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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 18, 2013

In this book, a young Indian boy is shipwrecked, and ends up in a small lifeboat with a tiger. What might the tiger be in his life? What might it be in ours?

Life of Pi is a rich story, gorged with beauty, horrific suffering, philosophical pondering, compelling mysteries, intellectual challenge. The story, told to the writer by the adult Pi in his home in Canada, is about a sixteen year old boy named after a public swimming pool in France, Piscine Molitor Patel. Tormented by classmates who call him “pissing,” he takes the nickname Pi, “And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.”

Pi is a religious Hindu boy, but while the family is on vacation in the hill country, he is drawn to a Christian chapel. The priest is there, and they have conversations. Pi is outraged at how un god-like Jesus is, from his doubts to his hunger to his suffering to actually consenting to die. When he asks the priest why a god would do that, the priest answers “love.” After three days of talking, Pi asks to be a Christian, and the priest says “you already are, in your heart.”

A year later, in his hometown, he meets a Muslim baker, a Sufi mystic who speaks, enraptured, about “The Beloved.” Pi begins to study the Koran with him and becomes a Muslim. On his next birthday he tells his parents he wants a Muslim prayer rug and he wants to be baptized as a Christian. Both of them are modem Indians, secular and sensible. They get him a prayer rug but they don’t like it. On a walk one day, the whole family is confronted by the Sufi teacher, a Christian priest and the Hindu pandit.

“Your son has gone Muslim” he says.

“He is a good Christian boy,” the priest says. “We hope to have him in our choir soon.”

“You are mistaken. He’s a good Muslim boy. He comes without fail to Friday prayers, and his knowledge of the Holy Qu’ran is coming along nicely.” They have a vigorous debate there in the street in front of Pi’s horrified parents. This, he says, was his introduction to interfaith dialogue.

“He must choose,” they conclude.

“But I just want to love God,” Pi says. He tells a story about Lord Krishna dancing with the milkmaids; he makes himself so abundant that he can dance with each of them at the same time. As soon as one imagines she is his only partner, though, he vanishes. His parents allow him to be all three.

One of his school teachers, Mr. Kumar, is an atheist. Pi recognizes him with respect and calls him a brother believer. “Like me,” he says, “they go as far as reason will carry them — and then they leap. ” The agnostics are the ones he cannot relate to. “Doubt is useful or a while …. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a mode of transportation. “

Pi describes his preferred stance in the world as “an intellect confounded, and yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose. Why look at life with a “dry, yeastless factuality. – God is the better story.” Why not love God? It’s a better story.

Pi’s family owns a zoo. He grows up with a pride oflions for his alarm clock, with peacocks, tigers and monkeys all around. He learns how dangerous their wildness is, how much animals are creatures of habit and routine, territory, and hierarchy. This knowledge is life-saving later on.

They decide to sell the zoo to a Canadian company, pack up all the animals and take a Japanese freighter toward Canada. One night in the middle of the Pacific, the ship sinks in a storm. Fast. Pi is on a life boat. On it with him are a zebra, who has broken its leg leaping onto the boat, an orangutan, a hyena and an adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker who climbs into the boat from the sea during the storm. Over the next several chapters the hyena eats the zebra and the orangutan. The tiger kills the hyena.

Pi needs to get rid of the tiger, but how? Maybe he could just not feed the tiger, and just outlive him? No. A hungry tiger would be worse to have in the boat with you. Pi spends the night in a panic, his body shaking. “Fear is life’s only true opponent.” He says,” Only fear can defeat life.”

p.134 “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. As a result I perked up and felt much better. We see that in sports all the time, don’t we? The tennis challenger starts strong but soon loses confidence in his playing. The champion racks up the games. But in the final set, when the challenger has nothing left to lose, he becomes relaxed again, insouciant, daring. Suddenly he’s playing like the devil and the champion must work hard to get those last points. So it was with me.”

The next morning it comes to him. He must tame the tiger. That’s the only plan that will work. “It was not a question of him or me, but him and me.”

“But there’s more to it. I will come clean. I will tell you a secret. Part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. “

Establishing Alpha-Omega relationships with major lifeboat pests, “he says, “is not covered in the life boat survival manual. “

Pi sets about training the tiger, marking territory, using the tiger’s weak sea legs to make him seasick while Pi blows on a whistle, making the tiger associate feeling weak and sick with Pi’s mighty roaring. Pi feeds Richard Parker and gathers fresh water for him. They go blind together from the lack of good food. Nearly dead, they wash up on the shore of Mexico together, whereupon the tiger bounds off into the jungle without a backward glance, leaving Pi to Mexican medical personnel and officials from the Japanese shipping line.

