Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

February 12, 2012

Our fifth Principle talks about liberty and justice for all, with a goal of world community. How are we supposed to get this done?

How would you sit down to eat a car? Knife and fork? Hacksaw? Ketchup? Hot sauce? Would you circle the vehicle a couple of times, figuring out where to start? Would you drink a nice lemonade with the upholstery? What about the more metallic meals? White or red wine? That would probably depend on whether it was a meaty truck like a Dodge Ram or a fishier Plymouth Barracuda. Eating a car is something that would take commitment, time, planning. It would take a special mind to think of doing it.

Our sixth principle is like that. It says that we, as UUs, agree to affirm (say yes to,) and promote (try to get more people to say yes to) the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. That’s really big. It makes a person think the framers of the principles were getting tired at the end there, and that they just wrote one that was the equivalent of “well, we want the whole world to be okay, everything else plus that big freezer in the garage.” What do you do with a principle that large and unwieldy?

There is a funny short film on youtube with the title “The Man Who Ate a Car,” and it opens with him talking in his kitchen.

“A car is just the sum of its parts, and a lot of the parts aren’t that big, just a couple of inches across. 75% of the parts of an automobile are a couple of inches across and half an inch deep. That’s the size of an Oreo cookie. And the ones that are too big, you just machine down, smooth out.”

Most of us don’t have time, in the biggest part of our lifespan, to do much for the world. We are busy making a living, raising children, maintaining the relationships we choose, taking care of our health and strength or adjusting to its loss. It’s hard to find time and energy for leaving the world a better place. Ralph Waldo Emerson said a successful life was to leave the world ” a little bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you live…” Many of us do that. I am beginning to know some of the stories of a good number of people in this room and I can tell you there are many people here who will leave the world a little better than they found it. Lives have breathed easier because you have lived. What will you be known for when you are gone?

Unitarians and Universalists have thrown their life energies in with the forces of change over the centuries. Many Unitarians and Universalists worked in the Abolitionist Movement to overthrow slavery. Many have worked in the Civil Rights struggle. Unitarian Horace Mann organized the public school system Universalist Clara Barton founded the Red Cross. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was led by his liberal faith to a much more inclusive interpretation of the law. Thomas Starr King (after whom one of the UU seminaries, the one in Berkley, is named) was inspired to fight the California legislature for continued land rights of Mexicans. Jane Hull founded Hull House in Chicago, and began to professionalize social workers; moving caring for the poor from religious institutions that often pressured you to convert to get care, to non-religiously affiliated professionals. Roger Baldwin was led to establish the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). May Sarton wrote poetry inspiring her readers with truth and beauty.

Social action, politics and art are some ways we can make the world a better place. Most of us, in the ordinary course of our lives, are doing it by being loving family members, teaching our children strong values of usefulness, tolerance, open minded curiosity, kindness, knowledge, wisdom, and love. We teach the children in the church, we care for our grandchildren, we cook for people and visit them when they need company. We make the world a better place by being good friends, by trying to behave correctly and do the right things. Do those actions bring about world community with peace, liberty and justice for all? We can barely make justice within our own church, our own families. How can we heal the whole world?

This principle is over-large, and it sits there, parked in the driveway of every UU who is resolving to live the faith.

“This is a long term activity,” says the man who ate the car. “Look, it took five years. I ate my first two lug nuts on Dec 30, 1990 — finished the last piece of the clutch housing on Feb 14 1995.” Compared to a task with no beginning, no middle and no end, eating a car sounds almost easy.

World community, with peace, liberty and justice for all is too big a goal. When my goals are that big, I get overwhelmed. When a person is overwhelmed, they are stressed, crabby, emotionally less stable and sleepy. The principles certainly aren’t supposed to do that to us. When a rule is too hard to follow, it’s just begging to be ignored. When a goal is too big, it’s just begging to slide down the priority list behind every other thing in the world that can be accomplished.

Overwhelm burns us out. When we can’t get anywhere, when the things we do accomplish seem so insignificant compared to what we are supposed to be accomplishing that we feel they are nothing. We don’t want the sixth principle to make us feel that all our small efforts are insignificant. What I learned about setting goals is that you are supposed to make a goal from something you can control. Instead of saying “I’m going to be a catalyst for change like Barbara Jordan was!” you might say “I’m going to change one thing ——about myself—- this week.” That you can do, usually. Instead of saying, “My goal is to be a millionaire,” you make a goal of saving a certain amount of your income, or of living within your means day by day, or just or writing down what you spend. Goals should be measurable. Did I do it or not? They should be attainable. We can say that we have a goal to do some action every day to make the world a better place. Most of us, just by living the principles and trying to be good people, are doing that. We can take the red heart from our bulletin and write a kind and loving note to someone who wants to get married and can’t do it in TX yet. The notes will be delivered on Valentines Day to the people who are going to the office on Airport Rd. to ask for licenses. Or you can get some food after church and take it to the Pecan Area of Zilker park where the Occupy folks have invited us and others for a picnic.

One good purpose that can be served by an extra-large, unattainable goal, though, is that it is a measuring stick we can hold up to the various situations and decisions we face as we move through our lives. “Is this going to be more or less like world community?” You might ask yourself. “Will this make more peace, more liberty, more justice, or less?” A good large measuring stick can help as choices come up.

Let’s take that sixth principle little by little, and let’s take our time. Take a big important stand or do something small every day, or both. Just keep it in mind. Look at your home, your work, your church through its windshield. Machine those pieces down until they are the size of an Oreo cookie. Then make them part of supper.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

February 5, 2012

In the Christian scriptures is a story about Rabbi Jesus doing a miracle where 5,000 hungry people were fed. It began with a boy offering to share what he had. What kind of miracle was it? What is its message for us?

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of sermons are also available for free from iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

January 29, 2012

The choir performs three of Kiya Heartwood’s choral works and Meg Barnhouse collaborates with readings. Science is showing us that we are all related to an African woman we call Mitochondrial Eve, and we can trace each person’s ancestry through their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, from mother to mother, all the way back to one of 26 “daughters of Eve.”

SERMON:

Music for the “Afri-Kin” service is called “A Balance of Earth and Sky,” composed by Kiya Heartwood (see program notes below)

I. Gloria (A Hymn to the Queen of Heaven)

This piece is honor of Mitochondrial or “African Eve”, our Homo sapiens common ancestor. Eve lived at least 200,000 years ago in East Africa and all humans are her descendants through their mitochondrial DNA (mt DNA). All humans share one common African ancestor and all women carry a strand of her DNA. This theory is supported in many books including Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes

II. Rivers of Grass

Homo sapiens descendants of Eve began migrating out of Africa to populate the rest of the world sometime between 95,000- 45,000 years ago. These daughters of Eve carry the gradual mutations necessary for survival in different climates and topography. These people moved on to new lands because of climate changes, floods, wars, droughts, and plain curiosity. We are all descended from these daughters of Mitochondrial Eve. We honor their perseverance and strength and we carry these traits into the next generations.

III. The Beauty Way.

This piece is based on a Navajo ceremonial chant that brings back balance and harmony into the celebrants’ lives. By honoring the connections to our common ancestors we remind ourselves that we are the sons and daughters of Eve and we are all related.

