Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
February 28, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We come together to celebrate the life of Rev Meg Barnhouse.
Procession of Ministers “Scotland the Brave,” played by bagpiper Jared Malone
Welcome: Rev. Carrie Holley Hurt
Call to Worship: Rev. Erin Walter
“THE GREEN AFTER”
from Did I say that Out Loud?At a camping weekend 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 unfurl, 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 the whole time, 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, stays inside me, a glowing place of peace, the certainty that I will always be 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.
Chalice Lighting: Rev. Meg’s grandchildren
Song:
“Holy Water,” (by J.P. Cooper)
sung by Love and Joy Gospel Choir, and First UU Austin Choir
directed by Brent Baldwin, and Rev. Kiya Heartwood
Reading: Rev. Joanna Crawford
“HEART OF COMPASSION,”
from Waking Up the Karma FairyWe were at Lake Blalock looking out over the water from a wrought iron table loaded with hot dogs and hamburgers, chips and dip. Sodas and beer chilled in tin tubs. My twelve-year-old was inside my friend Charlie’s house play- ing pool. Three little kids were jumping off the dock into their mothers’ arms. My fourteen-year-old was at the table with the grown-ups. In a few months he would go off to school in New Jersey, far away from this place.
My beloved friend Pat Jobe was across the table from me and my son was at the end of the table between us. “Boy, I got something important to ask you,” Pat said, in an old man voice. My son smiled at him with half his attention. He had other thoughts in his head. He was spending lots of time with those thoughts these days.
“Now, boy, you listen to me here,” Pat said, “This is something you goin’ to remember for a long time, something you tell your children about, maybe even your grandchildren.” Grinning, he grabbed the front of my son’s shirt in his fist. He had the boy’s attention now. Mine too.
“Have you got a heart of compassion?” My son wasn’t sure he had heard right.
“Excuse me?” He was smiling, puzzled. Someone took a picture. I saw the flash out of the corner of my eye.
“A heart of compassion, boy, you heard me. Do you have a heart of compassion?”
“Uh – I think so.”
“It’s the most important thing, boy, more than hot cars and fast women, more than money or schoolin’, to have a heart of compassion.
A week later we were standing in his new dorm room in New Jersey. It felt like it was a world away from our home in South Carolina. Dufflebags full of clothes and linens, a plastic basket of laundry supplies, golf clubs he had brought with him – everything was scattered on the bed, on the dresser, on the floor. He was going to grow into manhood far from home.
“Do you want us to help you get all set up?” I asked.
“I think I want to go down to see my coach,” he said, and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“I guess we’ll just get on the road,” I said. “I have presents for you.” I gave him a picture of all of us. Then I pulled out the picture of Pat Jobe leaning in close to him, his shirt bunched in Pat’s fist. “Do you remember?”
“Heart of compassion,” my son said with no hesitation whatsoever.
When I visited several months later for Parents’ Weekend, the picture was up on the dresser, the first thing you see when you come into the room. That boy’s going to be okay.
Remembrance: Rev: Chris Jimmerson
Good morning. I’m Reverend Chris Jimmerson, lead minister here at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. I welcome you all and am so grateful you’re here.
I was Meg’s assistant minister when she was senior minister here at the church. And even before that, I was actually in lay leadership and only about to enter seminary when Meg first came to the church. We went to lunch together one day and somehow got on the topic of doing memorial services.
Meg let it be known that she expected quote, professional mourners. She wanted people who would throw themselves to the ground with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So my fellow religious professionals… just a thought.
Over the years, Meg became a mentor, a trusted colleague and most importantly, my true and deeply loved friend. I learned so much from her about how to be a minister and just how to live life more authentically and wholeheartedly. I can’t possibly tell you all the stories of why I loved and admired Meg so much.
I’d take up this whole service and then some. Here’s just a couple. So many of you here, I know, experienced her seemingly effortless humor and sense of fun.
Her humor so often helped ease subjects in situations that were otherwise uncomfortable or difficult, and sometimes that humor could just whack away all the extraneous stuff and cut right to the chase, like one time I was given this assignment for a class to ask her about what makes for good preaching. The first interview question in the assignment was, “What is the most important thing I should know about preaching?” Meg paused ever so briefly and then said, “It is a sin to bore people.”