He tells two officials from the shipping line the amazing stories of his seven months in the boat. They say it’s hard to believe that he was in the boat with a full grown tiger for seven months and lived.

We’re just being reasonable,” they say.

Pi replies, “So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

The Japanese shipping officials insist Pi tell them “what really happened.” He insists that they just want another story. As soon as you put the experience of a life into language it becomes a story. Do they just want a story without animals?

Yes, without animals, they say.

He tells a horrific story where his mother, a brutish chef, a Taiwanese sailor and he are in the life boat. After a few days the chef kills the sailor, then Pi’s mother. Pi kills the chef and is alone in the boat.

After telling both stories, he asks the Japanese officials of the shipping company which was the better story. The one with the animals, they answered. Pi said “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

They draw the parallels. If the zebra is the sailor, the awful chef is the hyena, the orangutan must be Pi’s mother. Then Pi himself is the tiger.

I think life is at times like being shipwrecked. We drift along for a time, powerless.

There is a tiger in the boat. Maybe it’s our wild side, our need to mess things up, our fear, our addiction. Maybe the tiger in the boat is loneliness, the sense of being invisible. Maybe anger is what threatens to destroy you, yet if you kill it, you also kill a piece of yourself that keeps you alive.

So you drift, and from the story of Pi we see someone drifting, filled with a sense of belonging to the Divine, released by letting go and believing he will be okay, having the will to live until he dies, feeling that will be okay too.

How is this a story of Unitarian Universalist spirituality? We are spiritually free to be Muslim, Christian and Hindu, even though others may say we have to choose. Weare free to be atheists or to tell our own story of what it is that we worship. Anyone who puts an experience with Mystery into words – really, any experience into words— is telling a story. Why not choose the best story for you? The one that holds the most layers of truth? Your idea of God may be of a powerful being who holds the whole universe in her hand, or of a suffering loving being who understands what it is to be human, who even holds the experience of real death in his heart. Your idea may be of one flame from which all other candles are lit. Your idea may be of a force of love or truth or justice that flows through the world, or for you, the earth itself is alive and that is what makes your soul blossom like a rose and gives you the power to tame the tiger.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 11, 2013

So much of UU conversation has been about what we don’t believe. Let’s talk about one thing handed down to us by Emerson and the Transcendentalists – that there is one soul for all things.

I remember a class in Seminary where I sat stunned as the professor laid out my whole hard-won system of beliefs on the blackboard, listing the tenets of Mystical Pietism. I thought I had put that thing together over years of high school and college, late-night conversations, wrestling with what I’d been taught as a child, setting some of it aside, honing other pieces of it until they fit what I could live with, what made sense to me. Later, after most of that had fallen apart and I had walked out of its wreckage into what felt like a freer, more truthful philosophy, I was shocked again to read the tenets of Transcendentalism and find that there, laid out, was a list of my whole hard-won system of beliefs. Again.

I’ll read you the list in a few minutes, and you can see whether you are Unitarian Universalist in the Emersonian tradition. First let me tell you a little bit about him. His father was a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was 8. Several of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, and two more brothers died of tuberculosis as young men. He fell in love with a very young woman, Ellen Tucker, whom he met in Concord MA on Christmas Day in 1827. They married two years later. He was 27 and she was 18. His mother moved to Boston with them so she could take care of Ellen, who was already sick with TB. Emerson was working as a minister, and his faith took one more blow when Ellen died, at 20. He wrote in his journal a year later that he had gone to visit Ellen at her grave and opened the coffin. She was due to inherit a large sum of money when she turned 21, but never made it that far. Waldo (as he preferred to be called) sued the family and was awarded her portion of the inheritance, which gave him an income equivalent to the one he was paid yearly as a minister.

He traveled, wrote, read, and supported his friends who gathered around Concord in what became almost a “genius cluster,” with the Alcotts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller visiting, walking with him, talking intensely about the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, just coming into the American consciousness, about the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Their association enriched all of them. He married another woman named Lydia, whom he renamed Lydian, and she took care of everyone.

Too much had happened for Waldo to be comfortable believing in the traditional picture of a God who was a personality, in charge of everything. He and the skeptics around him struggled with the ageold conundrum: if God is God, he is not good. If he is good, he is not God.

