Winter Solstice: The Time of Turning

Frigga, the Earth Mother, the Norse Goddess of love and marriage, weaves the clouds with her spinning wheel. She’s responsible for the wind and the rain and the snow and therefore the crops and the food and Frigga could see the fates. Frigga was worshipped by all the ancient peoples of the North and was the beloved wife of Odin, The All-Father. She was known as a 'seer', one who knew the future though she could never change it.

As a seer, Frigga saw her son’s fate. She saw that her son, Baldur, whose name means Shining One, was going to die. Baldur is the God of the sun, the light, the one who brings life and warmth to Earth. Frigga could see the future but she had no power to affect it. Baldur’s death came to pass. The malevolent trickster Loki fashioned a dart made of the poisonous plant mistletoe and, in a cruel trick, placed it in the hand of Baldur's brother Hodor who was the God of Darkness, and offered to guide his hand while teaching him to shoot darts.

And so he did, guiding the arrow directly into Baldur's heart. Baldur was shot with a spear made of mistletoe and the Light died. His body was burned in a huge fire. Frigga couldn’t bear the loss of her son, so she impregnated herself by eating berries from the mistletoe and gave birth to him once again. The sun was reborn. Frigga is so grateful that she made the plant a symbol of peace and love, promising a kiss to all who passed under it.

Theirs is the story of the Winter Solstice. The light dies and Mother Earth brings him back again. Of all the holidays celebrated by humans, the solstice is likely the oldest. It’s a magical season marking the journey from dark to light, the turning of the year from the end to the beginning. The year is reborn accompanied by festivals of light to mark the rebirth of the Sun. In ancient Europe, this turning of the darkness was credited to Frigga who sat at her spinning wheel weaving the clouds, watching the fates and birthing the light.

We are entering the Winter Solstice. Daylight has given way to dark. Sunbathing and outdoor dining and open-air theatre are things of the past and the future. These are the days of hurrying from place to place wrapped in heavy coats and faces covered in scarves, of dutch-oven stews, and the feeling of nighttime settling in each afternoon. We have moved just about as far from the sun as we can get, plunging ourselves into days of cold and dark as our planet revolves and rotates in her magical, mysterious orbit.

Long before people were tracking our own history, we were celebrating, or at least acknowledging, the winter solstice. People, wherever they were, noted the turning of the season. The daylight is at its briefest and the nights are not only long, they are very dark. For some, there is no light at all these days, with the sun barely breaking the horizon even at the peak of daytime. The northern pole is leaning away from the sun so that everyone north of the equator, which means 90% of the human population, is living with these long nights and shortened days. For us, there are about 9 hours of light this week, 16 hours of dark.

Solstice is the time of turning. We are about to experience the darkest, longest night of the year, and although we will then begin to add seconds of light back, our experience for some time will be that of darkest winter. Then, in a month or so, we’ll notice that it’s no longer dark at 4:30, and in February it might even feel like spring is on its way as evening is pushed even later. Our planet turns and we along with it. Spinning faster than we can imagine, and obviously faster than any of us experience. In the day to day-ness of life, it all feels very slow, as dark descends and takes hold.

We are here, on the cusp of what’s next. Our year is ending as light reaches its lowest point. Each day we lose another minute of light as we get closer to December 21st at 10:27pm when the shift begins. That will be the darkest point and the next day, the light will return, at first just a few seconds at a time. The darkness is ending. Frigga’s mourning is soon over. We see the return of the shining star. Later this week, the hours of sunlight begin to lengthen and the fates are woven and new possibilities are imagined. Mother Earth is laboring to give birth to her son, the Shining One.

I have hope for the turning. I am of the belief that we are in a Great Turning, an epic moment in human history. We can see the last vestiges of a culture dying, an industrial growth society that’s reached the end of its effectiveness. This happens in human culture. We evolve. We change. There is a turning.

Twelve thousand years ago, there was an agrarian revolution in which people domesticated animals and plants. They learned that hunting and gathering could be shifted if they planted their own food and raised animals near their homes. This shift led to a massive alteration of human culture, allowing us to let go of nomadism and settle into homes and communities, thereby increasing life expectancy and expanding human culture.

It’s happened again and again through history with the solidification of world religions, the introduction of math, great scientific discoveries, important inventions, and new ways of thinking, each bringing an evolution, a conversion from what used to be into what happened next.

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century created one of these definitive transformations. Things formally made by hand in the home were now made by machine in a factory. Human lives were never the same again. There was a dramatic increase in population, tremendous growth of towns and cities, in education, transportation and massive immigration and exchange of cultures altering the course of human evolution.

And we are, again, at a moment of turning. Earth can no longer sustain our appetite for consumption. The industrial growth economy that requires demonstrable growth in every calendar quarter, demands an incessant and unceasing stripping of natural resources from Earth. The transition we’re seeing is from an unsustainable economy to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.

In the early stages of major transitions, the initial activity might seem to exist only at the fringes. Yet when their time comes, ideas and behaviors become contagious: the more people bear witness to their inspiring perspectives, the more these perspectives catch on. At a certain point,

the balance tips and we reach critical mass. Viewpoints and practices that were once on the margins become the new mainstream. We begin to see people organizing to move society toward a shared vision. Language that was used only by a select few is heard in everyday conversation. Average people begin to push for a new vision as norms shift and expectations for ideas that seemed far-fetched become realized.

We just saw this happen at the United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai. I won’t go into the details, but the whole thing was feeling doomed. Then it changed. For the first time ever, the world’s leaders agreed to phase down - or maybe out - fossil fuels. This is momentous. In 2015, the fight was to recognize that increased temperatures over 1.5 degrees was catastrophic. Each year, we move closer to the possibility of being able to address climate change meaningfully, but never have we said out loud that the cause of the problem is the burning of fossil fuels. Never. And in a million years I didn’t think that was going to change in Dubai, nestled in the heart of oil-land, during a conference whose president is a climate denier and the chair of a Middle Eastern oil company. But, it did. There is a turning.

The culture we’ve grown used to is ending. We can no longer consume resources the way we’ve become accustomed. We can’t deplete Earth of all her resources for our consumption or travel tens of thousands of miles a year. And as these concepts move from the fringes into mainstream awareness, many people, millions of people, are grasping at whatever they can reach to keep it alive. Slogans like Make America Great Again, reach backwards to a fictional past as a last gasp of a dying culture.

This is the path we follow. When the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in this nation, elections were rampant with anti-immigrant, racist rhetoric. In 1856, 75% of the House of Representatives was made up of what were called Nativists, people who today we’d call White Nationalists. And in 1860, the Civil War broke out and culture was transformed. There was massive change in the Industrial Revolution. Culture was altered permanently. People were terrified. They tried to hold on to a world they knew they were losing. And then, there was a Great Turning.

We’re watching again as fascism rises and democracy shows signs of strain. This is fear trying to ossify in our political and social systems. It’s how we respond to change. When culture turns, when one world dies and another is born, people afraid of change wield all their power to stop the turning.

In the current, charged atmosphere, I hesitate to even nod to the metaphor of light as good and dark as bad. There are dangerous implications in the ways we’ve embedded that language in our culture, and the increase in racism we’re witnessing makes me even more sensitive to it. But in this particular turning, this winter solstice moment, I’m making an exception and I hope you can make room this time for the metaphor.

Earth is turning again. We are in the last days of the old age, the days when Loki is aiming his poison at the light, hoping to burn out the sun. Frigga can see what’s coming, and in her grief, she will birth the light once again.

I suspect, in this moment of Turning, we all have the potential to be Frigga and Loki and Baldur and Hodor. Identifying with Baldur is easy. He’s the bright light who falls victim to someone else’s misdeeds. Loki wants trouble. He doesn’t like the way things are going and wants them to stop. He wants the world to stop turning, for things to stop changing, so he lies and manipulates to get what he wants. There might be people in the public arena who remind us of Loki.

Hodor isn’t paying enough attention to know what’s happening. He thinks Loki is teaching him something about spears and doesn’t realize the mistletoe is poison or that hitting his brother will have fatal consequences. He goes along with the plan, mindlessly. There are lots of Hodor’s around.

And then, there’s Frigga. She can see it all. She knows her son, the Sun, will be killed. She grieves his passing as any mother would. And then she uses all her power to transform that loss into a new birth. She creates life where there was death.

This is our call; this is our task. We are Frigga. We can see what’s next, and we are making ourselves ready. We are living in the dark, in the cold, in the waning days of the year. But the solstice is coming. Earth is turning. This is a time of Great Turning, a time of transformation, the end of the old and the beginning of the new.

This is the Winter Solstice. We count down the minutes. Night extends. Cold descends. And then it turns and the new world is born anew.

The Visitation: Advent

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent is the Christian season that builds toward Christmas. Using the story of Mary’s pregnancy, Christians relive those last few weeks, expectant. The world gets dark and often cold, and we move inside, get cozy, light fires, and wait for the birth of hope.

This is the cycle. This is the story, the myth, the metaphor. Every year a billion Christians, and a whole lot of other people who can’t resist, lean into this story. It begins today. A season of waiting. The church of my young adulthood moved services to the evening in Advent so that it was dark. Advent is about the dark. That’s part of the metaphor and it’s a reflection of the actual reduction of light 90% of the world’s population is experiencing. It’s dark. Mary is pregnant and she waits. We wait with her. We wait all month in a whole lot of cultural/communal ways. We have Christmas countdowns, we open daily advent calendars, we recount all the stories about Mary, we talk about the suspense of pregnancy in our story telling, we even make a huge deal out of Christmas Eve, so popular because it’s the closest we can get to Christmas morning, the final moments of anticipation. And then there’s Christmas, the birth. It’s the birth of Jesus, of hope, of light if you’re willing to use a dark/light metaphor which generally, I’m not but often pervades this time of year. The star song, the end of waiting, the meeting of the newborn, the shift into the new world. The end of what was and the beginning of what will be. The liturgical year ends and begins, over and over again, as we wait, once again, in the dark.

That’s it every year. We wait. We count. We expect. We anticipate. We celebrate the birth, until the next year when we wait again.

I’ll be honest. I love it. It’s a favorite season for me. I like Advent more than Christmas, maybe because I think it reflects our real lives more. Also, because nothing can live up to the hype of that much waiting. The waiting really is the best part. Even with a child in the house, even with a ton of gifts Christmas morning, even if we plan a perfect day, it’ll never quite justify an entire month of build-up. But we’ll do it again next year anyway.

In reality, the final weeks of pregnancy are alive with expectation, but the birth isn’t one day. It’s not even 12 days, as Christmas might be. It’s forever. It’s a lifetime. But, that’s not how we celebrate this. We wake Christmas morning, celebrate the day, the birth of hope in the world, and then we sleep for a week, pack up and go on with our lives. This is how you know the birth was a metaphor. No crying babies, no life-altering situation. Nothing has changed. The season ends and we move on to what’s next.

In this case, the season isn’t so much about Christmas, but about the weeks leading up to it. It’s about Advent, about the season of anticipation, of preparation. The pot of gold at the end

of the rainbow in our real lives won’t have much consequence, but we dedicate an entire month building up to the great reveal.

I suggest we turn our attention to how we spend this Advent season since this is, as far as I can tell, where hope really lives. In fact, while the last few weeks of a pregnancy are about waiting, it’s about a lot more than that, as anyone with 4 weeks left to birth can tell you. It’s about gestation, about creation.

This is what brings me to the Visitation. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. It’s about the baby and moves from there. If you’re Christian and going to live your life according to the teachings of Jesus, Christmas kicks things off. After the birth, the story is really about his life, his work, his death, the transformation of the world in response to his message. Those things are beautiful and worthy of our consideration and even our dedication, but in our very real lives, in our shared spiritual practice, we don’t spend too much time after Christmas focusing on those things.

But for us, the time spent during Advent is more relevant, more alive. What we do in the month of December year after year is more reflective than what we do on Christmas Day. The story of the Visitation is a reflection of so much of the socializing we do this month, and this story recasts the star of the show. The Visitation, happening in this pregnant moment, is about two women more than two male children. It’s about family and friendship and solidarity. It’s about all the relationships that happen before, about all the people who make one life – Jesus’s life in this case – possible and important. It’s a moment in history when two women share their joy and their concerns and they partner to move through the waiting, to move through the trepidation, to prioritize their bodies and their love for each other.

A few years ago, a good friend’s daughter-in-law was killed. She was shot by her own father in her home. He then shot and killed himself. My friend’s son was grieving, the whole family was grieving. My friend was holding all of them along with so much of her own sadness. Because the death was violent and stunning, people kept their distance from the family. Their minister didn’t even call. I went to their house for a visit and told my friend I was coming to sit. I told her we didn’t need to talk, she shouldn’t cook, certainly don’t clean anything. I’m coming to sit.

And we did. We sat on the couch for a long time. She told stories. She cried. Mostly, though, she didn’t speak at all. She just sat. I made tea. She held the warm cup to her face and breathed deeply. I touched her hands. I kissed her head. And I sat too. We sat and we waited as grief and fury moved through.

It was a Visitation. It was a holy time. In birth and in death, we Visit. We meet each other in our joy and grief.

It is who we are. It is what we need. Now, as much as or maybe more than ever.

The Adent season is an invitation to Visit. I’m spelling that with a capital V. Visit. Be with each other. There is an end, a new beginning later, like all stories, a place we’re heading where

this story will turn, but for now, we’re waiting, and the waiting is holy. It’s the in between space where we create the world we’re waiting for.

It feels like the whole world is waiting. Everywhere I go people are talking about fascism, authoritarianism, climate disaster, the end of democracy, the rise of the right, the disintegration of the world as we’ve known it. We don’t seem to be preparing for something, though, as much as we’re just waiting for it. We’re waiting to see what this election cycle will bring. We’re waiting to see if there will be any accountability for trying to overthrow our government. We’re waiting to see if our fellow countrymen care about the implications of the rhetoric or if they – or we – even understand it.

There’s a pall that is setting over the land. A sense of foreboding. I’m watching what’s happening at the climate conference in Dubai as world leaders – at least those who showed up – are making compromises that prioritize profit over planet and concede to concessions that are leading to our own destruction. Almost 30 years of United Nations climate conferences and emissions are still rising, making 2023 the hottest year in human history. Fish in the Irish Sea are lifting their heads above the water to get a break from the boiling sea. And we are watching them, doing the equivalent of nothing. Most of us are just waiting.

This is Advent. The time of waiting.

But, this is a time of gestation, not of passivity. Mary is creating a baby. Life happens in the dark. Worlds are conceived. There is no Christmas without Advent, there is no baby without pregnancy. It’s now that the world is created, now that we are designing and building and producing hope.

If this historical moment is fraught, if the world is hanging by a thread that seems ready to tear, then this isn’t our time for doing nothing. It’s our time to Visit. When people are feeling worried, when grief seems to be just over the horizon, we can use Mary and Elizabeth as our model.

December is often a very social month, but I’m hearing reports that it doesn’t feel that way to everyone this year. I’m not sure how universal that is, or why it might be happening. It could be a backlash from last year’s feeling of liberation after two very tempered Christmas seasons, or if the pandemic broke so many of our social bonds that we are finding ourselves without all the invitations we used to have, or maybe saying “no” is more the new normal, creating greater isolation, but there seems to be a little less celebration in the holiday season this year.

Given all of that, it’s time to Visit.

This is the hour of incubation, of construction, of creation. We do that together. If we are going to birth a new world, if we are giving life to hope, we are going to do it in community, in partnership, and please tell me we’re going to do it in Love.

Mary brought nothing to Elizabeth but her self. She brought her love, her care and concern. She offered her time, a sharing of her life. Elizabeth was in transition, pregnant, facing some level of danger, and Mary brought her Self.

That’s what we all have to offer. We bring our Selves to each other.

Next week, Leslie McKenzie had the lovely idea of having a birthday celebration for folks over the age of 90. We offer ourselves in celebration of life.

Janice has started a new gathering some Sundays for caring and exploring in community. We offer ourselves in shared spirituality.

When I hired Br. Zachary, I told him I was looking for an anam cara ministry, a ministry of spiritual presence which he has so deftly embodied. We offer ourselves in spiritual companionship.

When people are sick, Esther often brings them bone broth. We offer ourselves in healing.

When Lisa had her surgery last summer, a team accompanied her to appointments, ensuring she wasn’t alone in all the medical things she had to navigate We offer ourselves in care.

Br. Zachary and Rev. Jude have started a monthly brunch for people in their 30s and 40s. We offer ourselves in friendship.

Our choir has been opened once a month to all the people who love to sing together, who then share in bringing us beautiful music. We offer ourselves in joy.

Our Council will gather after this service for some lunch and strategic planning. We offer ourselves to our shared mission.

And we Visit. We visit each other in times of crisis, in times of celebration. We Visit each other for fun and friendship, to aid in grief, in loneliness, and always we Visit in love. Over and over again, we become the bodies of the Visitation, the people of presence who are not just waiting, but who are gestating, who are creating a new world the one that will be born of our love and companionship.

This isn’t about waiting passively for a single day of celebration, but about embodying the new world in all the days leading up to it. It’s the designing and weaving, the sitting by warm fires, embraced by the comfort of darkness. It’s incubation. It’s gestation. And it’s happening between and among us as we, here together today, are again part of the making the ground holy and ready with our Visitation.

Legacies of War & Peace

This is the sermon I’ve been actively avoiding since I started here. Before I started here. I was candidating and one question that came up repeatedly was where I stood on Israel/Palestine. I’d been in ministry a good long time and no one had ever asked me that question but it came up several times that week. I could tell there was a lot of energy around the topic, so I had a plan. Here’s my plan. Avoid the question as long as I can.

But, here I am, entirely unable to avoid it, having been told too many times by both sides that my silence is complicity.

I’m starting with my own story because who I am has everything to do with what I think about this and every issue. We cannot separate our personal narratives from our belief systems since much of what we believe has to do with the cultural worlds we were born into.

I was born into a Jewish family. As you might remember, my mother is Jewish, although my father came from an Italian Catholic background. Both had long ago rejected religion, which means that my experience of religion was entirely cultural.

Part of that experience was Passover. That holiday was central to my upbringing. Every spring my mother, father, sister and I went to my Uncle Joe’s house. Uncle Joe was my grandmother’s brother. At Uncle Joe’s house were people from three or four generations, mine being the youngest, with as many as 30 people packed into his little Long Island home. My father would bring some Italian Kosher-for-Passover wine which everyone loved and made him indispensable, even as he found this tradition a little mind-numbing.

I, on the other hand, did not. Aside from Christmas, this was my favorite holiday. It was the only time I would see our cousin Gilda who was mesmerizing in her brash, bleach-blonde wig and loud, shrill voice that seemed to fill every tiny room, and Chaim, her husband, who sat nearly still the whole night making small talk so dull I couldn’t help but stare. There were endless what-we-did-on-our-vacation slide shows and the joyful moment of opening the door for Elijiah when some fresh air could finally be let in the overcrowded living room where we’d gather around a single table snaked through the room, cobbled together with bridge tables and folding chairs.

The seating plan was prearranged so people could spend time with those they saw less often. A few times, I was placed next to the cousins with numbers tattooed to the inside of their arms. They showed me the tattoos, told me about concentration camps, talked about the trauma of starving, of being taken from the people you love, of being entirely powerless and victimized by strangers who think the world is better without you or your parents or spouse or children.

Regardless of how young we were, we heard the stories of rape. Of being dragged from our homes. Of watching our babies killed, randomly, by state-sponsored thugs. Of losing everything until the only thing left is the decision to keep breathing, a choice made only to ensure that evil didn’t win. We stayed alive in defiance.

I switched to “we” there. I always do when I tell these stories. Most Jews do. “When they came for us.” “What they did to us.” It’s how the stories were told. I sat every year to hear my family, my people, tell the stories of what happened “to us”. It happened when we were slaves in Egypt, it happened over and over again around the world in ghettos and pogroms in ancient and

medieval and then modern times, and it happened again when we didn’t expect it, in 20th century Europe. It happened in Egypt, and we’re here to tell the story- that’s what Passover is. The telling of the story of our people from slavery to liberation. And it happened again. It started in Germany, it spread through Europe. Nazis had power in the US, too. 30,000 of them gathered in Madison Square Garden with a huge picture of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

We told the story. We told the story of our suffering, enslavement, victimization, the story of genocide. And when every Seder anywhere in the world ends, we all call out, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Every year. Millions of Jews enact this same ritual. We tell the story, reminding ourselves and passing it to the next generation. We tell of our people, and we talk about resistance. We won’t let them do it to us again. We won’t take our eye off the ball again. We won’t be lulled into complacency again. We will protect ourselves, and take care of each other, at all costs. Never Again. Never Again.

