19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

Sermon

Being that this is likely the last Sunday I will occupy this pulpit for some time, I thought it only fitting to begin this sermon, not with a confession as has become my habit, but with a word of gratitude. I want to thank you all, and the members of the worship comity in particular, for allowing me to preach so frequently this spring and summer. It has been a blessing to me, a great learning experience and I think a very positive step on my road to ministry. So, thank you.

Truthfully, this has me a little sad and wistful. But I’m also very excited for two reasons. One, it means I can rest. Writing and giving sermons is like any worthwhile exercise: it invigorates and exhausts at the same time. And, especially now that my summer hospital chaplaincy internship has, just this past Friday, come to a close, I am righteously, if I don’t say so myself, exhausted.

The other point by which I am excited for this to be my last time up here for awhile is the reason behind that circumstance. Soon and at long last, we’re going to have a minister again. And that is truly exciting. Given the trauma ensuing during and in the aftermath of Davidson’s dismissal, I have been impressed by the commitment exhibited by the members of this church, committee participants, the staff, the board, workshop leaders and volunteers. In rocky waters, you kept this ship afloat. And for that you all deserve a tremendous amount of praise. So, if I may be so bold, on behalf of…. all of you, I would like to thank… all of you.

However, unlike me personally, we, corporately, cannot rest. In fact, the time is coming to double our efforts, to increase our commitment, to invest our character even more fully into the realization of the potential possessed by this church, which is at last, the aggregate talent, energy and disposition of the people on either side of you, and the people on either side of them and so on, which, of course includes you.

Yet, to this point, all that energy remains potential. All this commitment remains inert.

In the hospital I have come to learn that there are those patients who posses a talent for surviving. Then there are those who posses a talent for thriving. With the later group, the thrivers, it seems like they come to the hospital almost for the sole purpose of teaching me something. Their disposition and perspective are such that I find myself changed for the better without being taxed. They have life in such abundance that it overflows their being and energizes mine.

Now, with the former group, the survivors, yes, they have a sometimes miraculous talent for surviving, but not for thriving. A talent for surviving means that they are frequently sick. To be sure, they are to be admired for surviving some difficult circumstances. But they do not thrive. My friends, we have survived.

How, then, are we to thrive?

When I was a little kid, my parents hung a sign over the toilet in my bathroom. I know that’s a strange segue, but it’ll make sense when I tell you that the sign read, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.” A worthy sentiment. It occurs to me only now how curious that this was hung over the toilet. “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.” I suppose this was my parent’s sense of humor and their way of saying, with a nudge and a wink, “Hey kid, try aiming.” Of course there was a spiritual and existential message here as well. And that was not lost on me. And I think therein is a clue to how we may thrive. It strikes me though that wanting to know where you’re going and knowing where you are going are two different things. Perhaps this is the difference between surviving and thriving. After all, the process of discernment, discovery and decision making can be every bit as arduous as the execution of their conclusion, if not more so. This, among other things, is what our minister is here to help us do, to discern, discover and decide where we are going, and, indeed, who we are.

The leadership is hers. The task is ours. It reminds me of a story I was recently told. As I understand it, this is a true story. Whether or not it actually ever happened is beyond my powers of evaluation. Nonetheless it was an inspiring story in so far as it resonated perfectly with the point to which I am speaking today. As such, it may be that I’ve made most of it up. It’s still a true story.

So, this friend grew up in a family that was not exactly traditional. Nothing radical necessarily, just an atmosphere created by the parental versions of the free-thinking 60’s. The family was as functional as any other, which is to say, not very. It’s my understanding that they had less trauma, but more drama than many families, in the sense that there was no violence per se, but some wildly divergent personalities that were, in some ways, encouraged. But this led to some problems, chiefly embodied and brought to bear by their annual summer vacation.

You see, what they liked to do was pack a bunch of stuff for any and all potential circumstances, pile the five of them in a car and set out for something impressive, if ill defined, like a coast or a region. They reveled in the freedom to stop along the way wherever the interest struck them. And truth be told, they had a lot of interesting experiences going down a few of those rabbit holes.

Unfortunately, it was frequently the case that one of the siblings had to remain behind. Either one had to work off community service or another had to attend summer school. What’s more, invariably, they would find that their publicly vague destination was personally not so obtuse, just un-communicated. For instance, when they determined they were going to hit the west coast, they each had a different idea of what that would ultimately entail. One thought that meant Venice Beach, while the other thought that meant sipping lattes in the rain shadow of the Space needle and another thought it meant Sea World. Thus arguments were inevitable. Once they were resolved, it was frequently the case that they didn’t even have the necessary money to get all of them into the main attraction because they had spent most of their funds chasing passing interests on the way.

Almost invariably these trips would end in hurt feelings and pervasive disappointment. Finally, my friend took the initiative to sit the family down together and pick a particular, if peculiar destination. This was more difficult than he thought, of course, but eventually they hammered out an itinerary that was oriented to a rather more specific target they could all be excited about while still allowing some wiggle room, though not too much, for flights of fancy. But this fancy was normed by the destination, not the other way around. Now, the part that really was interesting to me was, that year, the whole family got to go. The kids stayed out of trouble and were more focused in school because they did not want to be left out this time. The two who were old enough even took part time jobs to contribute to the vacation fund. And since they had determined to go overseas, to really shoot for something grand, the family realized they had to cut back on eating out and give up cable T.V. etc, which in turn had the unforeseen effects of the family eating healthier food while also creating more time for homework, creativity and friends.

In other words, determining a destination had a systemic effect and, of course, the trip went well.

Now, I heard that story and I immediately thought about our Unitarian Universalist tradition in general. I thought of our congregation in particular. And I thought of my own faith.

You see, as effective as our tradition, congregation and faith are, they can be oh so much more so. What we need is vision, a holy vision of who we are and what we do. Recall today’s reading, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.” This is from the Sermon on the Mount as it is described in the book of Mathew. Note here that the eyes are themselves instruments of illumination. They illuminate that which they light on. Vision illuminates. Now in this case the eyes are connected inward, toward the body, so to speak. And, as is the case in much of the Bible, the clause, “so to speak,” is crucial. For here, it is enough to understand that the eyes are essentially instruments of discovery, discernment and empowerment (for they do not merely perceive but themselves illuminate). Meanwhile the body spoken of here could indeed be the biological body or it could be any system of which you are a part. Essentially, I take the passage to be in line with what so much of the modern sciences are currently saying, namely, “What you see, so will you be.”

So, what is your vision?

But beware. Vision alone is not sufficient. In fact, it may be absolutely detrimental if that vision is distorted. The passage reads, “If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.” But it goes on to reveal that, “if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” We’re talking about spiritual vision here in this passage and here in our church. Distorted vision leads to darkness. It leads to idolatry, a charge that is easily leveled at most of the incarnations of the Abrahamic traditions, that is, at most all monotheists. But idolatry is a charge that can be leveled at each one of us as individuals as well. That is to say, the self can be an idol, can distort our vision, and plunge us into darkness.

Let me give you a personal example from my recently concluded stint as a hospital chaplain. Part of the program was to get together with my fellow interns to try and uncover our blind spots as a way of helping us relate to our patients. As part of this process we read a book by the German neo-Freudian, Karen Horney. As she sees it, a great deal of neurosis can be attributed to the gulf between the idealized self and the actual self. For our purposes today, consider the idealized self a distorted vision of your character, an idol or false god, as it were. Most all of us have this distortion. When the process of life inevitably confronts you with the gap between how you are and how you think you are, you find yourself in the midst of a psychological crisis. The severity of the crisis is variable, depending on any number of factors. But what is assured is that the reaction to the threat, for such an event is always experienced as a threat, the reaction to the threat is entirely out of proportion to the reality of the situation. You are effectively insane and, more to the point, in no small amount of pain.

Consciously exploring this gap for yourself (with the quite necessary help of others or one other) is also initially painful. And here, you’ll just have to take my word for it, it is painful. And yet while the pain is acute and psychologically invasive, it is also corrective and preventative of an equally painful, frightened and chronic way of life. I had the opportunity this summer to be confronted with my own neurosis of the idealized self and am better off for it, if a little bruised yet. This is not to say that I am now perfectly aligned between my actual and idealized self. Rather, I am hoping to illustrate one of the pitfalls and benefits of vision as it applies to the individual. If your eyes, so to speak, are good, your body will be full of light. You will see the idealized self for what it is. If your eyes are bad, your body will be full of darkness and will think you are your idealized self. Pain endures. Thus, discernment is critical.

As I hope I just illustrated, this process of discernment is not merely a challenge to our corporate self, that is, our spiritual home at First UU. It can be and should be a challenge to our most intimate sense of our individual characters. As such, I can guarantee you this: pain lies ahead. For we are about to embark on a journey of self-discovery that will reveal those places where we have been lying to ourselves as a community. And if we have integrity, we will pursue those lies until we find where they are rooted in our individual selves. That action makes this place, truly, a holy place. This then really does become a sacred event. Do not pretend you can bring distortion into this venue without it destroying the event and all the intentions of those who participate in it. That may sound melodramatic. But you come here to feed your soul. What are you feeding on? This place is powerful merely by virtue of our shared attention. On top of that is the intent of that attention. What you bring here is what you find here.