If the belief that God was a personality, and that this personality was all-powerful was the root of the problem set before him by the skeptics, then perhaps it would be good to let go of that view of God. What do you go on? Not just scripture. There were lots of scriptures from lots of religions – how do you claim one is the truth? The Christian scriptures were being used to justify slavery and to keep women from taking their place beside men as their equals.

Do you go on other people’s instructions to you? No. You had to attend to your own experiences. Personal experience was something he felt you had to trust – your experiences and those of others.

Why are there some moments in life glow with meaning and with power? Some conversations have a depth and quality others do not, some people who seemed to be centered in something that others know nothing about. How do most people know what’s right and wrong, and why do we feel bad when we do something wrong? What can explain the feeling about the Divine that humans have in every time and culture? What feels true? What felt true to Waldo about God was that God was immanent, meaning nearby in life. “As close to me as my jugular vein,” as the Koran says. It made sense to him that God was in the world, in Nature, and that you could learn about the Divine by learning about Nature. He discounted the miracles in the scriptures, saying they had nothing to do with the blowing clover or the falling rain, that they were “Monster,” unnatural, and unworthy of the Divinity.

Emerson said a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love

Emerson was not alone in describing a new way to see God. Samuel Reed, another minister of that time in Boston, a huge influence on Emerson, called for a religion that sees God in everything.

Emerson wrote in the mid-1800’s that each person makes her own religion, his own God. What is God? “The most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection.” He called this the “oversoul.”

Emerson opened up the thinking of his time to the possibility that there is only one Soul, the soul of all things. That is God. Soul is in all things, in us, and the One soul makes itself manifest through our lives, our actions, our voices when they are creative, when they are useful, when they advance the cause of life and of love, truth and beauty. Could this be a way to think about a Higher Power for those of us who feel a need to think that way? Some among us are satisfied with the God or power or force they don’t believe in, or the one they do believe in. Others want to talk about it, not to make creeds or pronouncements, but to honor experiences we have had where we were loved or guided or lifted by something outside of ourselves. What do we call it? How do we talk about it without having to submit to doctrines and oppressive authority? The Oversoul, the One, the Source, maybe those are some ways for us to name this unnamable thing that we feel. See if this list captures some of your beliefs.

Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism:

This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared by many of them.

• The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit

• Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul or life force. (God).

• This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere, a deep power in which we exist.

• The divine can be found in both nature and human nature

• Jesus also had part of the Oversoul – so he was divine as everyone is divine –

• The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one.

• More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life – Emerson: “the one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”

• Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the Oversoul.

• Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. “Give me one world at a time.” – Thoreau

• Evil is merely an absence of good and not a force in its own right. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark.

• One must have faith in intuition and experience, for no church or creed can communicate truth.

• The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship, an interconnectedness between all things.

Are you a Transcendentalist? Do you desire to respect the Divine element in yourself, others and the rest of Nature? Might you believe that transformation comes through expanding our awareness of the Divine in all aspects of your life? Does it make sense to you that to be truly human, we need to live in community with others? I think I’m a Transcendentalist, which places me squarely in the middle of Unitarian Universalist tradition. If you are a Christian, you are squarely in the middle of UU tradition as well. If you are more of a Humanist, you are also squarely in the middle of UU tradition. The stream of thought, yearning, conversation and action in which we stand is a very large one. It feels good to have so much gone before and imagine all of those who will come after us in this faith.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 4, 2013

We’re afraid of all the wrong things.

Sermon

In October of second grade we lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. The teachers at the Mulberry Street Elementary School drill us on getting under our desks, crouching down on our knees, putting our hands over our heads. That was how we were to weather a nuclear missile attack. I was scared. At night I would listen in fear to every plane that flew overhead. I waited for the engines to sputter like they did in the movies when a plane dropped a bomb. I waited for the whistling sound of the bomb falling on Statesville, NC. Sometimes I pictured the bottom land where I rode horses burned and black. I saw myself wandering the streets not able to find my mama or my sister. Even then I knew dying wasn’t the worst of it. Children spend a lot of time being scared.

I was scared of bees, too. I’ve spoken about the time I opened the door of my mother’s station wagon while she was on the highway, ready to jump out because there was a bee buzzing against the window by my face.