Something else really, really valuable I learned from Meg came from watching how she could set these clear, firm boundaries, yet do so in this way that was so filled with love and kindness. Years ago, she and I had set up a meeting in her office with someone who could be extremely difficult and had been interacting with the church in ways that were less than appropriate. Not a church member and no one who would be here today.
Well, from the moment that meeting started, Meg began in this extraordinarily loving yet immovably resolute way to set out exactly what was expected and not acceptable going forward. The meeting went great and the person was all kiss, kiss, lovey, lovey on their way out. Later, I said to Meg, you realize they got halfway home before it suddenly dawned on them.
I just got called to the minister’s office because I was in trouble.
That was the thing about Meg. She infused all of her living with this amazing level of love, even when it wasn’t easy sometimes. From the moment she came to it, she centered this church in a theology of love. She moved me to try to love and live more fiercely by modeling so well how to actually do that. Meg was the most loving friend I have ever known. We were with each other through so many times of both joy and loss here at the church, as well as in our individual lives as friends.
There were times, like during the loss of my spouse, when Meg’s support was a huge part of how I even made it through.
I’ve been out on sabbatical, and I foolishly scheduled myself to preach tomorrow on my first day officially back. Before I left, I had chosen the sermon title, You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world.
The song goes on.
I think Meg actually did change the world. I know she changed mine for the better. And for that, I am forever grateful.
I will love you always, Meg.
Remembrance: Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt
Beloveds, I am the Reverend Dr. Sofia Betancourt. It is my privilege to serve as president of your Unitarian Universalist Association, and it is an honor. It’s a true honor to come on behalf of our living tradition and offer gratitude and praise for Reverend Meg’s ministry and for her life.
We have been blessed as a faith, truly blessed to have this prophetic voice among us and our gratitude for her life, for her service, for her calling knows no bounds. I want to particularly offer my love and care to Reverend Meg’s family of blood and of choice. Thank you for sharing her with us for this huge gift you gave us.
Thank you for all that you catalyzed in this remarkable woman and her remarkable life. Beloveds, it is a sobering thing when a tradition loses one of its bards. Words become weightier, intentions more immediate, music sounds at every level of being.
One of our colleagues at your UUA when speaking about Reverend Meg reminded me that so many of us carry a touchstone made of her music or her words. It could be an image from a story, it could be a particularly pithy turn of phrase or a chorus of a song held close in difficult times. I do not offer the honorific of bard lightly.
Our bards are those who travel among us, spreading the heart of our living traditions through that which is memorable and profound to the point that it becomes tangible. They leave us with guideposts that carry us along our way. Reverend Meg was such a bard.
There’s no room for argument about this, serving congregations and communities across our faith, sometimes in long-term settlements, sometimes at those tender moments of key transitions between called ministries, always, always in collaborative leadership, always enlivening communities through worship, art, the empowerment of leaders, the support of faith formation, the ongoing endless struggle for justice. Reverend Meg partnered over the years with our Women’s Federation, with the Church of the Larger Fellowship, with our UU World publication and more. She advocated for the safety and rights of women and girls, and she supported emerging congregations that were just starting to find their way.
Her ministry was one that touched many, and so many of her colleagues of our colleagues considered her a mentor and a beloved, faithfully supportive friend. She was, in her own words, I was delighted to see, a national voice for our denomination. And the echoes of her preaching, her writing, her songwriting, talk, radio commentary, and more, all of that spirit holds us in this difficult time of loss and allows us to carry her forward through our ministries, through our day-to-day living.
For all of us gathered in memory and gratitude and care, may you all be held in love in this season of deep grief. And please know, please know, that our surrounding community, both in this sanctuary and around our tradition and throughout the multiverse that was touched by Reverend Meg, is holding you, is here in support, in memory, in that radical love and in understanding. We love you, just as we loved Reverend Meg.
We love you. And we will be here with you in the years to come.
Remembrance: Ned Durrett
Hey, y’all. It is good to see you guys again. Oh, y’all.
It is nice to be back here in this space. As y’all know, well, my mom was a mountain. She was magical realism personified.
You know what I mean.
And to so many folks, she seemed like a character. Inspiring to oceans of folks imitated by some modeled by others. But she was my mother and our mother.