This is generational trauma and it’s intentional. It’s what we do to stay safe. Most Jews I know have some basic information almost unconsciously in their minds at all times. I know I do, and mine wasn’t anything close to a religious household. But, I know where to run when they come for me. I know to have both cash and jewelry ready, in case. And, when I hear my Jewish friends right now saying, “I know who will hide me,” I’m sure that sounds hyperbolic to some people, but that’s exactly the kind of information we were all raised to track, even when it wasn’t ever said explicitly. How will you get out? Who will hide you if you can’t leave? Next year in Jerusalem.

Israel is where we will be safe. It’s where we went when we escaped from Egypt and where we ran when we couldn’t stay in Europe any more. It’s the one place on this otherwise inhospitable planet where Jewish people can gather together, protect each other, the one place from which we won’t have to run. Every citizen a soldier. Every Jew a citizen. Ours, then and now.

I know this story deep in my bones, and I know this story was triggered for every Jew all over the world when Hamas, swearing the end of Israel, massacred people, tore into their homes, separated people from their children, kidnapped and continues to hold people very young and very old, threatening not to stop until Israel is eradicated. I could feel all those stories come alive in me, and I knew what to do because they are coming for us, again. Gather with my people. Fight Fight Fight. Never Again. Next year in Jerusalem.

But Hamas isn’t the Nazi party. And we aren’t replaying stories from ancient or Medieval or even modern history. And this story isn’t nearly as simple as those of the past.

When Israel was gifted to the Jews in response to the trauma of the Nazi genocide, there were people there. Palestinians lived there. In our trauma, we couldn’t see that we were taking on the role of the oppressor. Because we were so frightened, because we were so desperate, because we wanted to claim our power in whatever way we could, we dismissed the possibility that anyone else might claim rights to the land we so frantically needed.

Jews were pushed to the outskirts of European society, made into 2nd class citizens, and ultimately denied basic human rights, including the right to life. Israelis then did the same thing to the Palestinians. Both native and European Israelis moved in and occupied Palestine, even though there was already an ancient people on that land.

Amnesty International has declared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to be an oppressive and discriminatory system of government, committing the crime of apartheid. There are arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement including 175 permanent checkpoints in the West Bank designed to disrupt everyday life, checkpoints that have been the direct cause of human death when people can’t get through in time to seek medical care. Israelis also engage deliberate acts of collective punishment, administrative detentions, random acts of violence, denial of the right to work, and if that isn’t bad enough, they also withhold water, force evictions of entire neighborhoods, and according to the UN, there are many meaningful accusations of torture of Palestinian citizens. Last October, Israel started denying married couples in the West Bank with passports from different countries the right to live together, an act meant to destabilize families. Israeli forces have demolished entire villages, creating a constant sense of impermanence, ensuring no one ever feels safe, guaranteeing intentionally that people are not secure and will not thrive. For instance, a year ago August, Israel launched an offensive on the Gaza Strip that destroyed 1,700 Palestinian homes, displacing all those people. 49 were killed including 8 children.

And this kind of thing has been going on since 1948. Yet, what we’re seeing now is even worse. As I wrote this sermon, an alert came in that Israeli solders had surrounded a hospital, not the first to collapse under the weight of Israeli violence. This morning, that hospital has been abandoned, as have all the people inside who will not survive without care.

There are two sides to this conflict, and each side sees themselves as victims in a fight for their survival. In some way, I was raised to know who my people are, and to protect them with everything I have.

But it’s because of how I was raised, it’s because of the stories of Kristallnacht, of occupied Austria, of concentration camps, that I know the pain of being Palestinian. Never Again means Never Again. Not to us. Not to them.

The Jewish stand can’t just be one of self-protection, but of universal protection of the human right to life for all people. Freedom of movement, of housing, to marry, to raise children, to health care, to food and water for All.

I’m finally answering the question posed to me almost five years ago. Where do I stand? I stand with the people. I stand with the suffering, with the powerless. I stand on the side of distraught children whose parents were killed and grief-stricken parents who watched their children die. I stand on the side of the sick, the hungry, the elderly trying to find safe harbor when tanks are rolling down their streets.

I know it’s not that simple. Hamas has vowed the end of Israel and antisemitism is skyrocketing around the globe. Hundreds of people are still captive. Victims abound. Everybody’s right. And everybody’s wrong.

We need a third way. We need to step out of the binary us vs. them and instead think about what new can be created, what can we birth, what alternative idea, amalgam of solutions can we design? How can we put love at the center? Is there room even to ask that question?

Part of that love is the listening. Acknowledge the deep wells of pain, the anger, the fear of being erased from both sides. Too many of us can hear only our own, so that the response to this sermon is likely to be about “them”. What “they” did. Yes, what you are saying, what you are going to say to me, is true.

And none of that makes the continuation of violence, the leveling of city streets, the bombing of neighborhoods, the kidnapping of children, or massacres of anyone anywhere any more justified.

The only way forward is for Israeli troops to cease fire and for Hamas to return those they are holding captive. Israel has to withdraw and let people back to their homes. They have to allow humanitarian aid in and the US has to fund it. There is no peace without justice, but there is no justice without peace.

What happens next in the Middle East is for other people, but what happens next here is for us. Let’s learn to hold each other’s stories. Rather than responding with “what about” let’s respond in love. When a story is told in anger, we respond in love. When a story is told in fear, we respond in love. When a story is told in self-righteous indignation, in direct confrontation and accusation, let’s respond in love.

There is so much pain, histories of pain, generations of pain, ongoing, constant, regularly triggered pain, wounds open never allowed to heal. Let’s become the balm of peace, the soothing, comforting people who can hold that pain for each other. Rather than feeding into the divisions, let’s hold people together. See them and understand their fear and anger to be real.

It won’t be enough, but it’s what we have. Where spirits have been torn and shredded, where hope is struggling to stay alive, we can share our vision of freedom for all centered in love, holding the generations of trauma but not perpetuating them, ending the pain with our commitment to love, doing all we can in every one of our relationships to say Never Again. Not to you, not to anyone. Not ever.

Thinning the Veil: Memorial Sunday

This is a story I very rarely tell. I don’t tell it because most people I know won’t believe me or won’t believe that this story means anything. Those who do believe me might get some thrill from the spookiness which isn’t really the point of the story either, so, I don’t usually tell it. I am, after all, a rational person, a person who loves science, who doesn’t generally bother with things that can’t be investigated and proven. But, I’m telling the story anyway, because what happened was real, even if I don’t know or can’t prove anything about what it meant if it meant anything at all.

In February of 2004, my grandmother, with whom I was quite close, collapsed. She was 87 and had a leaky valve in her heart. After a few days at the hospital, she went home where she entered hospice. For the next 6 weeks we all spent time with her. At first it was with the force of a crisis with everyone flying down at once, filling her living room with four generations of us. When it seemed clear death wasn’t actually immanent, my mother and her brother took turns living in my grandmother’s Floridian apartment with her as she moved slowly toward the end. They slept in the bed next to her, held her shrinking body, reminded her of the long life she lived and, as was normal for my grandmother, they – and we – laughed quite a lot. It was a very sad, but also sweet and beautiful time for our family.

One night, when I was asleep in my bed in New York, I awoke because I couldn’t breathe. I sat straight up, desperately gasping for air. There was none. Absolutely none. I couldn’t open my throat enough for even a wisp of air. I was terrified. I wasn’t making a sound- no air was going in or out. My head was spinning, trying to figure out what to do, knowing I didn’t have long before I’d pass out. More and more desperately, I kept trying to get some air into my lungs. Finally, something released and I could get a thin breath in. And another. And my body relaxed and opened and more air could move in. Now I was breathing. In and out. Oxygen was again available. My heart began to slow. The panic subsiding. I looked at the clock. 2:36. I went back to sleep.

At 4am the phone rang. It was my mother, sobbing. My grandmother had died. She apologized for calling so early, but said she’d waited a while and didn’t want to wait any more. I asked her how long she waited to call, when did grandma die. My mother said, “It was about 2:30 when she drew her last breath.”

I can’t explain what happened to me that night, nor am I going to try. Nothing like that has happened to me since or had it ever happened before. Were these things- my grandmother’s death and my inability to breath – were they related, or am I drawing conclusions from an odd coincidence? Was my grandmother’s final breath somehow felt by me, was I connecting to her or she to me as we were both seeking air? Was I experiencing her last breath? Was my breathing, was my life, tethered to hers? I don’t know, but I find my own rationalism to be a little limiting

sometimes. I can dismiss real experiences because I don’t think they are logical or because I can’t explain them scientifically. Were I listening to someone else tell that story, I might let my skepticism get the better of me, but I’m the one who lived it and it was very real. I try not to explain. I don’t have anything to say that would ease my rational brain.

Interestingly, though, the few times I’ve told that story, someone has replied with a parallel story. Others have had that or a similar experience when a beloved has died. I’m not the only one who may have touched the veil between life and death.

At this time of year, we start to feel the layers between worlds thinning. Samhain (sow-in) is the Celtic, pagan holiday we’re marking this week. Samhain literally means the end of summer. It is the time we shift from warmth to the cold of winter. It is the time of year the leaves fall and decompose into Earth which opens the space between dimensions. The presence of death, of so much plant matter moving between the worlds, the sudden loss of leaves that filled the space around us, conspire to thin the veil, bringing the two worlds of life and death closer. This is the pagan pre-curser to Halloween when the spirits could move more freely in and out. This is the time a breath breathed here might be felt in the next world.

Halloween is fun, but the theme is supposed to invoke fear. Horror films, blood and gore, scream-fests, chokie-rooms, haunted houses- they’re all designed with the idea that this thinning of the veil is frightening. I’m not critiquing any of that. It’s fun to be scared in that way, sort of cathartic. And dressing up in a come-as-you’re-not costume, walking through dry-ice-fog with sounds of a crazed clown laughing or a ghoul howling while you knock on strangers doors seeking candy is a great way to spend an evening.

Outside the holiday trappings, though, the presupposition is that this time of year, this thinning of the veil, this closeness of the other world is frightening. Or, maybe that it should be. I don’t experience it that way, though. The other world, the world of the dead, is home to my grandmother. My father is there, too, both people who loved me infinity. The other world feels friendly to me. There’s love there too. My people are there. People I miss terribly, people I wish I could talk with, or sit with, whose voices I want in my ears, whose hands I want to hold, whose advice I want to seek, whose food I want to eat. For me, the thinning of the veil is akin to feeling closer to someone I can’t see, because I know they are right there, on the other side, feeling my breath each time I exhale.

The walls will get thicker again. We’ll move back, away, the worlds will separate and we’ll be left here without our beloveds. Our grief will return, as it always does. We will again forget and remember we forgot and feel guilty and relieved and sad all over again. Even in this liminal space of feeling closer to those we’ve lost, we’ve still lost them. They are not here, even if we catch a whiff of their perfume or hear a laugh that brings us right back to some delightful moment. They are not here. They can’t see how we’ve grown or be proud of some accomplishment or accept our apology, or simply accompany us in our lives the way they once did.

Mourning is supposed to be temporary, but there’s a way in which it is constant or that it comes and goes in waves, washing over us and then away, even as time passes with the turning

of months to years to decades. It is no matter in the world of grief and longing. Time moves differently making the past feel very present and then so distant again.

Late October, early November offer us a gift of liminal space where the distance of death, the distance of love lost diminishes. People around the world are gathering in circles, are calling to their loved ones, are ritualizing their longing and the sharing of this space before the veil becomes a wall again.

Br. Zachary and I would like to welcome you to our own ritual of fire. During this time of the thinning of the veil, we are writing the names of the people we’ve loved and lost and we are casting those names into a flash as a way of calling them forth while also letting them go. We are bringing them into our space, remembering them, calling to them. And we are using the element of fire to send our love and our longing and our memory into this liminal time so they can hear and see us. We are remembering. The cleansing power of fire, the element of passion, of connection, will be our catalyst, bridging the space between here and there.

Disrupt Church

I am angry this week. So angry! Last week, too. And, maybe the week before. It’s sort of been going on for months. I mean, if I’m honest, it started last October. Someone did me wrong last October. Me and my whole family and I’m still mad. For months, when I passed their home, I’d give them the finger. They didn’t see it, but it felt pretty good. I remember a long time ago when we were still protesting Apartheid, a nun I knew used to drive into Shell stations to give people the finger. I’m taking my cue from Sr. O’Neil. It means nothing outside of registering my dissatisfaction, but sometimes that’s all we have.

When I say I’m angry, I mean it, too. And that anger has been distracting for almost a year. It sneaks into my head when I’m not thinking about anything in particular. It fills empty space. It shows up in my dreams. It slips out during casual conversation. In these last two weeks, I even think it’s blocking joy, preventing me from living my life fully.

Early in the summer, I realized I was still so angry because there’s been no accountability. These are people who treated my family badly – my son in particular – for which they’ve experienced no consequences. This is a trigger for me. I have a hard time when people behave badly and are not accountable. And, as I’ve confessed here before, I behave badly when I’m right. They haven’t been held to account and I’m right. This is a bad combination.

I actually do pretty well when I’m wrong. I don’t mind apologizing for things. I even appreciate the opportunity to grow. I find being wrong sort of liberating. If nothing else, I’m in control. I can apologize and make things better. I welcome learning I was wrong. I’m not so gracious when I’m right. In fact, I’m downright self-righteous. I need people to know I’m right. I have yet to learn the grace of being right and being quiet about it.

And this family- they’re not only wrong but they hurt my kid. I’ve been plotting revenge ever since.

I’m obviously not good at the revenge game, though, because outside of giving them the finger from time to time, an act they know nothing about, I haven’t taken any action at all.

So, a few weeks ago, this family acted-out again. My son was hurt. My husband was annoyed. So, they called a friend and went out for ice cream. They returned laughing having forgotten all about what sent them seeking fun to start with. I, on the other hand, stayed home and stewed.

It was then that I realized that I am, in fact, in the wrong.

Not about the situation. I’m wrong – or more accurately – I’m misaligned with a greater Truth. There isn’t anything I can do about what happened or continues to happen. Br. Zachary and I sometimes say to each other, “It’s people being people.” This family- they’re Peopling. Nothing I can do about it. And I’m not wrong that they’re doing the people thing badly. But, when all is said and done, I’m the one suffering from it. And that’s where I’m wrong.

So much of our suffering is forced on us. Death. Financial insecurity. Illness. The loss of human and civil rights. But this – this silly social stuff that most of us spend our time worrying about – that’s optional. Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, this year of anger is entirely on me. I’m not at fault in the precipitating event, and the feelings and intense response I had last October were appropriate. But, in the months since, my misery has been on me. If I want accountability, I may never get that for these people, but I can get it for myself. I’m creating my own pain.

It’s not the first time in my life I’ve done this and I know I’m not alone. I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that we humans, we do this to ourselves. We get angry and we hold on to it, and we create our own misery.

Rosh Hashanah started a week ago on Friday evening, the 15th. Yom Kippur begins this evening. If we hadn’t gone to the climate march last week, I’d have preached this sermon and invited us all into a week of reflection. Instead, I’m limiting our time to today, into tomorrow.

Self-reflection is an important spiritual practice. It’s how we bring ourselves back into alignment. It’s how we connect with our deepest selves, with the god or gods of our understanding, with the great rhythms of Earth, with the source of Love and Truth, with the Ground of Being. We stop. We look. We sit with what we see. We breathe into the reality of who we are.

It is good. We are good. We are also misguided. Unforgiving. Resentful. Reactive. Judgmental. Sometimes we’re joyless. Humorless. Inflexible. Demanding. Entitled. Self-Centered. Arrogant. Thoughtless. Stingy. Sharp. Critical. Any of this sound familiar?

And, if we’re sitting and looking and breathing, we can also see that we are helpful. Kind. Generous. Forgiving. Unassuming. Grateful. Playful. Creative. We can look at ourselves and see that we are open. Curious. Engaged. Gentle. Thoughtful. Relational.

Once we see our full and true selves, our potential for harm and grace, it’s time to repent. There is no repair, no reparations, no way to move forward in healing unless we repent. This is our moment for accountability. We stop. We look. We see. We breath into what’s real. And we begin the work of repentance. Again, there is no repair, there is no healing, if there is no repentance.

I think about this in anti-racism work too. I know sometimes white people feel like we’re being asked to apologize all the time, and often the people who feel that way point out that their families were very poor or they came from another country where they were persecuted or that they were an underclass even here for generations, all making the point that most white people alive today, especially here in New York, weren’t part of the inhumane history of slavery or segregation, so why should we apologize. The presupposition is that it has nothing to do with us. Often, at least in the circles I run in, the people speaking are liberals who understand the impact of American racial history, and they might even be open to institutional reparations.

It isn’t enough. While I might not personally be perpetuating systemic racism, repair only happens after repentance, and the repentance all white people have to consider is the inherent privilege of whiteness and the generations of opportunity on which our lives are based. If there’s going to be repair, we have to reflect honestly, even fearlessly. Acknowledge where we stand in the system. And repent. Healing comes after we say we’re sorry, even if we aren’t personally to blame. We are, nonetheless, the beneficiaries.

I wonder if it might be helpful for you all to think about something for which you might need to repent. It might be, like me, something I’m doing to myself, largely, although those who live with me aren’t protected. Or, it might be your place in our larger systems. It might be something very specific that you did or said that hurt someone you know. Think for a moment. Get that clearly in your mind.

I can ask you to do that because there’s always something. No one can say, “Nope. Nothing. I’m good.” If we’re honest, we know there’s a place that needs mending.

Think clearly about what it is you did. What part of this did you have? Was it your actions? Was it an inaction? Did you cause someone harm? See if you can name it for yourself.

Holding that in mind, how can you repent? There will be people down at the East River throwing bread into the water. Maybe that’s your way too. Or, you can go directly to the source, the person you’ve hurt and say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. Or, you can pray, telling the god or gods of your understanding what you’ve done. Seek accountability for yourself.

Forgiveness may or may not come next, specifically when we’re dealing with other people. Nothing we can do about that. That part is out of our hands. All we can do is acknowledge and repent. Acknowledge and repent. That’s the practice. Others will do or feel however they will. This remains true even if the one who was hurt was ourselves.

The practice is necessary either way. The only chance we can bring ourselves back to ourselves, back into alignment, is to see all we’ve done to knock ourselves off course.

Here’s the one assurance I can offer you. Regardless of what you’ve done or who you think you are, you are loved. You are held, right now, even in your brokenness, in a vast matrix of love and welcome.

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual practices of this church. It might be that I need to deepen my own spiritual life and it might be because I’ve heard similar things from some of you, but I’d love for us to think about how we lean into opportunities like the one offered by Yom Kippur. There is a natural rhythm in the human condition and part of that is a time for spiritual reflection. Because of the timing, we’ve missed much of the opportunity of this holiday, so I’m preparing you now for Lent. I am going to invite us all into a deeper, more intentional and longer time toward the end of winter so we can lean in to this kind of healing for ourselves, for those around us, and for the world.

But that shouldn’t take away from today. If you are able and willing, I’m inviting you – as I’m inviting myself – into a day of reflection. Yom Kippur begins this evening and runs through tomorrow. I’m lucky that tomorrow is my day off, so I’ll have some time. I’m going to begin my day writing my reflection. I’ll spend real

time tomorrow putting language to all the things that are blocking me, that I’ve messed up, that I’m guilty of. I’ll then sit with all of that, breathing deeply what it means to be human, what it means to be me right now. And then I’m going to bring some bread to some water and I’m going to name each of these transgressions as I throw bread into water and with each naming, I’m going to ask the god of my understanding for forgiveness.

This is my cleansing ritual, and it might be for you too. Maybe this is a good time for you to take a similar spiritual and moral inventory. Maybe tonight or tomorrow, you can sit with and breath into some of the less comfortable truths about yourself. And, maybe the ritual of bread and water will work for you. Fire is another option. Write it all down and burn it. Kitchen sinks work if you can turn off the smoke detector for a few minutes.

