I suppose that would make non-flowing water, “lifeless.” I like that image. When we allow our spirits to flow, we are full of life. When we don’t everything deadens a bit.

So we accumulate objects, people, achievements, identities, habits, thought patterns, emotions, and if we don’t consciously sort these things out sometimes and let some go, they take over our lives and we become frustrated without knowing why.

I’m reminded of a story about two Buddhist monks who were on a journey. They came to a river which they had to cross. A woman was there who also needed to cross the river. The elder of the monks picked her up with her consent, carried her across, set her down on the other side and they went their own ways. At the end of the day’s journey, the younger monk was seething. “Why did you carry that woman across the river?!” he demanded. “You know we’re not supposed to touch a woman!” The other monk just smiled, “I left her back at the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

Perhaps the most dangerous things we accumulate are voices. Yes, voices; the ones that tell us:

You’re not good enough to _____(You fill in the blank)

If you were really a good person you would…

– Behave a certain way

– Be involved in certain activities

– Achieve certain accomplishments

– Make a certain amount of money

– Be interested in certain things

The list goes on

You are only acceptable if _____?

Your life is only worthwhile if_____?

You can only be loved if_____?

When we’re not conscious of those voices, we’re driven each day to satiate them. And they’re insatiable. We’re driven to constantly attempt to live someone else’s idea for our life instead of living our own.

I think these voices are the most dangerous things we accumulate because they keep us from the absolutely holy task of living our lives, our lives, authentically.

I think the most important kind of clutter clearing we can do is to quiet enough to become conscious of these voices, figure out who they really belong to (a parent, a teacher, our culture?) and then learn how to release them.

These are not the voices of our higher selves. New life cannot come without letting them go. They kill us one cell at a time.

You’ll notice that the title of this sermon is, “Listening to the whispers.” It’s part of a quote that says, “We need to listen to the whispers of our higher selves so that we don’t have to hear the screams.” We can each imagine what forms the screams can take.

I think that our higher selves know that it is essential to follow the lead of the autumn trees. They whisper,

Let go.

Let go of the voices, the fears.

Let go so you can rest from what incessantly drives you to live a life

that is not your own.

Let go to make way for fresh life to fill you.

I love this time of year.

The air seems to be energized with promise.

Soon the leaves will flutter down and blow around our feet. Tree limbs will be bare and the soft sunlight of winter will stream through them. It’s a time energized with promise because it’s when nature intentionally lets go of things it needs to let go of. It seems to snuggle into the earth to rest. And then when the time is right, it will wake up, stretch its limbs, and flood with new life.

Happy autumn.

The Religious Instinct and Modern Civilization- Gary Bennett

by Posted in Audio available, Gary Bennett, Guest Speakers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Gary Bennett

October 22, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

Imagine this: you are surrounded by loved ones, without inflated egos or scrambling for rank, wealth and power. Private property is limited to the decorative or personal. There is no “marrying or being given into marriage,” at least not as an economic unit. There is plenty to do, but it is meaningful. You labor until the task is done; then everybody rests or celebrates. You feel pleasantly tired, doing work your body was designed to do, without grinding you down. Fruits and nuts are there to be picked from the trees and bushes; game is plentiful. The land flows with milk and honey in Earth’s Great Garden. Best of all is the sharing with close friends of poems, stories, gossip, jokes; discreet flirtations and wild romances; mountaintop experiences of shared religious ecstasy or the serenity that comes from deep understanding.

This may not be your vision of Paradise, but it has commonly been so for peoples throughout the ages. Some, like the Jews and Greeks, had it as the Golden Age at the beginning of the world; others, like Christians, Moslems and Marxists, made it the outcome at the end of History.

The Greeks might insist Eternity is only for souls stripped of all human traits; Christians might fill up Heaven with activities that bore us silly on Earth. But there is a part of us that deeply craves a proper existence, one we never seem to get in this life, of intimacy, acceptance and meaning. This Heaven also resembles the reality of hunter/gatherer life for millions of years of our ancestors, at least “on a good day;” there were ups and downs, times when the game was scarce, the berries poisoned, the milk soured and the honey got you stung.