And I think what I want to shed light on is who that was for us. So many times, we got to travel with her to go where she was preaching or reading or singing her songs. And the number of times that people came up to either of us and said, you must be so happy that Meg is your mom.
In most of those times, I fielded that sentiment as a growing young man, growing in my confidence still. And I said, yes, I sure am. Now, raising a family of my own, I wish to say to that sentiment, y’all have no idea how lucky we are.
Mom was warm and she was kind and she was thoughtful. All the time we had meaningful conversations, she was so flippantly profound.
She had such a way of putting her finger right on the crux of the thing, of asking the right questions that would call forth the revelations within us, remarkably every time, also frustratingly every time.
The most powerful story that I could remember, thinking back on what I wanted to tell y’all, was I was in middle school and we were in the living room of the first house that mom bought after our parents divorced. We were standing on a Persian rug that she had gotten during one of her many stints of international travel and brought back as a keepsake for our family that now rests in our family home. And I challenged her physically in reference to her karate at the time she was getting her second degree black belt.
And I puffed up my chest and I wrapped my arms around her and she very casually threw me over her hip. But she caught me before I fell. She stood me up and she said, Now, let me teach you how to be immovable. So she had me spread my feet shoulder width apart. My hips pointed at the world. Arms ready, but gentle.
Then she said, Now, get a powerful base. Bend your knees slightly. Just like a mountain.
“Skylark” performed by Ned Durrett
Remembrance: Sam Durrett
I’m Sam Durrett and Ned’s brother, Meg’s oldest. Meg Barnhouse pursued truth and human connection as a mother, writer, musician and minister with her whole life. We’re all blessed that she crafted these universal truths with together with her personal truth into stories, songs and sermons.
Her sharp wit and intense compassion that she employed helped these ideas land in a way that resonates, since long after the initial delivery passed. Song titles like Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town and I was born just fine the first time.
Begging a litany of questions, and forcing introspection for years to come. Her ability to absorb these stories and parse truth served her well as a counselor and mother, unfortunately at times, for Ned and myself. But in my opinion, these gifts were better suited to her life as a minister, where rather than as a counselor, she could help console, heal and amuse large groups of people at a time rather than these small group sessions.
It was not easy for any of us who loved Meg, and there are many, to know that she was sick, and it was more difficult to know when she was dying. Her dying was slow at first, as is all of ours. But when her symptoms and pain accelerated to become unbearable, she decided to pursue more active transition away from her physical form, during which she seemed to enter a meditative state.
It comforts me to think of her last few days with us as exploring the connection between this familiar plane of ours and the universe beyond our daily experience and comprehension. Much the way Buddha quieted their mind and body and meditated towards enlightenment, pursuing oneness with the universal truth. Meg’s duality of being raised by one parent, a mathematician and physicist, and another a spiritual and whimsical second grade teacher, played out in her last hours where a fiercely logical thinker was able to play and study the fraying border between planes of existence.
One of the last concerns she shared with me was when she said, I just want to know that I’ll always be with you and Ned. To which I respectfully and lovingly chuckled.
Laughing in contrarian and uncomfortable situations is something I’m working on. I don’t want to appear flippant or disrespectful. But I replied, you raise Ned and me, how could you possibly not be with us always? Many of the fundamental voices in our heads are those of our parents. Even more so when you grow up listening to their deepest thoughts during sermons, book readings and musical performances. Now that she has completed her journey to become one with the universe, no longer limited by her physical form, the shared human consciousness is certainly better for having gained her undivided attention.
I’m so glad to have had Meg in my life and to be able to call her mother. It’s quite a gift of generational spiritual joy that I will be forever grateful for. I hope that we all remember Meg and feel her wisdom and presence with each spark of the divine that we catch.
Many thanks to all of you spirits for being here, both those in bodies and those without. If I may ask all of us to quiet ourselves as much as we are able to briefly commune and reach with the love outside of ourselves in silence, after which I’ve prepared a song that helps me feel connected to my mother, and I would love any accompaniment that you feel inclined to provide.
“Two of Us,” by the Beatles, performed by Sam Durrett
Remembrance: Rev. Tandi Rogers
I’m a little self-conscious in that I’m not wearing a robe, and ministers usually robe for stuff like this, but I’m not from around here. And your barbecue, I have been eating the barbecue since I landed, and this is such a trick of Meg’s, I know. I put on my robe last night, and even foundational garments would not help.