Fear can serve a purpose – it moves us out of situations that might be dangerous. It spurs us to protect ourselves, keep deadlines, use discipline in our behavior. It can make us stupid, though. “Fear is the mind-killer,” goes the quotation from Frank Herbert’s Dune. ” rest of the quote: ” I must not fear. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Some people like to be scared. Horror movies where scary men threaten beautiful women. Those movies wouldn’t work if the scary guy was threatening middle aged men, or ordinary looking people, or dogs. I’m not sure why we love to see beautiful people screaming. The news. Awful things happen. Horrors occur. Goodness happens, and humans help one another, but many factors go in to what stories are chosen for the news. I majored in political science, more particularly in the media at Duke, and we learned that one of journalism’s credos is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Good news just doesn’t sell papers, or generate clicks on the web site. Stations in the northeast run stories about how awful things are in the Southeast. Stations in the south run stories about how awful things are in the northern cities. Stories are most likely to be covered if the news people are there already, which is why the coasts figure prominently. News people love stories about themselves, so when the President doesn’t let the photographers follow him onto the golf course, you will have a couple of days worth of stories about that.

The stock central character in a lot of scary news stories is the black man. You see men of color being perp walked into the police station, you see their mug shots. When white collar criminals bring the world’s economy to the brink of collapse, none of them is photographed with their wrists cuffed, none of them is shown trying to escape police. Sometimes they are not prosecuted at all. This is a complex issue, but I want to point out how dangerous it is for black men, who can’t take a run at night, who get pulled out of their cars and rousted even a few days ago when their car is a police-issue black SUV and they are a New York City Police Chief, and who are in danger of being shot by law enforcement. The incident occurred as the NYPD is under fire for record numbers of pedestrians being stopped and frisked, the majority of them black or Hispanic. Some 145,098 people were stopped by the NYPD in the first quarter of this year.

Now we black men and we families of black men have to be worried that we will be shot by neighborhood watch people with guns. Our stereotypes can be deadly.

Another scary character is “the government.” I know a woman who says the government has wave machines that send waves over crowded places to lower the electromagnetic vibrations of the people so they will be angrier, more fearful, thus more easily controlled. She’s very nice, but that’s nuts. No government I’ve known has been that sneaky or well organized. Some people say that the media are keeping us scared so we won’t look at the corporate culture that eats up our family lives by making us work harder and harder, our culture that plagues middle class families with consumer debt because our minds are controlled to work more, work more, to buy more, buy more. I think that is giving the media too much credit for organization and malice.

People make money on our fears of someone breaking into our houses, even though we are much more likely to be hurt by the other people locked into those houses with us. They make money on our fear of identity theft, and it happens, but we’re more likely to ruin our own credit and good name than someone else is.

All of us have fears. Some of them serve their purpose, but some of them get stuck, and they are changing our chemistry, shortening our lives without doing us any good. Sometimes they make the thing we’re scared of worse. I raised two children on not very much money, so I got scared of bills. I just stopped opening them. That did not make them go away. In fact, that fear of opening mail cost me money.

Some practical suggestions on how to be brave. Some coaches suggest you keep an imaginary room in your mind where you keep outfits that will help you. You go in there and put on the accountant’s suit, and do your bills. You put on the fencer’s uniform and mask and go into the business meeting. You put on your wizard’s robes and sit down to write your book.

A less fanciful suggestion is made by (oddly) Merlin, in The Once and Future King. You heard me tell the children. Learn more about it. If you get a bad diagnosis, learn all you can about it. If you have to go through bankruptcy, learn all you can about it. If you are afraid of a certain kind of people, learn what you can about some individuals in that group. Some people are scary, but you can’t tell the scary ones by what group they’re in.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Many people are afraid of terrorists in our country, and we should definitely defend ourselves against terrorism, but when you learn a little about it, you learn that:

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by terrorists: 3.

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by toddlers: 5.

We are scared of our children being gunned down at school, or being killed in a terrorist attack. Horribly, it happens. But learn more. We lose 5 children a day in the US in abuse-related deaths. We are scared to walk at night in our neighborhoods, scared to hike in the woods alone. We are scared to die by the hand of someone breaking into our home and murdering us.

We are scared to be killed by ricin or anthrax. So know this: We will be more likely be killed by driving too fast or eating too much fat or sitting on the couch night after night, resolving to exercise rather than actually exercising.

Here is what I am thinking. We’re scared of the wrong things. We lock our car doors and take our kids home to where the guns are. We tell them all about being wary of strangers, and we forget to tell them about protecting themselves from uncles and cousins. We don’t let our neighbors into our lives and shut ourselves off so there is no one to turn to when we’re in trouble. We are scared of people who are different from us, we don’t want to know them, we worry that they want to rob or rape us, we’re also worried that lunging to lock the car door will hurt their feelings.