The Serpent in the Garden brought agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. It did not win because it was attractive to the tribes: the originally nomadic Hebrews called it the “curse of Adam;” and farming cultures have often lived in fear of having their own children “go native.” Agriculture won out nonetheless because it could support far larger populations.

Human nature was shaped in a fiery caldron. Without a strongly cohesive band of adults watching over the young and passing on skills and lore, humans were the most helpless of animal species; with such bonds in place, humans were so successful that they could think about other matters beyond survival. Our normal behavior does not make sense in a usual Darwinian model – why do we spend time gossiping with neighbors instead of foraging for dinner? – unless we understand that it is the result of ages of strong selective pressure for socialization. There were several different genetic adaptations toward this end, including a retooling of sexual behavior and a hard-wiring of language abilities. Religion was also part of this species makeover.

Part of our religious instinct reinforces group bonding. Religious cravings can only be satisfied by group participation. Have you ever wondered why you wonder?

All of us desire to understand our place in the scheme of things. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? How was the world created? How will it end? Why do evils like drought, scarce food, disease and dangerous animals exist? What are thunder and lightning? Tell me about death and what comes after.

The fact that we consider these questions important is rather odd. No other animals ponder such questions: they do not enhance survival. Yes, all animals attempt to avoid danger and death, but mostly by instinct. Thinking about death, fearing it, obsessing over it, does not make humans more likely to survive; brooding about death may even decrease survival chances.

But our questions cry for answers, and to get them we need other people, if only to reassure us – thus we bond to get something we need. The road to serenity is found in The Mysteries, rituals that promote secret and sure understanding. Today we claim to value scientific knowledge, but science is always tentative, and it does not satisfy the soul. You can’t make a religion out of science, as the content keeps changing, new explanations replace the old, and lack of absolute certainty leads to anxiety.

The Mysteries are sometimes physically addictive. We lose ourselves in them; the sights, the sounds, even the smells stimulate the senses. Sex and mind-altering drugs could enhance the mood of religious ecstasy. In America we have had Jim Jones, David Koresh, Philadelphia’s MOVE and the Comet Cult; each exercised psychic power over adherents to the point of mass suicide.

But for many, serenity itself is the sweetest gift, the “peace that passeth understanding.” And none of this makes any sense whatsoever in conventional Darwinian terms; objective knowledge of the real world should always beat fantasy and thus lead to higher survival rates, while the delusional self-destruct and do not leave progeny behind.

Let’s look at the underlying problem. Selfish behavior will always produce more progeny than unselfish behavior; so it should always be selected for, even in social species. Cheaters should out-breed cooperators; those who live to fight another day should inherit the earth, tearing it from the cold dead hands of the brave and self-sacrificing.

Sociability should be steadily undermined, until it pushes a social species to extinction. Bees and ants found one workaround: cooperation, hard work, altruism and self-sacrifice on the part of workers do not result in fewer progeny, because workers are always infertile; those traits are of value to the queen; so the queen which passes on the most altruistic genes to her workers will have an edge.

Our human ancestors took another path. Perhaps the original method of selection was simple: if your tribe got too anti-social, it would drop out of the gene pool, and leave a niche for tribes that hadn’t. But religion is a more elegant response.

We are wired to carry within ourselves an image of what society and pro-social behavior should be, idealized images from our childhood – unselfish cooperation and affection among members of the group. Some of us may be more tolerant and flexible than others, but all are wired to defer to “elders” who feel and express the “conservative images” most strongly. Reactions are triggered by extremely selfish or antisocial behavior; the group takes action against the deviant, through ostracism, exile or even death, but in any case exclusion from the gene pool. Extraordinary courage and sacrifice are also socially reinforced : “none but the brave deserve the fair,” we say. In hunter/gatherer society, these mechanisms kept human sociability, cooperation and altruism stable over vast ages.