PROGRAM NOTES

“A Balance of Earth and Sky”

is three song cycle of praise and connection written by composer/singer songwriter Kiya Heartwood for mixed chorus and piano. This work was commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton’s Music Ministry for the UUCP choir in 2011.

“A Balance of Earth and Sky” is a musical ceremony for centering and balance.

The pieces include: “Gloria”, “Rivers of Grass” and “The Beauty Way”.

I. Gloria (A Hymn to the Queen of Heaven) …. Gloria

II. Rivers of Grass

I am grass like an ocean, rivers of mountains, choirs of stone. ( Begin again.)

I am wise as the raven, strong as the horses running for home. ( Begin again.) We dance down through the ages mother to mother, never alone. ( Begin again.)

Begin. begin again. Begin. Begin again. Begin again.

I am grass like an ocean, rivers of mountains, choirs of stone.

Rivers of mountains, choirs of stone.

Choirs of stone.

III. The Beauty Way (Based on the Navajo Beauty Way Ceremony)

Oh Beauty! Oh Beauty!

In beauty may I walk.

Through the returning season may I walk.

Grasshoppers at my feet. A sky of joyful birds.

On the trail of sacred pollen may I walk.

Beauty before me. Beauty behind me. Beauty above me.

Beauty all around.

In my youth may I walk.

In my age may I walk.

In beauty, it is finished.

In beauty, it is finished.

In beauty, we begin, again.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

January 15, 2012

How can we begin to dismantle racism in our hearts and minds? How can we dismantle it in the structures of our society? Are all humans racist when they are born? What transformations might we hope for?

OUT OF A MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE

There is a lot I don’t understand about racism. If I were to talk about all the things I don’t know, we would be here a lot longer than we want to be, so I will talk about some of the things I do know. I know that every group on earth is racist about some other group. Here is what they all say:” They are dirty and lazy. They don’t want to work. They are over emotional and their religion is strange. Their brains are smaller– they just can’t think the way we do, so they are better at hands-on work — as long as you tell them exactly what to do. They will hurt children and women.” That is the Japanese talking about Koreans, whom they traditionally have despised.

It’s the he Northern Italians talking about the Southern Italians, the people or Northern India talking about the Southern Tamil Indians. In Sri Lanka the Tamils hate the Singhalese. Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other in 1947, as Pakistan and Bangladesh were being partitioned off from India. More than a million Hindus and Muslims were killed during the partition. Malaysians hate the Chinese. The Serbs hate the Croats. The Czechs hate the Slovaks. In Africa, the Hutus hate the Tutsis and slaughter each other. Right now the Tutsis are in power, but that will change, as it has before. In Nigeria the Hausa hate the Ibo. Sunni and Shiite Moslems war with one another in Iraq. In Syria, there are families and clans that hate each other. In Darfur, in the Sudan, the Arab-identifying Muslim nomadic Sudanese are slaughtering the non-Arab identifying Muslim sedentary Sudanese. The Israelis hate the Arabs. Will it always be this way? What has to change?

We try anti-racism training, with mixed results. We learn about the way we use language: we talk about darkness as evil and bad, we use the color black to symbolize negative things. “A black mood,” “a black-hearted person.” I was with a group of ministers doing an art project. We were making collages to symbolize our lives. One woman had colored an area of her page dark brown. She said, “This area symbolizes my depression. I learned in anti-racism training not to use black, so I’m using dark brown instead.” Bless our hearts.

To overcome racism, I have to learn to read another human’s face and watch their behavior before I can tell what kind of person they are. Their skin tone is one important thing about a person. Some people who go through anti-ism training say “I just don’t even see what people’s skin color is.” Well, you need to, because it’s an important part of who they are. One part. Like being gay, or being able-bodied, or being tall. One part of who you are. We want to work towards seeing one another as individual humans, reserved or out-going, structured or flexible, buoyant or grounded, excitable or calm. Those qualities come in all colors

That’s one thing we can do as individuals, and although it is arduous, it feels easier to me than dealing with institutional racism, which is one of the other things we have to fix. In his book Dismantling Racism, Joseph Barndt defines racism as “prejudice plus power.” Hispanics and Blacks have strained relations, Koreans and Blacks live in mutual mistrust in the cities of the Northeast. But none of those groups has the power to create a system that is the embodiment of those ideas. This is the point at which I can fall asleep if I want to. I don’t have to care about this. I have the luxury, being light-skinned, not to care or think about this. Not having to face it is one of the privileges I enjoy because of being white.

European Americans have most of the power in the economy and the government. We also have tremendous power in the schools and the service industries Barndt says our institutions are racist because the power behind them is White, and therefore they perpetuate white European values. . I don’t notice it, and I want to believe people who say “Aw, it’s not really that way.” None of the solutions we are currently trying seem to work well. There is some legislation that is working over time, but there are those working to dismantle that legislation as we speak. More long meetings where blacks and whites meet to talk don’t feel like a solution to me. I’ve been to enough of those. I have thought of an instant way to bring it into stark relief for myself and all of Austin. I believe with this plan institutionalized racism in our nation would be wiped out within years.

How would I do this? Imagine this solution: How about we pass legislation that would mandate that all children, in their tenth and eleventh years, do a two-year “exchange-student” program in other neighborhoods of their town. Your child might end up on a golf course or in a housing project. It would teach, enlighten, terrify and annoy all of us.

Be comforted in knowing that it won’t ever happen, but be aware of the feelings it brings up.

Do you think that would encourage the middle-class people of all to come up with housing improvements? Do you think that would encourage us to provide drug treatment for addicted mothers so their children would have a chance at life? And so their children wouldn’t make our lives hell during the time they were with us? I have to say I would in no way want that legislation passed, and the vehemence with which I do not want my children in a “bad neighborhood” tells me something important about the situation. This would counteract the anesthesia that we give ourselves so as not to notice the conditions spawned by institutional and cultural racism. That fantasy proposal woke me right up. I have privileges and so do my children that a non-white woman and her children do not have. I don’t have to worry about cashing a check. I don’t have to train my sons to be wary of officers of the law. There are so many things I don’t have to worry about since my sons have light skin.

None of us in here wants to be racist. We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. But most of us do participate unthinkingly in white privilege. This is not something to wallow in guilt about. Wallowing in guilt makes you stupid and drains your energy. You don’t think well. You don’t want to face the people who don’t have the privileges you do. White privilege is something to notice. This is not something non white people can or should have to help white people with. This is white people’s responsibility. In our UU churches, bless our hearts, it is not uncommon for the people of color who come in our doors to be approached about being on the anti-racism committee. It happens sometimes that when a black person joins the choir, suddenly the repertoire changes to include more gospel songs, even if that particular black person prefers Chopin or country.

Dr.. King said in his “I have a dream” speech “we shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The racism in our world certainly could weigh on a person like a mountain of despair.

I have thought a lot about despair and hope. I’ve been wondering about that image of a stone of hope. It comes from the mountain of despair, so it’s made of the same stuff. How can that be?