Whatever the actual practice, this invitation is open.

And whatever you find, whatever you see in yourself, we are Universalists. We know that Love is the ground on which we stand, that we were welcomed into the embrace of Love with our first breath, that we are surrounded by that very love in every moment of every day since then, and that we will be welcomed into Love with our last gasp of air.

With that Truth, with Love always at the Center, we will begin our litany.

Power Sunday: Leveraging Our Collective

TikTok says men think about the Roman Empire daily, but it’s the American Empire that has my attention. Mirroring the innocence of the mid and late 20th century, I grew up believing that the United States is the best nation that has ever existed. That opinion came from my white immigrant family grateful largely for opportunity and the freedom of economic prosperity. But, over time, our democracy has begun to fade, and whether or not children are told this is the best nation in the history of nations doesn’t alter our current downward trajectory.

As much as we like to say we’ve been a democracy since 1776, or maybe from the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, we’ve mostly been a democracy in process until the full realization of our potential with the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the codification of inclusion at the ballet booth, the United States of America became worthy of the admiration of democracies, both realized and struggling, around the world. Our system of government, standing on a strong foundation of law, had the full support of our nation’s people and our institutions, creating what we thought was an unbreakable network ensuring equal access to our founding promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But as we approach the 60th anniversary of that peak moment, most Americans are aware that our democracy is on a downward slide. There are many key markers that support this suspicion including our decline on the Polity Index that moved us below the threshold of full democracy in recent history. President Joe Biden warned us just a few weeks ago that democracy is at risk, that the threat to our institutions and our Constitution is serious, noting extremism and increasingly disturbing threats of violence on our leaders. Of course, we don’t need scholars or even our President to tell us what we can see and hear for ourselves. The words “chaos” and “dysfunction” and “in-fighting” have become common in our national headlines as our government grinds to a halt over and over again.

Strong, healthy democracies require what we call civil society. Civil society consists of all the voluntary organizations where people gather, autonomous from the State. These groups might have some state support, funding or interaction, but they are independent of state controls and have their own agendas and goals. They are concerned with public ends, but they aren’t seeking state power. They exist for many reasons, but one is to influence law, culture, and the ways we live together. They are part of a larger piece of community living, valuing pluralism, inclusion, and a wide range of life experience and thought.

The organizations that populate civil society include educators who advocate for curriculum development to train the next generation of thinkers and leaders, and climate activists who push against corporate influence, and librarians who ensure access to a diversity of ideas, and workers who leverage their collective power to ensure fair wages and protections. Civil Society includes museums that preserve our history, dance companies that celebrate self-expression, and community theatres where new philosophies are given language and an audience.

Cults aren’t part of civil society because they want to separate people from the mainstream and yoga groups don’t generally qualify because they have no interest in influencing public life. Churches, on the other hand, do. So do all of our UU organizations like Ministry for Earth, state action networks, and UUSJ, our UU voice on the Hill. All of these institutions are part of the fabric of civil society, without which we don’t have an authentic democracy.

Scholars tell us that democracies don’t collapse because of a single, influential person. They collapse because the people who should know better align themselves with stronger, more dangerous, personalities. They, themselves, aren’t fascists, communists or extremists. They’re just too weakly committed to democracy and are ultimately opportunists who say what they think they need to say to get or keep power. Civil society is one of the key levers to keep these people in check. Groups that are themselves run democratically, giving everyone the experience of having a voice and a vote, with deep membership rosters of concerned and engaged citizens, or public forums for open discussion, become a counter-balance to self-serving individuals. These organizations create occasions for influence and can reward opportunists with the popularity or power they seek without requiring them to compromise their commitment to democratic systems. They can also create and engage systems of social accountability that keep some of these people in check.

Totalitarian nations have no civil society. The more civil society in a country, the more democratic it can be. There are very few fully totalitarian nations, but we can see these systems of government increase as civil society decreases. North Korea is completely totalitarian with no visible counter to the current government. China used to be more complete, but civil society has been growing there. When nations like Russia want to increase governmental control, they shut down parts of civil society as does every autocrat seeking to consolidate his or her power. Voluntary organizations are a crucial part of any healthy, transparent, and legitimate democratic system. We can determine the vitality of a democracy by the integration of these groups in the fabric of the nation.

Faith based organizations are historically some of the most difficult to terminate because they are often seen as the moral centers of the community. Shutting them down forces the government to admit a lack of concern with morality, an act most citizens find alarming. Instead, many authoritarian regimes work to befriend religious institutions, seeking to align religious power centers with their own. We can see this happening here in the US with Evangelical churches who have become supporters of some of the more dangerous factions in our current system. This makes our own position as a liberal religious denomination all the more necessary in our current political climate. We continue to have the moral authority to counter the current trajectory and can stand against the wave of conservative religious alignment with the radical right-wing political movement. Our existence, our internal health, and strength, is an essential part of what can turn the tide of American democratic legitimacy. It is our witness to pluralism, an embrace of science as a source of truth, our own democratic structures, our collective voice for choice, for education, for inclusion, and our training of a new leadership class that demonstrates the need for

our witness and the centrality of our voice as part of civil society right now, at this moment in history.

Sadly, this comes at the same time religion is on a steep decline in American culture. Across the country, Unitarian Universalist churches have seen a dramatic reduction in membership. We’ve lost 18,000 children from our RE programs over the last 10 years. We’ve lost 100,000 members over the last 50. In 2020, the average size of a UU congregation was half the size as 20 years earlier. We’re not alone in this freefall, and as liberal religion declines in national influence, so does American democracy.

I don’t think these things are unrelated. Just as people are turning away from institutional religion, the demons of authoritarianism are gaining ground. When the moral centers lose influence and can no longer claim to be our collective conscience, it’s easier for alternatives to take root. Our voices get weaker and are harder to hear.

But lets not pretend we’re inaudible. There are close to 200,000 people in UU churches. We have not given up our space at the table nor our moral authority, even if the tide of totalitarianism hopes to wash over us. This is evidenced, at the very least, by your decision to bring this service to your own congregation today, as so many other UUs congregations are doing. We are interdependent, interconnected, and committed to holding up our shared liberal religious values.

Power Sunday comes from UU’s for Social Justice. UUSJ was founded originally by a circle of UU churches in the Washington, DC area who wanted to leverage their geographic location to influence the federal conversation. About two years ago, UUSJ broke out of that model and opened to UUs around the country to become our collective voice, not just those positioned so closely to DC power centers. UUSJ is a small organization with no full time staff, like so many of our UU groups doing the work of our faith, but with the help of their Executive Director, have had an outsized influence in federal policy conversations. This worship service is designed to get the word out about both our UU potential as a faith community through the work of UUSJ in these national discussions and to hold up one of our own institutions, also part of civil society, in need of support in these fragile days of our democracy. In future years, Power Sunday will include an opportunity for advocacy so we as UUs can leverage our collective power.

Scholars might tell us that American democracy is deconsolidating, but it is far from collapse. Even through significant challenges, the system is holding. With the kick-off of Power Sunday, UU congregations can step into our moral authority in partnership with each other and other liberal religious members of civil society to hold strong against the tide of authoritarianism. Through our connection with UUSJ, the building of our collective power on the Hill, and as a partner with other denominations also holding back the waters of authoritarianism, Unitarian Universalists play a key role in keeping our democracy strong.

Today, in churches around the country, we are raising our shared consciousness, holding up our critical place in the democratic fabric of our nation, tuning our collective voice, and reminding Unitarian Universalists that we are necessary, that we are not alone, and that in this fragile moment of American history, we are powerful.

Yom Kippur: Atonement, Accountability, and Healing

I am angry this week. So angry! Last week, too. And, maybe the week before. It’s sort of been going on for months. I mean, if I’m honest, it started last October. Someone did me wrong last October. Me and my whole family and I’m still mad. For months, when I passed their home, I’d give them the finger. They didn’t see it, but it felt pretty good. I remember a long time ago when we were still protesting Apartheid, a nun I knew used to drive into Shell stations to give people the finger. I’m taking my cue from Sr. O’Neil. It means nothing outside of registering my dissatisfaction, but sometimes that’s all we have.

When I say I’m angry, I mean it, too. And that anger has been distracting for almost a year. It sneaks into my head when I’m not thinking about anything in particular. It fills empty space. It shows up in my dreams. It slips out during casual conversation. In these last two weeks, I even think it’s blocking joy, preventing me from living my life fully.

Early in the summer, I realized I was still so angry because there’s been no accountability. These are people who treated my family badly – my son in particular – for which they’ve experienced no consequences. This is a trigger for me. I have a hard time when people behave badly and are not accountable. And, as I’ve confessed here before, I behave badly when I’m right. They haven’t been held to account and I’m right. This is a bad combination.

I actually do pretty well when I’m wrong. I don’t mind apologizing for things. I even appreciate the opportunity to grow. I find being wrong sort of liberating. If nothing else, I’m in control. I can apologize and make things better. I welcome learning I was wrong. I’m not so gracious when I’m right. In fact, I’m downright self-righteous. I need people to know I’m right. I have yet to learn the grace of being right and being quiet about it.

And this family- they’re not only wrong but they hurt my kid. I’ve been plotting revenge ever since.

I’m obviously not good at the revenge game, though, because outside of giving them the finger from time to time, an act they know nothing about, I haven’t taken any action at all.

So, a few weeks ago, this family acted-out again. My son was hurt. My husband was annoyed. So, they called a friend and went out for ice cream. They returned laughing having forgotten all about what sent them seeking fun to start with. I, on the other hand, stayed home and stewed.

It was then that I realized that I am, in fact, in the wrong.

Not about the situation. I’m wrong – or more accurately – I’m misaligned with a greater Truth. There isn’t anything I can do about what happened or continues to happen. Br. Zachary and I sometimes say to each other, “It’s people being people.” This family- they’re Peopling. Nothing I can do about it. And I’m not wrong that they’re doing the people thing badly. But, when all is said and done, I’m the one suffering from it. And that’s where I’m wrong.

So much of our suffering is forced on us. Death. Financial insecurity. Illness. The loss of human and civil rights. But this – this silly social stuff that most of us spend our time worrying about – that’s optional. Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, this year of anger is entirely on me. I’m not at fault in the precipitating event, and the feelings and intense response I had last October were appropriate. But, in the months since, my misery has been on me. If I want accountability, I may never get that for these people, but I can get it for myself. I’m creating my own pain.

It’s not the first time in my life I’ve done this and I know I’m not alone. I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that we humans, we do this to ourselves. We get angry and we hold on to it, and we create our own misery.

Rosh Hashanah started a week ago on Friday evening, the 15th. Yom Kippur begins this evening. If we hadn’t gone to the climate march last week, I’d have preached this sermon and invited us all into a week of reflection. Instead, I’m limiting our time to today, into tomorrow.

Self-reflection is an important spiritual practice. It’s how we bring ourselves back into alignment. It’s how we connect with our deepest selves, with the god or gods of our understanding, with the great rhythms of Earth, with the source of Love and Truth, with the Ground of Being. We stop. We look. We sit with what we see. We breathe into the reality of who we are.

It is good. We are good. We are also misguided. Unforgiving. Resentful. Reactive. Judgmental. Sometimes we’re joyless. Humorless. Inflexible. Demanding. Entitled. Self-Centered. Arrogant. Thoughtless. Stingy. Sharp. Critical. Any of this sound familiar?

And, if we’re sitting and looking and breathing, we can also see that we are helpful. Kind. Generous. Forgiving. Unassuming. Grateful. Playful. Creative. We can look at ourselves and see that we are open. Curious. Engaged. Gentle. Thoughtful. Relational.

Once we see our full and true selves, our potential for harm and grace, it’s time to repent. There is no repair, no reparations, no way to move forward in healing unless we repent. This is our moment for accountability. We stop. We look. We see. We breath into what’s real. And we begin the work of repentance. Again, there is no repair, there is no healing, if there is no repentance.

I think about this in anti-racism work too. I know sometimes white people feel like we’re being asked to apologize all the time, and often the people who feel that way point out that their families were very poor or they came from another country where they were persecuted or that they were an underclass even here for generations, all making the point that most white people alive today, especially here in New York, weren’t part of the inhumane history of slavery or segregation, so why should we apologize. The presupposition is that it has nothing to do with us. Often, at least in the circles I run in, the people speaking are liberals who understand the impact of American racial history, and they might even be open to institutional reparations.

It isn’t enough. While I might not personally be perpetuating systemic racism, repair only happens after repentance, and the repentance all white people have to consider is the inherent privilege of whiteness and the generations of opportunity on which our lives are based. If there’s going to be repair, we have to reflect honestly, even fearlessly. Acknowledge where we stand in the system. And repent. Healing comes after we say we’re sorry, even if we aren’t personally to blame. We are, nonetheless, the beneficiaries.

I wonder if it might be helpful for you all to think about something for which you might need to repent. It might be, like me, something I’m doing to myself, largely, although those who live with me aren’t protected. Or, it might be your place in our larger systems. It might be something very specific that you did or said that hurt someone you know. Think for a moment. Get that clearly in your mind.

I can ask you to do that because there’s always something. No one can say, “Nope. Nothing. I’m good.” If we’re honest, we know there’s a place that needs mending.

Think clearly about what it is you did. What part of this did you have? Was it your actions? Was it an inaction? Did you cause someone harm? See if you can name it for yourself.

Holding that in mind, how can you repent? There will be people down at the East River throwing bread into the water. Maybe that’s your way too. Or, you can go directly to the source, the person you’ve hurt and say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. Or, you can pray, telling the god or gods of your understanding what you’ve done. Seek accountability for yourself.

Forgiveness may or may not come next, specifically when we’re dealing with other people. Nothing we can do about that. That part is out of our hands. All we can do is acknowledge and repent. Acknowledge and repent. That’s the practice. Others will do or feel however they will. This remains true even if the one who was hurt was ourselves.

The practice is necessary either way. The only chance we can bring ourselves back to ourselves, back into alignment, is to see all we’ve done to knock ourselves off course.

Here’s the one assurance I can offer you. Regardless of what you’ve done or who you think you are, you are loved. You are held, right now, even in your brokenness, in a vast matrix of love and welcome.

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual practices of this church. It might be that I need to deepen my own spiritual life and it might be because I’ve heard similar things from some of you, but I’d love for us to think about how we lean into opportunities like the one offered by Yom Kippur. There is a natural rhythm in the human condition and part of that is a time for spiritual reflection. Because of the timing, we’ve missed much of the opportunity of this holiday, so I’m preparing you now for Lent. I am going to invite us all into a deeper, more intentional and longer time toward the end of winter so we can lean in to this kind of healing for ourselves, for those around us, and for the world.

But that shouldn’t take away from today. If you are able and willing, I’m inviting you – as I’m inviting myself – into a day of reflection. Yom Kippur begins this evening and runs through tomorrow. I’m lucky that tomorrow is my day off, so I’ll have some time. I’m going to begin my day writing my reflection. I’ll spend real

time tomorrow putting language to all the things that are blocking me, that I’ve messed up, that I’m guilty of. I’ll then sit with all of that, breathing deeply what it means to be human, what it means to be me right now. And then I’m going to bring some bread to some water and I’m going to name each of these transgressions as I throw bread into water and with each naming, I’m going to ask the god of my understanding for forgiveness.

This is my cleansing ritual, and it might be for you too. Maybe this is a good time for you to take a similar spiritual and moral inventory. Maybe tonight or tomorrow, you can sit with and breath into some of the less comfortable truths about yourself. And, maybe the ritual of bread and water will work for you. Fire is another option. Write it all down and burn it. Kitchen sinks work if you can turn off the smoke detector for a few minutes.

Whatever the actual practice, this invitation is open.

And whatever you find, whatever you see in yourself, we are Universalists. We know that Love is the ground on which we stand, that we were welcomed into the embrace of Love with our first breath, that we are surrounded by that very love in every moment of every day since then, and that we will be welcomed into Love with our last gasp of air.

With that Truth, with Love always at the Center, we will begin our litany.

The Five Stones, Pt. V: Choose Hope

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

September 3, 2023

The prior 4 weeks, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. Is this the first time you’re hearing about – real briefly – I’ll try to catch you up. He was one of our Unitarian theologians who was physically active in trying to stave off the rise of Nazism in Germany before he moved back to the States. And his teachings from a century ago, are as relevant today. In short regarding the piece about the five stones, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. I’ll paraphrase one last time all five stones – it’ll help you memorize them. ;-)

What does our liberal faith say about living? I will paraphrase the much longer piece, which itself is an edit of a sort, using language that might be more familiar to us: 1. Revelation is not sealed — in the unfolding of the human spirit we continuously experience life in new ways and so too does our experience of truth. 2. Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles 3. We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression 4. Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. Goodness happens in relationships with one another. 5. We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.[1]

Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.”

Each of these are interdependent with one another, and each is a way to stave off humanity’s totalitarian tendencies.

1) Revelation is not sealed – reminds us that there is no one right way to do all things. Strict adherence to creed is antithetical to the human spirit – and so is following propaganda and groupthink. 

2) Mutuality and Consent are ethical and theological principles. Fascism targets consent first – the show of power over, rather than power with, is the point of Fascism.

3) Building the Beloved Community, and the prophethood of all believers. Community transcends Ego and it transcends charlatans and narcissists. Where the protestant reformation made all of us priests in our own faith, JLA is anointing us all prophets to speak truth to power for the wholeness of Community.

4) Each child that’s born is another redeemer. Fascism wants to segregate, separate and scapegoat whatever “other” they can come up with. If Love is truly at our center, and every child is another redeemer, we remember that we need all of us to survive.

Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.” We’ll be talking about a community vision today, and our individual choices to choose hope. Fascism wants us to feel demoralized, to wonder what the point is, or to forget our own power and agency. We began this series talking a little about science and perception, and our faith teaches about the evolution of our ethics and our expressed religious practice. (Evolution in the scientific sense, of adapting to the current reality, rather than in the sense of better and better for ever and ever. Perpetual growth for the sake of growth is a quirk of a bad take on textbook economics; JLA is teaching us about depth, not expansion.) And we’ll end with another discussion about science and ethics.

There’s a notion – I’m not sure where I first encountered it – that makes a distinction about the evolution of science and the evolution of ethics. It suggests that they differ in one notable way. As science unfolds, it progresses on what came before. Each generation is faced with new learnings that are rooted in old learnings, and the body of scientific knowing gets passed on to the next generation to pick up from where prior scientists left off. Barring catastrophes like the Dark Ages, science isn’t lost, it perennially moves forward. It will likely unfold with experts developing into further and further specializations; so that each area of sub specialty gets more and more nuanced and hopefully advanced.

Ethics is a different creature. Although our scholars in the field may function in the same way, building off what came before – as a people – each generation needs to learn and relearn the same lessons. Why is war the worst solution? Why are basic civil rights a thing each generation needs to fight for over and over? Why do we enter and recreate financial crises that we knew would occur – the proverbial market bubbles that we force upon ourselves again and again? It’s because as human creatures, our communal intellect may be willing to build off the lego blocks of past advancements, but our hearts have to start from the beginning with each new generation. And ethics has the additional challenge that there are bad actors who lie to us, or to themselves, or to both – that they are the good actors and not really the bad. For communities, ethics is learned from the ground up, with an ever changing cultural peer review panel whose rules are written and re-written for every generation…  and science starts from the shoulders of past giants; theoretically with a consensus.

Now that statement has a way about it that’s painted in broad strokes. Even if science can give a clear answer – like on the question (or non-question) of climate change – ethics deeply influences our ability to accept it as answer. Likewise, we seem to be able to make the processing power of computers multiple by 1.5 times annually, but ethics seems to stall our improvement of fuel efficiency and our choices to even research renewable resources. But the basic notion is still accurate – we have all the resources to transform the world, but we don’t always choose to do so.

Spiritually, there’s a way in which that feels exhausting. We have all the capacity to affect the changes we need, but we often don’t have the moral courage, or maybe the moral willpower, to pass on the lessons in ways that seem to match. But we can choose to flip that script.