So where do we start? I will offer two possibilities. They are not the only possibilities, but they both attempt to articulate where we are as a community. They are baselines from which we may begin as a global body, a local community and as individuals to envision a particular way of being and thus graduate from merely surviving to the more powerful mode of thriving.

The first possibility is a statement of faith as articulated by one of the modern sages of our tradition, Dr. David Bumbaugh. Some of you had the pleasure of hearing him offer this statement from this very pulpit during his keynote address delivered at the 2008 spring South West District Conference. In the midst of our diversity, Dr. Bumbaugh has noticed that we have a stunning amount in common in terms of our faith. I have only a little time left here. So I will paraphrase.

We believe that the universe is the expression of a process that has evolved from singularity to multiplicity, from disorder to order.

We believe that the earth and all who live upon the earth are products of the same process that swirled the galaxies into being, that we are expressions of that universal process.

We believe that all living things are members of a single community. We hold the life process itself to be sacred. Therefore we affirm that we are called to serve the planetary process upon which life depends. We believe that in this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole.

We believe that the universe outside of us and the universe within us is one universe. Because that is so, our efforts, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions are the dreams, hopes and ambitions of the universe itself. We believe that our efforts to understand the world and our place within it are an expression of the universe’s deep drive toward meaning. We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments.

We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation.

We believe that those located on the margins have important contributions to make and that in some curious way, we are all located on the margins.

We believe that all that functions to divide us from each other and from the community of living things is to be resisted in the name of that larger vision of a world everywhere alive, everywhere seeking to incarnate a deep, implicate process that called us into being, that sustains us in being, that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, that receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Not knowing the end of that process, nonetheless we trust it, we rest in it, and we serve it.

The second possibility that I offer is from a much less esteemed, though I hope, no less earnest a source. Namely: me. One of the first runs in the pulpit I invited you all to take part in a ritual that I felt embodied our faith. And if you will indulge me, I would like to return to it. It is not only a part of my vision for our movement and our congregation to develop embodied symbolic articulations of our faith, it also seems like coming full circle, that I will leave on a similar note to how I began. So, if you would, please take a moment to move so that you are all sitting next to one another.

When we have completed this ritual, please stand, stretch out, shake hands and say hello and thanks to the folks in your vicinity. These are the people with whom you share your spirit and who will cooperate with you to find a vision that carries us from surviving to thriving. Look on them with good eyes. For what you see, so you are.

For now, if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Honest religion often takes us out of our comfort zone. Keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, hold your hand open and feel the qualities of the air.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Breathe in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person, how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor. Through your singularity, you touch the life force.

Finally, see if you can coordinate your breathing with the rhythm of your neighbor’s heart beat and let that coordination expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here as nodes on the interdependent web of all existence and facets of the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

Take a minute and say thanks to the folks around you. This is your church.

The Miracle of Metaphor

July 26, 2009 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

July, 26, 2009

Prayer

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet, wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy Lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy Ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

Sermon

I think I’m developing a little ritual. It is self indulgent, I know, so I hope you don’t mind. But I have been, quite naturally and organically, developing a little ritual or habit that I do when I step into the pulpit. You see, the pulpit is like a circuit between the congregation and the better angels of their nature. That makes me the circuit breaker. Sometimes I worry that I might blow. Which brings me back to my ritual. Here it is; I feel like I’ve begun most of my sermons with a confession. Something about preaching makes me want to confess. It’s the same today. I am simply compelled to name my transgression with regards to this role. You see, as I sat down to write this sermon, as I put on my theological space suit, climbed into the ontological rocket chair and hit the ignition switch, I realized that I had no idea where I was going. I had, quite simply, forgotten the topic and title that I had some weeks ago given to the communications wing of this outfit.

Now, in my defense, I did recall that whatever the topic I had given, I had made it intentionally broad so as to be able to fit whichever shape the spirit moved me to take. I remembered that it had something to do with metaphor. And fear not, it most definitely will have something to do with metaphor. So my legal team says I’m in the clear, even if we do take the long way around.

And we will take the long way around, because first I want to talk a little bit about preaching. It’s this compulsion to confession that’s really got me going right now. It goes way beyond the imprecision of my memory. Right? There’s more to my sense of inauthenticity than that because its not just today. This confessional thing happens every damn time. I come up here and offer my inadequacy right off the bat. Maybe I’m just beating you to the punch, just protecting myself and it’s the preacherly equivalent of asking you if this dress makes me look fat. Maybe I am cowed at the immensity of your trust and curiosity in the face of the elusiveness of the spirit. Maybe.

I do think part of my compulsion to confession is some sort of back door approach to authority. I mean the one thing that I am an authority on, is that I am not an authority on anything. And so that is honest or at least a pass at honesty. And so now you think I’m being honest. And it’s through that honesty that you then, in spite of my disclaimer, may grant me authority. Or so I think it goes in my mind. At any rate, it is rhetorical jujitsu. It’s kind of a neat trick.

This doesn’t make it bad. Or untrue. In fact, it is not only true, but necessary in order for me to allow myself to be up here at all. The confession is born only out of the good intention to clear the air, so that you see me, or rather, the message, clearly. So that I see you clearly, so that I see myself clearly and so that I might pursue and communicate those things which I have been charged to pursue and communicate when accepting the invitation to fill this pulpit.

To put it plainly, I come up here and speak to you of things we need to consider, that I do not consider, of things we ought to do, that I do not do, of facts that I present as obvious, if ingenious, but that I had never even heard of until the night before. It’s just a role, or… more like a dream. I am, like this, my own figment. To step into this pulpit is to step into, to inhabit, my dream. It is shocking because it produces in me a feeling of discord that borders on dishonesty. But the beauty is that it forces me to face it. My dream and my being are so divergent here, but inhabit by force of commitment, the same space. Maybe there’s a place in your own life where you feel similarly. At any rate, for me, sometimes this coincidence of divergence feels like atoms splitting.

The energy released from that explosion – it has a sound. And that sound has a shape – in my mouth and in my notebook. And that shape surrounds an idea, rendered, as everything is, by metaphor. And it goes something like this: Religion is a fiction and I am a charlatan.

The word charlatan comes from the Italian word cialare, which means, “to prattle.” Huh! The more full bodied rendering of the word connotes a person, “who is being accused of resorting to pseudoscience in order to swindle his victims.” Well, I admit to not understanding half the science behind the science that I report from the pulpit. Yet, the very medium in which I ply my trade, the very context within which I work, the material of my profession, at its heart, defies evidence. It is, as I said, a fiction. It is a dream. What fact can capture the religious event? What scientific method can empirically measure meaning? What proof can we touch that there is anything beyond machine here? What test is explicit enough to convince me of god or art? There is none. It is all fiction and figment, experience ordered and recast in the storybook of memory. And then, who better to speak of it than a charlatan?

Fiction and figment. Our most basic response to the knowledge that we are alive and that we will someday not be alive… is a fiction. God is a fiction. The big bang is a fiction. History is a fiction. Memory is a fiction. How we relate to one another is a fiction. In fact, in nearly every way, the you that you know – is a fiction. Reality as we understand it and experience it – which does in fact stand as other than or in addition too or sometimes even in contrast with material, chemical fact Ð reality as we understand and experience it is a fiction.

David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University has written that our brain, “responds to only one particular slice of possible sensory space. Our brains then process this sensory stream to extract certain kinds of information, ignore other kinds of information, and then bind the whole thing together into an ongoing story that is understandable and useful.” To which I might add, “we hope.” We hope it is useful.

Because what is NOT at stake is whether or not it is story or whether or not I am a charlatan or religion is a fiction. That is not at stake at all. It may, I hope, have sounded shocking at first. But shock is a mere parlor trick, a rhetorical slight of hand we charlatan’s use to advance the rubes from A to D without then having to bother with the boring details of B and C.

No, fiction is our reality. So fiction is therefore primary and of the highest esteem, not the other way around. It is because it addresses fundamental fictions via myth and its intersection with experience and logic, that religion occupies the center square of the great game.

And what is a charlatan, preacher, priest or parishioner if not a poet with both hands sunk deep into the ink of this central fiction? So while it may have sounded like I was wallowing self-loathing by calling myself a charlatan, I was doing anything but. In fact, I was not only calling attention to myself, but then paying myself quite the compliment. And I called it confession. What a strange dream.

And it is beautiful. Fiction is beautiful because it is truth unbound to evidence. That is why, for instance, the Bible or say The Grapes of Wrath, are such beautiful works, precisely because they are not evidence. They are truth, not fact. It does not matter, not to me at any rate, if there ever was a King David, Jim Casey, resurrection, or Holy of Holies. They are as true to me as my own name. They are as true to me as my mother, as true to me as my father, as true to me as water, and the sky above, and the earth on which we stand. They are all fictions. They are a dream. And I, as I mentioned before, am also, and especially up here, a dream.

In fact, I had a dream the other day that was similar to this and most peculiar. Have you ever had a dream where you were talking about a dream you had? It’s a strange thing, because you begin to lose track of what you thought was a dream and what you thought was not a dream. See, in this dream I was preaching. Here. Or it looked like it was me preaching. The dream was in the third person, so to speak. I could see what looked like me, dressed in this suit and tie. But even though I could see a person that looked just like me, the only reason I knew it was a dream was because the person that looked like me was not in the pulpit.