Isolation is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us alone. Ignorance is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us at home, associating only with folks of our same nationality, class and color. Rigidity is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us from bending, growing, changing in a supple way. Missing life is greatly to be feared, but our fears lock us down into a narrowness of experience that sucks the marrow from our bones and leaves us dried up husks in nice brick homes with satisfactory retirement funds. Looking like a fool is greatly to be feared, but our fears make us keep silent when we should speak up and talk to much when we should be quiet. Yeah, we are scared of all the wrong things.

If you find yourself afraid of something, get to know it. check out its reality. Do some research.

Get to know yourself. Don’t ignore the violence in your own heart. Or in your own home.

Take the anti-racism course here in the fall. Increase your cultural competency. Practice seeing individuals rather than members of a group.

Encourage people not to be afraid. Even being afraid of Cancer doesn’t help. Many people overestimate their odds of getting it, and studies show that the greater a person’s fear is, the less likely they are to go to the doctor for timely diagnosis and treatment..

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already. If you want a way to do it, talk to me or to Jack, our Social Concerns chair, and we will try to set you up. Refuse to be afraid. Refuse to be afraid.

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already Refuse to stay afraid. Refuse to stay afraid.

Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.

All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.

Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.

Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then the danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.

You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris First.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 16, 2013

The sermon topic is “salvation.” What does the word mean? Is it something we want? How do we get it? We have yielded the ground on words like this to the more traditionally religious communities, but we really can go there. It will be okay.

Last fall this church held an auction, and one of my contributions was that people could bid to request a certain topic for a sermon. One person won the bid, and then another person paid that as well for his request. “God the Huntress” was one “auction sermon,” and I preached that last February. This one is “Salvation.” What would a UU view of salvation be?

Most sermons start with questions. What does “salvation” mean? What are the views of the religions in which Unitarian Universalism has its roots? Are we being saved from something? Saved for something? Are we broken, in need of some kind of fixing or are we good the way we are?

I’ll start with the word. When it is translated from the Hebrew, the language of the Jewish scriptures, it has the connotation “to keep alive,” “to redeem,” “to deliver.” In Greek, the language of the Christian scriptures, its root is “sozo” which means to save, to rescue, to deliver, to protect. “Sozo” is also translated in the New Testament with the words to heal, preserve, save, do well, and to make whole.

There is a range of meanings in the word “salvation,” from being delivered from something, kept safe, rescued, or healed. It has to do with the endpoint of the soul, with a state of being that is clean and free and peaceful.

Even though the word from the auction question comes out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, I would like to range farther afield into a more ancient religion to see what it was its adherents were trying for. I suppose the most ancient religions are the earth-based ones that Christian scholars call “fertility cults.” You find yourself in this great world and you have to feed your children, which are formed somewhat miraculously inside your bodies. Well, the female ones, anyway. Of course, matters of how to stay alive will be at the forefront of your thinking. Sometimes the berries are thick and sometimes they don’t grow. Sometimes your children are healthy and other times they are in trouble. Is it something you did? Can you do the things that will make everything good? Are there spirits or gods involved who want certain things? Do they need to be reminded to make things grow? Do they need to be appeased to make your childbirth go well, to give the hunters luck with the hunt? In this system, keeping the gods awake and appeased so that things happen well would be what was most desired. Salvation would have to do with being in favor with the earth and the sky so that your life is sweet and your children live.

In the middle east, Judaism was stirring between two and three thousand years BCE. Its main teaching was that there was one God, and that the best way to look at things was not as an endless cycle, the view of earth-based religion, but as a timeline with a beginning, a middle and an end. The primary relationship was not between the people and the Earth, it was between the people and the God. A person was called to be righteous, doing what the God said to do, but as the religion developed though the time of slaver, through the Exodus from Egypt, and the time as the people of Israel, Salvation was seen, not as an individual matter as much as it was that the people of Israel were to be redeemed as a whole. What redemption meant in that context was that they were free from oppressive rule, that they were keeping the Torah, the commandments, living righteously and pleasing to God. In the Jewish Scriptures, you are righteous even when you fall. The righteous person can sin, can fall, can disobey, but the righteous get up again and keep their faces turned toward God. Hope continues for the salvation of the people, and for the healing of the world.