The thing that despair and hope have in common is the vision of a better future. A necessary component of despair is knowing that things aren’t what they should be. To feel that, you need a vision of what things should be. Despair is when the vision of what should be combines with the weight of what is and threatens to overwhelm you. You can’t see how to get there. You can’t believe things will ever be better. Despair is giving up. The antedote to despair is that we just take a little piece of that mountain, and the piece we take is the vision of how things could be.

We all know that, if all you have is a sense of how things should be, you can be one miserable human being. In ancient Greek mythology, when Pandora opened the container and let all the evils fly out into the world, she slammed the lid shut with just one left inside. What was it? Hope. What was hope doing among the evils of the world? Hesiod said it was because hope is empty and no good, and it takes away people’s industriousness. Friedrich Nietzsche said ” Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” Yes, hoping without action is foolish, if an action can be taken.

Rita Mae Brown says “Never hope more than you work.” That’s what those people in Ohio were doing. Hoping and working. That’s what the people who believed in Dr. King’s vision did. They held the vision and they worked. Maybe stone is just the right size for hope. Maybe the rest of what we work with is clarity, reason, facing the elements of our lives and those of others with open eyes.

Maybe stone is just the right material for hope. Dr. King did not say “Out of the mountain of despairs we mine a jewel of hope.” It is not something rare and precious we find within the despair, covered, held and hidden in there. Maybe stone is just the right value for hope. Stone is ancient, far more ancient than humanity, and it’s everywhere. It’s common. We can lose hope over and over and just pick up more anywhere. You can throw hope away in a fit of rage and loss of spirit, then just pick up another piece.

Maybe stone is just the right hardness for hope too. Hope has to be tough. One of my friends said at a twelve step meeting her sponsor handed her a stone and said, “Any time you feel like taking a drink, put this in your mouth. When it dissolves, go ahead and have a drink.”

We hold on to our hope. Find yours, and live with it in your pocket, in the palm of your hand. What do you hope for? Hope, and we do what we can do make things better The most important thing is that we do it together.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

January 8, 2012

Our fifth principle talks about affirming and promoting the democratic process in our congregations. Does that mean every voice should be heard? How should it be heard?

Text of this sermon is not yet available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available on iTunes for free.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

December 18, 2011

Conflict is part of a healthy system. We can’t agree about everything all the time. How do we voice disagreement without being disrespectful or unkind?

What is it about disagreeing that is so—-disagreeable? It all goes back to the families we grew up in.

In many families, disagreement is seen as an attack. Punishment comes down, if not directly, then indirectly, later. They WILL get you. Disagreeing is against the set of unspoken family rules everyone learns and abides by– until their teen years. This unwritten list of family truths and rules can be called the “family treaty.” To violate that “treaty” is to imperil the family’s sense of security and unity. Any violation of the treaty makes a family member fill up with formless dread and guilt. The treaty in most families says that there is only one way to do things—the right way. Other ways are wrong, and if you do things other ways you must be stupid— or dangerous. Most people comes into a marriage or a job or a church with an unquestioned certainty that the way their family did things is the standard way, and all other ways are somehow deviant.

Each family’s “treaty” is a powerful force in members’ behavior far into their adult lives. What things can you say? What things are unsayable? What can you notice? What are you not allowed to notice? Can you say “Mom’s passed out again” or do you have to say “Mom’s not feeling well this afternoon.” Can you say “Dad’s having an affair” or are you not allowed to notice? What emotions are you allowed to have? Some families only allow anger, and affection is seen as “not done.” Some familes are the opposite. Positive emotions are okay, but no one in the family is allowed to be angry. In some of those families, the anger turns inward and becomes toxic, turning into depression. Or you have to say “I’m not angry, I’m hurt,” I’m not angry, I’m just a little frustrated.”. You can tell when you have crossed the line and violated the treaty by the shocked silence that immediately falls. It is as if the brains of everyone around you have gone blank. People don’t always gasp, but they may as well….

Families have standard ways they handle money, discipline, anger, affection, conflict, power, loss, embarrassment. If you work on any church committees you have run across all different styles of working. We carry so much with us is from our raising.

Disagreeing is something almost always covered by the family treaty. Some people do it directly. “I don’t agree.” Some do it by sidestepping “Whatever…” Some do it sweetly. They smile and nod and then roll their eyes at the person next to them, or they talk to others about their opinion but not to you. Some families shame you when you disagree. “Well, that’s just foolish,” someone will say, to make you shut up and sit down. Or, “You don’t think THAT?” Like a person of your obvious caliber could never truly be proposing an idea so stupid and ill-conceived. They shame you into agreeing, or bludgeon you into it. In my family they would just talk at you and quote Bible verses until you were so stunned by the barrage of words that you would nod and agree to whatever it was just to get some rest.

Styles of disagreeing are something we learn from our growing-up time. Some of us are logical or distant or impassioned or we raise our voices or we call names like “illogical,” or “uninformed” or New-Agey” or “cold” or “rigid.” Some of us state our case mildly and expect others to read the passion betwen the lines. Others have fun with building dramatic noisy arguments that act like steamrollers, mowing down all opposition. Given that we are bound to meet all these people in our lives, how can we disagree passionately and calmly?

Keep breathing. Some of us forget to breathe when we are stressed, and we don’t think well without oxygen.

Acknowledge what kind of situation you’re in. You can say “Whew, this sure is a hot topic.” or “We sure are talking about some hard things.” This lets the other know that you aren’t dismissing the importance of your conversation, and that you know this is a big deal for them and a big deal for you.

Stay on the topic at hand. What question is on the table NOW. “If only’s” are non-productive. Saying “We wouldn’t even BE in this situation if you hadn’t..” is not productive. Bringing up other problems makes a conversation that might make things better less likely to happen.

A disagreement is not an attack. This is something that’s hard to remember. I know people who even get uncomfortable if they don’t like the same food or music as a friend. Many of us grew up in families where closeness meant sameness. As we become more differentiated ( a goal of growth and wisdom and therapy) we become more comfortable with differences.

If you find yourself thinking “You CAN’T see this any other way,” be quiet for a while until you can see how someone COULD see it another way.

Start from the position that there may be more than one way to do things. Be as specific and concrete in your comments as possible. Generalities don’t get you anywhere. Words like “Support,” “justice,” “love,” are very general. I’ve told some of you about the couple where the woman said she wanted a kiss when she and the man saw each other after work. “I DO kiss you!” he said.

“Not a peck on the cheek, I want a kiss on the lips”

“How long a kiss?” I asked.

“About—um—-five seconds long.”

“Can you do that for her?”

“Sure, I can do that. No problem!” Specifics get you places.

If you have a criticism, please try to have a good comment AND a constructive suggestion at the same time. This soup is wonderfully thick—it would suit me better if there were a little less salt.

Ask “What would happen if….?” This is a good queston for many situations. Teaching a child to tie her shoe: What would happen if you looped it this way and pulled? For teenagers: “What would happen if you came in the door and asked for the car as if you loved and respected me?” For spouses: “What would happen if we wrote down what we spend and told each other every time we charged something?”

Try to say your piece and then leave it alone. Some of us have the misplaced faith that saying something one more time will be the key….