He was walking around up here, away from the pulpit. And I do not leave the pulpit. That would terrify me.

And in the dream the preacher was confessing about his inadequacies and how he felt like an atom bomb when his dreams conflicted. He was barking about fiction being a first thing and primary. “It’s like breathing,” he said, and then he took off his coat because walking and talking had made him warm and because he’d seen other preachers and politicians do it repeatedly and at the same time in their talks and so, he supposed, there must be some magic to it. Then the preacher continued pacing, and talking from note cards about dreams and how God is a dream (and he loosened his tie here because he new the stakes were high if he was wrong). The preacher then tried to explain that we are vulnerable in dreams in ways that our culture discourages in waking life, and how that very discouragement winds up creating a nation of neurotics who are out of touch with their inner conflicts. “Dreams,” he said, “are a venue for healing.”

I then saw the preacher roll up his sleeves and for a moment I wondered if this was going to be one of those dreams where the preacher, who looked, really remarkably like me, was going to wind up preaching in his underwear.

“Don’t worry,” said the preacher, “it’s not one of those dreams.” It was weird that he would say that. But dreams are like that.

And in the dream I could tell the preacher was nervous that maybe he wasn’t getting through, maybe he wasn’t communicating as clearly as he had hoped, maybe he wasn’t speaking to the body, to memory, to dreams themselves. He did not know what to do and he began to sweat. And then, I saw the preacher stop preaching and, he seemed pray. He said, “I don’t know that I’m getting through. What do I do?”

And then, in the way dreams do, there came a voice, from everywhere and nowhere. And the voice said, “It’s in the song.”

Well that didn’t make any sense. But that’s okay because dreams often don’t make sense until you analyze them and I wasn’t analyzing just yet. I mean, what the hell is a pulpit, really. And why can’t I leave it? And the voice came again and said, “The truth is in the song.”

The preacher seemed to get it though because he started to lead the congregation in a song, a round, which they sung twice through, where this section started it and then this section came in and then this section over here and they all started singing ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT when he said, “One, two, and..”

No, it’s okay. In the dream, the congregation was confused at first, but then they started singing the round when the preacher, for the second time now, said, “One, two, and…”

Hopefully that was memorable. And germinating. Look, dreams are not argument. In keeping with that, I have eschewed presenting much of an argument today, but instead tried to craft into explicitness what is often implicit and ignored: Life is but a dream. The world is but a stage. And Stanislavsky said, “There are no small roles, only small players.” And Ruykeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” So let’s split those stories and play our lives wholly. Holy.

Stories are dreams reigned and harnessed. We are surrounded by them: day dreams, movies, books, advertisements, comics, history, music, dancing, sporting events, reports on science, memory, you, me, everything is rendered in symbols and metaphor. Our lives. Our positions in a room, where we stand in a conversation, who we are in conversation with, our context, colors, where we work and play and how, all mean something and reveal our needs… if we are brave enough to see them as dreams to be harnessed. Truth to be discovered. Now, to make some argument this morning and to throw a bone out to the scientific minds out there, it is compelling that during REM sleep it looks, more or less, from a recording of brain activity, like the person is awake. And see here, its not that dreams and reality are equivalent. I can fly in some of my dreams. And, as of yet, I can not fly in reality. But the meaning we take, the way we form ourselves, how we interact and achieve some kind of happiness, satisfaction and quality of living – the poetics, the fictions are true in similar ways.

And so now we are in the deep end of metaphor. Having stripped reality of its pretense to not pretending, we are left with only metaphor. We are left in a world where meaning is relative, a world drowned in deep symbols. And we can breathe under water, when water is like that. It is here where the speculative art of interpretation can help us live a life more full. It is in dreams where we are forced to confront aspects of our selves we have buried or forgotten. It is in dreams where the genius of our inner artist is allowed free reign and we are reminded, soothed, indulged, lifted and exposed in ways we think are unavailable to us in waking life. But if, as I’ve offered, waking life is a dream, a fiction that can be deconstructed and opened up… well now things get interesting.

I wonder what would happen if we practiced the art of dream interpretation and then applied that art to our waking life. What would happen if, having become somewhat practiced at exploring the metaphors of dream, we turned that metaphorical exploration onto our lives. What institutions, activities, illnesses and relationships that look so necessary as to be taken for granted, suddenly become ripe for personal revelation? What are we really doing? This is what is at stake.

It is a highly, gloriously, subjective mode of being. But it is a way of being that investigates the mode in which we already, subconsciously, bio-chemically live. It is a move away from an oblivious life. Imagine what happens when you bring the subconscious under conscious scrutiny and appreciation or vice versa? We are, after all, myth-makers. We construe our life and the lives of others as beautiful or tragic and that construal IS reality, it is the way the world works. But usually, the myth-making is retrospective. What if we made a practice of making the myth in real-time? What if real-time and dream-time intersect? What depth of meaning and richness of life might we uncover and live into?

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet. Wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy, lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy, ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

For as the bard says, “And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

Out of airy nothing. This is how we live. This is life as god’s process, life as art. You are the poet, accidental or otherwise. The question is: what are you saying?

Listening

July 5, 2009 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

July 5, 2009

Sermon

Listen.

There are depths here. There are depths to listening. And as a metaphor, it is a posture of being, rather than merely the function of one of five senses. In other words, you hear with your ear. You listen with your entire being. I’m here to tell you that our culture does not listen well, and the cost of not listening is usually catastrophic and, at the very least, tragic.

Incidentally, I am fully aware of the irony of talking about listening. It automatically makes me a hypocrite. And where is the integrity in that? The preacher’s supposed to have integrity, right? Well, not today. Not ever, most likely. And I want to talk about that for just a moment because it is related to this notion of listening. Integrity and listening. I hope that relationship becomes clear as I move along. But for now, maybe by way of example, maybe by way of confession, I want to hold up the issue of integrity from my point of view as a future minister. You might think that is just a hazard of the preaching profession. You’d be right. My classmates, my mentors, and I myself wrestle with that particular angel through many, many nights, always begging the question, who am I so low to speak to these people about such high things? Personal and social expectations set a standard that is, frankly, impossible to achieve. And so I, and all my colleagues are doomed from the moment we hear the call. So yes, it is a hazard of the profession.

But then, it’s also a hazard of the species. I take both comfort and caution in the notion that integrity and humanity seem to be metaphysically incongruous. At least I have company.

But, hold on now, preacher. Did I just say you people lack integrity? Yes. Yes, I believe I did. Who says UU’s can’t do fire and brimstone? So you may be thinking, “But, the sermon’s on listening and we’re listening! That’s integrity. Not like the preacher.”

Okay. I’ll let you off the hook. For now. But don’t get comfortable. You see I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently. And my thinking has coincided, happilyÉ or perhaps problematically, with many of the educational experiences I’ve been pursuing of late. In fact, the subtitle of this sermon could well be, “What I’ve learned so far, and what’s missing.” And I’ve learned a lot. And I’m missing still more. For instance, I’ve learned that Christ didn’t so often forgive people of their sins as recognize and pronounce that their sins had already been released through their faith. That’s from reading in Greek. I’ve learned what its like to feel helpless in the face of a hospital patient who has no hope. I’ve learned that any notion of the divine must compromise on either goodness or ultimacy. That is, there can be no god that is both all-powerful and an unconditional lover of humans and creation. I have learned all these things and more. But it should come as no surprise that of all I have learned, what stands out, is that the more I know the more I know how much I don’t know. And that is exciting. And frustrating. And frightening.

And one of the exciting, frustrating and frightening things that I know I don’t know is how to live with integrity. I have not learned how to do this. Okay, practice what you preach. That’s integrity of a kind. But how do I practice? What do I practice? Is there any practice that make me whole, that allows me, compels me, empowers me to live with integrity? This I have not learned. In fact, I have learned, rather, how much I am by birthright compromised, and worse, how much I compromise myself. I have learned that it is impossible to live with integrity. Keep in mind this sermon is about listening.

So let’s talk about integrity and listen to the familiar Hebrew myth of the garden and the fall. It’s resonant here. Listen and know that we are perfected in ideal only. In life, we are bound to make mistakes. But are we bound to our mistakes? That, in the end, is the question. But we aren’t to the end yet and I want to pick at this scab a bit more.

We are, it is said, fallen. And it makes sense mythically. As I’ve already mentioned, humanity’s understanding of the highest and best and most compassionate and powerful, namely God, demonstrates a lack of integrity that is devastating to its conception. And so no surprise, that we, who the ancient poets described as being created in the image of this God, inherit what we attribute. That is, like God, it is impossible for us to be all good and be who we are.

So what do we do with that? Usually we ignore it. We ignore the planet. We ignore each other. We ignore ourselves. We live half lives.

Maybe ignore is not the right word. It’s close but doesn’t necessarily capture the dynamic at play because there is a willfulness to the ignorance that is at work here. Where does this willfulness come from? Where are its roots? That’s actually a fairly easy answer. Basically we are trying to protect ourselves. Deep down we know there is pain in the world, pain in the hearts of our neighbor, pain in our own hearts and, even worse, that we are responsible for it. That we turn from this so instinctively, so resolutely is ignorance, yes, but it is more. It is denial.