In the change to herding and farming, there were many dramatic changes, but the fundamentals of relationships changed little: it took a village instead of a tribe to raise a child; there was still a rough equality of wealth and status; religion continued to be a shared monitoring for selfish behavior.

But by 3300 BC, cities had begun to appear in Mesopotamia, piling village on village, plus those bereft of any community; in this chaos, tribal mechanisms no longer worked. The first rulers were priest-kings, originally bureaucrats handling religious rites. Religious control became political control. Non-orthodoxy was treason; religion kept citizens obedient. Reciprocity of rights and responsibilities, an integral part of human society from its origins, was gone. Some people became tools to be used by others; and the earliest human governments were among the most despotic that have ever existed.

Thus began “status quo religion,” the use of human religious instincts for the benefit of an elite. Thousands of years later Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, hoping the piety of the Christians would shore up a decaying civil society. Before the American Civil War, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split nationally, with their Southern branches remaining loyal to slavery and the planter class. And then came the modern Religious Right.

Fundamentalism among evangelical Protestants dates to the early part of the 20th century as a reaction against Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. William Jennings Bryan might be a political liberal; but as the most respected Biblical literalist of his day, he was dragooned into being spokesman for that cause and became branded forever, not as one of our heroes, but as the foolish villain of Inherit the Wind. For all that, fundamentalism was still a fringe movement in my youth. In the “60s Nixon initiated the first “wedge issue” campaign, his “Silent Majority.”

His successors in the “70s brought modern business techniques to creation of a religious right machine: mailing lists were assembled; evangelical ministers and conservative Catholic clergy were courted and tempted with power; conservative denominations like Southern Baptists were hijacked by coups, engineered by new corporate style megachurches. Conservative Protestants and Catholics, whose predecessors had spent the last 400 years trying to exterminate each other, were forged into uneasy political alliance by Radical Right apparachiks. So began the modern campaign to use status quo religion to help forge an American Fascist Movement.

Where the religious instinct originally was used to monitor the behavior of people close to you, wedge issue politics today use modern advertising methods, mass media and coordinated attacks to arouse anxieties and feed off them by generating an endless succession of issues, each painted as a spontaneous reaction to some incredible attack on values. News and entertainment media have long been used to this end; they make grisly crime stories their meat, as the public can be entertained indefinitely in anticipating an equally grisly vengeance, while coming to fear their own communities.

But modern propaganda techniques have also managed to elevate to the highest levels of public importance such things as never ending wars on drugs, wardrobe malfunctions, celebrity peccadilloes, steroids in sports, taking the X out of Xmas, teaching science in science class or sex in health class, and in fact almost anything which might suggest that sex continues to exist and motivate human beings, yea even unto the current generation.

The Terry Schiavo case is wedge issue politics at its most obscene. Her higher brain cells were long dead, and she had been in the limbo of a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. An army of doctors supported this diagnosis; an endless array of judges supported her husband’s right to terminate medical intervention.

But what was the message delivered by television news coverage? Doctored video footage was played over and over, an endless stream of libelous attacks on her husband’s character were shown, all trying to persuade us that this was a vibrant young woman on the verge of waking up, yet subjected to a slow tortured death by inhuman secular liberals. Attacks on the Constitution, death threats against judges, laws riding roughshod over separation of powers and Federal/state divisions, laws aimed at specific individuals; most frightening of all, the total disappearance of any principled opposition in Congress, leaving judicial integrity as the only barrier against government gangsterism.

The roles played by news media and government officials would until recent times have been unthinkable; now they are routine, expected. Some believe the Right overplayed its hand because polls say three-quarters of the American public disapproved; but the experience of recent politics says that the frenzied faithful have long memories and turn out in elections, whereas most of the three-quarters would forget the whole business in a month.

In what was once the world’s premier democracy, these become the stuff of the news and of public discussion, replacing health care, job creation and disappearance, deficits in government budgets and in the balance of trade, Social Security prospects, war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, population growth and the depletion of the world’s resources.