In the earliest Hindu Scriptures, the Vedas, which come from about the time of the Exodus, the beginning of the Jews as a people, the main concern is for doing things in the right ways that would appease the gods so life would be good. Later on, in the Upanishads, the concern becomes more about how to attain eternal peace, how to get enlightenment. The earliest Upanishads were being written around the time that Buddhism was beginning, around 500 BCE. Both Hinduism at that time, and the new offshoot, Buddhism, were concerned less with how to make sacrifices to the gods and more about how to understand reality and the self in order to let go of the rollercoaster of happiness and suffering. How to come into peace. That peace would be the understanding of salvation from the Hindu and Buddhist point of view (and I want you to know I am painting with a very broad brush). Salvation is getting to the point where you are no longer weighed down by either good karma or bad karma. Karma is the energy generated by actions. You are born the last time and then escape from the endless wheel of rebirth. Some sects of Buddhism believe that you can be helped along the way by borrowing some of the good karma of the saints, or bodhisattvas. Others teach that you are on your own, doing good deeds to build merit for a better reincarnation each lifetime until you achieve release from the endless round of rebirth is salvation.

For most segments of Christianity, salvation means being rescued from the punishment due you for your individual sins. This is the system of thought I know the most about, having spent my childhood in a Christian family and studying for the ministry for three years at Princeton Seminary. Some Christianities teach that humans are born in sin. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians believe this. The action of God is necessary to lift you into salvation, which basically means you get to go to a place called Heaven when you die. Methodists believe that humans are born good, and that they can choose to do good or bad things. Even if you aren’t born in sin, you still choose to do bad things, and you need forgiveness. The teaching of most Christianities is that salvation comes from understanding that the death of Jesus the savior atones for your sins, as he took our punishment on himself to save us. So your sins are paid for. Forgiven. Paid for?

My father is a Presbyterian minister who has studied the Bible long enough to come to believe in Universal salvation. That God doesn’t send anyone to hell. That makes him a Universalist. He says “look, your sins can’t be both forgiven and paid for. If I owe you ten thousand dollars, and she pays you on my behalf, then my debt is paid for. If you say that you will forgive my debt and it no longer has to be paid, then it’s forgiven. Either one or the other, but not both.” He preaches that Jesus died, not , our sins, but he died because some people killed him. God forgives us with or without that, and also forgives those people for killing him. In that view, salvation comes from God’s forgiveness. You aren’t rescued from the consequences of your actions, no one teaches that. You are rescued from any kind of eternal separation from God because of your actions.

For Islam, the most recent religion we’re looking at (if we count Unitarian Universalism as starting back in the third century with the Arians “heresy) salvation has to do with going to heaven. You get to heaven if you believe in God (Allah) and in his message, Islam. If you just believe in God and not in Islam, your fate is in God’s hands. There is no heaven for people who don’t believe in God.

For Unitarian Universalists there is no danger of hell. People can create hellish lives for themselves and for one another, but it’s here in this life that hell is felt. If there is no hell, there is nothing from which to be delivered, except for our own guilt and regret over promises broken and damage done. Grace consists in forgiving one another, and in forgiving ourselves. Grace can be a realization, an insight that frees our thinking and feeling. It can be another person allowing us a fresh start, not holding our actions against us. Grace can be a touch from a book, a piece of music, a view on the hiking trail, a line from a movie that puts something into a new perspective. It can happen when someone else cleans up a mess you made. It can happen when someone decides that you are more than the mistake you made. Sin is, in Buddhist language “out-of-joint-ness,” in Christian language “missing the mark.” Both concepts have to do with something not fitting, not in harmony, not working the way it should. Unitarian Universalists have a sense of sin when we break promises, when we do not act out of our better selves, when we drink bottled water, or, worse, toss our empty water bottles in the trash. We have a sense of sin when we drive gas-guzzling cars or judge someone for something we’re supposed to tolerate. Sometimes we do things that are worse — – when we are abusing substances, being cruel to family, willfully turning our thoughts away from things we know we should be paying attention to. How do we get made whole from those things? How do we forgive ourselves, which is often the hardest step? Salvation, for us, means being made whole. It’s a process having to do with getting better and better at doing what we say we’re going to do. With our chosen spiritual practice, we get more stable, more emotionally disciplined, more sturdily rooted. With practice in compassionate and loving relationships, we get better at both giving and receiving love and compassion. We ask forgiveness for what we do wrong, and we make amends the best we can. What is salvation, wholeness after death? No one knows. Read “the Green After.”