What do we deny? I can lay out some statistics. They won’t mean anything, not really, not effectively. Which kind of proves the point, but I can give them to you. One out of every six American women have been the victim of an attempted of completed rape. That’s over 17 million people. Nearly a million children are abused every year. 14.4 percent of men in prison were abused as children. The U.S. is the biggest global warming polluter. Over 350,000 pigs are slaughtered everyday in this country. 1 billion of the 6 billion people on the planet are going hungry.

I could go on and on, mining the internet and my library for figures that demonstrate the damage we’ve done to our planet, our fellow creatures, our families and ourselves. These statistics in turn may lend my argument some credence. But in reality, that would be a smoke screen. The problem with statistics is that they function on a merely intellectual level. It’s as if we think that by digesting the number, digesting the fact, that we have digested the problem.

But in terms of functioning as a healthy creature, capable of the cosmically rare processes of knowledge and emotion and thereby capable, to some extent, of determining the healthfulness of our evolution, we need another order of interface to fully live. We can’t face our demons just by counting them. In other words, because we are spiritual beings as well as intellectual beings, the use of statistics to prove the point of our culpability in the production of pain and in the degradation of our ecological and social communities and indeed of our very selves, just doesn’t cut it.

At any rate, my argument doesn’t need proof. In this case, proof is the lie because proof is somewhere else. Proof is about someone else or something else. It is a vicarious projection of our guilt onto categories and numbers and words. Statistics are scapegoats. In that there is only the veneer of satisfaction. My argument is self-evident to those brave enough to listen. And here, I do not mean by listening to me. But by listening to yourself.

You see, we already know that the planet is dying to us and because of us. We know that children get hurt, that evil persists, that women have been abused, that animals die to feed our appetites, and that people die because they have no food. We know that we have been hurt and have hurt others. We know it. But we don’t face it. We don’t know how to live in it.

In part this sermon was inspired by a book by Derrik Jensen called, “A Language Older than Words.” Jensen is particularly concerned with the disconnect he sees between our culture and the devastation it has wrecked on the land and on the people that proceeded our occupation of the land. But Jensen’s perspective is unique. Or maybe not so unique. What follows is not for the faint of heart of any age. It is in fact, quite brutal. So I want to warn you. You see, Jensen’s perspective has been influenced by the fact that as a child, he was raped by his father. Jensen, his brother and his mother were all repeatedly beaten and raped by his father. It was an episodic assualt. So while it was repeated, it was not necessarily constant. After each episode, life would return somehow to some kind of normal and the family would persist. Until the father’s rage boiled over and trauma ensued once again.

So Jensen looks out at the land, at the loss of land, at the loss of species, beings, animals and character and the loss of clean water and clean air, Jensen looks out at the devastation of the ecosystem and sees himself. Devastated. Abused. Raped. And denied.

Jensen’s father never left the family. And the family, unbelievably, stayed together. And so it is that Jensen has been able to confront the man who visited such unthinkable pain upon him. And here’s the thing; Jensen’s father, now subdued by age, claims to have no memory of his villainy. In the face of testimony from his entire family, he refuses to accept that he played any part in any thing like what they describe him as doing.

Jensen sees himself in the land. In our culture, that is, in us, he sees his father. And if you think that too strong a claim, you essentially prove his point. Denial. Our crimes. Our trespasses. The food on our table. The comfort of our lives. How do we hold these things together? No statistic can make that go away. No proof will alter the mind of Jensen’s father. He is, by his denial, protecting himself from something he knows will convict him. Our history books do the same. We are left living half lives of unresolved consequences and stunted spirits, too afraid to unfurl, to afraid to listen to the universe speaking through our being.

So let me ease off the doom pedal for just a second to present you with a picture of how the universe speaks through us. David Deutsch is an Oxford physicist who has written a book called the Fabric of Reality. I have not read the book. I have heard him speak, however. Deutsch, talks about the relationship between humans and a Quasar, which is an unfathomably explosive stellar phenomenon. He marvels that, “É some bit of chemical scum (by that he means us humans) could accurately describe and model and predict and explain, above all, explain a QuasarÉ The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.” So a Quasar, and in theory, the entire cosmos, is mirrored (at least potentially) in us. Deutsch goes on to conclude that, “Éwe are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything.”

And so we contain what we observe. But it’s more than just information and mathematical models. After all, hearing and listening are different, right? Hearing is about information. Listening is about being.

Because as lovely as Deutsch’s idea is, his insight, while articulated with new metaphors, is not itself new at all. And you don’t need the tools of science to come to it.

For instance, there is a story told in Islam about a Mullah who traveled to the grand mosque of Mecca, the Kabah. After hours of meditation the Mullah fell asleep with his feet pointing to the Kabah, which enraged some Meccans. They woke him and berated him for his sacrilege. “Very well,” said the Mullah, “Please take my feet and put them in a direction where Allah is not.” The Meccans left him alone. “Everywhere you turn is the Face of Allah,” says the Qur’an.

I see resonances between Deutsch and this story. The mathematical models of all the cosmos is within us, the face of the cosmos is all around us and in fact, these are the same things. Listening brings these things to our living.

Another verse from the Qur’an says, “And in the earth are signs for those whose faith is certain.” Jamal Rahman, a Muslim mystic who penned our reading today, expands on this, writing that, “The mystics, with their heightened consciousness are eloquent in their expressions: the song of birds and the voice of insects are all means of conveying truth to the mind. In flowers and grasses are woven messages; in the rustling of leaves there are specific instructions; at dawn the breeze has secrets to tell.”

I want to own this as speculation on my part, but I see a path to connectivity by learning to see the world as metaphor. Can I identify with the mathematical model of the cosmos, or find story in the flight of dragonflies, watch God? Would listening to the world metaphorically make the heavens and the planet and the soul and the body line up? Because, ultimately listening, be it to quasars or cousins is listening to yourself or you are the cosmos.

But listening and denial are mutually exclusive. That’s the connection here. And denial is pervasive. So it seems there is some work to do before I can listen to the music of the spheres.

This requires four moves. Find your beauty, the moments wherein your soul is singing in tune. Find your blind spots, those personal and cultural places we have covered over and denied. That, by the way, is very difficult and it helps to have help. Next, reconcile your beauty with that experience of sin. For this, the only tool available is forgiveness. It is the key. Lastly, adjust your life accordingly. This is a never ending process, because we are caught, we are human, flawed and beautiful, capable of knowledge and capable of forgiveness.

And how does one forgive? I don’t know. One example already mentioned was Jesus, who, actually, did not forgive. He merely acknowledged forgiveness. So maybe there is a lesson there. Maybe the lesson, if we listen, is the presence he brought to bare. His presence, we are told, was one of grace, peace, mercy and healing. So I might suggest that listening to the world (because you are the world you listen to) with a presence of peace, grace, mercy and healing might be a first step.

I’ll refer again to Jamal Rahman, who writes, “In the East, the lotus flower is a symbol of beauty and spirituality. Notice, teachers tell us, that the flower has a stem that roots it in the mud. The spiritual flower owes its existence to the mud; it is the mud of daily existence that feeds the root of the spiritual flower.”

This gives me courage to face what I deny, what my culture, my family and my experience have buried out of shame. So, I stand here, feeling as though I am on the edge of a precipice. For I have not done what I see needs to be done. I have not been listening. Not as well as I need to. So again, I am in a posture of hypocrisy and speaking out of my depth. But I see where I need to go. And I have some ideas about how to go about it. In this endeavor, I invite you to come with me.

Beginning July 12 and lasting to July 17, I will be organizing an experiment in connective spirituality. It will be the first annual No Kill Week, a week wherein all those who elect to will vow not to kill any living thing, plant or animal, nor eat what has been killed, plant or animal. This is based on the first of the two creation stories in the ancient Hebrew texts wherein we can read, “Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” This was the ideal, before the fall, before we mytho-psychologically had anything to be ashamed of or guilty for. So we will live into that impossible ideal for a week.

Ultimately, No Kill Week is not about food. And in the end we will realize we are still caught, because we are still human. But the week and dietary restrictions form a frame of extra-ordinary compassion which will be focused through spiritual practices, fellowship and discipline. And we will be a graceful and merciful presence. I’ll leave a sign up sheet for those of you courageous, interested or crazy enough to dive in.

In short, we are going to listen. We are going to listen to the parts of our lives and our culture that we are in denial about. We are going to listen to our joy and our wonder too, no doubt. But we will listen to ourselves, look our world and out lack of integrity square in the face and begin the practice of making peace with it. That practice may require of us a change in lifestyle or not. I don’t know. It may enable us to reconnect with God or The Force, or the Tao or ourselves. Or not. I don’t know. But it seems a worthy pursuit and an exciting first step.

Thank you for listening.

Sacred Palimpsest: the Rites of Spring

April 12, 2009 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

April 12, 2009

Mark 16

1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Gilgamesh; a verse narrative

Friendship is vowing toward immortality and does not know the passing away of beauty… You have known, oh Gilgamesh, what interests me, to drink from the well of immortality. Which means to make the dead rise from their graves and the prisoners from their cells and the sinners from their sins. I think love’s kiss kills the heart of flesh. It is the only way to eternal life.