Despair sets in when we think we can’t affect change. That’s either rooted in cynicism, or that’s rooted in facts that paint a bleak picture. Let’s look at both. Staying with the science road, history tells us that the facts of science seem to indicate we have all the capacity we need to affect change in the world. From polio, to penicillin, to the moon landing, to the ozone layer – give us a challenge that we can unite behind, and give us generations to accomplish it, and we can do it. That’s the fact. Cynicism looks at perfect outcomes and pretends that those perfect outcomes are the new benchmark to follow. If we don’t meet the benchmark of perfect, then the solution is flawed and so what’s the point. There’s some interesting blogs out there wrestling with our political situations and the impact of cynicism that I won’t go into here, but there’s a lot of thought out there on this topic of cynicism that you might want to look into on your own.

Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world. History presents both an onerous and a hopeful record. Each generation must imprint humanity’s moral progress upon the tablets of our hearts anew. We can choose to look at that with despair for the effort, or we can choose to look upon that with awe. We have the capacity to impress humanity’s moral progress anew!!!  It’s a matter of will; it’s a matter of personal and communal choice. That’s our spiritual charge as a religious community.

In a few short weeks, we will be entering the High Holy Days in the Jewish liturgical calendar - how do we begin again in hope after seasons of hardship? As we are come upon these days of awe, can we bear witness to their lessons and apply them to the choice for hope? Do we look upon past choices with despair, or do we choose to look upon them with awe? For the month of September, our sermons and services, we will be imagining what it would mean to be a People of Renewal. How do our choices impact that imagination?

I once heard our regional lead for the Central East Region, the Rev. Megan Foley, was leading worship for 40+ clergy and she had a metaphor that’s really helpful here. She spoke of earlobes and nostrils. I’m going from memory, so I’ll get the gist, rather than quote – but I thank her for getting me to think in this direction. In the body of life, we all have a role. If you’re an earlobe, your role is to be the best earlobe you can be. It’s not to create more earlobes; it’s not to make the nostril over there act more like an earlobe. You may want to put in some effort to help the nostril be the best nostril it can be, but that’s as far as you should go from your role as earlobe – because the world still needs someone to be an earlobe.

That metaphor got me thinking a lot about our mission as a religious community in the face of hardship and hope. We function as a group of individuals; but we also function as a group of groups. There are bodies (committees) that help move forward our social justice work and our anti-racism work; who help to maintain our men’s refugee shelter; who create and curate art, who offer communal pastoral care, and on and on. We don’t need our membership team to take over our shelter, but maybe our membership team can help identify folks who are well suited for direct service work. Our Church Council doesn’t need to figure out the solutions to a better office system, but it can help us all to identify when something isn’t working, or something is working fabulously!  In a community as large as ours, the minutia matters if we want to achieve our common purpose. The earlobes and nostrils of fellowship-work, lead to a common purpose.

In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world.  Those are just words, but the impact is larger. We care for our members in times of crisis as best we can, when we know of the challenge; we offer a shelter in the cold weather months and collect and distribute food to those in need. We partner with non-profits the world over, our denomination and other local groups and intake shelters, to offer funds, or organizing, or marching (like on Sept 17), or simply following their lead; and on and on - and that list takes a ton of minutia to happen. We need earlobes and nostrils – as unexciting as that work sometimes sounds – makes the life-saving and life-affirming ministries happen. In these days of renewal, and the coming days of Awe in the Jewish calendar, it’s not just the sublime sunset, or the quiet of the garden that affirm our spirits, it’s the mundane everyday task that takes 30 years to build or rebuild– that also affirms our spirits and blesses our hands to do the work ahead.

In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world.  If I were to whittle that down to three words, what would they be? Community, Individual and World? If that were it, it would mean community draws the individual into the world. That’s true – and that’s one of our goals. Maybe, Nurture, Caring and Healing. In a too often broken-feeling world, healing can only come when people choose the path of compassion and support. That’s true too. What I see as central to our religious purpose is the reality that we need to be drawn out of our individual concerns into an accountable community that chooses to heal these corners of the world through care and justice. Sometimes that will be hard; sometimes that will be uncomfortable; sometimes that means that our individual opinions will be in conflict with another’s views, but we do so together.

I’ll close with a matched theological demand to James Luther Adam’s 5th stone. I see the matching demand of progressive faith to be this questions: Does it remind me to live with hope? When we are faced with a belief that challenges us, or leads us to despair, our faith tells us that it’s misleading. If our faith truly teaches us that – Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world  -(and it does) – then any theology that seeks to cause us to forget hope is a theology that is misleading. Hope doesn’t mean easy; it doesn’t mean perfect; it doesn’t protect us from having to endure through periods of exhaustion or boredom or minutia – but it does make sure we face the world with a healthy sense of awe and possibility. Awe and possibility.

The Five Stones, Pt. IV: When Goodness Happens

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 27, 2023

The prior 3 weeks, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. Is this the first time you’re hearing about – real briefly – I’ll try to catch you up. He was one of our Unitarian theologians who was physically active in trying to stave off the rise of Nazism in Germany before he moved back to the States. After many requests, I promised I would work through each of the stones in successive weeks. In short regarding the piece about the five stones, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. After today we have one more to cover, but today, I want to focus on the 4th stone in Adams’ theology. That precept paraphrased is: “Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. 

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

But like the other sermons in the series, I want to start out with a story. When I was a child, one of the worst insults another kid could make toward a boy was to say they acted like a girl; or threw like a girl, or ran or walked like a girl. “Man up”, meant toughen up. Being a guy meant being strong, and loud, and taking up space. And the barbs would come from boys for sure – but those barbs would also come from girls. It would be engrained by implicit actions by adult men, and by adult women. As kids we would voice aloud the stuff that we would quietly live by as adults.

It’s sick. It’s a sickness in our culture that strives to denigrate half our population in order to apparently lift up the other half. But it only does so in appearance. When boys and men are raised to think masculinity has only one form, we box in our boys’ potential as we diminish the worth of our girls. No one wins; everyone loses. The pain is merely felt differently for each of us; but the pain is real. And although we’re all diminished, girls’ and women’s safety is put up as the gamble.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

And it continues well on into adulthood. The worst excesses get normalized as harmless ‘locker room talk’, when what is actually being bantered about - amounts to sexual assault. But we don’t have to go to that extreme to see it in our daily lives. At work, or out and about, take note who takes up room in discussions. Note how we are trained and raised to speak or not to speak. Who gets to repeat the same tired point over and over until folks are beaten into submission, and who struggles to whisper their view even once? Misogyny is a sickness, and we’re swimming in it – we’re swimming in it so - that some of us normalize it, some never notice it, and some are being killed by it.

We’re living in a culture where several women can accuse a public or political figure of sexual assault, and a mainstream media pundits will punish them by tweeting out the women’s home address and phone number. If we wonder why women do not speak aloud in a timely manner after being assaulted, we only have to look to that to know one of the reasons. How is that even legal?! We give the whole public direct access to the potential victim of sexual assault. How traumatic that is for the victim. But there’s also a way in which that punishment for speaking out gets felt by all women, by all victims of sexual assault (not just women.) They’re put in their place – once again. Misogyny is a sickness that demoralizes, victimizes, and sometimes kills.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

Theologically, misogyny is another form of Original Sin. We don’t need to have done anything to be infected by it. Men, women, all people raised in our culture must deal with its imprint on our psyches and on our souls. We’re born into, infected by it, and live lives that replicate the systems of abuse – knowingly or unwittingly – even if we’re also victims of it; because we’re all victims of it. But even if we’ve done nothing to deserve the sin of misogyny, in order for healing, we need to address it. For some of us we’re victims and a whole range of support systems may need to be relied on for healing, for safety, or for justice. If that’s true for you, and you need help, please reach out, and our Church will help in every way we possibly can.

Some of us have internalized it so much, that we contribute without knowing the damage we do – in some ways large, and in some ways small. If I go back to my childhood – being a guy meant being strong, and loud, and taking up space. The flip side meant that being a girl meant being weaker and being a door-mouse. When we find ourselves living by either of those false truths, we need to seek to push ourselves to break free from that bind. Binding lies, break our spirits, harm our world, and risk our lives.

And for the men in the room, we need to do better. We need to be a little more believing of women who say they are in danger. We need to be a little more gracious with the space we dominate. We need to be less permissive of supposed “locker room talk” when we hear it. Women become less safe, and men become less human, when we pretend that language that perpetuates sexual assault is harmless in our personal fantasies. It’s not harmless; it doesn’t further the peace; it doesn’t make space for women (and not only women) to be themselves without fear of harm. We have to do better.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

Theologically, what does that mean for our culture? If every child that’s born is another redeemer, then misogyny is a lie. We’re not better than any other soul because of the happenstance of our birth. Any ethic that lifts one group over another is a spiritual lie that erodes our conscience and diminishes our humanity. Each girl that’s born is another redeemer, and we ought to treat one another appropriately with care and support. Our common humanity is wrapped up in the common redemption of all people. Each of us has the potential to redeem the broken corners of our world.

We are soon coming to the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, next month. Throughout the Jewish religious life, these holy days teach us wisely to admit our failings, and atone for the harm we’ve brought into this world – through our actions or due to our inactions. There was a teaching that comes from an 18th century Chasidic proverb. “Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be, “For my sake was the world created.” And the other, “I am dust and ashes.”

 This wisdom speaks to us based on where our ego and where our sense of self lie. When we’re allowing the world to step on us, and destroy our sense of worth, we need to remember that for our sake - was the world created. When we’re doing the soul-crushing of another, we need to find more humility and remember that we’re dust and ashes. Misogyny confuses the world into thinking those two proverbs apply distinctly based on gender; as if the world were created only for men, and women were but dust and ashes. If that feels extreme, take a closer look at how men and women are spoken of in the general public, on the schoolyard, and in your work meetings. I don’t think it’s that far off how culture functions at its worst. And it functions at its worst far too much.

But if each child that’s born is another redeemer; if we each have worth and we each having a saving agency to bring to Creation, then that potential for goodness is inherent. That potential for goodness also obligates us in the face of a world full of struggle. If we have agency, goodness obligates us to use that agency for the betterment of one another. To do otherwise is to turn our heads from another’s needs; to become complicit in systems of oppression and indifference that churn through the lives of our children and adults, and through our own lives. The demand this fourth stone places upon us is the perennial question: Do I live into this holy work? At times of hardship, it may be enough to simply try to survive, or to heal. But when we have the capacity to ease the suffering of those around, goodness obligates us to live into this holy work. At those times of strength, living into this holy work means taking seriously when another speaks up about violence or coercion done to them. And to be sure, when we’re going through those times of hardship, living our authentic self is the first movement toward living into this holy work.

The Five Stones, Pt. III: Out of Isolation

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 20, 2023

When I was still living in Brooklyn, we had a small garden that wraps around our terrace – think herbs and some wild flowers and grasses. When the weather is nice, I wrote my sermons from there. It’s probably why I have so many nature references in my sermons. My dog would lay down in the shade of one of the flower boxes, and my cat gets the proverbial popcorn and watches the “Nature Channel” in my garden. Everything is extremely fascinating to our cat – Toby. He’ll stare at ants like they are alien creatures, but won’t go too close or engage. Bees on the other hand – bees turn him into a jerk. He’ll stalk them and swipe at them if they linger too long on a flower.

At first I was horrified – without a clue as to what to do about it. I have a mild allergy to bees, so I’m not going to get too close to intervene, but they also don’t deserve that fate before the claws of my cat. In another feat of dog-training magic, I’ve figured out how to train our dog to tackle the cat when he goes for a bee. It was based off an earlier essential lesson in tackling-the-cat when the cat scratches the furniture. Basically, we’ve trained our dog to tackle small cats on command. I think it’s fun for everyone really, but I’m sure the bee appreciates it as much as my couch does – I dare say more so. Enough times being tackled by the dog, the cat is becoming increasingly hesitant to swipe at bees (it doesn’t seem to stop him though from destroying our furniture though. Can’t have everything I guess.)

Bees are interesting creatures. The common wisdom is that they defy all laws of aerodynamics in order to fly with their wings that should be too light for their bodies to get lift; but they still do. They live cloistered away with several thousand of their closest family members. They work tirelessly, so that the next generation which they may not live to see, can be born in another season. How many millions of worker bee hours does it take to produce one jar of honey for our toast and tea? …Then they return, again and again, to the field, to gather more and more food for the honeycombed table.

From the perspective of us humans in the northeast, they are gone for half the year, isolated from the cold and inclement weather. Even raindrops can be a challenge when you’re that small. When I water my garden, they head for the hills. Then as the weather turns to spring and summer, they fly back out of seeming isolation, and live fully in the wider world. Food, and garden hoses, and allergic bystanders, and yes, even psycho-killer felines are here to greet them as they return. It’s a microcosm of the world we live in, and just as true.

We all have our times of quiet, introversion, rest and renewal, in between the periods of work, or study. For the bee, it’s the call of physical nourishment, that brings them out of their quasi-isolation from the world. No matter how much we hunker down, at some point, the reserves run dry and it’s time to go back out for connection.

This year Rev. Peggy will continue to lead us in imagining what it would mean to be a people of covenant. Maybe you know the word covenant mostly from Jewish and Christian and Muslim stories about God and God’s people. That understanding is about the promises we are given, and the promises we are held to, in light of the demands and support given to us by God in those stories. But for today though, I want to focus more on what promise is held in covenant. Community and covenant draws us out of loneliness into a shared humanity that defines our lives.

In UU Congregations, Churches, Societies and Fellowships, one thing is almost universally true - the essence of the covenant centers around our desire to be accountable to one another. In a secular world where consumerism and convenience trumps a sense of a common ethic of mutual support, it’s imperative for religious communities to stretch out to, and within, one another to build the common good. Covenant is about building the common good – or what Martin Luther King Jr commonly referred to as the Beloved Community; a phrase we each recite every Sunday as part of our services.

Last Sunday, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. In short, for those that missed it, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. I’d like to focus on one more of those stones. In the next two weeks I’ll get to the 4th and 5th stone. But today, I want to focus on the 3rd stone in Adams’ theology – and go a bit further with it than I was able to in the first of sermon in the preaching series. That precept paraphrased is: “We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression.”

As I paraphrase it, community has a corrective effect on systems of oppressions. Theologically, covenant is the antithesis of oppression. You only build a covenant when folks come to it with equal footing, and when we have equal footing, we can hold one another accountable from an equal place. So when we talk here about someone falling out of covenant, we’re talking about a situation in our Fellowship, where one person is leveraging their power, or their feelings, over and beyond the shared agreement of how we work together collaboratively. It’s referring to a situation where the individual ego is leading over another person’s worth, or another person’s pain. And to be fair, we all fall for the tricks of the ego. Falling short of our covenant doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, it means that you’ve let your ego run before the rest of us, before all of us, and that’s something we all do from time to time. We all do it. It’s human, and it’s our quintessential challenge to overcome as humans. As UU’s we choose to face that challenge together; publicly, and to do that together publicly fosters some awkward moments. So when we fall for it, and someone points it out, try to hear it with love, and begin again and again. It’s being human at our best.

Last week, I also spoke about demands that our faith places upon us in relation to those precepts – those “stones” Adams proverbially spoke about. The matched demand to this third precept would be the theological question, “Does this thing or value before us, seek to bring more harmony and more equity in our relationships (– even if the work is very difficult?)” What does that mean though in every day language? When we’re trying to decide on an action, or a belief, or a value, or an angered reply to something someone says or does in our community – the essential question follows: Does our response bring more harmony and equity to our relationship? If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then we are straying from the religious path our faith challenges us to adhere to. When we ask ourselves if our response or actions bring more harmony or equity, and the answer is no, we’re falling prey once more to our lone ego. The domain of the ego is isolation, and community calls us out from that lonely place. I believe that progressive faith calls us out of isolation, to do much in the world, but it also calls us out of isolation to spiritually mature past or through our attachment to ego. And it’s in that maturing through our attachment to ego, that we also begin to do much good in the world.

 See that? We sometimes joke that we can believe anything. I don’t agree with that, and if you think I’m wrong, then next week let’s plan for me to preach about whatever I personally feel like and see what happens. 

 Because we can’t. We can’t believe anything. We’re not about belief, but we have central values that are very specific, even if we don’t always see it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring together what demands our theology places upon us. Our actions in the world, as UUs, as religious people of faithful purpose – demand that we act so that we nurture harmony and equity in human relations. When we act from anger, or ego, we’re being very human, but we’re falling short of our theological convictions. We’re not evil for doing it necessarily, but we have fallen short, and our faith calls us out, calls us in, and calls us for more.

The Five Stones, Pt. II: Broken Twigs

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 13, 2023

We’re at our second sermon in a five week preaching series on the ethics of James Luther Adams – an early to mid 20th century Unitarian Harvard professor who was committed to combating the rise of Nazism both abroad, and at home. We’ll take a circuitous route today through a few stories that all touch upon his second of five stones (it’s a later editors’ reference to the David and Goliath Story where with five stones, an oppressive attacker was beaten back by a kid with a sling.) It goes – “Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

First Story:

A few years back – prep-pandemic – I  attended ten days of working conferences for religious professionals. One part of those conferences was primarily about having difficult conversations. How do we as leaders, how do we as religious people, have the difficult conversations around the big topics: money, race, death and sexuality. I was also asked to lead part of the workshops around race, identity and racism. Not surprisingly, the week started with the comparatively easy (I kid) topic of money, and (not surprisingly) saved sexuality for the last day.

One of the premises of the conference was that we needed to understand our frameworks around each of these topics if we’re to have the difficult conversations within our communities of faith. Where we start from, when we’re thinking about race or death, has as big (or even bigger) an impact than any set of facts or subset of knowledge on the topics. What’s our story about money or sexuality, and how do we tell it? One of the odd stand-outs for a very unusual conference for religious professionals, was realizing that if something happened to me, my husband would have a hard time figuring out where all of my investments, or retirement portfolios are, where my bank accounts are and so on. That’s something we’re still working on fixing, but it taught me something about myself that I hadn’t quite realized: Part of me is still living, in some ways, a story of individuality.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Don’t get me wrong; almost everything that impacts our household goes through a rigorous schedule of fretting, and arguing – like any very happily married couple. But there are some habits of the single years, that I haven’t quite put to rest – even now 8 years into married life: shared documentation, shared calendars, and negotiating where we go for Thanksgiving and Christmas – all still trip us up – even after 8 years married and 13 years together. How do we start a shared google calendar – has become a seasonal refrain that despite all my tech savvy, I find extremely onerous. Individuality runs deep in our culture, and it’s a hard practice to unlearn – and I don’t think I’m alone here on this.

Another side of individuality is isolation. We all live in isolation at some time in our lives, even if we’re surrounded by people all the time. (And we don’t have to be alone to be in isolation.) It’s another story we tell ourselves: how alone are we…We can become most aware of it when we’re going through times of crisis – whether or not we have all the communal support we can ever dream of – how we relate to crisis can determine if we tell our story as individuals, or tell our story as part of something larger. Do we fight that struggle with cancer as lone warriors, or do we let ourselves lean on our friends and neighbors for moral support, even knowing still that we are the ones that have to go in for chemo? When our relationships wither, do we reach out, or do we hunker down? Having good friends and family – even when we have many of them – doesn’t necessarily mean we let them in when the road gets rough. Sometimes that might be the right choice – only you know that answer for yourself – but sometimes we think isolation is the best choice – even when it’s not.

Second Story:

I was listening to an interview with a comedian some of you may know, Patton Oswalt. He was being interviewed on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. At the time - He’s a man in his mid to late forties with a 7 year old daughter. His wife suddenly died in her sleep – there was no warning. She had been working very long hours and he finally convinced her to stay home and get some sleep; there was an accidental and very tragic dose of sleeping medication…. He’s been very public with his grief, and he took a long break from his work in comedy. Something he said about grief in the interview really struck me as true. “If you don’t talk about it, then grief really gets to setup and fortify its positions inside of you and begin to immobilize you. But the more you talk, the more you expose it to the air and to the light, then grief doesn’t get the chance to organize itself, and maybe you can move on better and easier…

…[grief] can’t be remedied, it must be endured – and it’s the endurance, oddly enough, that becomes the remedy.”