Speak for yourself. Don’t say “Everybody in town laughs at you for being like this.”

Appreciate and applaud drama.

Ask questions.

Questions:

Tell me how you came to this position?

Help me understand more about it.

What appeals to you about this?

How does it feel to you?

What are the strengths of this position to you?

What does this touch in you?

What, if anything, do you feel uncomfortable with about this?

Here is what feels uncomfortable or disagreeable to me about what you think or what you believe. Can you help me with that?

When you find a certain person difficult, odds are that many people do. They have an abrasive style that puts off most people.

They rob your time and energy.

Their behavior is out of proportion to the problem.

Try to be direct with these people and not make excuses for their behavior or play games with it.

Remember our principles: each person has worth and dignity. We trust the democratic process. We support each other in their responsible search for truth and meaning, no matter how wrong they’re being.

You may want to try saying: “The Divinity in me salutes the Divinity in you.” or–“You may be one last spark we all need to light the whole world.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Meg Barnhouse

December 11, 2011

The fourth in a sermon series on the seven UU Principles. We agree to affirm and promote “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Some say that a search for truth is too private a focus for a person of faith, that the search needs instead to be for justice. Some say you can’t articulate the Truth anyway, and maybe there is no capital “T” Truth anyway.

Here we are at the season of holy days, when most religions originating in the northern hemisphere celebrate the return of the light. Hanukkah is the Jewish celebration of the light that burned in the temple longer than it could naturally have burned, a miracle of light in the darkness. Hinduism celebrates Diwali, the Pagans celebrate the Winter Solstice and Christianity celebrates the birth of the son at the same time that its Roman rulers were celebrating the birth of the sun. No one knows the historical truth of these stories, but we feel in our hearts that they have a different kind of truth, an inner truth that can teach us about ourselves, about how to live well, how to get along with the way the Universe seems to work, a truth of the spirit.

In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, there are only two declarative sentences that are translated “God is….” God is love. God is light. For those of you who have an interest in how the Divine is spoken of in scriptures, I’ll go into this just for a moment more. It doesn’t merely say “the Divine is loving,” or “the Divine is like light.” It says “the Divine is love.” “The Divine is light.” That feels more cellular to me than descriptive. The Christian scriptures which talk about Rabbi Jesus as if he were a special part of the Divine call him the Word. The Greek in the NT translated this way is the Greek word logos. Logos is a concept whose many layers of meaning include not only “word,” but more on the order of “reason,” “structure,” “organizing principle.” Scholars think the author of this part of the scripture was educated in the Greek manner but was born a Jew. In the Jewish scriptures, the word is a creative force, especially the word of God. It’s how they described the creation of the skies, the oceans and the earth. In this religion, the creation wasn’t a birth from a great mother or a star, it was done by words. So when the gospel writer says “in the beginning was the word,” and implies that Rabbi Jesus and that word are the same, he is trying to communicate that he wants people to worship the reason of God, the Creative power of God, the underlying principles by which everything in the Universe is laid out. In this same gospel, the spirit of God is called the “Spirit of Truth.” I know, it’s quite unusual to hear a Unitarian minister speak about God, Rabbi Jesus, and the Spirit It’s Christmas.

In my opinion, when we talk about truth, “capital T Truth,” we are talking about something that has this kind of generative power. We find truth and it changes things. It’s not just something to which we assent by nodding our heads sagely or clapping our hands and rejoicing that we have another bit of knowledge to add to our cocktail party conversation or our discussions with friends. In the view of these scriptures, love, light, reason, and the truth of things are ways of describing the divine.

Because our fourth principle says that we agree to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I’m going to tell you something true about the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke that you may not yet know. We’ll see how you feel about knowing it. We’ll see if it changes anything.

Did you know that a person steeped in Palestinian culture would understand the Christmas birth story very differently from the way I always have? I’m a bit chagrined to have found this out, and I’m wondering if I should keep quiet about it, because it will ruin a lovely story. You know how you hear the story of an event, a marriage, a journey and you think to yourself “That’s a great story. What really happened is more complicated, but if I say anything that will take away the sweet shape of its telling, that kicking punch line, the moving moral at the end.” The truth is still compelling to most of us, though. We want to know.

In churches all over the place the kids are dressed as shepherds, the angels have their wings on, the kids playing Mary and Joseph are ready, and this year’s baby Jesus has been chosen. The narrator tells the story about Joseph and Mary traveling from Galilee to Bethlehem for the census, and the couple goes from one inn to the next only to be told there is no room for them to stay. They end up in a stable with the animals, far from any other human contact, giving birth alone and far from home. Sermons are preached that go like this:

“Don’t be like the mean old inn-keeper who wouldn’t give Jesus a place. You make room in your life, your heart, etc. for the child.”

We do need to hear the message of making room in our lives for Spirit, and it’s a moving commentary about the comfortable and the safe people having a harder time making room for the Light than the outsiders and the lowly.

I started reading the lectures of Bible scholar Kenneth Bailey, an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament Studies. In addition to a doctorate in New Testament, he holds graduate degrees in Arabic language and literature as well as Systematic Theology. He spent forty years living and teaching New Testament in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. He is the author of books in English and in Arabic. He, in dialogue with Palestinian Christian Bible scholars, has illuminated the cultural context of the story behind our children’s pageants. Palestinian culture is much the same now as it was in the time of Jesus’ birth, so most Arab believers have always understood the nuances of the story.

The first thing you’ll want to know is that hospitality is the highest value of the Palestinian culture, and that has been so for thousands of years. Joseph returning to the city of his ancestors would never have stayed in a commercial inn, even if Bethlehem had been large enough to sustain one. He would have stayed with family. For a descendant of David to be turned away from staying with family in the City of David would have brought unthinkable shame on the whole town.

The word in the text translated as “inn” is the Greek word katalyma or kataluma. This is not a commercial building with rooms for travelers. When Luke meant to talk about a commercial inn, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), he used the Greek pandocheion. Kataluma is a guest space, typically one of the two rooms of a common village home.

“A simple Palestinian village home in the time of King David up until the Second World War had two rooms – one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey; Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.

“The days came for her to be delivered” the Gospel writer says. Nothing in the text says Mary was in labor as they were looking for a place. Mary would have spent the last part of her pregnancy in the home of whatever cousins they were visiting. There wasn’t room in the guest room, so the baby was laid in one of the mangers dug into the stone floor of the family room or made of wood and stood up on the family room floor, surrounded by animals, aunties. uncles and cousins.

Bailey has written a children’s Christmas pageant, if telling a more culturally accurate story is important to you. In the old story we are told to make room for strangers, to make room for the Divine. We are told the Divine is an outsider, despised and rejected from the beginning. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being selfish and uncaring.

In the version that is congruent with Palestinian culture, though, it seems the Divine comes to birth when you have finally found your people, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, animals, warm, noisy and crowded. There is no shame for me in the story, no scolding tale of humans failing yet again, just a family doing the best it can.