Song of Myself

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Prayer

We come here today in the midst of a loss, a loss of trust, and of community and of direction within our congregation. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of global ecological and political turmoil. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. As our spiritual disenchantment festers, our financial philanthropy dwindles. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of a global economic crisis. Which touches not only our friends and neighbors, but also those we may not have met; our global brothers and sisters. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

But as the winter becomes the spring, so shall the troubled past become the promising future.

We come here to understand that the investment of our energies into our community lead to a greater personal and communal spiritual growth. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here to understand that a commitment to political and ecological non-violence will help us to change the world. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that good life is giving life and that is accomplished through compassion, respect and interest in eachother. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that in supporting all of the earth’s creatures we support ourselves. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

Amen.

Sermon

Isn’t it delightful that there’s the whiff of iconoclasm in reading the Bible in a UU church? I’m going to actually take it step further and make a confession. This will be a sermon of sentiment. It is sentimental. And I’ll own that and confess that as long as you all understand that a confession is not an apology. Because I feel today drawn between two ordeals. I feel it in myself. I feel it in our community. I feel it in the nation. I feel it in the land. I feel today drawn between beauty and ruin. The feeling took root two mornings past. It just so happened to be Good Friday. You’ll remember because it was probably the same for you, I walked out into the crisp, bright morning and inhaled… the scent of burning. And as I drove to Mayfield park that day, I could see the smoke, come down from the fires far, far north of us, fuzzing out the horizon of hills. So there was that tension, of beauty and ruin, right there in the day. You could see it. You could smell it.

It did occur to me that the day was significant. Perhaps not as much for our community, but for our greater heritage and the culture at large and certainly for many of my classmates at seminary, Good Friday is a momentous notch in the year. It is the day Jesus is put on the cross. And so, it was the day a hero died and a god was born. Beauty and ruin.

Now, this was a couple of days after Passover, which celebrates the freedom of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Pharo granted this beloved freedom after the breath of the Hebrew God killed the first born of every non-Jewish house. Beauty and ruin.

And this morning we have seen a fine piece of theatre about Brother Capek, who, like Jesus, spread his gospel of life while in the belly of a system of death, meeting a similar fate and producing a resonant faith. This is not to mention the performance of the play itself, which appropriately had its own share of beauty and ruin. It’s meta-theatre here at the UU church. Very avante garde. And here we have our flowers, which represent our own flowering and our willingness to give ourselves to others and to receive and recognize the loveliness of our fellows. These flowers are gorgeous. But these flowers are dead. Or dying. Beauty and ruin.

Meanwhile, pulling the lens back to wide angle once again, our economy continues to molt. One has the sense that the system wants to die or is, for all purposes already dead, except for one last mission; for there is a persistent will to not die to nothing, but instead to create another vessel for life, a similar but changed system for the energy of the dieing system to inhabit and invigorate. So that seems ruinous. But there is beauty there too. It’s quite a time to be alive.

So this tension felt, feels, very personal. But maybe you feel it too. Because the personal was just one plane upon which the tension arose. It was in the land, in the economy. It was on the calendar, in the significance of this time of year to our culture, to our practice of Unitarian Universalism, to Christians, to Jews, and, given that not for nothing does this all occur around the vernal equinox, it is significant as well to our pagan forbearers and contemporaries. It’s loaded. It is, and here I get to use the ten-cent word of the sermon title, a palimpsest.

That’s a mighty fine word. As a word, you’d think it might be good for ten dollars, not just cents. But while the economy is cracking, inflation has remained stable, so it’s still ten cents. And worthless in Europe. At any rate, a palimpsest is, first definition, “a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible,” and, second definition, “an object, place, or area that reflects its history.”

And so here, with this beauty and ruin in this calendrical space, we a have a sacred palimpsest. Humans throughout time have responded to this period of year, with the deepest method at their disposal: the art of mythmaking. Particularly in the west there is a sense of pairing, not of opposites necessarily, but of a pairing of beauty and ruin, which are perhaps only a prettier gloss for the clearly oppositional words: life and death. But I don’t want to make this binary. It is more subtle than a play of opposites. And so I will use, rather than life and death, beauty and ruin. I think it more accurately captures the nuance and desperation that culture after culture have felt, crafted stories around, and then placed and recalled for good reason at this time of year.

This palimpsest reminds me of a story in a book I read for class, though now I can’t recall which book or even which class. At any rate, an astrologist or physicist or some such was lecturing about the earth’s place in the solar system, it’s orbit and the implications thereof. At the end of his lecture there was a question and answer period. An elderly woman stood and reprimanded the lecturer. She told him that his words were wrong, that everyone knew that the earth was flat and that it was held up by the back of a turtle. The clever scientist saw quickly how to outflank the woman. Sure that the logic of a simple question would startle her out of her superstition, he asked her, “Well, what’s the turtle standing on?” But she was entirely unphased and replied conclusively, “It’s turtles! All the way down.”

I’m not agreeing with her science, but taken as a testimony to something like a sociology of spirituality, it rings true. What I mean is that, given the sacred palimpsest of this day, right now, and maybe always, maybe everyday, its beauty and ruin – all the way up, all the way down. I don’t think the theme is limited to this time of year necessarily, but its prominence is heightened by the earth’s current alignment, the cyclical flowering of life out of death and back, no doubt.

So here is this stack of turtle-backs of beauty and ruin, running through culture and time, through me, through us, through economy and ecology, from the concept of God through to the concept of Nature. And since these last two seem to meet, we may have a circle rather than an ascending line. So its stacked turtle backs, all the way around. Beauty and ruin, all the way around. It is not likely that we are left out of this great change taking place in our ecosystem, and by that I simply mean spring. We are of the ecosystem, after all. And so maybe this theme is biological, at its root. And if that’s the case, and I tend to think it is at least that, then we as individuals and as culture are, by our very hope and discomfort, expressions of something, articulations of something that is deep within ecological and, by extension, cosmic processes.

So what’s the message? Why is God, the universe, ecology, the pagans, the Jews, the Christians, and Norbert Capeck (in conjunction with whoever moved the flower communion from early summer to the equinox… I think I’ve just gone deterministically from God to a committee, which is true.) At any rate, what are they trying to tell me with this undercurrent of beauty and ruin? What am I trying to tell myself? And quite to the point, what in the name of beauty and ruin am I trying to tell you? What are we supposed to learn or be reminded of? How do we apply it?

For me, the answer has something to do with the notion that creation is a product of tension. Tension is what occurs between a writer and an empty page, between sculptor and clay, between lovers, between the promise of life and an empty tomb.

Recall the readings. The women find the tomb of Jesus empty. This is from the book of Mark, which is incidentally, the first gospel to be written. In Mark’s tale of the resurrection, we don’t ever see Jesus. We see this odd little dude in white, which may very likely be a later edition to the text, but we don’t see Jesus. We just know that his corpse is gone. We are told by this avatar narrator in white that he is risen. But the main thing to understand is that the tomb is empty. This is how Jesus becomes the Christ. His particular, locational absence makes possible his ubiquitous presence. The fact that he is not there, means he can be everywhere, incarnate now in us. The emptiness of the tomb begs questions, calls to our religious imaginations, leads us into that emptiness, so that we too might be everywhere in our reckoning and Christ-like in our compassion. The ruin of the tomb is the beauty of resurrection. It is a new life in the mold of the hero Jesus and therein a kind immortality.

This was also the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditation of its authors. The ancients who carved this tale into stone understood that immortality was not found in the conquest of time but in the timeless act of love. For though friends pass out of our lives, it is acts of true friendship, they tell us, where life is unbound.

So what of beauty and ruin? What of that tension? What are we to do with that sensation? Well, for one, take heart. Celebrate. Savor. The tension between beauty and ruin, gives us hope amidst the rubble of our lives. And when we are feeling high and fine and light, it reminds us to revel in every drop of light, every sweet breath because it is fleeting and will pass. But its passing makes it’s apprehension all the more exquisite. Beauty and ruin, but… beauty and ruin. It plants hope in horror, seeds forgiveness in evil, and from dry boredom, despair and lonliness, coaxes life and worth and laughter. It will come again. And more than that it is here now. Beauty is not permanent, but neither is it permanently suppressible. It is erupting and dying all about us all the time, even in our sorrow, even in our sin, even in our suffering and struggle. It is there. We find it. We nurture it. We savor its every sensation because we know beauty will pass and in that we are sustained. We are nurtured ourselves. We are found. We are given the great gift of unsustainable satisfaction. Beauty and ruin.

So here I am tempted, in response to our congregational episodes of beauty and ruin, to cajole you all into recommitting to this church and to each other, to finding that immortal sensation in friendship, to find life in the empty tomb of this building. But, alas, I see that I am too late. You guys are way ahead of me. I look around and I see the vibrancy of the children’s religious education program. I see book groups and philosophical discussion forums. I see the dedication of our church staff. I see covenant groups and adult education programs. I see, and usually smell, the men’s group breakfast (I smell the breakfast. I see the group.) I hear the talented voices of our congregation lifted and crafted in song and sermon. I see hours and effort put in by caring people in countless committees and positions of leadership and volunteerism. I see an updated web page listing these and many other ways to get involved. I see the senior luncheon and the Voyagers and the FuucYaa’s, a brave few of which are set to do a little evangelizing as they participate in the Hill Country ride for aids very soon. I see an active social action committee inviting our engagement. I see hands on housing and freeze night. I see you. I see you here today holding your flowers and sharing this moment with each other. We are here to refine our best nature. And I gotta say, on the whole, you guys are great. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.