The point of wedge issue politics is not to solve problems, for a problem solved is an issue lost; it is to keep the passions constantly at a fever pitch and so overwhelm the democratic process. Rational discussion, even on areas of profound disagreement, is the lifeblood of democracy, but it is poison to status quo religion. Your opponents must be painted as deviants and perverts, not even fully human; their very existence fuels your outrage.

If status quo religion were all that remained of our instinct, we might conclude that religion had become a dangerous atavism, that we would be better off in a totally secular world. Many liberals seem to have reached such a position: for them, secular vs. religious means enlightened vs. troglodyte or even good vs. evil.

That’s pretty much what the fashionable blue state/red state thing is all about – people on both sides of the political fence who believe that wedge issue exploitation is the only way that religion can be part of politics. But status quo religion is a perversion, not the impulse itself. The standard by which hunter/gatherer humans judged each other was not just an idealized world of their own childhoods; it was an unchanging image of cooperation, unselfishness and intimacy. History is filled with prophets who judged their societies not by the desires of rulers, but against the ideal vision of life we carry within us.

When the power of a prophet’s voice matches the strength of his convictions, the world trembles, and sometimes it changes. The prophets of ancient Israel attacked their societies in times of social and economic injustice. “Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion,” said one; of others, it was said that they comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

Judaism gained a commitment to social action it has never lost. Jesus argued for a life built on love and compassion, sought out the company of losers, pariahs, lepers and prostitutes, and announced that it were easier “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Early Christians often lived in other-worldly hippie-type communes. Much the same happened with early Islam; and social justice has been a central part of that religion ever since, even more so than in Christianity.

In America, the power of prophetic religion has produced major positive changes at least three times. In the years before the Civil War, most Bible-thumpers who tackled the issue at all were against slavery: some courageously faced death in delivering their message.

Two generations later, in a time disturbingly like our own, with both political parties owned by corporate money, with corruption, cynicism and despair everywhere, a young William Jennings Bryan – yes, he of the Scopes Trial – electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with a politically grounded, religiously impassioned keynote speech in which he pleaded that his countrymen not let Mankind be “crucified on a Cross of Gold.” He and his followers made common cause with more secular reformers and recreated the Democrats into a party of reform, arcing from New Freedom through New Deal to Great Society before finally losing their way in the last generation, when they stopped speaking to the needs of the whole nation and started seeing only voting blocs, electoral coalitions, corporate financing and a comfortable status quo.

The third example was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and “60s, when Rev. Martin Luther King and others were able to share with America the vision of a great crusade for justice and equality that went beyond group interest politics. The Segregationist Deep South never got that support from its own ministers, and its cause was lost; even white Southerners understood at the deepest levels that their cause was wrong, and so the battle was already half over.

Would we then be better off without the religious impulse at all? It can be positive as well as negative in political impact. When it is a negative force, as in recent American politics, some other group is usually manipulating religious feelings for its own purposes.

But an equally important question: is there an alternative? We throw around the word “secular”: what does it mean? Is it a good or bad force in the world? The secular has probably been around from the beginning, making up our underlying personality traits, over which selected religious behaviors are superimposed. All of us, even the various kinds of saints, live in the mundane world most of the time, even if for saints, the context of that daily life is shaped by great religious life choices. And religion has in any case been more for ordinary folks than for elites, leading Karl Marx to his cynical comment about religion being the “opiate of the masses.”

But there are now whole cities, states, civilizations where public piety is exceptional and religious arguments unimportant in civil discourse. Some of America’s great cities may have reached such a condition. We can certainly see a sharp dividing line between blue tending Austin and surrounding small towns and rural areas of Texas; and similarly sharp lines could be drawn all over the country, as between Philadelphia and small town Pennsylvania.

Nobody questions that Europe has become quite secular. Europeans and Americans seemed to be on a similar path toward secularism after 1870, but have diverged rather sharply since World War II, perhaps because of our higher birth rates; having children around seems to correlate to stronger religious feelings. Are there consequences?