The stories we tell in our families and in our faith communities shape our experience. They signal to us who we are, where we come from, what we can expect. If I tell the story that I’m unlucky, I am more likely to notice the times when things don’t work out my way. If I grew up on the story that my people get their value from being smart, when I make a mistake or forget something, or when I fail, I feel cast out of the warm circle of belonging. If I go to a church where the story is told that a father killed his son so that the father could forgive us for our sins, and that this father loves me but would send me to eternal hellfire for making a mistake, I might feel like an overly soft parent if I don’t take my children’s mistakes out of their hide.

I like the story with less shame in it, with less loneliness surrounding the light at its birth. What changes might ripple out from the new story? I’m pondering this in my heart.

Some people who write about UUism say our principles are bland, or that they encourage us to be a private church where our search for truth is in danger of making us end up in a dusty room surrounded by books and CDs of spiritual teachings, improving ourselves and searching until we die, more wise but unworn by interaction with the world. I think if we just keep coming to church that won’t be a danger. Surrounded by folks who are in pain, in need, who are feeling hollow and restless or full and overflowing, surrounded by music and joy, as we find truth it will explode in us like a big packet of seeds, and some of them will begin to grow and make demands and create new shapes in our thinking and our doing. The magi, the wise men in the story teach us some things about how to do this. If this were my dream it would mean that you don’t search for truth alone, but in company. Sometimes you travel a long way. You orient yourself by the light you see and move toward it. Be prepared for trickery from the powers that be. They do not benefit from the truth. And you prepare yourself to find the truth by bringing your gifts to give to it. You don’t show up like a rude guest, empty handed. Bring the truth presents, because the truth cannot just be consumed, but you enter into a relationship with the truth that is ongoing.

One of the messages this season is that the truth is organic, personal, not just a concept that will help you win your next argument. It might change things, make demands, stir things up, ask things of you, send you on a quest, open you and scatter you like seeds.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

December 4, 2011

Why has Unitarianism always been such a shy denomination? Why do we define ourselves so easily with what we don’t believe rather than what we do? What does Harvard have to do with our history? Who is William Ellery Channing? What is the Baltimore Sermon?

The opening scene in the birth of American Unitarianism as an organized denomination took place in 1805 in the halls of Harvard University.

I love reading church history. We need a Donimick Dunne to write about it for Vanity Fair magazine. There is intrigue and the clash of personalities, vanity and ambition, integrity and the clear sense that what is obvious to one group seems dangerously misguided to another.

In 1803 the man who had been Hollis Professor of Divinity died, leaving the post open. Ministers were trained by the Divinity professor. There was no Divinity School before this. Ministers were trained during their college years. Many went on for further study in Germany. At Harvard, the Hollis Professor of Divinity had been a moderate Calvinist. If it strikes you that you aren’t completely clear any more about what Calvinism is, I’m about to remind you. John Calvin, in the 1550’s, revived theological ideas of Augustine of Hippo, who was an Ethiopian Bishop of the Christian church in the early 400’s.

“TULIP” is the mnemonic device by which students remember the Calvinist precepts:

Total depravity of human nature: the belief that humans are basically bent, and we choose to do destructive things more easily than we choose to do good. No amount of peace education will take the warring out of us, no amount of coddling or challenging in school or at home will take the crime and stupidity out. Mostly we are inclined to choose selfishly, and it is mainly the fear of punishment that keeps us between the lines. This has been the most difficult of my Presbyterian beliefs to give up. I find it a moderately cheerful and relaxing doctrine. If we’re bent to the extent that it’s easier to choose to do destructive things than creative and live-giving things, we’re pretty amazing whether or not we’ve built hospitals or cured cancer. We’re doing well to have gone this long without knocking over a gas station, we’re doing amazingly well to be pretty good people most of the time. Now I try to believe in the basic goodness of people, but it opens one up to more episodes of disappointment.

Unconditional election of the saints: God, for his glory, chose some from the beginning of time to be saved. It follows logically that there are some who are chosen to be damned to eternal punishment. This is the “double predestination” that they somewhat sheepishly teach in Calvinist seminaries. Predestination does NOT mean that everything is foreordained by God, fated, only that the end of things is foreordained. Free will can operate in-between. Your end is the only thing that is predestined. Over the centuries, many Christians shrank from the harshness of this doctrine. After Augustine proposed it in the 5th century, a church council met to declare it “anathema” which is Greek for really really icky and not true.

Limited atonement: Also following logically from the election of some to be saved: that Jesus died, then for those who are chosen to be saved, and NOT for those who weren’t chosen.

“Irresistible grace of God.” If God chooses you to be among the elect, the saved, you will be, bec ause God’s will is always done. If you get saved, it is because you were one of the ones chosen. Don’t worry that you are getting saved all for nought, acting right even though you are doomed to damnation. If you are saved, you are one of the elect. If you refuse to believe, if you don’t act right, if you don’t believe, it is because God’s grace isn’t reaching out to you. If it were reaching out to you, you would “get it.” Since you don’t get it, it’s because, sadly, God doesn’t care whether you get it or not.

Perseverance of the saints: Once you’re saved, you’re always saved. You may struggle, but God will not let you go.

That is traditional Calvinism. There were a hundred years in New England where that was the only brand of Christianity taught by the churches. That is what counted as orthodoxy, right belief. The society in New England was fairly homogeneous. All the Quakers were in PA. The Baptists were in RI. There were Catholics, some Quakers, some Baptists, but most of the citizens of MA were Congregational Calvinist.

Every town had a church whose minister was paid with tax money. This was called the Standing Order, and it had been in effect since the Puritans. Attacked now and then as unfair, it had gone through several versions. By 1805, ministers were paid with tax dollars only if their church didn’t make its budget, and if you were a Quaker, a Baptist or a Catholic, you didn’t have to pay the tax. The Congregational ministers, by this time, were varied in their theology. Some were strict Calvinists, others were more moderate Calvinists. Some had become Liberals. Liberals did not believe or preach the doctrines of Calvinism. Some of them did not believe that humans were born in Sin. They had begun to believe that God had created human beings basically good. They did not see God as demanding blood to forgive sins. Jesus was a savior who saves by his teachings, and by awakening the mind and heart, not by his death on the cross. William Ellery Channing, whose face is on the front of your bulletin, likened the doctrine of the crucifixion as to having a gallows at the center of the Universe, and that the spirit of such a god, “whose very acts of pardon were written in such blood, was terror, not love.

Enter the Bad Guy. There was a Calvinist named Jedediah Morse, who had moved to MA. He was amazed that the Liberal s and Calvinists got along together there so well. He did not approve of this ease, and felt that ministers should be asked to take a stand, to be counted and categorized by where they stood on the TULIP principles. Morse began hinting that the Liberals were tainted with the “Unitarianism that was being preached in England.” Those Unitarians, most notably Joseph Priestly, a scientist and minister whose most well-known discovery was Oxygen) were preaching that Jesus was just a man, possessing no divinity at all. Dr. Morse was troubled that the lack of controversy came from differences not being voiced or pointed out. People were being too nice, and it was getting in the way of knowing who was who. Who could be trusted to preach correct doctrine and who could not.