So, I’m just going to keep eating your barbecue, and please forgive me, this is not out of disrespect, it is out of deep respect.
I met Meg about ten years ago, I’ve known about Meg, but I like met Meg about ten years ago, at a minister’s retreat. My wife Sue and I were out on a break, and we were walking around the campus, which is just beautiful, when we ran into Meg and Kiya, doing the same thing. And there was this immediate recognition, another queer clergy couple, not performing anything, in charge of anything, just our delight.
And clearly, unmistakenly, in love. You know, when you meet another couple that’s in love, it’s like, oh, that is good. What I remember most is the ease, our delight. Let it out. The quiet relief of seeing lives shaped by love that looked a little bit like our own. Soon after, Meg and I began talking on the regular.
Over time, those conversations became a steady pattern in our lives. We talked about birds and dreams and regrets and things that pissed us off. We talked about how sexy and badass our wives are, about grandchildren who felt nothing less than holy.
Oh, the stories I got about y’all.
About the astonishing grace of having sons who actually want to have conversations with us.
I would bring poems or songs sometimes, and we would together unpack those and notice what was alive and meaningful. Even as life felt changing, I was with her through many thresholds. Through the shedding and reorganization of papers and decisions, her final memoir, her last song.
Learning a wheelchair, a medical card, retirement. The long and humbling work of getting used to needing help. She spoke honestly about aging, about how exposed it felt, how identity shifts when the body changes faster than the spirit expects.
Too much change, she would say. And too slow, too hard. And yet again and again, Meg would return to gratitude.
For home, for Kiya who she adored and was fiercely proud of. For sons who felt like company. For miraculous grandchildren.
And for friends who showed up in all the ways. For seeds. For fruit. For birds. And smudge.
For swimming. That silky, salty relief where pain loosens its grip and she could remember herself from floating. We talked about pain a great deal. About how pain can be mean.
And how it tries to shrink who you are. And still she said more than once, I want to stay alive as long as I can love. I want to stay alive as long as I can love.
And that was her compass. Love. We hear it from everybody who’s spoken.
And she was fascinated by the ancestors. Not only the respectable white Calvinistic Protestant ones, who she suspected were quite horrified by her life. And honestly, that pleased her a little bit.
But also, but also ancestors like Audre Lorde and her Aunt Ruth. That widening lineage of courage. And now she is an ancestor.
She once told me that angels, if they exist, surely say, why don’t we give up about, excuse me, we don’t give up about marriage, we care about love. You know what I’m putting in there, there’s children here, okay. And that sounds exactly right to her.
And near the end, she wondered who might greet her. She hoped that it was her friend Charlie. And maybe Denise, the TikTok receptionist of heaven, because Meg never lost her sense of humor when it came to the eternity.
And if you don’t know who Denise TikTok is, you can also find her on Instagram. You are welcome. Her dreams grew more vivid.
Dragonflies, red birds, kites lifting up into the open sky. And what I witnessed over the years was someone learning how to receive love and release roles and expectations, all while holding fast to what mattered most. And beneath everything else was this quiet knowing.
She was loved and she loved well. Meg loved fully and fiercely. And wherever she is now, among ancestors, angels, birds, or mystery, I imagine her greeted not by judgment, but by recognition.
Ah, there you are, Beloved. Welcome home.
Meditation: Aisha Hauser
Hi, I just got here at 10:30, so getting caught up on everything. I’m not wearing a stole because I am a religious educator and not an ordained minister, and I am wearing one of Meg’s stoles. Many people are complimenting me.
I said, it is hers. And I did ask permission from Kiya to wear it. I am tempted after what Chris said to invite everyone to throw themselves on the chancel and wail.
It feels a little disrespectful to just now invite you into, because Meg wasn’t a big prayer. However, I will invite us to think about how Meg made us feel. I thought of Maya Angelou’s words. “You will forget what people said, but we will remember how people made us feel.”
But we do remember what Meg said and how she made us feel. So if you are so moved, you are invited to settle into your body, lower your gaze, or close your eyes. If you want to let out a wail, I will not be offended. Bring your feet to the ground. This is all an invitation. Do what feels right in your body.
Meg is now an ancestor. We breathe the same air she breathed quite literally in this room. She is among the stars and we are made of stardust.