Today I have too many friends who are dying. Sometimes at a Unitarian Universalist memorial service I feel dissatisfied-and I’m the preacher in charge. I think: What is going on that I can’t figure out how to preach my view of resurrection?

I know that people would want to hear it; I’m not worried about offending or confusing anyone; and I treasure the ability to speak the plain truth as I see it. The plain truth is no one knows for sure what happens when we die. That’s not a very stirring thing to proclaim at a funeral, though, honest as it is. We all have some kind of belief about it, even if that belief is that there is nothing after we die.

The reason I haven’t preached it yet is because when I call to mind my belief about the afterlife, it comes to me as a color.

At a camping weekend with friends, we were nestled in a clearing on a mountainside. Most of the folks were around the campfire, talking or dozing. Our chef was in the cooking tent, grilling and gossiping with his fiancŽe and a couple of others. I love those people, and they love me. Being surrounded by love is one fine way to spend your time. I wandered off to the hammock, and lay there looking up at the sky through early April leaves.

I was soaked with light, the blue of the sky, the green of young leaves, the sun shining through them like stained glass. I thought, “When I die, I want to have my ashes buried under this tree, so that for one spring after another my body can be part of this particular green.” I could feel my life flowing through the cells of a leaf, feel the leaf opening to the warmth and the light, feel myself part of that green, and I was happy.

If that is my afterlife, I will be deeply happy.

The hope of that afterlife doesn’t take any leap of faith. I know it can happen. The minerals and the water in my body can be soaked up through the roots of that tree. A part of my body will be unfurling, green in the sun.

My soul may be somewhere else. Sometimes I think my soul will float in an ocean of love. Will I recognize old friends, family, who have gone on ahead? I don’t know. I think I will know they are there. I will know this: there is not now nor was there ever any separation between us. I will know that they were with me as strongly when I was alive as when I’m part of the leaves.

The green of a new leaf, lit from behind with the spring sun-that color stays inside me, a glowing place of peace, the certainty of remaining part of life. During a memorial service I see that green, I feel that peace. It’s hard to preach a color, but I’m going to think of a way.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 9, 2013

We hear in songs that love is a rose. We read the poets, who say life is a rose. From Rumi to Emerson to the Grateful Dead, the rose is used to evoke beauty, pain, the ephemeral nature of life. It’s summer, and the roses are blooming.

Reading: The Greening Breath

The new house we moved into has roses blooming all along its sunny southern side. Mama told me roses were hard to grow, so I never tried before, but here they are, and I like watching them. A medieval Christian mystic named Hildegarde of Bingen wrote: ” ……the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.” Watching my roses, I see that greening breath moving up slowly through the stem, sending energy through the tips of the leaves as they uncurl, gathering in what they need from the summer sun. Hildegarde said: “The soul is a breath of living spirit, that ……permeates the entire body to give it life.”

I find myself wishing for that greening spirit in my soul this summer. The heat drains the life out of me. Some days I just drag around, crabby and overwhelmed. I see people on TV having cookouts, rafting down refreshing rivers, enjoying places I can’t afford this year. I know that comparing my life to life on TV is a no-win practice. When I’m hot, it feels like everyone else is graceful, loving, patient, financially savvy, organized, with animals who do what they are supposed to do. They do things a little at a time rather than letting them pile up. When it’s hot, everything is too hard. Or maybe I’m too soft. I can’t tell. The greening is hard to feel in summer, for me, but I see my roses feeling it.

Sometimes I wonder if it hurts to bloom. I know scientifically, that doesn’t make sense, but suspend disbelief for a moment and picture this: if you were a rose, and this were your first time out, would you be having fun being a bud, all curled around yourself, feeling hugged and tight, knowing what’s what? You are soaking up the sun, being gently tossed in warm wind, and suddenly everything starts to loosen up. Your petals are letting go! They are moving apart from one another! Do you try to hold on, try to grab for the edges and keep the changes from happening? Maybe you think to yourself, “I don’t understand this, but maybe it’s what’s supposed to happen.” You allow the once tight petals to move apart. Does it hurt? Does it cause anxiety? Do the buds think they are falling apart or do they know they are blossoming ? The roses seem to accept each stage with grace, but how do we really know that? Maybe we just can’t hear them screaming.