He goes on to talk about how he’s found that not only has talking about his grief with others helped him to move forward with his life as an individual and then as a widowed dad of a young child, but he’s learned that his sharing has helped others in extreme grief find avenues for healing. Speaking our stories has a healing power that can help us get back to living more fully after times of great loss.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Third Story:

This reminds me of the old folk saying about twigs. Take any twig you find and try to snap it. It’ll break pretty easily. Put that same twig into a bundle with other twigs, and it gets harder and harder to break. I think when we separate ourselves too long from one another, from community or friends, we can become like that singular twig. Life’s pressures can become too much; grief or loss can become too much – and we don’t have to do it alone.

Alone or together – the story we tell about our life changes us. British fiction author Terry Pratchett said, “People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” Well, we are a people of story. Most of my sermons start by telling another type of story – basically parables of daily living. For us, we don’t have to imagine being a people of story as much as consciously realize how deeply stories impact our lives and our living.

What are the stories you come back to year after year? What stories do we raise our kids on, and why? Which stories defined your character, or pull on your heart strings, or get you in the gut when they resonate with what’s happening in your life? As Pratchett writes, people are shaped by stories – we should choose our stories wisely. And we should choose the stories we tell about our lives just as wisely. What negative story do you choose to try to convince yourself is true about you? I spoke about separation and isolation before, but there are many other stories we tell about ourselves that harm more than help.

Fourth Story:

Some time ago, a colleague of mine was sharing a story about their congregation on Facebook. (I have permission to share this here.) He wrote, “One thing that I never expected to be quite so good at – helping calm really little kids down who are missing their parents. I wonder if this sort of inherent knowledge came when I was hired as a DRE, or if it was there all along.” On one level, there’s a story we all tell about our capacity to be in the world; what we’re good at, what we’re bad at, and what our roles are in our lives. But on the spiritual level, his story reminded me about the central purpose of communities of faith – and I don’t say this flippantly. All religious life is essentially helping one another struggle through our separation anxiety: our sense of separation from the Holy, from God, from one another. In times of grief, we remember those who have died in our lives. In times of change, we hold one another’s hands to remember we’re not alone. In the every day, or maybe for you only a few times in your life, we struggle with whether there is meaning and depth to this world; whether we’re part of something greater. For some the answer is community, or compassion, or justice-building. For the more mystical among us, I believe we’re never truly alone – but despair sets in when we forget that truth. Religious life is helping one another through our struggle with separation and isolation, through grief and loss. And the other side of that struggle is a question of the spirit – and an answer that draws us back out – again and again.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Fifth Story:

Let me try out today a new metaphor: The parable of the Chili Bake. I hope this will explain all things. Social media is sometimes an odd place to be in my friendship circle. One mid-western colleague was talking about the sounds and looks of horror in a NYC deli when she asked to put Lox on a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel, and further out west,  a bunch of my Texas friends and colleagues were talking half-seriously (but very half-seriously) about Texas state politics and a recent accusation that a certain candidate (who will remain nameless here) puts beans in his Chili. There were gasps, and comments of, ‘well this is getting dirty now isn’t it.’ Then enters the Jersey-boy/New Yorker and I slowly raise my proverbial hand and ask, “If you don’t put beans in your chili, what do you put in your chili.” Insert more gasps.

Two Texas colleagues came to my rescue and explained what their bean-less chili is – how to my Italian ear what they were describing was actually just spiced sauce – no, no, no, there’s too much meat in there for it to be sauce. Which then sounded like they were talking about hamburger helper, which produced more gasps and not a few sighs. No, no, no, it’s straight beef, not ground meat. And on, and on. I recall saying that, “Wow, it’s like we use the same words but they have different meanings.”

Then one saint stepped in and performed what I will call “Chili exegesis.” Rev. Joanne Fontaine Crawford.

She explained: “The Authenticity answer: chili is cowboy food. On long cattle drives, you didn’t have room to carry a lot of supplies. Certainly not beans. 

Texan Foodie answer: a properly made chili has no need of beans. It is not like what passes for chili in other places just minus the beans. It is usually slow cooked for hours and is full of chiles, spices, and good meat (not ground beef, shudder) and you want to taste that without the “filler” of beans. In a proper bowl of Texas red, you can stick your wooden spoon in the middle of the pot, and it will stand up straight with no help, because it’s that thick. 

Practical answer: in Texas, chili isn’t just one dish. Chili is an ingredient. It’s thinned and poured over enchiladas, thick and added to hot dogs, used to make frito pie, etc. You eat beans on the side.””[1]

It’s almost as if we are using the same words but they mean different things. And they’re both still chili; just a chili that addresses the answers for the people in the place where they are (whether that answer be cowboy food, an ingredient in another more elaborate dish, or a entrée of its own.) As my theology professor, Dr. James Cone, would often repeat, “Theology is how we make and understand meaning in the world.” Each community, each people, is going to wrestle with the answers and questions before them in their own way. (And yes, it’s still wrong to put Lox on a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel.)

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

I made a choice in this sermon to focus on the everyday side of this second stone of James Luther Adams. A bunch of stories about everyday togetherness, mutuality and daily free exchange of ideas, stories and life. Consent would be a series of sermons all on its own. And we’ll get there over the years together. But I made the choice to focus on the everyday – right-relationship side – of this message because we all could benefit from honing in on how to rebuild that when we don’t all see the world the same way. Here in Metro NY, that is our next goal. Rebuilding relationships that understand what mutuality means when we don’t all understand the world in the same way; because we simply don’t – as the news daily reminds us.

The Five Stones, Pt. I

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 6, 2023

I’ve told this story about how I found UU before, so I’ll be brief, but it’s important for today’s wider message. I was 19 when I found Unitarian Universalism. In some ways, I share the usual story for converts to our faith. In my case, I was a devout Catholic who had come to accept that there was no Hell, that God was loving, and that homosexuality was not a sin – but an expression of love. In other ways, my story was unusual. I found a UU Fellowship in northern NJ through a job. For a host of reasons, I dropped out of college in my first year studying environmental science. After getting laid off from a part-time job at a chain bookstore right after Christmas, I got word that a church was looking for a custodian. Over the next three years, that job expanded into their events coordinator (think weddings and art shows.) I was still pushing the mop, I was coordinating weddings, and I was back in college – this time studying religion and anthropology. For those of you going through a tough time with school or work, try to remember that you never know how things will turn out. Some of the worst times of our lives, still find a way to end eventually, and there can be something new in store for any of us.

In many ways, the Morristown UU Fellowship was the last place I would have imagined myself joining. They were a staunch atheist fellowship that had severe allergies to theological language – and I very much believe in God. H forbid anyone use the G word. And the J word was right out! Buddhist influence wasn’t wide-spread enough yet in the mid-nineties to inform the spirituality of the services overtly. And yet there was a lot of heart in their meeting space on Sunday morning. There was a there – there – that I couldn’t exactly place at the time. If I’m honest with myself, my younger self appreciated the stark contrast to conservative Christian teachings that I hadn’t yet worked through. It was a community that was wrestling with the nature of being. And that was enough for me. I didn’t need an answer, I needed a space to find myself, and live into community.

The next congregation I was a member of, couldn’t have been further afield in style or expressed theology: All Souls in Manhattan. Largely toted as NYC’s only New England Style white-steeple church. A 1500 member churchy-church, with an organ, actual pews, multiple pulpits, and monthly communion services. I joined there while I was in graduate school.

Both settings are Unitarian Universalist. Both hold the same values. Both are seeking a faith path that is open to hope, possibility and joy. Openness, mindfulness, reverence – have become central in most of our congregations. All of our communities have religious humanists and religious theists among us. Trappings are the difference, not content. All of our congregations have a central UU theology – in some locations it’s more clear and others it’s simply felt beneath the skin.

I’ve long identified as a sort of hybrid UU. Denominationally speaking, most of us are converts and some of us are life-long UU’s. I have converted to this faith, but I did so right at adulthood – so in many ways this feels like my life-long choice. By a show of hands, how many of you have been attending our Fellowship for 2 years or less? How many of you have been a UU since childhood (prior to turning 18?) How many for 30 years or more? (I love watching the changing demographics!)

Now I’m guessing that the folks that have been attending for 2 years or less are thinking – “Oh good! We’re finally going to hear someone tell us what the central UU theology is.” I think it would be safe to guess that the folks who have been UU for 30 years or more are thinking, “Oh good! We’re finally going to hear someone tell us what the central UU theology is.”

Being a non-creedal faith is both a strength and a challenge. Folks are reticent to assert theological claims when we have no test of belief. We don’t want to make any theological truth statement because we appreciate that we all see the world differently and that’s not what we’re about. Some years ago, I was attending an annual conference of religious professionals in Williamsburg, Virginia. One Sunday evening I attended worship at their local Episcopal church – which was led by a former professor of mine when I was studying in England, and who became a dear friend of mine over the years when he moved to the States. They got to the point in the service where the community recited the Nicene Creed. For those who are unfamiliar, this is a minute or two long creed with some very specific theological details in it (just about none of which I actually agree with.) My UU colleagues next to me were visibly shocked (one actually jumped – and he’s not a jumper by nature) when I began reciting it from memory. For context – it had been over 20 years since I had attended a Catholic Mass, and left the Catholic church in my high school years. …We have nothing like that. Although I imagine we could begin the practice of reciting our 8 principles as a covenant and it would fit that role. Our principles are promises we struggle to keep with each other. But they’re action statements – not creedal assertions.

Our UU theology is rooted in our six sources. But our sources themselves are not strictly a theology. Our sources are not an interfaith smorgasbord, although we sometimes treat them as such. “I prefer the course of cultural Christianity and a heavy dose of agnosticism please.” They ground us in our religious meaning. Any theology would need to reckon with them to be true to our core. Here they are more simply put: Transcendent mystery and wonder moves us to a renewal of spirit. Prophetic deeds challenge us to confront systems of oppression with compassion. All world religions hold wisdom to inspire our ethical and spiritual lives. Love our neighbors as ourselves. Reason and science warn us against idolatries of mind and spirit. We are part of this world and ought to live in harmony with it. (Ok, maybe that could work as our Nicene Creed.) None of these sources answer whether we ought to believe in God or not, but frankly – that’s not what our theology could ever look like again. But our Six Sources are rich in very different ways. They give us space to be true to ourselves, to learn how to live into community, and hold a rich depth in themselves. And we’d be hard-pressed to come up with a reason to disagree with any individual source – except for maybe how we apply them.

That’s a framework though, and not a theology. One friend once asked me, “but isn’t the central theology of Universal Unitarianism that there isn’t a central theology of universal unitarianism? Theological Switzerland, so to speak?” I won’t fault him on his placement of U’s in that sentence. And he’s right in a way. We tend to live with an explicit theological message that this is so: All are welcome. All can see the world the way they see it. (The only really important theological question is the nature of God so let’s just say we don’t have a theology because we’re not going to touch that one!) But that’s not the case.

I’ve been heavily inspired by the writings of James Luther Adams. He’s a mid-20th century theologian, minister and academic from the US who lived in Germany in the 1930s and was active in the clandestine resistance to the rise of Nazism. We often take our theologians out of context. And as I talk about his thoughts, keep his experience in Germany in mind.

After the breadth of his 40+ years of writing were complete, folks started pulling together bits and pieces of his thinking, jumbled them together, and came up with some pretty helpful combinations. One such is an essay on “The Five Stones.” It’s a metaphor back to David and Goliath. In the Jewish story, a teenager “David” manages to defeat the Giant named Goliath on the field of battle with a sling and five stones. It’s a violent story, but a course of action that prevented two armies from colliding. There was one death instead of thousands. For JLA, the five stones become a metaphor for how we can combat systems of oppression in the world. What are the five things we can do that will unbind the oppressed? In modern language – how do we end Racism, Homophobia, Classism and Misogyny – to name a few.

What does our liberal faith say about living? I will paraphrase the much longer piece, which itself is an edit of a sort, using language that might be more familiar to us: 1. Revelation is not sealed — in the unfolding of the human spirit we continuously experience life in new ways and so too does our experience of truth. 2. Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles 3. We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression 4. Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. Goodness happens in relationships with one another. 5. We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.[1]

This faith statement is central to our UU theology. If you are craving an affirmation or a negation of the nature or existence of God, I can only say again – that’s not how we do theology. Our kind of theology is like the scientific method. When we learn that Newtonian Physics is only correct at certain speeds and certain proximities to really big gravitational objects (like the Earth going at about the speed we happen to be going) we don’t throw out physics and say Science (I hope you can hear the capital S) is wrong. We say that there’s a process of testing and observation to follow. Likewise, our theology is one of testing and observation. When you have questions of purpose, belief, or values ask yourself – Does this thing or view leave room for the ongoing evolution of the human spirit? Does it draw me closer into a community that is mutually supportive? Does it seek to bring more harmony and more equity in those relationships – even if the work is very difficult? Does it falsely make me forget that I have the capacity to live into this holy work? Does it remind me to live with hope?

Our theology is both a faith statement and a process of reflection. Our faith teaches us that we can expect to continue to be inspired, to learn from one another, and to seek out that spiritual growth. Wheresoever we freely choose to enter into communities with one another we are doing sacred work – not easy work – not convenient work but holy work. In this we are obligated to vigilantly transform systems of oppression with acts of love and compassion. We all have the capacity to make this happen, and everything that we need to do so already exists. There is a reason to hope in this world.

[1] This is a paraphrase of James Luther Adams. Various sources include “On Being Human Religiously”, The Tapestry of Faith Online Curricula, The GOLDMINE Youth Leadership School and the 2012 Keynote address at the LREDA Fall Conference by Dr. Raser.

This We Believe: The Beginning

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

I’m not sure I remember learning about Adam and Eve as a kid, but I clearly remember learning about Moses and the Exodus. That was a story we told in detail for hours every spring with everyone in our extended family around a table. Passover served as a critical part of my own identity. This is the story of our heritage. These are our ancestors. I’m aware that as a parent, I haven’t done that with my own child. As a UU child, my kid might be able to tell you about lots of creation and origin stories, but none of them are his. It’s true for adults, too. The stories that hold us up often weren’t learned as part of our shared faith, but were brought in from somewhere else.

As Unitarian Universalists, we talk a lot about our faith, but when it comes time to define it, we often speak quickly about what we don’t believe rather than about what we do. If pushed, we lean heavily on ethics, and a few shared understandings of what the world should look like. From time to time, in moments that make every religious professional squirm, someone will pipe in with, “We don’t believe anything” which, of course, is absurd but no better than, “We can believe whatever we want” which is an adolescent response to our stated value of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Of course you can believe whatever you want. It’s a free country. But, it’s not an answer to the question. Unitarian Universalists do have a common theology, but we haven’t done a good job of articulating it which leaves us scrambling.

To combat that reality, many ministers talk about the elevator speech. We talk about rehearsing it for our members so they can adopt or adapt it and have something useful to say when asked the question. If you’re interested, mine is, “UUs are part of a covenantal faith. We don’t have doctrine, because we believe that revelation continues to unfold.” It’s short, it’s accurate, it gives a broad sense of who we are. I use it often. It’s fine. But when we’re talking about living into our faith, an elevator speech isn’t enough. We don’t live an elevator speech. We live a theology. We live, we are defined, we behave, we are liberated, by a living faith grounded in a shared theology.

Theology is a system, not just a line or two. It’s a deep and wide expanse of interconnected, interrelated stories that become the foundation for how we understand our lives. Theology is poetry and philosophy and ethics and mythology. It’s broad speculation sometimes made very small so we can hold it in prayer when we are most afraid. It translates out to culture and back in to identity and out again to politics and human systems. As UUs, we have theology, but we haven’t been very good about articulating it. Which is why I’m starting this series I’m calling This We Believe. Over the course of the next few years, I’ll take a systematic approach to theology. This will translate to some adult programming as well as we grapple with the big concepts that make up rich theological systems. It’s also, in its simplest form, the basis for this season’s podcast that I record with Rev. Sarah Lenzi called Hope and Heresy.

What better way to start this UU theology than at the beginning. Cosmology. Creation stories. And here at the dawn of a new year, starting at the beginning makes sense. Sort of. I’m not sure that January, 2022 is really a beginning. I think we’ve been in this doorway or portal, this transition into something else for almost two years. We’re living in a liminal space between what was and what will be. We’ll arrive somewhere and that will be the start of what’s next, but for now, we’re living in the meantime.

But if we’re starting our theological quest, it makes sense to start at the beginning. Every faith, every culture, has a creation story. Or two. The stories have a lot in common as you heard from our reading. Light and Dark. Land and Sea. People. Animals. Floods. Some traditions have more than one. Genesis serves as the creation story for Jews and Christians and in it there are at least two distinct stories. One is told by the day. There is a god who exists before anything else and that god creates it all from nothing.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

It goes on like that. God separates the land and the sea, creates humans, all the animals…you know the story. It’s beautiful and rich. There’s a second story, too. In the first story, humans were formed as part of the creation of all the things. In the second story, it says, “The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” It goes on to say that God planted a garden in Eden and that’s where the man lived for what seems to be quite a while because God is busy creating trees and streams and naming things, but then God realizes the man is lonely, so he takes a rib from the man from which he creates Eve. “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

This is a foundational story and, for good or ill, it defines the Judeo-Christian tradition and the many countries founded on that tradition, like our own. These stories create order out of chaos. They tell us why things are the way they are. They give us context. We might let go of them in their literal forms, but the mythology lives in our culture and language, serving as the infrastructure for our collective lives.

What are the creation stories that undergird Unitarian Universalism? We begin with science and the Big Bang. It starts with fire. Creation doesn’t begin in one moment; it came into existence in a sequence of events unfolding from within as billions of galaxies. Eco-theologian Brian Swimme puts it this way, “In the depths of its silence, the universe shuddered with the immense creativity necessary to fashion the galaxies…These gigantic structures pinwheeled through the emptiness of space and swept up all the hydrogen and helium into self-organizing systems…” Sidney Leibes, in his book A Walk Through Time says, “The primal brilliance expands briefly and then suddenly, with great fury, enters upon an even more explosive expansion that physicists designate with the phrase inflation, an exponential billowing forth in which the elementary particles, the first material beings, are torn out of a deep well of potentiality and allowed to enter the adventure of evolution.”

About five billion years ago our sun was born and became a supernova seeding all the elements of our solar system. Four-and-a-half billion years ago spinning around the sun was a disc of the original subcloud just large enough to resist the cosmic rays from the sun. A cold remnant of the subcloud, a hanger-on, a residue, a swirling disc of elements, gave birth in time to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planets were formed, and the solar system took shape as a community.

Cletus Wessels wrote, “The earth was a privileged planet with its size producing a gravitational and electromagnetic balance, and its position with respect to the sun enabling it to establish a temperature range in which complex molecules could be formed. Out of these seemingly random conditions came the earth’s stupendous creativity over the next four billion years that brought forth all the beauty of its land, its plants, and its animals. And then between two and three million years ago, the earth became conscious in the human.”

This is our creation story and one that can lead us more deeply toward mystery and awe. This is our mythology. To be clear, to call something a myth isn’t to denigrate it. On the contrary, I’m looking to elevate this story. Myths are big stories, universal stories that we can hold our individual stories up to. They are mirrors, or lenses, ways for us to see ourselves and our place in the universe. To call something myth isn’t a comment about the facts of the story. It’s to say that the story is True. The creation story science has given us offers meaningful insight into our lives on this planet. One of our sources of Truth is science. And, science, like UUs, changes its mind sometimes. New information is made known and new theories are posited. UUs don’t have doctrine because we know that revelation continues to unfold. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t have myths. Myths can change with time, but they aren’t dependent on facts.

The creation story the scientists have given us is ready to be mined for Truth, necessary insights into what it means to be who we are. These stories tell us that the universe is self-organizing and alive. Creation comes from chaos. Everything from galaxies to solar systems to cells and atoms, everything evolves into collaborative communities. Every species helps shape every other, all of life is in an intertwined process of co-evolution. Sidney Liebes tells us the universe is a cosmogenesis – a developing community – with a role for everyone.

Like every great creation story, this one has implications for how we live our lives. We are wildly, radically, connected to and dependent on all life on this planet. Nationalism is absurd in light of the truth of our becoming. It’s also a call to know our place, to keep ourselves right-sized in this massive story. Thomas Berry, the groundbreaking geo-theologian warns us that humans have multiplied into the billions making us the most numerous of all Earth’s complex organisms. We’ve inserted ourselves into most of the ecosystemic communities throughout the planet, reducing Earth’s diversity and channeling the majority of the Gross Earth Product into human social systems. The future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to what he calls the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as resource for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern.