I mean, we’re a little bit all over the map. We make mistakes. And where our mission ought to be, where our purpose ought to be, there is instead a big empty tomb. And that is alarming. But don’t run away. Run in. That’s where we will find life, that’s where we will find each other, if only our attitude is of life, or rather of beauty. Because beauty implies ruin, and that will make compassion the rule, and the key to unlocking immortality in each other. The Navajo have a benediction, or a parting wish classically given; “Walk in beauty.” But I say walk in beauty and ruin and be thereby compelled into a resurrection, into life. Not just life but life unbound. Original energy. And here, because I am a sentimental fool and willingly blind when I know I can get away with it, I have brought a little resurrection of my own. The flower communion is a meaningful event that affirms our principles, our compassion and interconnection. It is beautiful. But, as we noted before, it’s beauty in-folds ruin, as we have sacrificed some life by exchanging it. So I have brought something magical with which we can rejuvenate life. I have brought seeds. We’ll have them for you in the lobby as you leave. What you do is find a little spot of ruin, throw a few bits of good intention into it. Cover it so that it is protected from birds. Give it water and light, watch it grow. Invite your soul. Plant it. Nurture it. Savor it.

Consider the flowers in your hand the seeds of our community. Plant their image and significance in your mind. See it’s beauty and ruin in the hearts of your fellow seekers. Attend to that, protect it and watch it grow. Plant it. Nuture it. Savor it. It is all around you. It is you, every atom.

The Death and Life of Free Will

March 8, 2009 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

March 8, 2009

Reading from Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew Bible.

Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

This also is illusion and a chasing after breath.

Prayer

Let’s pray: We come here today humbled by the uncertainty of our times We return here today, to a touchstone of our lives We arrive here today audacious enough to hope that By our participation in these moments, our fears of uncertainty Might be transformed into a celebration of uncertainty. We come here to connect with our most profound understandings And to give our most generous attention to our ideals, our truth and each other. We are here, hat in hand but fist held high, humble and hopeful. And so we give thanks For this company, for this time and for this place And ask that it train and sustain us For mercy and grace.

Amen

Sermon

Today is a good day. These are uncertain times, but this hour is a good hour. This light. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we are here to recognize them as good, to praise them and be grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, as are these words good words, framed as we are by this day and this hour.

But in the midst of this goodness, there is anxiety. In the midst of our gratitude, there is resentment. In the midst of our praise, there is judgment. We are conflicted, as bodies and as a body. And this is no surprise. In fact, it may be a constant. We’re complex. We’re messy. On a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time. That there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it.

After all, there are reasons we are here this morning. Admirable reasons. There are causes that account for our choosing to show up in this place. We want to be here. So give thanks. Despite our troubled hearts, and maybe because of them, we each made a conscious decision to come worship together. Or did we? Was it ever really a choice? We’re we going to come here this morning regardless of our experience of deciding to do so? Perhaps it was pre-ordained, written in the stars or in the book of life. Could it be that, your being here today was a predestined result due to nigh on infinite causes and consequences dating back to the big bang? A series of causes and consequences that you have no say in whatsoever?

I know that’s not what it feels like. It feels like you chose to be here this morning. But the paradigm in which we live maintains that while there are forks in the path, there was never really any question about which path is taken. Thus, choice is a figment. Free will is an illusion.

So here’s a story. Tell me if you’ve heard this before – a man came face to face with the truth in the form of an apple. A curious fellow, he was fascinated by the natural scene around him and the apple tree near which he sat. And then came the fall. And everything changed. To be clear, it was the apple that fell, not the man. You see, our protagonist’s name was Isaac Newton. And what changed everything, was his assertion that an unseen, but distinct, measurable and predictable force was causing the apple to fall to the ground. No longer did God keep the seas at bay. No longer did reality have a purpose.

Be careful of apples, people. They keep the doctor away, sure, but as Adam and Isaac Newton can attest, they have a conspicuous and dramatic potential to destroy worldviews and realign identity. For no less than that is what gravity did.

At any rate, the discovery of gravity was an assault, the final and definitive assault, on the preceding paradigm. Like most assaults, this one had collateral damage. Much like Galileo and Darwin, Newton did not set out to kill god. And yet there lies the occidental diety, amongst the rubble of antiquity. And next to him lay the corpse of free will. It might come as a shock that God and free will were in a relationship of such intimacy that they would both be felled by the same apple. It’s certainly not without irony. To many here, an omnipotent, omniscient God might be synonymous with predestination and the suppression of free will. And yet the in the end, the paradigm that Newton and his kind ushered in, eliminated the possibility of either.

Here’s the forensics; the way Newton described gravity set us on a trajectory of cause and effect, where every event has material causes, identifiable, measurable causes and every effect can be predicted by taking these causes into account. This view is maintained in physics, biology and psychology. It is a notion of reality where our predictive accuracy is limited only by the amount and accuracy of the information we posses. The metaphor is billiard balls. The metaphor is a machine. And it is a powerful worldview. Cause and effect took humanity to the moon. However, our personalities, our decision making methods are reduced or, perhaps, elevated to a definite (if difficult to figure) mixture of DNA, biological secretions and socialization that is purely mechanistic. This knowledge is inherent, however threatening it sounds. After all, we debate about whether a cause was nature verses nurture, not whether there was a cause. Play that out, folks, and it leaves no room for free will.

But let me shift the perspective a little bit. I first started thinking about this when I was considering the Buddhist concept of Prat_tyasamutp_da. This is the doctrine of dependent origination or mutual causation. Essentially, this observes that every being is contingent on every other being, that reality arises in an infinite and interdependent web of causation, that nothing in the universe exists without everything else in the universe. That made sense to me. I could kind of reverse engineer my present to that conclusion slash origin. So, I was thinking, “huh, if everything causes everything, that doesn’t leave much room for free will. But, I’ve grown up to really value free will.” It was a riddle.

And then it occurred to me that, “hey, this inderdependent web thing sounds kind of familiar.” It’s right there in our principles. To be fair, the committees at General Assembly didn’t come up with the interdependent web out of thin air. It is attested to in several ontologies, from Buddhism to the environmental movement and deep ecology to physics and western philosophy. It’s the butterfly effect, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Botswana has some consequence, eventually in Siberia. But think; a thousand butterflies. A million butterflies. Think every butterfly that ever lived.

Let’s just imagine this for a moment. Think of a spider web. You are a node or maybe a strand between two nodes on the web. I’m assuming that a spider web as we imagine it is more or less one-dimensional. Existence is not. So at every node imagine several other strands connecting at every conceivable angle. Each of these strands connects to a node in yet another web. And each node in another web has strands attached to it at every conceivable angle to other webs. And this tightly compacted weave and interconnected web is as big as EXISTENCE. If I move one node here, everything moves. If every event is mutually dependent, if it’s all cause and effect and every effect is another cause, what then of free will? Under pressure from all of existence, is there room for it? So Newton and gravity and the billiard ball cause and effect present a significant challenge to free will. Buddhism and our own UU principles severely limit any notion of free agency. It’s beginning to feel like piling on, but contemporary science kicks it to the curb.

Benjamin Libet conducted the touchstone experiment for this in the 1970’s. He was able to determine that people were acting before they decided to act even though they thought they were deciding to act before they acted. He found that the brain had initiated movement before any conscious decision to move had been made. According to Libet, free will, insofar as it is conscious, is more like story telling than decision making. It is purely after the act. In a more recent study, Yale psychology professor John Bargh (Barge) sent one of his grad assistants into town, arms full of papers, a briefcase, pens, all sorts of stuff, including a cup of coffee. The grad assistant would then administer a survey to random passers by. The survey described a person named Joe and included his photograph and asked something like, do you like Joe? Sometime near the beginning of this encounter, the grad assistant would shift his too many things he was carrying and ask the survey participant to hold the cup of coffee. This would be for a mere second. Very casually done. The trick is that some people were given hot coffee. Some people were given ice coffee. Consistently, the clear majority of people who held the hot coffee, for ONE second, liked Joe. And those that held the cold coffee, did not like Joe. You think the cold coffee people think they made a decision of their own free will to not like Joe? In a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, drives home the argument. Specifically naming the research of Daniel Wegner at Harvard, Gladwell states that, “If you go through all of this research that’s been done in psychology recently, you end up with the position that the conscious will is an illusion.”

We can do a little experiment here this morning. The experiment goes as follows : Decide you are going to close your eyes, relax, pay attention only to your breathing and have no thoughts, i.e. do a form of meditation. OK, if you were running this show this should be no problem, decide to have no thoughts, have no thoughts! It would be very surprising if most of you didn’t find it exceptionally difficult to banish thoughts. The brain, is generating them in spite of your conscious best intentions. That is what the brain is designed to do, regardless of whether “you” want it to or not. It has been said that we are, each us, fundamentally a hundred trillion cellular robots who are not self conscious and who do not know who “you” are.