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

I love that image of a rose bud, tightly curled, beginning to loosen and just going into a panic. “Help! What’s happening? My petals – they’re coming apart!” What the rose blossoms into is so lovely that it has delighted humans and ants and aphids and many other creatures for millions of years. The oldest fossils of roses, 32,000,000 years old, found in Colorado and Oregon, resemble more the East Asian roses than the American ones of the present day. The first record of the kind of roses we know best is a highly stylized one in a fresco at Knossos in Greece; it dates from the sixteenth century B.C. E. Maybe they come from East Asia. The Goddess Lakshmi was said to have been born from a rose that had 108 large petals and 1008 small ones.

From ancient days, the rose has been a symbol. A symbol is a thing that stands for something else, often something abstract and multi-layered, hard to understand. With its thorns and its beauty it makes an excellent stand in for many abstractions.

What is both beautiful and painful? What lifts the heart and pleases the senses but also can hurt you? What, in life, is welcoming and forbidding at the same time? Some would say “Life.” Khalil Gibran says: The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose – Kahlil Gibran.

You could say “creativity.” It certainly has its joys, but there is self-doubt, the mystery of when the muses are with you and when they’re not, and there is often lack of appreciation or criticism of what you produce. Progress would be some people’s guess. You try to change things and make them better, and there is always resistance, there is always conflict and failure that you have to get through. Progress has its beauty and its thorns. When most people think about what is beautiful that can also make you bleed, they say “love, of course!” The rose has been a symbol of love from ancient days. Sacred to the goddess Venus, whose Greek name is Aphrodite, the rose naturally became a symbol of the female face of God that the Christians brought to history: Mary, the mother of God. They say the rosary was called that because the beads were first made of the pressed-together petals of roses, in her honor. Lots of baby girls are named Rose Mary, Rosemarie…. After Mary, the rose of heaven.

The rose is love, all right. Pure love: white roses. First love: pink roses. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old Time is still a-flying – Robert Herrick, urges young women in To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time True love: red roses. O, my love’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June – Robert Burns , A Red, Red Rose

Cheating? Yellow roses. When I learned that it made me sad; the split rail fence at my grandfather’s farm was covered in yellow roses, and I have thought since then that they were the most beautiful.

One friend saw my sermon topic and told me about a poem by Walter de la Mare that ends: “Oh, no man knows, through what wild centuries, roves back the rose.”

Many wild centuries ago the rose was a sign of silence and secrecy. The word sub rosa “under the rose” referring to the demand for discretion whenever a rose was hung from the ceiling at a meeting or fastened to the door of the room where the meeting took place.

The number 5 is associated with the rose, as it has five petals in each layer. In mystery traditions, five represents the four elements plus Spirit. Also, a human being when standing with arms outstretched has five “points.” Geometrically, the rose corresponds with the pentagram and pentagon

The rose has linked them with the 5 senses. In an absolute sense the rose has represented the expanding awareness of being through the development of the senses. Many people touch smell and even taste roses. I don’t know what they sound like, but there could be people who hear them….

Politics and the struggle for justice is a prickly business. A red rose held in a hand is a symbol of socialism or social democracy: it is used as a symbol by the socialist or social democratic parties of many countries. This began when the red rose was used as a badge by the marchers in the May 1968 street protests in Paris. In the early 1900’s James Oppenheim had written a poem that was used in a textile strike in MA. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.”

You Grateful Dead fans know that one of their best-known albums is titled “American Beauty.”

In an essay for the book Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. David Dodd Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs talks about how often the rose shows up in their songs. “The rose is a metaphor waiting to happen, and peoples have always ascribed to it some aspect of the mystery of life.” In the words of Robert Hunter: ” ‘ I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses.” Jackson, Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped, (p. 152-153)

Dante uses the rose as a symbol of the whole universe, with its swirl of many petals a representation of the expanding cosmos.

The rose is such a rich symbol that it can hold many meanings. One woman I know imagines, when she is going into a difficult situation, that she is covered in roses. You are welcome to try it if you like. I do when I remember, and it’s quite pleasant. The rose has been working on the human brain for untold ages. It helps us. “I know this rose will open,” we sing. Rumi says:

“In the driest whitest stretch of pain’s infinite desert, I lost my sanity and found this rose.”

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

“Slowly blooms the rose within……….”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 2, 2013

Our stories tell us who we are, where we’ve been. They let us know what is expected of us and what we can expect. Sondhaim says “Beware the tales you tell, the children are listening. Your tale is your spell. The children are listening.”

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Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776