Before the controversy of 1805, most Liberal preachers doubting Calvinist doctrines did not preach these Liberal thoughts from the pulpit. To avoid controversy and keep peace in the congregations, they did what many Liberal preachers do today. They just preached around the Calvinist doctrines, choosing to preach instead about social responsibility, ethical behavior, and the loving kindness of God. The ministers in MA, as a rule, got along peacefully and well together. At the ministerial association meetings, they avoided speaking of their Liberal beliefs. No one really stood up to be categorized as strict, moderate or liberal. The ministers in the associ ation were in the habit of pulpit exchanges. A minister would be in his own pulpit about half the time. The other half he would preach at other churches. This provided relief to the congregations, who got to hear other voices and other points of view. It also provided relief to the ministers, who had to write fewer sermons, since they could repeat their better ones when they visited another pulpit. The Standing Order of tax-supported worship and the pulpit exchanges were what gave what happened at Harvard the importance it had.

The Hollis professor who died and left his Chair vacant was a moderate and well respected Calvinist. These things were written about him at the time: “In him, never were orthodoxy and charity more closely aligned. and “He was desirous of correcting his own errors, and was willing that others should enjoy their sentiments. “That is the kind of man who can get along with both liberals and conservatives. Those people are hard to find, like a treasure when you come across them.”

Here’s where academic politics come into the story. The President of Harvard procrastinated in suggesting a candidate because the most obvious candidate was a Liberal Boston minister named Henry Ware, and the President was a Calvinist. He didn’t want the controversy. The President just never brought up the subject of a replacement at meetings of the Harvard Corporation, and for two years the post was left vacant. By 1805, a candidate had to be found soon. The Boston papers were making trouble, even intimating that the money in the endowment for the Hollis fellowship was being used for purposes other than that for which it was given. Then that President exited the fray by dying.

A professor. named Eliphalet Pearson took over the acting Presidency, and was widely understood to want the permanent job very badly. In the writing of people who knew him at the time, he was characterized as an “ultra-Liberal before the President’s death, and a staunch Calvinist after. Hm. Why the switch? Some thought he was playing a part for political expediency. He was disliked by the students as a bully, and he tended to alienate even those who agreed with him.

EP and five other men made up the Corporation that governed the university. There was one other staunch Calvinist, two liberals, and two moderates. One of tho se was Judge Oliver Wendell, a liberal whose daughter was married to the conservative Calvinist Abel Holmes. (She was the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) The selection process began with each man in the Corporation writing down two names. The two Calvinists each wrote down names of two Calvinist candidates, the two Liberals each wrote down the names of two Liberal candidates, and the two Moderates each wrote down the names of one Calvinist candidate and one Liberal candidate. Within a few weeks the choice was narrowed to two: Jesse Appleton (a moderate Calvinist) and Henry Ware. The meetings were sour due to the personality clash between EP and Dr. John Eliot, a Liberal minister. It was said that EP’s personal attacks on Eliot were school boyish and mean.

Finally Judge Wendell proposed a compromise. How about Appleton for professor and Ware for President? No, they answered. HW was not suited for the position of President. How about Appleton for President and Ware for professor? NO from John Eliot, who was concerned that JA had an unpleasant and dissonant voice, unsuited to conducting public worship for the community, which as President he would have had to do. Appleton could have won in spite of Eliot’s no vote if EP, wanting the presidency for himself, had not voted against the compromise. Judge Wendell’s compromise failed. Finally, several months later, Henry Ware was elected by a margin of one vote. There was no candidate settled on for President.

The appointment then had to be okayed by the Board of Overseers of the Commonwealth of MA, made up of ministers and politicians. The Calvinists were understandably distressed that the professor of Divinity would not be orthodox. All the ministers that would come out of Harvard now would be taught by a a man they all thought of as a Unitarian.

The only point open for discussion was whether Ware fit the stipulations of the Hollis grant. Dr. Jedediah Morse, who was an ally of Eliphalet Pearson, saw this as an opportunity to show the people how sneaky and deceitful the Liberals were, not wanting to declare outright their position. Here was a chance to cross-examine and bring the Unitarianism to light. With 45 of the 47 members of the Board present, he attacked. What procedure had the Corporation followed to satisfy itself that Ware’s views were in accordance with the terms of Thomas Hollis’s gift. Hollis had written that the professor should be “a man of solid learning in divinity, of sound and orthodox principles. ORTHODOX, said Morse. SEE? This man doesn’t fit! He will not adhere to the Calvinist Westminster Confession. Hollis was not an Arminian (someone who believes that everyone can be saved) or a Unitarian, and he would NEVER have countenanced the election of a man who had departed from sound doctrine. The Liber als’ position was that Hollis, as a Baptist, had already departed from the Westminster Confession, whose doctrines the Baptists did not believe. Baptists believed in Jesus death being for everyone. Hollis himself had written that the only article of belief to be required of his professor should be that “the Bible was the only and most perfect rule for faith and practice, and that it should be interpreted “according to the best light that God shall give him. The election of Ware was no breach of trust, as Morse and Pearson were accusing, but was in keeping with Hollis’s intent. Ware was elected.

Within a matter of weeks, Morse had written and published a pamphlet complaining about the election of Ware. Then, months later, another Liberal was chosen for President. EP resigned and went to be head of Phillips Academy. Morse and Pearson founded Andover Theological Seminary, still turning out Calvinists today, and within three years, in response, Harvard Divinity School was founded.

The ministers in the Standing Order, at Morse’s urging, started organizing. Trinitarian orthodox congregations made their own associations, refusing to exchange pulpits with liberals, accusing them of “Unitarianism. Jedediah Morse in 1815, published a pamphlet called “American Unitarianism, accusing the Liberals of, well, believing what they actually did believe. The Standing Order broke down as the Congregational churches split into Orthodox Trinitarian and Liberal churches. The liberals increasingly felt pressure to defend themselves against charges of English Unitarianism, since they held a higher view of Jesus as savior than the English Unitarians. ” Unitarian did, however describe their view of the Oneness of God, and finally in 1819, in Baltimore, William Ellery Channing preached the sermon that was the manifesto of American Unitarianism. In it he asked why God would created us with free will and then punish us for using it. Why he, as a supposedly loving father, would choose some of his children to go to eternal damnation. Weren’t his listeners all better parents than that? Why should we be better parents than God?

Our task from the beginning has been to define ourselves other than as against Calvinism. We still struggle with that. Many UU’s are most comfortable saying what we DON’T believe. At the beginning of our movement, we were pushed into declaring ourselves, “outed” by the attacks of the opposition. We still have a legacy of hiding, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to be right out there with our faith.

Unitarian means we believe in the unity of God, that there is only one. Or, as some agnostic UU’s put it, “at MOST one God, and Universalist, meaning we believe everyone is saved. No one dies into eternal damnation. This, to me, is truly good news, and I would like to join William Ellery Channing in his passion to proclaim that truly good news.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 20, 2011

I’m going to talk about the devil this morning. We don’t do that too often in the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m also going to talk about Martha Stewart, because the holidays are here and we are going to be decorating and being with family and cooking and buying presents and traveling and it’s just a lot to deal with.