We will always be connected to her, through her, and how blessed we are that she left us with so much to remember her by. For those of us who had the absolute honor and privilege of being close to her, the stories she didn’t tell in books. Her sense of humor that was wicked stays with me.
Take a moment to think and to feel. Feel her memory. Feel her laughter. Feel her songs in your body. Take a few deep breaths in the ways that nourish your body. Breathe in her love.
Breathe out her laughter.
Breaths of meditation. Breaths of love and gratitude that we got to be a part of Meg. And how lucky that she has five, maybe more, coming grandchildren, that we get to say, we knew and loved your grandmother. And Sam and Ned, I hope you feel the love and are surrounded always. And of course, the Emilys, Emily and Emily.
Take a few more deep breaths and tell Meg, aloud or in your ear, quietly, how much you love her. What I know to be true is Meg is with us and knows and feels our love as we feel her love.
Thank you, Meg.
Invitation to silent personal prayer
Candle Lighting
“Hold On,” by Heidi Wilson; led by Kiya Heartwood
Sermon: Rev. Jake Morrill
When you make a practice of paying attention, at least I’ve been told, you can learn a lot. And so it is that over 30 years of field research in the Atosha National Park in Namibia, Dr. Caitlin O’Connell of Harvard Medical School, up on an observation tower, has studied the herd behavior of elephants.
Watching them moving over years in vast terrain, guided by the oldest female, the matriarch, whose memory guides them to water in drought, whose judgment steers them gently from danger, whose steady presence holds the family together. But O’Connell’s most striking findings are not about the behaviors of rote survival. Instead, O’Connell’s most striking research is about the ritual behavior of these elephants, the ritual behavior of these elephants.
After an elephant dies, the herd will gather and linger there in that place. And they touch the bones and the beloved body with their trunks, and they stand in breathtaking stillness. And what they are doing as these elephants gather, there is no immediate function, no food to find, no threat to flee, only tenderness, only presence.
Dr. O’Connell says there’s no other word to call what’s happening there in that moment in that space, but a funeral. And she’s found something else, too, that after the death of an especially wise and long-lived matriarch, one whose leadership over time has helped the herd flourish, the circle of mourners is wider. More elephants actually show up.
Attendance swells even from neighboring herds. They want to kind of get in on it. As if to honor not just a life that has ended, but one that they acknowledge with their presence has made a real difference.
Friends, we gather today because such a mighty oak among us has fallen. By the sheer fact of your presence in these numbers, by the widening circle of love, including online, we can see the measure of this life that we celebrate. We come to mourn, yes, but we come for something more.
Because gatherings like this, whether among elephants on the savanna or humans in a sanctuary, mark not only an ending, but also a beginning, not only a death, but also a turning. Yes, something is being laid down, but also something endures. In that light, I remember my own grandmother’s graveside service.
It was in the family plot in north central Iowa, nothing but corn fields and sky, a small country cemetery, a fumbling Methodist preacher shuffling his pages, the urn at his feet with my grandmother’s ashes, the early spring wind moving through all of us with a chill, and then over in the parking lot, the crunch of gravel and an old Ford sedan. The door opened and outstepped my grandmother. Same sensible coat against the spring chill, same sturdy leather purse, a scarf pinned just so, protecting her hair from the wind like she did.
She shut the car door, wrestled open the gate, and started down the dirt path toward us. I locked eyes with my sister. We were thinking the same thing.
The urn was right there. And yet there she also was showing up to her own funeral. It was one of the eeriest moments in my life.
And then something clicked. My grandmother was one of eight sisters, and her older sister, Naomi, looked exactly like her. And this was just Naomi running late to the service, of course.
And yet, in a deeper sense, it was not so simple, because there’s some strange arithmetic on an occasion like this. We gather to name the divide between the living and the dead, to say that this life has ended, this chapter has closed, so we can zero it all out. And then somehow, the one we came to bury keeps on showing up in a familiar gesture, in a turn of phrase, in the way a niece folds her hands, or a nephew laughs weird.
The modern mind insists on subtraction, but holy love doesn’t math out its math in that way. Part of the spiritual work of this day, and of the long road of grief up ahead, is learning to live with that holy contradiction that even as we lay a life down, we discover again and again it’s not entirely left us. As the old Appalachian song that Kiya sang last night goes, ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.
Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down. When I hear that trumpet sound, gonna get up out of that crown. Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.
And maybe some here will find some comfort in that. But for me, I see a challenge. Because while in this room, there may be any number of metaphysical views on what exactly those words mean, and where life goes when the body has died.
I know one thing for sure, part of it goes with us. We don’t get off scot-free. If you’re here, you’re part of it. You’re divinely implicated now. In where Meg’s life goes from here. Because what a shame it would be if we only gathered to stand around, gawk and admire, shed a fat tear, and eat brownies.
What a shame it would be if this was only goodbye. It would seem, I think, to let us all off too easy, as if nothing now more was required of us. So, if we would meet the living presence and legacy of Meg Barnhouse in this room on this day and find ourselves now implicated, dare I say called, to carry forth something of her life, what would that take to move from memory to mandate, remembrance to responsibility, tribute to transformation?
What on earth would that take? I’ll tell you, as I think about that daunting task, I tremble. I don’t know that I’m up to it.
I’ve been sizing up Meg for a long time now.
Because here’s what I remember, and this isn’t going to make me look good. Early in my ministry twice a year, along with ministers throughout the Southeast, I’d make my way to a retreat center in North Carolina called the Mountain. Probably some of you would know about that place.
These were precious hours where ministers gathered together, could let our hair down, swap stories, maybe learn from each other. Something like the gathering that ministers in the Southwest had this past week. Anyway, early on, I think it was 2004, an older colleague was leading morning worship for the rest of us, and it was clear that this was a person who had been going through it in his life and his work.
And instead of a sermon or anything in the zip code of celebration, what we got was a slow, sorrowful inventory of all that was wrong with ministry, with the people at his church who were giving him a hard time, and in general, all that could be found that was wrong with the world. There was not a flicker of hope in anything that he said. He was in despair and taking us all down with him.
And I wish that I could tell you that in response listening to this poor soul, what I did was to close my eyes, perhaps say a little prayer for him and not to mention the people he served. I wish that I could tell you that this is what I did. And in my defense, before I tell you what I actually did, I’d like to say that this was a time in my life when I had a baby at home and was always sleep deprived.
I was often baffled by what people in my church expected out of me. So to keep my head above water, I was living in those days on a lot of hot coffee and the power of positive thinking. All to say that what happened next was not my finest moment.
Because, and I can’t tell you how, but all at once I was up there right alongside this sad colleague looking out at the room, not, I tell you, in a spirit of consolation, but of outright rebuttal.
As if this Enneagram 7 was allergic to the whiff of suffering, I talked loudly, talking over him, to the room about joy, about hope, about gratitude, all with exclamation marks. It was a full-on anxiety-driven pep talk, and I knew as it was happening that it was wrong that I was up there and that I should just go sit down. But whether because of coffee or sleep deprivation, I just couldn’t stop talking, and I remember looking out, seeing the face of Meg Barnhouse. Her eyebrows were lifted well beyond her hairline. Her eyes not in surprise, but kind of saying, well, now, what kind of nonsense do we have here? And a little lower on her face, that smile that you know, spreading into a grin, and then in a moment, she too was up there with us.
The poor soul addicted to misery, and the one who had been in the grip of fake optimism. Both of us utterly jumped the tracks, and her in between us, hands steadily on each of our arms, with a smile. And I don’t remember the words she said then, but the words weren’t important.
What was important was this, she did not correct us or scold us or mock us, although she was smiling. And I could see she found some humor in all this foolishness, and these emotional men. What was important was that as she took her place between us, the weather in the whole room and that moment changed.
That’s why I tell you that when I think about the challenge of this day on my life, and I gently suggest perhaps upon all of us, I am daunted, and perhaps you’re daunted too, to know what is asked of you now as somebody who knew Meg, whether as family or friend or colleague, congregant or companion. Because in that room where there had been electricity running hot all over the place through its wires burning up, now in our midst, there was a different kind of power, the kind you experience when you know you’ve arrived in the presence of the Holy, because you know that whatever’s going on in your own fevered life and whatever’s unraveling in this chaotic moment, and despite all of your own obvious and self-evident limitations, it’s going to end up okay. Because you are held, we are held, by something beyond our own efforts, beyond our own intelligence, beyond our own capacity.