So by now, I’m hoping that I’ve put some serious questions into your brain about the possibility of free will (as if you could choose to believe in free will or not). This might be the grown up version of being told there’s no such thing as Santa Clause. It’s a bummer. I mean, is it so much to ask? I’m not asking to control the stars, or even a starship, or even someone else. I just want the dignity of self-control. Now inherent dignity is collateral damage too.

And what does this say about morality? Did we just obliterate any notion of benevolence? Did the distinction between good and evil just evaporate? If we’re all part of an unplanned plan with no triumph of progress or humanly understandable goal of any kind, is there any meaning to be had at all?

These are serious questions. For what its worth, they are being hashed out by our champions of philosophy and science even now. In fact, you can watch parts of the conversation on you tube. I watched far too much of it preparing this sermon, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to disregard them. Sometimes you can’t fix a problem from the same vantage point and with the same tools with which you created the problem. It’s harder to find your way out of a maze when you are in it than when you are above it. So we need to shift our perspective. It’s like a couple Sundays ago, one of the youth First Austin and I were trying to teach the precocious little Spencer some really big words. Spencer, by the way, is our Director of Religious Education’s little boy. He’s like four or eight or some small number of years old. He’s a little guy. He’s locally famous for being the one in the kids choir that usually looks like he’s about to fall over from enthusiastic singing. Great kid. So we tried to teach him the word synesthesia so he could blow his teacher’s mind come Monday. We didn’t have a lot of luck. So I asked Spencer what was the biggest word he knew. He thought about it for a bit and then replied, “The Sky.”

The Sky. Right. Thank you Spencer for teaching me a truly big word. So, a shift in perspective. Let’s have a fresh look at how this argy bargy began. Go back to the interconnected web of existence and understand this: Every event in the world that has happened, every breath, every confession, every joy, every misspelling, every shift of sand on the ocean’s floor, every leaf dying in autumn, every inching of every worm, every event is plugged into you, is shaping you and propelling you just as you propel it all likewise. Can you feel it? Well…. Can you feel some of it? Maybe. Can you imagine it? Yes. In some way. Yes. And that is the trick.

The quantum physicist John Wheeler puts it this way, “There is no out there out there.” All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, without us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there, independent of us, it is evidently something we dream up.

Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion as quantum physics. The visual world, what we see, is an illusion. The science writer Tor Norretranders, author of The Generous Man writes, “The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attest to a very simple fact: What we perceive as being outside of us is indeed a fancy and elegant projection of what we have inside. We do make this projection as a result of interacting with something not inside, but everything we experience is inside.

So, there are causes, but we’re imagining our experiences of them. In some way, we’re projecting the events that determine our actions. Well, that’s not necessarily free will. But it is a radical kind of agency for which I don’t think we even have a word. I mean, the sky? The sky inside. This is radical agency. This is the agency with which we reappropriate our inherent dignity. So the next time you go outside and look up, I want you to see that great big word; dignity.

On top of that, all this radical agency is correlated. It’s all interrelated. It is entirely relational and co-arising. It is Prat_tyasamutp_da. Which, by the way, is a seriously big word.

So, if this is the adult version of the unmasking of Santa Clause, we can, as we did as children, take solace in the fact that we still get presents! It’s not Santa, it’s better. It’s our relatives, our relationships! We still get presents. We still get life. We still get love and hope and fear and breath and fresh bread. Now, I can say without exactly lying and for similar reasons, that, yes, Virginia, there is free will.

So today is a good day. This breath is a good breath. They are good precisely because we recognize them as good. We praise them and are grateful. And the way you’re sitting and thinking are also good, correlated as we are with this day and this moment.

And that there is anxiety and judgment and resentment need not mar the goodness of this hour and may in fact highlight it. For on a metaphysical level, we’re somehow complete and incomplete at the same time.

“Illusion of illusions, says the Teacher, illusion of illusions! All is illusion.” And so, I have been chasing my breath for the past while. But is there some inherent good in this futility? Is there some purpose to the mistaken attribution of purpose?

Free will, experientially, existentially, is akin to an emotion. To deny it would be like denying the reality of love or hate or hope. And as it turns out, emotions are among the primary building blocks of our reality. They have kept us alive and evolving since they emerged in our being. They are the connective tissue in our sense of reality. They are the connective tissue between each other. This is radical agency, but it is also relational agency. We need the world. And we need each other.

Look around. When you see your neighbor’s faults, then you will see your own also. When you see your neighbor’s dignity, then you will have secured your own. Let us embody it with ritual. When we have completed this ritual, please stand, stretch out, shake hands and say hello and thanks to the folks in your vicinity. It’ll be a nice way to close it. You can then remain standing and we’ll move into the song from there.

For now, if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Honest religion often takes us out of our comfort zone. Keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, hold your hand open and feel the qualities of the air.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Breathe in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations, how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor. Through your singularity, you touch the life force. Finally, see if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of your neighbor’s heart beat and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here as nodes on the interdependent web of all existence and facets of the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

Take a minute and say thanks to the folks around you. We’ll move to the next hymn from here.

Disembodied Dreams

January 18, 2009 by Sasha Lorenzo Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

January 18, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Reading 1

I Have a Dream (excerpt)

Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Reading 2

Untitled Poem

Carl Wenell Himes, Jr.

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him

Build monuments to his glory

Sing hosannas to his name.

Dead men make

Such convenient heroes: They cannot rise

To challenge the images

We would fashion from their lives.

And besides,

It is easier to build monuments

Than to make a better world.

So, now that he is safely dead

We with eased consciences

Will teach our children

That he was a great man … knowing

That the cause for which he lived

Is still a cause

And the dream for which he died is still a dream,

A dead man’s dream.

Reading 3

Creation Spell

Ed Bullins

Into your palm I place the ashes

Into your palm are the ashes of your brothers

burnt in the Alabama night

Into your palm that holds your babies

into your palm that feeds your children

into your palm that holds the work tools

place the ashes of your father

here are the ashes of your husbands

Take the ashes of your nation

and create the cement to build again

Create the spirits to move again

Take this soul dust and begin again

Reading 4

Barak Obama

From a speech following the New Hampshire Primary

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

Homily & Sermon:

Disembodied Dreams

First Movement

Let me take you back to Thursday, April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The late Dr. King’s body has been taken away. But for his close colleagues returning from the hospital, there is a grim reminder of his having been here: a pool of blood on the balcony floor. Jesse Jackson approaches and sinks to his knees before the puddle. He places both of his hands, palms downward, into the blood of his friend. He then stands and wipes the front of his turtleneck shirt with his hands, taking the blood of Martin onto himself.

Dr. King was murdered as he was about to join the efforts of striking garbage workers in Memphis. It was a somewhat unplanned initial step on what was to be the most ambitious endeavor of King’s career; the Poor People’s Campaign. This effort was envisioned to culminate in a multiracial army of the poor descending on Washington D.C. until Congress enacted a Poor People’s Bill of Rights, which would include a massive government jobs program.

Having learned a little bit about the levers of power in our nation while he fought for desegregation and equal rights, and then while he spoke out against the war in Viet Nam, Dr. King was determined to hit at the root of exploitation in the Poor People’s Campaign. This carried him well beyond the field of race politics and into the much more dangerous field of economics. In Selma and Washington D.C., King was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about race. What he was about to do was change the way people in and out of power thought about power.

His inner circle thought this too diffuse and a departure from the work they had all been doing up until then. They began to fracture and he was loosing patience with them. And when the invitation came for him to go to Memphis, King was counseled that it was too paltry an affair in addition to being part of a venture his associates weren’t entirely on board with. But it was neither insignificant to King, nor was it anything less than exactly the kind of systematic sin he was hoping to root out of America. And so he went.

The day before his assassination he assured an audience that has subsequently grown to include the whole world that he had been to the mountaintop, that he had seen the promised land. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!î

I think King was wrong. If there is a place to get to, I think he will get there with us. He was murdered. But he was not ended. His action lives on in his disciples and in the trajectory upon which he set this nation. And what are we if not our action?

There is no end there. Just more means to further means, action birthing action, character in mitosis.

You see, when Reverend Jackson knelt down and dipped his palms in King’s blood, he was physically enacting a kind of resurrection. After all, the great work hadn’t got done. So Jackson was, in a sense, taking onto himself the properties of his friend. But he wasn’t just taking them onto himself alone. Because we see it ñ we’ve seen pictures in the past or we see it in our mind’s eye today ñ because we see it and understand it’s history and significance, we know that the properties of Martin, in transferring to Jesse, have also been transferred to us. For while Jackson remained focused primarily on racial questions, there were other people and organizations that took up the post-racial agenda that King had begun. Nonetheless, on that night in Memphis, it was Jackson who embodied a transference that unwittingly would take root in many of us and pave the winding way to this Tuesday’s inauguration.

It turns out, evidentally, that blood is both medically and poetically a rampant vehicle for the transference of properties from one person to another. And because were using the poetic sense here, properties means the character of or the meaning of that blood. What Jesse did was only what mankind has been doing for millennia. It’s either hard wired into our DNA or the vestige of humanity’s hero myths, but there seems to be a repeated practice among our species of taking on some properties of a beloved martyr through the martyr’s blood. An obvious example of this is the Christian Eucharist, wherein the blood of Christ is swallowed.