I admit, this origin story is more complicated than “God separated the heavens and the Earth and on the 7th day He rested.” But, it’s beautiful in its complexity. Its proximity to facts is enticing. And its implications are transformative. We could embrace this story, adopt it as our cosmology, our central story of creation and the origins of our shared lives. We have it here to mine, to discover Great Truth that can hold us up when we feel overwhelmed or unsure or confused about the world. This gorgeous, ancient, poetic history of a story is the infrastructure for our lives, telling us who we are, holding us together as a community, providing insight into how we should move forward. I can imagine us telling the story to our children, sitting around a table, explaining that they are stardust, no less than the trees and the moon, that their ancestors became planets and oceans and apes, all evolving into the glorious world we’re now a part of.

As we begin this new year, as we continue on this journey into unknown territory, this story reminds us that we are part of something magnificent, a community of elements that organized into this awe-inspiring life and we are now active players in the long, poetry of our creation.

God Isn’t, Can’t or Won’t: The Question of Suffering

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
May 7th, 2023

I stood in my kitchen on Friday with a friend of mine. Aracelly is a good woman who left Guatemala more than 30 years ago with nothing but her 3 year old son. She worked in a factory, learned how to speak English, became a US citizen, got married and today lives quite comfortably with her husband having had 4 more children and now some grandchildren. And on Friday, she was telling me how grateful she is for everything she has.

Then she reminded me that none of it mattered, that she’d willingly give it all up if only she could have her son back. That little 3 year old, some years later, died in a car accident. There in my kitchen she cried, as she’s done in my kitchen so many times. And she posed the question that she poses again and again, especially in the springtime, around the anniversary of his death.

Every time she says “Why, Peggy? What have I done? Why did I deserve this?” Her friends and her priest have given her answers like “God tests those he loves most” and “This is how God proves to others who really loves him.” Somehow it’s her job now to bear witness to her unwavering faith. Many spiritual traditions advise the benefits of suffering. It forms character, it opens us to intimacy with God, it sets “good” in clear relief, all the more appreciated for the contrast.

If those answers worked for her, she wouldn’t spend so much time asking those questions year after year, nor would the millions of other people when drowning in their own pain. “Why? Why did this happen?” We grasp for meaning when the world feels most cruel. We search for the only ground we think we might find. “Why?”

Suffering is religion’s Achilles Heel. This is particularly true for monotheistic traditions that posit a single powerful, knowing and even controlling god. God with a capital G. God as Designer. Director. It’s lovely and safe and is a very popular understanding for billions of people. But, that vision and image of God has trouble holding up to the realities of human pain.

Suffering is inescapable. No one lives without grief. In the course of a week, most people don’t talk about it, but there is no person you have met, no one any of us encounters who hasn’t experienced real pain. We’ve lost children and parents and siblings and friends and lovers to death, to addiction, to dementia, and possibly to violence. Grief is an ongoing part of the human experience.

While much of that is common, there’s also uncommon suffering. Children in Ukraine are being taken from their families to be brought to Russia for adoption. Uyghurs in China have been pushed into forced labor camps to punish them for being Muslim. The list goes on and on. Sudan. Ethiopia. Palestine. Iran. These are the modern hot-spots, but there will be a different list in a year because life on this planet is difficult.

I took a course in graduate school on the Holocaust, the uncommon suffering that is most present in my own family. That course was my first introduction to the depths of human depravity and a serious challenge to my faith. It was also the beginning of my quest to understand, to answer the “Why” that inevitably is asked when grief is unexpected. The question that haunted me then and still lives with me, especially as we see similar patterns here to those 15 years in Europe, the question I asked was: Is God all powerful and therefore evil, or is God powerless and therefore useless?

John Roth in his reflection on the Holocaust wrote, “Where was God? Off trimming the divine nails? We want to know the source of this evil, and if God was on-duty when it happened. We want to know who has hell to pay for the evil we see around us. After all, does not Hell seem superfluous?”

How can we believe in a powerful god? If god is good and powerful, why is there suffering? That is, if god could prevent suffering but doesn’t, can god be said to be good? On the other hand, if god is good, but cannot prevent suffering, can it be said that god is powerful?

The religions of the world, humans through history have been asking these things in their own contexts and they’ve left us breadcrumbs to follow, hoping one day we’ll find answers that can hold up in times of trouble.

Distilling all that wisdom down, we can see a few patterns. For instance, a very common response the world-round is the “consolation of a promise”, the notion that there’s something better coming, either in this life, or in another life, or in the after-life. We suffer now, but it’ll be OK in the end with “end” being a flexible term. In Hebrew scripture we are promised a future peace and told that “one day the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion will lie down together, and the child will lead them all.” Hindus believe in Karma, in an ultimate system of justice where balance will be found, where we all get what we deserve, but this promise will be made real in our next life. The Qur’an tells us that Allah will give good provision,

that God is indulgent in the after-life. So, in the future, in another life, or after death- at some time we will find peace and/or justice, even as it seems elusive now.

This consolation of a promise is the carrot held out in front of us. Karl Marx called it an opiate, a drug that lulls and distracts us. He suggested that we awaken and claim a more immediate response. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, when confronted with similar promises of a world not-yet, told us that justice delayed is justice denied.

This same promise of consolation comes in sayings like “God has a plan” or “everything happens for a reason”. It sooths us into feeling like things aren’t random, that there’s a purpose and that ultimately, we’re being taken care of, that all will be made right. It feels good to believe the suffering will be justified, although I suspect the good-feelings are often for those who have not been violated. It’s more a remedy for onlookers. I don’t know anyone whose suffering was alleviated by such platitudes.

This consolation of a promise feels like a denial of authentic suffering. A pat on the head and a “don’t worry, it’ll be alright”. That’s not who we are.

This sermon is part of a series called This We Believe. For the last two years, I’ve been teasing out UU theology. The challenge for today isn’t to tell you what all the other religious traditions believe about suffering, but about what we believe. What does Unitarian Universalism have to offer to people in times of tremendous pain?

We don’t deny the depths and reality of suffering. Those promises, those carrots, are necessary only after creating a worldview in which there is external force in charge. In other words, I was asking the wrong question. I was asking about power. Who’s responsible? What solid, stable worldview can give suffering meaning?

But, the precarious pathway of human life challenges the idea that god is both good and powerful, leading many believers to doubt or even to see faith disintegrate when that worldview cannot hold up under the weight of real pain. As UUs, we do not have a mythology to which we have committed ourselves so strongly that we have to continually alter reality in order for it to make sense. We have not indoctrinated a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful god, so we do not have to struggle with that image while confronting, for instance, the massacre of children in their classroom. We don’t have to ask if god knew in advance or if god chose not to stop it and we do not have to justify god’s actions in the face of it with empty platitudes like “everything happens for a reason”. No grieving mother will ever have to hear that here.

After struggling for 2 years with writing that paper for that graduate class, (yes, 2 years – it was late) I realized I was asking the wrong question. Power isn’t at the Center. Love is. Love is the highest attribute. I was wrestling with questions of power, as is everyone asking “Why?” and wondering who’s in charge, wondering what we could have done – what prayers we were missing, what actions we didn’t take.

Immediately after the massacre at Sandy Hook, conservative talking heads claimed it happened because Connecticut had fought so hard for marriage equality. The slaughtering of their children was their punishment.

Our theology doesn’t require that we appease an angry god. We don’t think humans are sinners or that god has put us in slippery places and awaits our fall, who keeps us from the pit of hell only by his good grace. We never look into the face of pain and wonder what they did to deserve it.

Unitarian Universalists are free to be shocked when confronted with true suffering. Without an omnificent deity controlling our every breath, we don’t have to be afraid of our own horror and we don’t have to alter our faith in order to make room for reality. Our search for truth includes an embrace of unanswered questions and a confrontation with the depths of human suffering.

For most Unitarian Universalists, hope is not external. Hope does not come from the ancient god of Moses or Jesus or Muhammad. Hope comes from us, from the reality we are creating, the world we are dreaming and building together. Hope comes from this room, from this community. Hope comes from Now and Here. Hope comes from We Who Put Love At The Center of Everything.

Congregational membership, covenanted relationships, are rooted in love. This love sees the Other clearly and entirely. Love isn’t blind; it sees EVERYTHING. Love means we can see each other as whole people, with our potential for kindness and cruelty. It’s a full acceptance of who someone is now, coupled with a profound willingness to help them become more, to help us all become more- to live like we are more.

We are here in the name and in the service of Love.

The question isn’t about whether or not god is powerful. The question is about whether or not we can summon Love, live into Love, act with the open heart of Love so well that we become powerful.

There is no cure to grief. When Aracelly cries, I hold her hand. When George Floyd died, we took to the streets. We are not the source of Love, but we are her magnifiers.

I’m not going to reduce our woes to a need for more love. I know it’s not that simple. And I’m certainly

not going to suggest that if there were more UU congregations we’d be free from violence. But I am going to suggest that when we face into human suffering, it’s the strength of our shared faith, grounded in our covenanted relationships, held by Love, that will bind us when everything else feels like it might fall apart. If there’s hope, I believe it will be found in the radical, counter-cultural, witness of congregations like ours, of people who are willing to name the suffering without dismissing it with platitudes or over-simplifying it because the rabbit hole is too deep or justifying it with an absentee god. If there’s hope, it’s because we are willing to participate in the experiment of being human, moving us forward into the unknown. Awake and afraid, but not alone.

The Pleasure is the Point

The world has become a frightening place. I suppose, it’s always been that way to some degree, and I’m sure every generation is convinced they are living in the end times in one fashion or another. Change does that. Becoming awake does that. With that said, the planet is in a particularly precarious position with about 7 years left before the damage we’ve done to our climate becomes irreversible. Equally frightening is knowing that our democracy is losing the guardrails that have held it together for 250 years, making the foundation for our lives - both the platform for all life and the ground for our particular American context - unstable and dangerously close to collapse. I would argue that we are in a more fragile place than at any other time in human history, both because of the imminent collapse of our planetary systems and because of our access to global communications that force momentum at lightening speeds. While in the past, people might have had time to adjust to advancements, today we live at high velocity. While our direction is destruction, we hardly have time to catch our collective breath before another horrific thing happens, propelling us toward the disintegration of our free society faster than our minds can fully understand all that’s going on. And, even if we weren’t bringing ourselves to the edge of national disaster, climate change is bringing the whole planet there, a problem we can’t seem to summon the will to address in any meaningful way, guaranteeing global catastrophe.

There seem to be two responses to these dual realities. One is an urgent, angry activism propelling people on both the right and the left toward intense, self-righteous politicking. The other is hedonism sponsored by denial. We are either shaking people to wake them up and get them to fight or we’re keeping our heads down, reading romance novels and watching reality TV. Sometimes, we do the activist thing, signing letters, posting frightening facts, showing up for rallies, reading the news daily, and then we burn out, overwhelmed by the distance between where we are and where we need to be, so we spend the next few months keeping our heads down, reading romance novels and watching reality TV.

Neither of these is a perfect solution. I’m not sure either of them will get us anywhere close to where we want to go. It’s possible hedonism will serve those who live into it, focusing on themselves and those in their immediate circles, indulging their physical desires, and even their spiritual desires in the form of churches who preach personal success, hyper individualism through personal relationships with god, and feel-good theologies. And, it’s possible the activists who never let up, who won’t stop until every system reflects their understanding of peace, who shame us into constant participation will eventually create a world where justice rolls down like water. I’m guessing, though, that neither will create a future of balance and joy. There isn’t anything wrong with taking care of yourself nor is there anything wrong with the fire of activism. I’m just not sure that either road is leading to a utopian future.

I am imagining a new world. It’s what the novelist Octavia Butler calls writing Science Fiction. We have to imagine it to achieve it. And when I imagine this utopian future, we’re living in communities of intentionality, with people caring for each other in real and tangible ways. We’re growing food together, we’re sharing resources and skills and training, we’re living slower lives in partnership with each other. We are living with Love at the center of Everything. We don’t get to that new world or whatever science fiction you’re imagining following either the path of self-righteous activism or hedonism.

How we get there matters. We are building the plane while flying it, and the tools we use will determine what kind of plane it is. So, I’m hoping we build with joy, and love, and tenderness and pleasure.

Emma Goldman was an anarchist, which for her and the left-wing activists of the early part of the 20th century, was about liberation. There were rules, especially for women, that bound them into very small lives. They were fighting for suffrage, but also for an end to the conventions that dictated who they were allowed to be. One day, Emma received a letter from a man after her attendance at a party had been noted by some others in the women’s rights movement. The letter told her that in a time of such distress, it was unseemly for her to be seen dancing. He went on to note that her frivolity would hurt the cause and that her behavior was undignified. There were, after all, very serious matters at stake, and if they were going to be successful, they needed to reflect the urgency, especially in public. In her response she said, (I’m quoting from her memoir) “I did not believe that a cause which stood for such a beautiful ideal…for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.” She then went on with a version of the now famous line, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

The revolution isn’t separate from the joy. The revolution – the dramatic upheaval of the conventions that have brought us to the brink of destruction – the revolution has to include dancing. And singing. And art. And even though we don’t usually say these things from the pulpit, it has to include sex. One day we should talk about why we think sex isn’t something you should talk about in church, but that’s for another day. For today, I’m just noting that if we’re talking about pleasure and joy and art and dance, we shouldn’t forget sex.

In so many ways, we’re all feeling frightened. On Friday evening in a residential neighborhood, a man was firing his AK-15 in his backyard. A neighbor asked him to stop because his infant was having trouble sleeping. In response, he shot and killed him, 3 women and an 8 year old child. This is the world we live in. We are armed to the teeth, shooting children who accidentally knock on our door or drive into our driveway or neighbors who ask for quiet so the baby can sleep. Urgency is not unwarranted. The crisis is real.

The work is necessary, but that doesn’t mean it also has to be unpleasant. The world might feel sharp and hard, but we can greet that with softness, with kindness, with authentic care and whispers to counter the screaming. The revolution is communal, it’s deeply relational. Hyper independence brings us to a place of buying guns to protect our homes and shooting our neighbors for wanting quiet. Instead, we lean into community, into flexibility. We yield to each other. Our softness is our resistance.

Yesterday, I wasn’t feeling well. It’s been happening all week and is related to migraines which I used to get often but haven’t in years. This week was different and Saturday morning I was dragging. I had to write this sermon, take my son to get his haircut, my brother-in-law is in town and we were having dinner with him and my mother-in-law. So, early in the morning I was in my office in front of my laptop pushing through when my husband quietly handed me a banana he’d started to peel. Bananas have been my salvation all week, for reasons I don’t really understand. I feel better after eating one. My husband saw we were out, so without saying a word, he went to the grocery store to get more, then handed me one with some Excedrin and a glass of cold water. It was kind. And generous. And as I was writing about the harshness of the world, it was a reminder of gentleness.

Our activism and our restfulness, our fight for justice and our joy, our chanting in the streets and our singing in the shower, are connected. And, it’s not about needing one to continue the other. It’s that these things are the same. We are building a new world while engaging all of it. This is the revolution.

There is no “here” and “there” or “this” and “that”. It’s all one thing, one place, one life - Ours -and we’re living it as whole beings. The method is the message. So, if I want to build a world of radical inclusion, I have to live into that vision now. If I want a world where communities are the central sources of goods and services, where we partner with each other, caring for our families and the details of our lives with a larger circle of people, I have to build those communities now. If I want love at the center of everything, I have to put it there now.

The pleasure is the point. It’s not a by-product. It’s not an aside, a way to rest to go back to fight. The pleasure, the joy, the sweet love that makes our days possible – that’s the point. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re creating a world of THAT. A place everyone has that. A place everyone can safely play and dance and read romance novels.

Rest, and the centrality of love, and a shared practice of joy, and the commitment of communities of care are part of my vision for the future. Which means they need to be part of my life right now. Without apology. Without feeling badly that we’re getting ready for our climate action by painting fabric and learning paper mâché, or even though we’re furious about yet another black man being killed, we can bring singing to the streets to help heal our heartbreak. And when we’re back home, it’s OK to take a hot bath, to let a new soundtrack take you away, to eat a favorite meal or get a full body massage. More than OK. These things are all part of the creation of the new world. These are the tools because these are what the plane, is made from. The pleasure is the point. It is the vision of the new world. Communities working together, building something new, sourced by joy and a vision for something better.

I brought chocolate with me. We’re going to eat it, together. I’m calling it communion. In my theology, communion is the action we take to connect. The word comes from Latin literally meaning With Together. It’s an act of Being With. It might mean being with god or gods or connecting with others or the ground of our being. In November, I learned that there was a tradition of cornbread communion and you all introduced that to me. I’m now introducing you to chocolate communion.

Chocolate is sensual. It’s sweet and soft. The chocolate I brought will melt in your mouth, extending the pleasure. When eaten slowly, it can be joyful. And when eaten together, it can also be communal.

It feels like a window into the world I’m dreaming about. A place we rest together, enjoy life a little, experience something indulgent, in community. Not only part of the future I hope to imagine into existence, it’s part of the present I want to live into. I want us to offer each other things that are beautiful and delicious. Without

guilt or shame, without anyone telling us to do better or be more or work harder, I want to share chocolate. Chocolate, With Together. Communion.

A few notes- please don’t leave the wrappers for someone else to pick up. There’s a garbage on your way out. If you are allergic to nuts, it might be safer not to eat it. You know your own body, but Lindt says that their chocolate might have come in contact with nuts.

While the chocolate is going around, we’re going to sing. Indulge. Listen to the music. Taste the chocolate. The pleasure is the point.

Love is the Enduring Force

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 26, 2023

What would it look like if Love was at the center of everything?

What if Love was the organizing principle of your condo or coop board? What if Love was the organizing principle of your kid’s school? What if Love was the organizing principle of our city or state government? What would it look like if, when making decisions, Congress asked themselves what the most loving choice would be? What if corporations prioritized Love over profit? What if Love was the driving force, the central principle of every institution, every organization, of our lives? What if we recognized Love as the one constant, the critical reality that never loses value, over time? Millennia? The universal force for good, recognizable in every cultural context. What would happen if we put Love at the center of Everything?

I suppose, if that was a revolution we’d want to spark, the place to start would be religious institutions. And if we were starting with a religious institution, it may as well be our own. And if it was going to start with us, we may as well start now. But first, let’s look at how we got here.

It was the year 2009 and General Assembly, the annual gathering of UU delegates, was taking place in Salt Lake City. A lot of business is covered at these gatherings and thousands of people representing their congregations are there to learn and debate and embody the critical relationship between governance and theology. My husband, Graham, was there on behalf of our home church in Mt. Kisco, and there was an item on the agenda that had his attention. The language for our Seven Principles and Six Sources was potentially going to be altered and the new version, in his opinion, downgraded atheism. Graham wasn’t happy. My 15 hour days were over and I was done with GA, very much looking forward to catching a plane home, but Graham insisted we stay for this vote. He even went to the mike to speak against the proposed change. The debate was heated. Usually debate gets cut when one microphone- the pro or the con- has a long line and the other has no one, indicating that the gathered group was coming around to a conclusion, but this debate had long lines at both. When time ran out, people voted for more time, and the discussion was extended. There was no clear winner here, so Graham insisted we stay to make sure our votes are counted. Cutting our travel time very close, we remained in our seats with our pink voting cards in the air to ensure our opposition to the change was noted. With more than 4,000 people in the room, it came down to 13 votes, and two of them were ours. The motion to change the language failed. We ran for our plane.

I wasn’t as committed to keeping the language as my husband was, but I did find the whole process fascinating. The Seven Principles and Six Sources are written into the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association which is a collection of congregations who have committed to a loose relationship with one another, largely bound by covenant as expressed in these bylaws, while remaining entirely independent. When the text was first written and codified, it was 1961 and was done as part of the merger between two separate denominations, the Unitarians and Universalists. Because both groups were non-creedal, they were concerned about putting anything in such a document that might, over time, ossify. They were afraid if we outline our theology even in the barest of terms, people might grow too attached, ultimately not allowing the language or the theology to change over time. We do, after all, believe that Revelation continues to unfold. So, in addition to writing a brief statement of faith intended to hold these two historic groups together, they also built in an automatic deliberation of that statement every 15 years, forcing us to at least consider changing the language periodically.