Because in that moment when you have just lost your mind, and are standing in front of colleagues, having barked out some pep talk nonsense for well over four minutes, in a way that now can’t be taken back, you need not feel shame, you need not hide under the table, nor run from the truth, because despite all, you are nonetheless held. Held by loving strength, held by generous and overflowing grace, held by forgiveness, and held by the love that our Universalist ancestors spoke of, the holy and eternal kind that includes every last one of us, and all that we are, and that doesn’t give up on us, and never quits, and leaves nobody out. Held by that.
When Meg Barnhouse got up out of her chair at that retreat center, and came up to stand between two burned out colleagues, it was as a minister, and an ordained facilitator of that kind of love. And I know with my story that I am not alone, that you have your own stories of when she showed up in your own life like that. You know what it felt like in that moment, and perhaps that’s why it’s so daunting, if that’s what’s asked of each of us now, to be that for others.
Later in this service, we’ll get to hear once again Meg’s most beloved and widely known song, All Will Be Well, drawing on the work of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, whose words Meg brought back to life and handed back to us. But Julian of Norwich said a lot of things, other things. And here’s something else that she said.
She said, if there is anywhere on earth, a lover of God, who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But she went on, this was shown, that in falling and rising again, we are always kept in that same precious love. In other words, this lifetime is going to no doubt deliver upon us wave after wave of disappointments and setbacks.
Perhaps some of you showed up here with some of those in your hearts today. Heartbreaks and sorrow and outright human pain, we can see it in the news, including this morning. And we see it in the eyes and the lives of our beloveds.
We know it in our own hearts. We don’t get out of this life without knowing suffering. If there is anywhere on earth, a lover of the Holy who is ever kept safe, Julian of Norwich said, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.
But this, Julian said, was shown that in falling and rising, we are always kept in that same precious love. In falling and rising, we are always kept in that same precious love. So what if we would be what we are asked to be on earth, do we do in response?
Well, I think that when Meg was ordained, the Divine called an artist to the priesthood of holy, generous, unstoppable love. And she was an artist who could, with the humble materials of a room full of exhausted, burned out souls and dead-end imaginations and worry and fretfulness, rearrange the furniture of that moment into nothing less than communion, holy communion, where the suffering were joined as one accepted for all that they were and for all they were not, and were held despite it all in that same precious love. What I mean to say is that through any number of media, including her own presence, her own life, she brought forth the Divine in our midst.
And if we would leave this room as those who are now charged to go forth and to carry something of her life with us, I would say that the call on our lives is nothing less than the mandate to be such artists, to make of our lives something like the instrument of that same precious love that Meg made of her own. That in rooms where people have lost themselves and are drowning in sorrow and confusion, that in neighborhoods where common humanity has gone missing, that in a society that has sometimes seemed to utterly lost its heart of compassion, not to mention its sense of humor, we here would be those if we would honor Meg, who would rise and rise and rise once again into ordinary moments and ordinary encounters as the vessels and vehicles of divine love. As the elephant observer, Dr. Caitlin O’Connell would tell us, after elephants gather quietly in remembrance of a great one who has fallen and tenderly touched their trunks to her bones and her body, they move on and from that place in that moment, but they are not the same.
For having known this great one, her research shows they’ve been changed. Memory isn’t just for looking back, it’s how wisdom is carried forward. Soon from this room and this time, we too will move forward.
This world is hurting, our neighbors are crying out, we have work to do. As we do, let us not be unchanged. Let us, each of us, as we move, claim our part of the mantle of the legacy that Meg has now left us.
To be those artists of life, to be those priests of holy love, who with a word or a touch and sometimes perhaps often a grin, can change everything with the reminder that no matter what the day brings, no matter how lost we feel in our falling and rising again, we are held by the same precious love. And so is every last person we meet, every last struggling soul, even and especially those irritating ones. Let us be the artists who can see through the despair of this life to the generous unyielding all-encompassing love at its heart.
This, I would say, is the challenge Meg’s leaves us and the grinning invitation. Let us answer with our lives and let our answer be yes.
Song:
“All Will Be Well” by Meg Barnhouse
Benediction: Kiya Heartwood
“Remember the Way of the Wind”
Most sermons during the past 26 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776