As a whole, European nations have made better political choices than the United States since 1945; most Quality of Life indices rank many of these countries above us and the gap widens each decade. These choices appear to be from secular moral systems. Yet an increasingly secularized Europe after 1871 was a seed bed for materialism, racism, Social Darwinism, militarism, fascism and communism, ending in slaughters running to the tens of millions in World War I, World War II, Nazi Holocaust and Stalinist purges. Like religious societies, secular ones can make good or bad moral choices.

While I am a “blue? in the present culture wars, I am uncomfortable that racist and Social Darwinist ideas from a dreadful past have slipped back into vogue among liberals. Many believe that the greater Kerry vote in blue states occurred because people in those states are intellectually superior. But demographic analysis shows that the most Republican tending groups were the richest and, in general, more educated groups, just as in every other election.

Neither religion nor a secular outlook automatically leads to doing the right thing. If you are concerned about wedge issue politics, as I am, then work to control big money spending, money that buys politicians in both parties, uses lying and manipulative advertising, undermines independent journalism with phony news channels and phony reporters – these corrupt political practices have much more to do with the decline of American politics than the passions of evangelicals do; and those who spend the money are consummate hypocrites. And if money is so out of control that the integrity of American politics cannot be restored in any conventional way – then perhaps we should all pray for a return of prophetic religion inspired politics – the only vision which cannot be bought or corrupted, cannot be lied to or manipulated, and which cuts through all pretenses, all humbug.

Much of religious evolution in the past 5000 years can be seen as an attempt to regain the certainty we enjoyed in tribal life. In the West, the first attempt was polytheism: every village religion was considered true; but where one story of deceit, seduction or cruelty by the god was a sacred mystery, a pantheon of such stories invited contempt and disbelief. So philosophers offered a God from reason; though their logic went unchallenged for millennia, common people never found it religiously consoling. Christianity brought the Infallible Church, which proved to be run by quite fallible human beings; then the Inerrant Bible, passages of which contradict not only science, morality and common sense, but each other.

If there is a religious instinct, is our knowledge of God also hard-wired? No such luck: look at the diversity of religions. On ultimate matters, we are always left with a leap of faith. Here is my own:I don’t know if there is a God, but I have staked my life on three bedrock beliefs: first, God cannot be a deceiver – if we have been given the ability to unravel the universe, it cannot be merely to trick us; secondly, God cannot be a cosmic sadist, condemning us to damnation; thirdly, God does not depend on our adulation. Deceit, vanity, torture: the worst of traits in human beings; they are unimaginable in what God must be. The patient and humble methods of science are a surer guide to truth than are sacred texts of primitive peoples or arrogant men who claim they are chummy with the Almighty. The universe is billions of years old, developing according to comprehensible laws; humans got the way they are over long ages of evolution by natural selection. Intelligent Design may lie behind it all; but this is not science.

If God doesn’t need our worship nor punish unbelievers, then our creeds may not be life’s most important religious task. If finding the right answer were crucial, we should have been born with the tools to find it, not left with as many dogmas as there are people to dream them up. What we must know is hard-wired: we are here to need, accept and embrace one another; there is no better way to love and honor God, Whom we have not seen, than to love and honor our neighbor, whom we have.

The prophets, including Jesus, have said this: “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” I personally do not wish to go back to the Garden of our hunter/gatherer origins. Western Civilization in the last 500 years has enriched human experience immeasurably by its emphasis on the Individual – and we would be diminished to be forced back into the simple life of the tribe. And competitive capitalist economies have unleashed great wealth and innovation, to which we have become rather addicted.

But if the end result of the path our economy, politics and society are on is to turn the whole world into nothing but a vast competitive arena, a war of all against all, with only buying and selling left as a bond between one person and another, then we are on a path to catastrophe, because we are warring against all that made us human in the first place. We shall see an endless succession of rebellions, fundamentalisms, random violence by the alienated, senseless rage everywhere. What our religious sense never stops telling us, the poet W.H. Auden said best: “we must learn to love one another or die.”

Gary Bennett 2006