I’m fascinated by Martha Stewart. She was the idol of perfection for many straight women and gay men, and then she went to jail. I think she went to jail, not because she was a bad criminal, but because she was a woman with money and she was mean and arrogant. That’s just an opinion. Even the way she went to jail was perfect, though. She said “Enough delays, let’s just do it and get it over with,” and she went and held her head up and did some good for the other inmates and endured merciless mocking, and then went back to work cooking perfect things with her little house arrest bracelet on.

Long years ago, before I had children, I asked for her gardening book for Christmas, and I devoured it. The photographs of peonies and tomatoes were luminous. Even pictures of her garden in the winter, under snow, showed patterns of stone walls, brick walkways, hand built trellises, a gazebo, and an herb garden in a knot pattern. Month by month she instructed me about what to do, from starting seedlings to painting concrete urns. She taught me to prune trees and to make a poached pear dessert with the pears that came from my….. well, I didn’t actually do that. All I had in my garden were tomatoes, beans, and zinnias. I was a long way from pear trees. I wondered how she did it all. I felt clumsy and inadequate until I learned she sleeps four hours a night and has a staff of helpers standing by to follow her every instruction. The helpers even get into the pictures in the book once in a while.

I’m not here to trash Martha, I just want to look at how she affects some of us. I don’t know if there is an equivalent perfectly manly person. The guys on the Home and Garden and Do It Yourself networks might be close. Norm, on the Yankee Workshop, can use a miter saw, a router and a lathe. He can reproduce a 17th century French cupboard from looking at its photograph, but he’s a little goofy looking, and the way he says “remember, always wear eye protection is almost motherly. It makes me feel good. Back to Martha. Martha is fit and lovely and competent in all areas of making a home beautiful. She can make it perfect. And she will even step back from something she’s cooked or dipped in gold and make into a wreath and she will say, “Ah, that’s just perfect.”

Can I tell you the number of times I’ve stepped back from something I made and said “perfect” ? Zero. There is something in many of us that wants to be perfect. Some are more controlled by it than others. There are those who have it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 and those who only have it a 3 or a 6. It can fluctuate depending on our state of mind, tiredness, bank account, weight loss or gain, stress at work… It comes from the fear we all carry of not being good enough– that there is something secretly wrong with us that is not wrong with anyone else, a deficit we must cover and adjust for in all our interactions. The fear of not being good enough, the shame of feeling that you are lacking an important competency others naturally have can drive us to try to control everything around us, to make everything just right.

Perfectionism can work its destructive power on any of us. Some of us don’t have it in the areas of housekeeping or cooking or woodworking, but it affects us when it comes to our personal appearance, or the written work we turn out, or the way we handle our money.

Perfectionism can have a positive side. Good effects of perfectionism include high quality work, reliability, and attention to detail. Bad effects include stress and anxiety, along with an unwillingness to take on something you aren’t already good at. You lose your ability to take risks, to say something in a group that might add to the mix, but you don’t want to sound stupid. Being wrong is out of the question. A mistake would mean humiliation of an unbearable magnitude. Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination. You start a job late so when it’s done, you can believe that it would have been perfect, only you didn’t have enough time. Perfectionism can also lead us to be more critical of others than we should be. We expect perfection from them too, and we become superior or enraged when they don’t do things just right. In all its aspects, perfectionism leads to more fear and less love. We as spiritual folk are trying to go the other way: more love, less fear. More love, less fear in every aspect of our lives.

Martha makes some people feel clumsy and incompetent because they are comparing their insides to her outsides. We know how unruly, unkind, inadequate we are because we see ourselves inside and out. Someone who looks like they are doing it all right — mostly we only see their outside. We don’t know what goes on with them in private, or internally. We compare our insides to their outsides, and we come up short.

Martha Stewart is not the problem here, it’s the devil. Let me explain. “Satan” in the Hebrew means “the accuser.” When I say it’s the devil who is the problem I’m talking about that voice inside most of us that whispers “You are not quite adequate. You’re a weak specimen, a broken reed, a slight disappointment to your mother and father. You have a shameful laziness, and you might be a touch stupid.” Do you know that accusing voice? That is the voice that fuels the fires of perfectionism. Some perfectionists look driven and capable. Others don’t. Lots of people who are perfectionists have given up. They act like they don’t care about things, like they will never be any good. They feel discouraged and depressed. They have grown up on maxims like “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” This is true, of course. It is a good thing to try to do things well. It is also true that “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”

Let me tell you about my mama’s violin. She practiced her violin every morning of the world. I always woke up to scratchy scales and finger exercises. She never got any better, really, but she sat in the back row of the Main Line Symphony and had a great time playing the music. It was worth doing for her. And worth doing badly. All-or-nothing thinking is one of the ways perfectionism damages us. Either we look fine or we’re a total slob, an unmade bed of a human being. Either we played our instrument at the top of our form and caught fire with inspiration or we bombed. Our home is in perfect order or it’s a wreck, either we had a calm, kind, and imaginative time with our families over the holidays or it was a disaster. There is little in between for a perfectionist.

I used to have a cartoon in my office with Glinda the good witch of the North, lying on her psychiatrist’s couch, and she’s saying “It got to be too much — You give someone a heart, you give someone else a brain, and people start calling at all hours. Finally I realized, ‘I don’t have to be everything to everyone. ” I can just be the ‘good-enough witch.'” One way to counter perfectionism is to have as your goal to be a good enough parent, a good enough spouse, a good enough worker, a good enough crusader for social justice. Be more compassionate toward yourself and others, more friendly.

What I want to say here this morning is that “the devil” is the spirit of fear that drives us into rigidity and anxiety, which saps our good will and clouds our compassion. The spirit of Love is where our allegiance lies as good people, spiritual people, people who want to make the world better place. Love is always in dialogue with fear in our souls and bodies and minds. So when perfectionism is sharpening its claws in you, take some deep breaths, stop comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, remind yourself to be a good enough witch, and wonder — what would this whole situation be like if I had more love.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 11, 2011

How do you prepare for hard times? How do you protect your life against times when the rain dries up and the wind blows hard and everything is brittle and easily broken? When nourishment is hard to find and you aren’t sure you can face what’s coming next? If you are in that situation literally, what you need is to have a good deep well, a well that reaches way down to where there is nearly always water. In September we had a water ceremony, where we mingled our lives together by pouring water into the common bowls, talking about the places that fed our souls. Water is the basis for all life. Everything that breathes is largely made of water and needs water to live. The poet Bryon says: “Til taught by pain, [we] really know not what good water is worth.” Don Juan

Many of us are like that in our lives. Those things that sustain us – we don’t know what they are worth until we are in a dry spell. We need connections with people, friends, people who know not only our name but what moves us, what hurts us, what we love. Being here in this church community is a way of making connections, but Sunday morning is a time when having a conversation of any depth is hard. (Rabbi story)

One of the good opportunities here for building deep connections with people is our small group program – we call them Chalice Circles. In our Chalice Circles we talk together with 4-12 other people about big questions like “What is an example of grace in your life? When have you experienced a heartfelt truth, and how did it change your life? What about your daily work do you find nourishing?