While we understand the Eucharistic blood of Christ is symbolic, in Jesse’s case, the blood was both symbolic and all too physical. When he dipped his hands into that blood, he took part in an impromptu ritual that ratcheted him, and ourselves as well, to the continuing action of Dr. King. So, Jesse still has blood on his hands. Barak Obama has blood on his hands. And the blood is still on our hands. It reminds us of the guilt in which our history implicates us. But that historical indictment is only worthwhile if it also reminds us that we continue ñ all of us, regardless of our heritage, skin color or economic status – to participate, to varying degrees, in a vast system of repression and exploitation that pollutes our character by a lack of awareness and a lack of intentionality. The good news is there are things we can do about that. Yes we can.

So, on one hand the purpose of the blood is to remind us of our transgressions. And on the other hand, is the transferred properties, a reminder of hope, and heroism, of faith in humankind, a reminder of fallibility, forgiveness and true power, and the life and work of Martin Luthor King Jr. That blood has become ours. It is our heritage. If we don’t want it, that blood becomes only an indictment.

And yet, if we accept it, if we take it in, if you let it seep into our imagination and into our heart, that blood becomes, not only an indictment but it also becomes a force in our own veins, a meaning in our own life. For that is the blood in which the murdered prophet still lives. And we are worthy of it. And we are guilty of it. As worthy and as guilty as the prophet himself. So, if we accept it, if we accept that blood, if we accept this story, then we can hold up our own bloody hands and see death (hold up left hand) and life (hold up right hand), guilt and hope, and change these disparities from a posture of the convicted, to a posture of conviction (clasp hands in prayer).

Let us pray.

We come hear today to be nurtured by one another,

with hopes of hearing a healing word, of singing a song that helps us, of celebrating, of walking back into beauty.

Our lives are fraught with trouble, and actions that miss the mark and cause damage to ourselves or to others.

But our being here confesses our awareness of our imperfection and hopes that such an awareness must necessarily understand and thus forgive the failings of others as well as of ourselves.

Just as our joy is a beacon, so to can our sorrow be a guide.

Let this awareness be the seed of empathy then, and this fellowship be the soil to nurture that empathy, so that its fruit can feed many.

Amen.

Disembodied Dreams

Second Movement

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It displayed an image of Obama in red, white and blue, above the words, “Yes, we did.î Now, I know this person was just slapping a celebratory flag on their car. I know they were just feeling proud, feeling good. And they should. Yet, I confess that I was somewhat troubled by that bumper sticker. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the layers of significance that an Obama presidency promises. I most certainly do. I have high hopes and deep gratitude.

It’s just that, “Yes, we did,î suggests that the work is over when, really, the work is just beginning. The phraseÖ is, “Yes we can,î not “Yes, we did.î And therein is a message of both political and spiritual consequence. The work is not yesterday. The work, the joy, the pain is always and ever arising. If I can hearken back to King for a moment the view from the mountaintop of equal rights is of the mountain of unscrupulous warfare. The view from the mountaintop of unscrupulous warfare is of the mountain of economic exploitation. The mountains get bigger. The work is never over.

The difficulty is that once you start down the path of justice, it is easy to be overwhelmed by where that path leads you. You start in a soup kitchen and you wind up waving a defiant ladle at the World Bank. It seems like an impossible task. But then we also know, as our soon-to-be President has reminded us, that, “nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.î And what do you know? It works. At least its working to shift the face of the power structure in Washington. But the real work, as we know all too well ñ as we witness Palestine unraveling, as Pakistan and Mexico stand on the brink of collapse, as our own economy teeters on the precipice of national terror and a crisis of character ñ the real work has only just begun.

So, not, “Yes we did.î “Yes we can.î And maybe that implies, “Yes we are,î right now, right here. If the work the joy and pain is ever arising, then it is arising now, right here, as you sit.

After all, being here is an action. And what are we if not our action? Being here has an effect; on you, on the people next to you, on the world you encounter away from here. Being here is an action. But the question we must ask ourselves, as participants in this corporate body ñ sitting here, are we active enough? What does being here do? More to the point, what are we doing here?

So, when I go to church I know that most of the time I’m there I’m sitting and listening. Right? You’re listening, aren’t you? Okay. That’s a start. I know that my listening is reinforced by my standing to sing and by my singing (apologies to those within earshot). So, that’s also a step. I watch candles be kindled and light some of my own. That’s good. But in a religion that has no central text, in a religion whose cosmology, ontology, theology is intentionally vague, in a religion that is essentially new ñ despite the braided histories we claim ñ and lacks a rich tradition – is listening enough? Are these actions enough to embody our purpose? Or do they leave us entirely without “a tradition, an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure,î as has been suggested.

The way I see it, the problem is not that we do not have an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure. The problem is that our understanding comes from such a broad spectrum of sources that it is all too easy to miss the forest of consensus for the trees of our variety. Maybe because of that, our understanding has not been taken into our bodies in any kind of communal, central ritual. And so it is that our religion has been damned to a mere haunting, all too often remaining in the realm of ideas, a dream without a body to be in.

In short, we’re a religion without any religious experience because we are a religion of disembodied dreams. T.S. Eliot comes to mind.

“We are the hollow men.

Our dried voices,

when We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass”

“Shape without form,

shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

I don’t think Eliot was talking about us, but he sure could have been. Emerson, however, was definitely talking about us when he called Unitarianism “corpse cold.î But we can change that. We can live into the dream of our forebears and we can and must do this together. Oh, yes we can. In fact, we will.

Some of you may know, I am currently studying for the ministry at Austin Seminary. This past semester, a small group of my colleagues began meeting once a week to create some sacred space in our lives. We would gather, splash our hands and faces with water (a practice borrowed from Islam), do some physical action which we often drew from yoga. We would then sing ñ to clear away the ego. And finally, we would relax in silence for a half an hour, ala a Quaker meeting. This was followed by the sharing of snacks and some discussion. I can assure you, our theologies all varied radically from one another. And yet we could create that space together. It was a deeply enriching experience each and every week.

Now I could have, and have, done something like this on my own, alone. But the fellowship was important. The fellowship elevated the experience. Fellowship taps into love and that’s why we’re here this morning, right?

So ritual embodiment creates space. It also articulates faith. After all, what is Islam without Mecca-facing prayers in prostration? What is Christianity without the Eucharist? What is Buddhism without meditation? What is Unitarian Universalism without… umÖ We claim these traditions as sources. There is wisdom in the fact that they ALL ritualize their bodies in order to reinforce and articulate interpretations of the world.

The Buddhist author Jack Kornfield writes, “Spiritual transformation Ö doesn’t happen by accident. We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.î In other words, we have to practice cosmology. We have to practice ontology and theology. We will neither grow, nor be effective, nor, in my opinion, even survive as a religion without also thriving as a religious practice.

Now, I’m not just going to whine at you. I want to try and find a solution. So what kind of ritual embodies our values and beliefs and theological liberality? How shall we practice? The Buddhist teacher Achaan Chah described the commitment to practice as “taking the one seat.” He said, “Just go into a room and put one chair in the centerÖ open the doors and the windows, sit in the chair, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.”

So we will take our cue here, with a few minor changes. I’m actually going to ask you to move a bit. Indulge me. Let’s see how this goes. So, as you are able, shift in your pews toward the center aisles, so that you are seated close to each other, right next to each other. Thank you.

SoÖ we are going to do a ritual, a ritual that embodies our theological and ontological openness, our social vision, our scientific grounding and our spiritual aspirations.

Now if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Ritual, principles and honest religion often, in integrity, take us out of our comfort zone. So, see if you can come in to this next step. If you would, keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right. Try to find a pulse, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, place your free fingers on your own neck.

You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Now I’ll ask you to breath in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how this gesture recalls our principles, how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations.

Consider how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor, through your singularity, you touch the life force.

Consider how this reveals our fragility, just as it reveals the miracle of the human machine.

Finally, take a few breath cycles on your own, increasing your sensitivity to your neighbors life force. See if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of their heart and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here and then onward so that your thoughts turn at last to the interdependent web of all existence and the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.

Amen.

I hope that gave you an idea of what I am talking about. Actually doing it hopefully made the idea more clear than if we had just left it at talk. And that is precisely the point. I hope it is an idea we can build on. It doesn’t need to be the ritual we performed today, but I would encourage some kind of exercise that embodies our faith to become a regular part of our service, our related board and committee functions and your personal practice. I’ll submit it to the worship committee for some deliberation. Consider today the first line of a conversation. But it must not only be a conversation.

Allowing our thoughts only to be in our mind and allowing our minds to be only in our brains does each component, as well as their sum ñnamely our lives and the gods in which we live them ñ a great penalty. Meanwhile, using our bodies to express our consciousness in ritual will lead to using our bodies to express our consciousness to each other and to the larger world. This can help in troubled times. And as a church and as a nation, these are troubled times. We can start healing without a word. We can take that wisdom and apply it to ourselves and our world. We can live this dream of Unitarian Universalism. We can heal this nation. We can repair this world. Yes we can.

Amen.