In 1961, there were 6 principles which included “to cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers…immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love of God and love to man” and another that said “to encourage cooperation with men of good will in every land”. I’m grateful we assumed regular revisions. Those statements remind me of the language you’d have found in many Unitarain churches in the first half of the 20th century that said, “We believe in the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation through Character and the Steady Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever.”  Over time we’ve become more expansive, more inclusive, and generally more open to a larger variety of ways people connect to the world spiritually. We extended to 7 Principles and 6 Sources. We altered language first to include women, and more recently to let go of the binary altogether. We’ve also tried to do a lot of wordsmithing; the vote in 2009 was one example, but there have been others. I was part of a group hoping to alter the words “every person” to “all beings”, and we’ve all been part of a move to add the 8th Principle to encourage and support our commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression work.  

Honestly, this is why I hate bylaws. I think every set of bylaws should say as little as possible. You’ve all seen it here when we try to change a bylaw, a task I think we’ll take on at the next congregational meeting in a few weeks. Now imagine there are thousands of people in the room. Yes, it’s as bad as you think it is. With an equal level of frustration, someone proposed something new. What if, instead of having hundreds of congregations wordsmithing our Principles and Purposes and Sources, all part of Article II in our bylaws, what if we change it completely? What if we consider broad values we all share instead of trying to get so specific?

A covenant, which is the language used to introduce these Principles, is not a creed or an unchanging declaration or the final word on anything. It’s a framework, a way of relating, an understanding between people that we are in this together, that we are partners in the work. It’s an acknowledgment of a relationship that exists regardless of how we behave. A covenant calls us to presence, to trust, and sometimes to sacrifice. It is humble, knowing change is required in response to an unfolding and unpredictable future. It is in movement, always being renewed, always seeking a new harmony with new voices. A covenant is also stable and stabilizing. It is the container within which we exist together, providing walls to lean on, keeping us within boundaries as we engage all the complexities of human relationships.

As members of this Association, we are all, technically and maybe just theoretically, in covenant with one another. One of the few ways we’ve articulated that covenant is when we say, “we covenant to affirm and promote” and then we list the Principles. And, we agree, the Principles aren’t a creed, aren’t perfectly reflective of our faith or our shared values, although they come close. And we agree that they should be reviewed and altered periodically.

To that end, the UUA Board appointed a team which was, at it happens, led by our own Rev. Cheryl Walker. There were, as you can imagine, focus groups and forums, both open and closed. There were rough drafts and first drafts and rewritings of all kinds. And what we have now isn’t done. It’s a proposal. They’ve created something they believe reflects who we are, across all kinds of boundaries and borders, mirroring what we believe.

It’s not linear. It’s not a list. It’s a dynamic image revealing so much of what we value, and at the center is Love. There’s a diagram on those handouts. I’m not sure if you have those and I’m pretty clear about the difference between a sermon and a lecture, so not having those is fine. When you get a chance, though, take a look. It’s almost a flower, or waves, or arms stretching out from the center which is the word Love and a chalice. Surrounding Love are the words that the writing team heard consistently during all the focus groups they’ve been holding. Our shared values include Interdependence, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Generosity and Justice.

At the center, though, is Love. Love is the heartbeat, the life-giving force that animates all these other values. In this new articulation of who we are, we are saying that Love is our organizing principle and from Love, or because of Love, we live big, hopeful, beautiful lives, and we promote choices that hold people up, that heal our planet, that support expansiveness, inclusion, and life in all its full and rich dimensions.

It’s often said that no one is going to recite the 7 Principles on their death beds. As a Catholic, I would recite the prayer often called the Our Father to myself whenever I was in need of strength or grounding. In times of grief or trauma or in times of joy, I would almost mindlessly repeat those words to myself because I found them comforting. As a UU, I don’t have something similar. I wonder, though, if the authors here have given us something, or at least a place to start.

I wonder if this might be our new mantra. “Love is at the center. I know Love is at the center. When I am afraid, when I am angry, when I am grieving, I remember Love, at the Center.” I think there’s something there. I’m even wondering if it might become our congregational covenant. “We know love to be at the center. When we are afraid, when we are angry, when we are grieving, we remember love at the center.”

Adrienne Maree Brown, in her book Emergent Strategy, wrote, “When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient…If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact…If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through the eyes of love…We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of relationships, which can only be measured by their depth.”

This brings us back to the beginning. What if Love was at the Center? What if Love was the organizing principle for our lives? What if we knew that our strength is in our relationships, that our power comes from the depth of our empathy, that our task is not to win but to commit to the transformative power of Love. What if we let go of the lists of things we are sure we believe in and instead leaned into a more dynamic possibility, centering Love and moving from there into the world. What would that do to our church? How are we different if we center love? What does that do to the covenant we have with all the other UU churches? Does that change the way we relate to them? Should it?

Imagine the witness we could become in the world if Love was at our center. As I was writing this, I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelter. With Lisa and Austin remaining committed even though they moved to Delaware. With the committee, with the staff pouring themselves out to ensure we can provide beds for people we don’t know, but who need to be safe and warm. Br. Zachary was here only a few weeks before he grabbed the directive with his whole being, fully engaged in doing whatever it took to get us open again. Love was at the Center. So, maybe this is who we are. At the very least, this is a peek into who we can be.

What will happen to this new language is unclear. The delegates at June’s General Assembly will vote on whether they want to move the process forward. If they do, we’ll spend another year tweaking and wordsmithing I’m sure. Then we’ll vote again next year. Regardless of whether anything comes of it, though, I think the challenge has been issued and we can’t pretend we haven’t heard it.

Can you let go of everything else and live into the grand question… What would it look like if Love was at the Center of Everything?

Find a Stillness

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 19, 2023

 It’s been such a warm winter, it’s nearly been spring with the exception of maybe 4 days- Christmas, of course, when we were all standing outside wrapped in every winter item we could find, and one brutal weekend two weeks ago – and even then, there’s been no snow or ice to speak of. This week, it hit 70. The problem is, at least for me, that winter is the time I slow down. As a working mother with big obligations in many areas of my life, I’m busy all the time. I need winter to force a slow-down, and this year, I’ve been short-changed. Instead of the natural stay-inside response to freezing weather that slows things down after the holiday season, we went from the hustle and bustle of December singing Busy Sidewalks to actual busy sidewalks, and all the growth and productivity of springtime.

In the absence of that necessary and common winter slowdown, I’m offering instead this sermon. It’s meant to be a meditation on winter and stillness with the explicit invitation to just breathe through it, letting your body relax, letting your mind go. I promise not to say anything important. I won’t talk about trauma, I won’t call you to action, I won’t give you anything deep to think or worry about. There will be no facts or figures, nothing you’ll want to remember later. Not today. Today is meant to be a gift, a kindness, a way for your brain to slow down, for your body to be still, for you to rest. So, listen to the meditative sermon. Or let your mind wander. Notice how beautiful the stained glass here is. Then come back to my words which are nothing more than an invitation to lean in to the stillness of winter.

Make yourselves comfortable. Take a deep breath.

Annie Dillard says, “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and re-seeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog…The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. All that summer conceals, winter reveals.”

I live in the woods, which might seem odd since I only ever see any of you here in Midtown, but I do. My house is surrounded by trees and for much of the year, we can’t see the other houses on our street through all the leaves. But in the winter, the woods empty and I can see everything. The spring is a virtual cabaret of flowers and budding trees and the summer is a carnival of life and autumn a festival of color.  But the winter is more like a memorial, a time for reflection and revelation. The trees and shrubs end the autumn in a dramatic striptease exposing a bare Earth and the humans make our way inside where we are less vulnerable, less exposed than the planet appears to be.

And then things get quiet. When there’s snow, sound seems to be absorbed and we enter the quiet time. Even when the snow melts and turns that awful gray, the chill keeps us indoors where we can think. Humans don’t talk about hibernation, but I think we do, in fact, enter a semi-hibernation state where we eat heavy food and sleep longer hours, and move more slowly. It’s natural for us to hole-up, to make our homes into little caves, to be lazy. And, to be clear, I’m not using the word lazy as a judgment, just an observance. Doing less isn’t bad. It’s counter-cultural, so it’s unusual, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, it’s even good. It’s time to recharge and it’s wholly necessary.

This is what sabbath could be for us. One day a week for rest. To be honest, I’m not a leader in this field. I have one day off each week and I still read email or do other work things. So, I preach these words for me to hear as much as anyone else. In a world that measures success by market growth, that understands the rhythm of the planet only insofar as it pertains to economic advancement, requiring everyone to do and spend more each quarter than we did the last, observing the sabbath is a wholesale rejection of a culture that cares nothing for our collective spiritual well-being. Taking one day as a break from the system that sees us all as commodities, instead focusing on healing and breathing, and being in relationship, could be a balm for ourselves and this perpetually moving culture of ours.

My aunt is dying. I spent a lot of time in her home recently with my uncle and cousins, who are some of my favorite people. Carolyn is dying at home. She’s too young, but she’s in bed surrounded by her family. There’s nothing like the stillness of a home waiting for death. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. We’ve spent a lot of time being still. Waiting. We make small talk. We make big talk. People move in and out- old friends, nurses, neighbors, caretakers of many kinds – and we sit. We hold her hand. We tell her stories, although she’s been asleep for a week. We eat when we’re hungry, never really clear about what time it is or what meal it’s supposed to be. Time has little meaning when everything is just what we understand to be Before. There is great sadness in our stillness, in the stillness of that house. And there’s connection. And tenderness. And love. Even as we do little more than breath together, and wait.

So many of us – the entire planet, really – had the experience of collective stillness for at least 3 months, and really more like 2 years, didn’t we? We were ordered into our homes. We were told that moving around was hurting us, was spreading a deadly virus. We need to stay still. Keep ourselves contained. And as sure as we were that we could never do that on any large scale for any period of time, it was stunning how quickly we did just that. We all stayed still. We moved indoors and waited.

Quarantine felt like a multi-national spiritual practice. Everyone inside. Everyone stay still. Everyone breathe deeply and lean into your powerlessness. Everyone. Shhh…Don’t move.

Let’s all try it. Let’s try for a moment to not move. Let your hands rest, maybe drop your eyes to a fixed place on the floor. Breathe in. Feel your breath move through you. We’re going to breathe a little together. We’ll breath in to the count of 4, then hold for 7 and breath out for 8. Doctors tell us this is good for our bodies.

Breath in 1-2-3-4. Hold 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Out. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Again.

And sit. Feel the seat. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. Feel the air on your skin. The floor beneath your feet. Your clothes on your body. Breathe.

And let your mind rest. Watch the thoughts melt away. Lean into the nothing. Let your body be still, but not so still you feel afraid to move. I was once joining a Roshi for the Zen practice of sitting and when I realized I wasn’t allowed to move I nearly had a panic attack. Don’t be that still. There are no rules. This is just about being. You and I are just being. We aren’t doing. We are still and we are breathing, and we are alive, and it is enough. It is good. It is very good.

I will keep talking, and you can tune back in or you can keep feeling your breath moving through you.

W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

We can make our minds so like still water. Stillness is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of  fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the volcano of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and tweets and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Stillness is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

So, let us sit. Still. Let us sit still. Just for this moment, with Madison Avenue busy behind you, let us sit still. Let’s breath into the stillness of our bodies, long deep breaths. Let the world progress around as it does, let the day move and the buses pass, and the sirens blare, but let us sit still. There’s healing in the stillness. If we do it long enough, we’ll hear our own voices quietly telling us where to go next. We’ll see our ancestors smiling. We’ll feel ourselves rooted in Earth and nourished from our common Source.

These winter days, with or without the cold and ice, are an invitation to move inward, to rest. To be still. This is our season to appreciate the Sabbath, the sabbatical of the winter, now is our chance to reclaim our lives from the busyness, to move indoors and discover what the stillness of winter will reveal.

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their siblings
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

Healing the Wounds that Bind Us

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 12, 2023

Google “religious scandals” and you will be as overwhelmed as I was with the dizzying array of salacious events to choose from. Faced with an astounding list of options, I first clicked Jim Bakker, since that was a familiar name. A televangelist with his own Christian theme park, he and his wife founded the Praise the Lord Club, a televised program netting over $200 million a year. Bakker resigned from his ministry after paying his secretary to be quiet about raping her and then he went to prison for felony related to accounting fraud.

In 1990, Covenant House, an organization designed to help runaway kids, was slammed with accusations that Fr. Bruce Ritter, their larger than life founder, sexually abused some of the kids in his care. That revelation opened the gate for a tidal wave of stories from people across generations all over the country not just accusing priests of molesting them but of a massive system of cover-ups aided and abetted by the most powerful men in the American Catholic Church.

Just a few months ago we learned that a Hasidic school in Brooklyn has been failing to educate their students essentially neglecting to teach them math, English, science or social studies, choosing instead to spend huge sums of money on religious indoctrination and Yiddish. Orthodox schools have also gotten city and state money for children with disabilities, but the schools have provided little or no accommodations for those children. Making these scandals even worse, lawmakers in the area have known for years but haven’t wanted to appear antisemitic or to challenge the voting block which they need to maintain their power in the neighborhood.

People calling themselves Christian have been trying for-ever to convert people who don’t conform to sexual or gender norms. LGBTQ people have been subjected to electroshock treatments, conversion camps, and full communal exclusion when they display behaviors considered outside the acceptable societal expectations. Christian preachers croon about hell and cite narrow interpretations of scripture to marginalize people, leading to unbearable pain.

A woman I know was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She met her husband in her church, but soon after marrying they decided they wanted to take a break from Sunday mornings and stopped going to church. The minister told the community to shun them, which meant to completely shut them out of their lives. The community included their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. They were excluded from gatherings of all kinds; not even phone calls were allowed. Under pressure, the couple agreed to return to church where the shunning continued for 6 months until they proved their faithfulness.  

I was raised without religion, a fact many people tell me they wish was true of them. Both of my parents had been treated badly by their religions of origin. They’d both experienced trauma as children and neither of their respective religious traditions or communities were able to speak to their needs in any meaningful way. To make it more complicated, after they fell in love, the fact that he was Catholic and she was Jewish meant that neither family was supportive of their relationship. My mother’s mother forced a break-up. My father’s cousins looked for my mother’s horns. The whole thing was destructive and when I was born, they agreed to keep me away from organized religion. (We can see how well that turned out.)

Religious institutions have been the source of tremendous pain in the lives of millions of people.

Raise your hand if you have been hurt by a religious community or particular theology. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if you rejected religion because it was harmful to you. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if, before coming here, you were sure you’d never step foot in another church/synagogue or other house of worship again.

You can put your hands down. That’s a lot of us. A lot of people right here in this room have experienced religious trauma or have barely escaped it, and we aren’t alone. Our streets are filled with people who have been hurt, rejected, or otherwise harmed in one of a thousand ways by the very institutions they were taught to trust.

I read a sermon written by a colleague of mine down in Georgia. Her name is Charlotte Arsenault and in her sermon she references a writer named Jim Palmer. He’s done a lot of work on this subject, but what I found most interesting is a list of messages people get from religion that create trauma. Here’s his list:

I am inherently bad.

I can't trust myself.

My heart is wicked.

I deserve punishment.

I don't measure up.

I am powerless.

Self-denial is holiness.

I need forgiveness for who I am.

I need to be saved from myself.

I am worthless on my own.

Being devoted to God means staying in an abusive relationship.

Therapy or medication is a lack of faith.

Self-care is selfish.

The world is evil.

If I mess up I will lose my salvation and go to hell.

People I deeply love are in hell or will go there.

Everything outside my church culture is a threat.

I can never be good enough.

Feelings are dangerous and not trustworthy.

I am not capable of thinking for myself.

Obedience is true discipleship.

Questioning is a spirit of rebellion.

I must be perfect.

My struggles mean I am not trusting God.

I am nothing.

I am weak.

And lastly, God will fix it for me.

To Mr. Palmer’s list I’d like to add:

You don’t need science if you have faith.

You might be in pain, grieving, terrified, but it’s all God’s will.

This is God’s plan.

Your beloved died because God wanted them with Him.

Sex is sinful and separates you from God.

Clergy are closer to God than you are.

Clergy are rarely wrong, sad, angry or in need.

This is because they have real faith.

When you are wrong, sad, angry or in need, it’s your lack of faith.

Women are subservient to men.

Women should not lead.

Women should be quiet.

These might be messages you’ve heard before. If so, I’m sorry. I’m sorry anyone said these things to you or implied them or build a world or system around them. I’m sorry anyone has had to hear them, or that anyone believes them enough they’d repeat them. Those messages saturate our culture, sink into our minds, and effect self-worth in powerful, often lasting ways.

People are running from organized religion, and it’s no wonder. The hurt perpetrated, over and over, generation to generation is finally repelling people, something I hope is a sign of health. I hope there’s a wholesale rejection of messages that don’t align with other shared cultural values.

If I were to make a list of what messages I hope people are hearing or assuming here, here are some things that would be on it:

I am beautiful

I am made in the image of all that’s Holy

I am loved

When I feel broken, there’s somewhere I can go to be reminded that I am whole

Everyone behaves badly sometimes

Everyone gets angry

Everyone feels sad

Everyone knows how it feels to be lonely

None of these feelings are a lack of faith

Everyone is loved

Everyone is saved

My gender, my sexuality, the color of my skin, are reflections of God

I am part of the divine spirit that lives and loves in all of us

My voice matters, even if I don’t have a job or a home or don’t speak English

It’s OK that I don’t have answers

Questions are faithful

One of the ways I see religious trauma play out is in inherent distrust of clergy, and sometimes other church leadership. It’s always interesting to me when I see people start to question the motives of their friends once their friends are sitting on the board. I tell board members when that happens that it’s not about them, the same way I know the similarly suspicious energy I receive isn’t about me. It’s one of the ways we play out years of pain or childhood religious trauma. It’s safer to assume malintent of people with any kind of religious authority. I mean- it’s annoying for us, but in some ways it’s also understandable. I don’t want to downplay the trauma it perpetuates, though. At least two past board chairs here have been honest about how that experience has eaten at their souls. One recently spoke publicly in a congregational meeting that she has some PTSD as a result of how badly she was treated by other members of this congregation when she was in a position of authority. Often in UU churches, once a board chair steps off the board, they leave the church, sometimes just for a while, but often for good. We’re seeing ministers fleeing under similar circumstances. With a national shift toward self-care, clergy across denominations are deciding they can’t be lightning rods any more. We’ve all heard the old adage: Hurt people, hurt people and whether they are aware of it or not, that anger plays out in houses of worship over and over again, continuing the cycle of victimization.

As we make our way toward a congregational covenant, acknowledging the religious trauma we might be carrying will be necessary. We don’t want to keep rehearsing pain, building our defensiveness into new relationships, designing new systems on foundations of unprocessed suffering. We don’t want to perpetuate the same trauma on others because we haven’t come to terms with it within ourselves.

One sermon isn’t going to heal anyone. That’s a magic touch I just don’t have. Today is one step in a process of mending those fragments of our spirits that are still torn, or frayed from having been pulled out from under some heavy guilt and rejection and familial or cultural weights. The steps toward healing aren’t linear. I can’t tell you what’s first, and the fact that you’re here says you’ve already begun. This is more of a spiral where you know the pain and feel it and consider it and deconstruct it and then know it and feel it again. It’s a movement, like all healing is, a dance deeper in and back out again in a process of discernment and letting go and finding replacements for the messages that cause so much hurt.

Those healing messages are spoken here every week, and even as you hear them, they won’t push out the more damaging messages until they are lived and demonstrate themselves to be real. One of the things that helps us to live them is to be honest about them. To talk about where and when and how the damage was done. And let me acknowledge something some of you might need to hear. I know some of the damage was done here at Community Church. I know that this church hasn’t always been the safest place for everyone. We haven’t experienced sexual misconduct from leadership – as far as I know – but there are other ways for clergy to behave badly, ways for leadership to damage a church in a slow-burning, the effects of which are seen over time rather than in the in-your-face-ness of a mega-church guilty of tax evasion or paying off rape victims. We don’t talk about it much here, which I wonder about sometimes. Does it seem disrespectful to name openly what’s been happening here over the last 40 years? Is it that the people still here aren’t the ones most hurt, so there isn’t much to say? Is it that the people causing the hurt or dysfunction might still be in earshot? Or is it that we’ve all been taught not to speak these things out loud, that millennia of listening to religious in power conditioned us to keep quiet?

Just before the Me Too movement hit nationally, the female clergy within the UU Ministers Association started telling some difficult truths. At the beginning of that reckoning, one of our luminaries who has worked with congregations in the aftermath of clergy misconduct gave a critical lecture to our entire membership. She started by invoking the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc where the lead character played by Harrison Ford told his friends not to look as the Arc of the Covenant was opened and the demons were released killing anyone with their eyes open. Instead, she said, Look. We might be afraid, but we have to look and see what’s in the box we’ve been keeping closed or we will never heal. 

A few months ago I apologized from this pulpit for something I’d said the year before. It was a very deliberate act and I did it for several reasons. One was that I regretted what I’d said. It was also because I suspected very few people in this room had ever heard a member of the clergy apologize from the pulpit. It happens very rarely. In fact, I was trying to remember a time I knew of where it had happened without the person resigning and couldn’t come up with one example. This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty, but none come to mind. What does come to mind is people recognizing something they did and then walking away. That might be appropriate sometimes, but I’d like to think there are ways to acknowledge mistakes that allow for a continuation of covenantal relationship. In fact, that’s what I think covenantal relationships are. Some of you have asked me to forgive you for things you’ve done or said and my response is always, “Of course”. That’s covenant lived in real time.

And that’s authentic religious community. No shunning. No converting. No hushing or denying. We speak truth in love. And when we can’t, when we can’t find truth or love is distant, we say that too. We say it in faith, knowing that we will make our way back to ourselves and to each other, that we are together, walking each other home. As Alice Walker tells us, “There is no god but love and so rising is inherent in our heart beat as we move carried or knocked about by life. This we know: We were not meant to suffer so much and to learn nothing.”

So we are here with our broken hearts, our healing spirits, and our wisdom being born.  

Reclaiming History: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street

February 5, 2023

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

After the Civil War, the 5 Indigenous Nations living in what is now Oklahoma gave a group of freed people land on which to start new lives. Word got out that the Territory was a safe place for newly liberated people, creating a land rush that only got more intense through the rest of the century.

In 1889, OW Gurley, born to freed people in Alabama, moved to Oklahoma where he purchased 40 acres with the idea of supporting other Black people to buy land and build homes and businesses. Often called the Architect of Greenwood, the neighborhood in Tulsa sometimes referred to as Black Wall Street, Gurley provided loans and other support to encourage the creation of a new community for Black people. 10 years later, he was joined by JB Stradford, a Black lawyer from Kentucky, who built homes and businesses including a luxury hotel. In that intervening decade, restaurants, doctor, dentist and lawyer offices, schools, grocery and candy stores, banks, churches, pool halls, hair salons, and theatres had opened up and by the turn of the century Greenwood was a destination for Black people to settle or vacation. They even had their own hospital and newspaper, the Tulsa Star, founded and run by an activist committed to telling the story of this thriving Black enclave. You could live in Greenwood and never leave. Covering about 35 square blocks – from Lex to 7th, from 35th to 42nd st., everything a family needed could be found in walking distance. Families were accumulating wealth and were spending it in their own community, keeping the neighborhood self-sufficient, while the people were interdependent.

There are some lovely stories of the Greenwood neighborhood. Ellis Walker Woods walked from Memphis to Oklahoma after seeing a flyer advertising for Black teachers. As a college-educated man, he soon became the principle of the Booker T. Washington High School. Simon Berry, a pilot, learned that the taxi service in Tulsa only served white people, so he borrowed the money for a Model-T Ford to drive Black people where they needed to go. He then expanded creating a bus line and then a charter plane service for wealthy Black oilmen. Mable Little arrived in Greenwood with $1.24 and was able to open a hair salon with the help of other female entrepreneurs who were committed to supporting each other in this new world they were building.

On May 30th, 1921, 19 year old Dick Rowland, a Greenwood resident working in greater Tulsa, got on an elevator run by a 17 year old white female elevator operator named Sarah Page. When the elevator opened, Ms. Page accused Mr. Rowland of attempted rape. In subsequent investigations, it seems clear that nothing actually happened on that elevator, but the accusation was all that was needed. Rowland was arrested the next morning and brought to a Tulsa jail. By then, rumors were circulating about an assault, fed by a front page story in the primary Tulsa paper accusing Rowland of raping a white teenager.

As evening fell, a group of white men gathered outside the courthouse demanding the Sheriff release the teen to them. He and his deputies refused and barricaded themselves into the top floor. About 25 armed Black men showed up offering to help the Sheriff protect Rowland, but he turned them away, telling them to stay outside or go home. As the evening progressed, as many as 1500 white men were at the courthouse where the 25 Black men, now joined by their neighbors and totaling 75, stood guard. Shots were fired and the Black men retreated, heading back into the Greenwood neighborhood. Assuming the shots were from the Black men, the Sheriff deputized some of the white mob and asked for help catching them.

That white mob, now acting on behalf of the law, and soon joined by even more people coming in from all over Tulsa, descended on Greenwood and started to burn it down. Firefighters came to the scene but later reported that they were threatened at gunpoint when they tried to put out the fires. The rioting went all night and into the morning. In the end, more than 300 people were dead, almost entirely Black, more than 6,000 of the 10,000 Greenwood residents, including children, were arrested and put in holding cells, and every home and business had been looted or burned to the ground. Almost 1300 private homes were flattened along with schools, theatres, their media outlets, and even their hospital. All gone. No white people were ever charged with anything related to the violence in Greenwood.

A few days later, Rowland was released from jail without charges. It seems he’d accidentally banged into Ms. Page during the ride. He never returned to Tulsa.

Newspapers called it a race riot. In Tulsa it was called a Race War. No one called it a massacre, which is, of course, what it was. The Boston Massacre saw 5 killed. The worst riot in American history until then saw 119 dead, and they were on both sides as were death tolls of most other American riots.

Not only did they not call this a massacre, within weeks, no one talked about it at all. It was a big story with major newspapers covering it in the immediate aftermath. There were even white people taking pictures, creating postcards, and selling them as souvenirs. But by August, no one was talking about it at all. It seemed to have been largely erased from American history, until recently.

At the 75th anniversary in 1996, the City of Tulsa created a Commission to investigate. It’s from them that we have most of our statistics. Even with that acknowledgement, we were looking at the 100th anniversary with most Americans having never heard of the Tulsa Massacre.

The decision not to tell the story was the result of a cultural conspiracy from both white and Black people. On the one hand, the people of Greenwood were traumatized. Everything they knew was gone. Their homes. Their clothes. Their neighborhood. Their neighbors. They were terrified it could happen again, which was a legitimate fear since the Ku Klux Klan increased in both size and visibility right after the massacre. Their numbers swelled to over 10,000 in the city, ensuring that Black people remained silent. And white people didn’t want to keep talking about it either. The city officials were afraid of scaring off oil tycoons with talk of riots and other residents were just happy it was all behind them. So as not to embarrass the city, people in charge agreed not to include the incident in history books and many newspaper accounts were removed and archived to microfilm. Black residents didn’t want to pass on the pain to their children, or to dampen their ambitions and white residents didn’t want to admit any of this had happened at all. Together, they ensured that the story was never told.

It became part of the American conversation in 2019 when HBO aired the first episode of The Watchmen which opens with a depiction of that horrible night. Like so many Americans, I watched and assumed it must be fiction, as the rest of the show is. But curiosity was piqued and some vocal historians injected the conversation with facts, which are now making their way back into American culture, adding depth and texture to our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how much work there is still to do.

We have entered Black History Month and I have to ask myself, “How can we celebrate Black History when we don’t even know it?” And I’m asking that question during a spasm of intentional, institutional mis-educating, history-erasing, fact-denying activity. Right now – Even Now – Still Now - the governor of Florida is doing everything he can to make sure people don’t know and can never learn American history. An Advanced Placement course was recently updated to include Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, the relationship between varying oppressions, and explanations of Critical Race Theory. Specifically rejected from the course outline is an article on intersectionality and violence against women of color, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking article on reparations, and a book by James Baldwin.

AP classes are designed by a national board with the intention of helping high school students gain college credit; they are open only to the most accomplished students in the school and are completely optional. Rejecting the curriculum in one state means that no student in any state will have access since AP classes are created for national standardization. This particular course was designed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute. They have now gone back to rework this Black History course so as to eliminate – or what I’d call WhiteWash - much of Black history.

They’re also eliminating queer history, and gender history, and the very concept of intersectionality in this course. It is not to the benefit of those in power to allow a framework to be taught that recognizes the relationship between oppressions. They would prefer to target individual people or singular groups with accusations of resentment or entitlement, rather than acknowledge a massive system of oppression undergirding the entire American narrative.

Greenwood was not unique in its destruction. Have you heard of Bronzeville in Chicago? In the summer of 1919 they suffered a series of massacres and mass burnings of homes. Or West 9th street in Little Rock, or the 1906 riots in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta where white people randomly killed Black people en masse. I can’t find a death toll for that one either. The stories of so many of these places isn’t told, wasn’t investigated, and has moved into the dark underbelly of our country.

And that’s where conservatives would like it to remain. Unseen. They would like to retain power by keeping We the People uneducated lest we learn from our past or embarrass or make anyone uncomfortable in talking about it.

Timothy Snyder is one of our most respected writers and thinkers on political repression. He has a tiny, critically acclaimed and powerfully necessary book called On Tyranny in which he lays out the steps to resisting the shift away from democracy. The very first thing he tells us in this book is, “Do not obey in advance”. Very often, especially in the early stages of the shift into authoritarianism, power is given freely to autocrats. We see what they want, and we let them have it. Sometimes, like the case of Ron DeSantis wanting the college board to change the curriculum, they ask for it or even demand it, even though they have no moral or legal standing for such a thing. In response – maybe because we want to avoid a fight or maybe because we want to seem flexible or maybe because we’re intimidated by the power being wielded – we acquiesce. We obey. We figure there are ways around whatever they want. Or, we decide it’s not that big a deal. How many students are even taking this course?

And that’s how we end up, 100 years later, not knowing about a night of penetrating violence that killed hundreds, traumatized thousands, and burned a thriving neighborhood to the ground. We obeyed. We didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Make people uncomfortable. We stopped talking about it and thought it went away.

One month a year – and the shortest month at that – to talk about Black history seems a little absurd. But, that’s only if we forget that Black history is American history. We take one month to make sure the past is in sharp relief. We look carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously investigating, pulling at all the threads we have yet to consider. Then we weave those threads into the rest of our larger story.

The story of Greenwood is part of the story. The story of the GOP trying to erase that history is also part of the story. We reclaim our history by telling these stories, and by reclaiming the narrative, pushing back when someone tries to stop us.

There is hope in the struggle. There’s hope in the fact that people are struggling, that we haven’t just acquiesced, that we are raising our voices and using our pulpits. And, I’d like to encourage you toward a little curiosity. Investigate what you don’t know. See if there are stories no one is telling, and start telling them. Maybe post them in our Facebook group. Send them to me or to each other. Tell them over coffee or at the diner. The trauma inflicted on the Greenwood community wasn’t unique and isn’t over. The people of Memphis can assure us of that. Let’s commit to keeping those stories alive.

And when we do that, we keep our communities alive. We keep our history alive. We keep ourselves alive. Each of us. Nurtured by Truth so we can Embody Justice.

The Madness of Love

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

January 29, 2023

In 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist have a summer job herding sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. They fall in love but pursuing a same sex relationship is dangerous, so both men leave that summer and marry women. Over the course of the next 25 years, these men struggle with their tremendous passion for each other grounded in an intense, lasting love but tempered by the reality of the time and location of their lives. Not being willing or able to risk the loss of family or safety, they settle on loveless marriages and periodic fishing trips on Brokeback Mountain where they can be alone. It’s during those trips they are each most alive and most authentically themselves. The months and years between are empty, often lifeless periods of waiting for the next time they can be together. Ultimately, Jack is killed although Ennis never really knows what happened and is left to live his life profoundly alone. In the final scene of the movie, Ennis is in a room holding two t-shirts covered in his and his lover’s blood.

On this bleak mid-winter afternoon, I’m hoping to bring a little warmth, maybe some joy, hopefully a brief respite, by talking about love and desire. We’re taking a break from our usually scheduled Love As Justice, and instead, we’re talking about romance.

Romantic love is one of humanities primary relationships. I talk often from the pulpit about the power of love in changing the world, the necessity of love as a tool for social justice, and I’m sure I’ve nearly worn out the word love, speaking it so many times it’s gotten thin, smudged, faded and so soft it might disintegrate. But today I’m talking about romance, about falling in love and living in love and being so defined by love we can no longer even tell it’s there.

Love is all- encompassing, life-altering, world-changing, mind-blowing, family-creating… and family-destroying. It might be the most powerful experience a human can have. The loss of love or the loss of a loved one is equally explosive and life-defining.

The Madness of Love. Or, in the case of Jack and Ennis, the Madness of a Society that Blocks Love. But, that’s so often the case. Regulating love and sex is as ancient as civilization. But desire cannot be regulated.

Romeo was a Montague. Juliet, a Capulet. Their families were sworn enemies, but they met at a ball and fell madly in love. After the party, in what is now famously called the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of his family. Romeo makes himself known to her and they agree to be married, a promise that comes to pass the next day. After their secret wedding and one night together, Juliet’s father agrees to offer her hand in marriage to a suitor named Paris. In an attempt to get away from her fate, Juliet drinks a potion that will make her appear dead. Romeo, thinking his lover is gone, kills himself. When she awakens, Juliet sees her husband dead and follows him to her death.

That story always strikes me as being both an epic love story and a little bit ridiculous. They met, married and died for each other in the course of 3 days. Of course, they were teenagers, so it might not be completely unrealistic.

Regardless of the timeline, this is a classic love story, an ancient story rewritten and timelessly memorialized by Shakespeare and reimagined over and over again for each new contemporary context. We can’t stop telling the story, hearing the story, because love captivates us, because we have all known love – or wished to know love – so powerful we weren’t willing to live without it. It becomes the life of every cell in our bodies, the breath we need to continue minute to minute.

The experience of falling in love doesn’t last a lifetime, but it can set the stage for a lifetime. Real lives are filled with the mundane, with doing dishes and running errands and answering phones and feeding children and going to meetings and living on a budget. Doing those things as you build and sustain a life with someone you love alters the nature of daily life.

We often speak of "falling in love," as if love is stumbled into or we talk of "being in love" as if love is a permanent condition. Both phrases imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet there’s hardly any human enterprise which begins with such hope and expectation and fails so regularly. Love takes time, effort, even training. It’s not for beginners, a fact Romeo and Juliet found out the hard way.

When we talk about finding a mate, we often talk about becoming desired. Stand in front of any collection of popular magazines and it’s all quite apparent. The problem most people think they have is not  loving better, but becoming more lovable. For men, that often translates to money and power. For women, all too often, we focus on physical beauty. Second to those things for all genders is the ability to maintain interesting conversations, to be funny, and to be well mannered. Being lovable becomes a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal as any high school sophomore can tell you.

It’s as if there’s nothing to be learned about love, that the problem is one of the object, not the faculty. In other words, we think loving is easy, the difficulty is finding the right person to love- the object of my affection. The difficulty is being attractive enough to someone I desire. Love becomes an extension of our consumer culture. We spend our courtship years- which happen between the ages of 10 and 100 – window shopping. We marry when we have found the best item on the market, given our own spending limitations.

But real love requires much more than making the right purchase, more than being desired by one you desire. That might make for a really fun weekend, but then you’re done. Love is what happens after, what happens when the falling is over and you’ve landed in a home with a partner. It’s good to remember that real love isn’t a feeling. Feelings come and go. Scott Peck taught us so long ago- Love is a Decision. Love is a difficult and lasting decision, a decision to be present and honest and fully yourself while encouraging growth and offering support for an other. And while that decision can be changed, that it’s been made creates a container for the rest of our lives. We can feel angry, but that anger is held in the framework of love. We can feel disappointed, or bored, but the decision to love still encircles us. It’s why we can disagree, and decide to talk about it later. We know we’re together, that most things aren’t urgent, that the container we’ve wrapped ourselves in will hold.

Authentic love is also, by its very nature, self-generating.  It multiplies, it expands. It rehearses it's abundance in generosity. Many years ago I was presiding at a wedding for two people entering their second marriage. They had a mature love, one that drew people in and sent them back out with a great experience of joy. I had told them not to pay me for the wedding, so instead, they pulled up to my new house with a car filled with flowers to be planted in my empty garden. When they opened the back of the car, I gasped. There was so much color and life filling this car. It seemed like a perfect reflection of their relationship- filled with a love that multiplies generously.

Real love extends beyond ourselves and into the world. It’s not about desiring one other person, but about loving one person so much it spills onto the streets. One of my favorite moments in the Romeo and Juliet tale is when Romeo refuses to fight. Romeo is confronted by one of Juliet’s kinsmen and challenges him to a duel. But Romeo sees his former enemies as his future family and can’t bring himself to participate. Love has expanded to include even this man he hardly knows. True love is inclusive, opening the lovers to union with all of life. Love awakens us to existence outside ourselves. We can suddenly see the other no longer as enemy but as family.

         Living with someone for a long time, growing older with someone, living in the averageness of daily life doesn’t preclude the need for passion. This is why I loved our opening reading. It’s a regular moment. She’s in a café with her husband. Something they’ve done a thousand times together. But a young woman leans over and asks about his dessert and the author yearns for a life in that moment in which people are reaching for so much more than what’s in front of them, where people are accepting their own lust and giving in to it if only just a little bit. She enjoys that her husband feels something, wants something. He’s still alive. And so is she.

         She can only get to that place because they’ve been together a long time, because she trusts her husband and isn’t living in constant insecurity. She’s learned something about love. She’s learned how to find and offer room within the container of marriage. She’s learned not to be afraid of hungers, not to be afraid to want something or to allow her husband to desire something more. It’s how we grow, how we stay alive. We accept and love the life we are living and we reach for more. Within the container of joy and commitment with a partner, we stay alive by reaching for more.

Falling in love, agreeing to share your life with someone is a risk. You could get your heart broken. It happens all the time, which, if it’s ever happened to you, is difficult to believe. How can people function once that’s happened? How do you get up in the morning, get kids off to school, go to work, have conversations, how do you gather the energy just to take a shower once your beloved has cheated on you, left you for someone else, told you you are no longer loved? How do you move forward when your lover has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or died in a car accident? How can you continue when your heart has been broken? Maybe it’s better not to take the risk, better to let love move by you, remain unnoticed, safe, alone. Love is so likely to end badly, it might be best to stay away. And yet, even with millions of books and movies and songs going back through the ages, warning us, it’s a risk most of us take at some time. We want more from life than what we have, we want to live bolder and sing louder and feel stronger than we do. We want the feeling of falling and of standing and living in love, of creating a life with someone.

UU Minister Rev. Bob Janis wrote a poem I’ve been loving. It’s called “The Hunter”.

Love, the Hunter

Love roams the earth

Looking for victims

Sacrifices to the high God

She is not inescapable

Some days we are too fast

too wary

Once I was able to disguise myself

as a man looking at a train timetable

She went right on by

until I started looking at the numbers too closely

and I enjoyed the way the four looked next to the eight

And I was flattened

If love catches you

then that's it for you

I'm afraid

O you may find a moment or two out of her clutches

A time to reminisce about when the days were your own

and you were the one

trying to capture the world

and bring it home

But in the end

there is only one pit

and we all fall in

And though it's not the fire that consumes us

everything that brought us to this point

down to our very flesh

will be destroyed

But at that point you won't care much

For you will become a part of love itself

Maybe love is after all more of a gatherer.

Ultimately, we want to be caught, want to burn in a fire, be destroyed in a pit, melt into love. We might even want to love so ferociously we’re willing to die or even kill to protect it. Like Ennis and Jack, we’re willing to risk everything we have because when love is real, nothing is more powerful or beautiful or more necessary. We are not here to live numb, cold lives, to play it safe. No one gets out alive. We’re here to live boldly, to risk mightily. We’re here to love what our bodies love, to be with the people we can’t live without, to climb balconies in the middle of the night and profess love unto death. This is what it means to be a people of desire. This is the joy and the madness of love.