What is the meaning of life? Why do we need religion? Why evil? How do we know what we know? How can we face death? Why do we suffer? What does it mean to be human?” The lessons have a structure for the purposes of sustainability and fairness. The format give us a way of structuring our interactions so that all of us, the quiet ones as well as the verbally quick, may be heard and made to feel a part of the whole. There is an opening reading. This is one from the lesson on Listening:

I like to talk with you.

I like the way I feel

when you are listening

as if we were exploring

something in ourselves:

The plunge into a silence

and how you come up with words

I tried to find:

The otherness about us which makes

conversation possible.

When I talk with you,

the give turns into take

and borrow into lend.

Now and then, a phrase from you

will kindle like a shooting star;

the mornings in you rouse me from a sleep.

I like the babble and the banter when I greet you

at the door,

and when the room is filled with guests,

your quiet look,

as if there were a secret between us

of which nobody knows.

– from Raymond Baughan

After the opening reading, everyone briefly checks in, saying a few words about how they are that week. Then a bowl is passed around with lots of slips of paper with readings on them having to do with the topic of that lesson: forgiveness, hands, failure, hope, patriotism, views of God. After they are read, there are a few questions posed in the lesson. Participants choose one question or a few questions and talk about them in a time of sharing. Everyone gets a chance to talk, and no one interrupts or talks back to you or even asks you a question. When you are through, they say “thank you.” That helps shy people feel safer sometimes. When everyone is through with what they wanted to say about the questions, there is a time of silence, where people just breathe together for a moment or two. Then the discussion starts, when you can comment on what someone said, ask questions, say what came to your mind as they were speaking. There is a covenant of respectful behavior that is followed. Each group works out a covenant of how they want to be together, so there is kindness in the discussion, support, so no one person dominates the group. A facilitator is there to remind people of that, to hold the covenants in mind like a container for the group. When the discussion is done, there is a check-out time. We usually say “How do you want us to hold you in mind this month?” It’s a way of getting to know and trust a few people you may never have otherwise had in your life. Another bonding experience is the service the covenant groups promise to perform together. One group I remember organized the library at the end of the hall, in room #6. Another group cleaned the kitchen together after their meetings.

In order not to form cliques, the groups hold an empty place in each circle to keep attention on the fact that there are always more people who may want to be there, and that the groups will grow and change. The chair is the stranger in our midst, the challenge of opening in hospitality, of not pulling the ladder up after you when you get up into the clubhouse.

Some of the groups will be long-lived and strong. Others will be short-lived. We would like to know what makes a group strong and fine. We read from other people’s experience that it is keeping the covenants. We will see from our own experience, though.

In the UU tradition, we believe in ongoing revelation. Everything that is knowable about the world, about the human being, about the truth, about the Spirit, about ourselves, about one another, is out there, still to be found out, still to be revealed. We believe that there is tremendous wisdom and beauty in the scriptures of the great religions of the world, but we believe the truth is still coming in, that it can evolve, that the story of each of our lives and the story of our lives together are as sacred as the story of the people of Israel or India. So the story of your life, the story of our lives together, is sacred scripture.

Dr. Thandeka, who teaches theology and culture at a UU seminary in Chicago called Meadville Lombard, says that it is in small groups that we practice the central ritual of our faith, the sacred act of being in right relationship with one another. She says that the power of people coming together to share their stories, to talk about ideas, to accomplish a service for others, that power is the central authority of our faith. I think that power is the water we use to quench our thirsty lives, and to quench the thirst in one another for being heard and known. In doing that, we help to put the world back together.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

November 6, 2011

You can add up the parts

but you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march,

there is no drum

Every heart, every heart

to love will come

but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen Anthem

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

One of the things you will hear over and over again from this pulpit is that church is for proclaiming liberty to the captives and setting the prisoners free. One of the things that keeps us prisoner is the idea of perfection, specifically that there can be perfect relationships, that if mistakes have been made, a relationship is somehow compromised, scarred, less than it once could have been. Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection, so we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks in our relationships? How do we live with the cracks in our experience of church? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.

If we do not practice forgiveness, our scars can wind around us like those monstrous vines in fairy tales, our resentments can hold us hostage. Oh we get to watch movies while we’re held hostage, though. The movie plays over and over, a bit different every time. We replay the wrongs done to us while waiting for an apology.

Booker T Washington, organizer and first president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had a lifelong motto: “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him”

When I talk about wrongs done, some people will think about a fight they have had with a sibling or a friend, others will think of the boss who is making their lives hell and still others brace themselves, wondering if I am going to say they have to forgive and forget incest or other abuse. What I want to ask is that you listen this morning as you are able, take what speaks to you and let the rest go. You are the only one who can say where forgiveness is needed between you and another, between you and yourself, or between you and God. Some people live feeling that God hasn’t forgiven them, and some people live as if they have not forgiven God. Why do we need to talk about forgiveness? Forgiveness is related to both emotional, physical and institutional healing. Every religion of the world says it’s important. Feeling you have been wronged is not good for you. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. It may be a collection of small grudges and resentments or it may be rage, but if the anger is not bearing good fruit for you in terms of moving you out of hurtful situations, protecting you from hurtful people, energizing you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. We may talk more about anger another Sunday.

Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is dangerous, the root of almost all wicked behavior. Remember the movie we watch over and over while our resentments hold us hostage? In it, we articulately explain our point of view with just the right amount of calm and just the right edge. The end is the best part. At the end of the movie we watch over and over, the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. They say. “How wrong I was!!! You were right and I was wrong. What can I do to make it up to you?” We exercise our arguments, we polish our grudges. We repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moment’s notice; we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. It feels good to be a righteous victim. We go to friends and get as many people as we can to hear our story. It is soul satisfying to hear them say “Oh NO she did not say that!”

There is nothing wrong with this if we do it in good faith. We are trying to validate our perceptions “Would this make you mad? Is this person being a jerk or is it me?” I have to say there is a lot to learn about yourself from watching to whom you go to tell your story. Some people are going to be on your side no matter what. Others will tell you if you are being a jerk. We go to the people we think will tell us what we are ready to hear. Many people are completely justified in feeling like a righteous victim. It’s an archetypal role, an ancient one, and it may be appropriate for a time, but we have to watch out for it, as we do all well-defined roles, that we do not start sleep-walking, letting it make our choices for us. Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive, looking at the stiffening righteousness. The harm is that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. The harm is that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced, ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers. You get to be the right one. Being RIGHT is a BIG part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely. And still be hurt by harboring anger against the person who hurt you. The Course in Miracles, which some of you have studied, says “You can be right or you can be happy.”

One way to let go of someone and get your strength back is the resentment prayer. Ask for/wish for them everything you want for yourself. You don’t have to mean it. Try it for fourteen days straight. It’s amazingly powerful magic, and I’m not sure exactly how it works. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working/playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.

1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.

2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation.

3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.

4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. Make a ritual to mark the event.

Several years ago I read a book called “Lovingkindness,” which expands on many of the things about which the Dalai Lama writes. The author says the first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself.

Say:

May I be free from danger.

May I be physically happy

May I be mentally happy

May I have ease of well-being.

Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself.