Today's sermon is about inviting friends and family to come to church with us. This is something that I think is hard for a lot of people in my congregation, warm and welcoming as they are. As a sometimes-shy person myself, I know they're not alone!
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
You’re Invited!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 22, 2010
Today I have three facts that I want to share with you.
Fact Number One:
29% of people living in the Western United States
are not connected to any religion or congregation whatsoever.
(Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, available at http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons#.)
That fact comes to us from a national study by the Pew Forum.
If we assume Stockton is about average in this regard,
that means about 80,000 people here in Stockton alone
don’t feel connected to a religious community.
That’s Fact Number One.
Fact Number Two:
Say there’s someone you know
who doesn’t belong to a church already.
If you were to ask that person to come to a church service with you,
researchers have found there’s a 90% chance
that person will come with you, right now or sometime in the future.
(New Congregation and Growth Resources, Unitarian Universalist Association, Congregational Growth in Unitarian Universalism (2005), p. 16, available at http://www.uua.org/documents/congservices/conggrowth.pdf.)
So if ten of us went out tomorrow and invited a friend to church,
chances are, nine of those people would actually come!
Ninety percent. That’s Fact Number Two.
Fact Number Three:
This is something we’re going to generate together, right now.
I’m really curious to hear about how many people here
have invited a friend or relative to come to church with you lately.
I don’t want to put anyone on the spot.
You don’t have to answer.
But if you’ve invited someone you know to come to church with you,
say, in the last year, and you’re willing to let the rest of us know,
would you raise your hands, please?
(About 12 people raised their hands at my church.)
I have to tell you, based on this snapshot,
it looks like Unitarian Universalists
have gotten much better at inviting our friends
than we used to be in the 1960s, when one study found
the average Unitarian Universalist invited a friend to church
once every 27 years!
By the way, I want to add my greetings to our visitors today.
It’s great that you are here
and I hope you will find a warm welcome here.
This is a really warm and friendly congregation—
we just get a little shy
when it comes to inviting people to check it out.
And there are reasons for that, which I’ll talk about in a minute.
But the bottom line is this: there are a huge number of people
in every city, including our own,
who don’t have a religious community to belong to.
People without a religious community
whose friends invite them to come to church
are extremely likely to say yes.
And though this congregation is already doing some of that,
I hope I can convince you today
that those of us who are members here
can and should invite lots more people
to come to this church—not just once every few years,
but whenever we get the chance.
I want to challenge you, in fact:
if you are a member or friend of this congregation,
I challenge you to invite at least one person you know
to come to church with you sometime in the next month.
This challenge is not just for the person sitting next to you;
it’s for you personally. Sometime in the next month,
invite at least one person you know to come to church with you.
Now, for some people, this is going to be easy.
You may be doing it already!
But I know, for a lot of us, inviting someone to church
is only slightly less terrifying
than, oh, let’s say, brushing our teeth with corrosive acid
or jumping out of a plane 5000 feet above the ground.
This one simple act of asking someone to come with us
and visit our spiritual home
brings up all sorts of fears and vulnerabilities
that are real and worthy of our compassion and tenderness,
even as I don’t want us to get stuck in our fears.
So I want to talk today about how we can try to get past
some of the obstacles that come up
and get in the way of inviting people to visit our church.
Let’s start with an obvious one.
We don’t want to put our friends on the spot.
We might be worried about embarrassing them
or putting a strain on the friendship, making things awkward.
Maybe we’ve been on the receiving end
of someone asking us to come to their church,
and we didn’t like it, so we don’t want to do that to someone else,
especially not someone whose opinion is important to us.
We don’t want to mess up the friendship.
I really hear that.
At the same time, do you notice:
all these fears about ruining the friendship
are based on an assumption that our friend
would not actually want to come to church with us.
And that may be true, or it may not be.
Let’s assume for a moment that’s true.
Your friend is really not looking for a religious community.
Some people we know are obviously happy in their own religion,
their own church or temple,
or maybe happy not being part of a religion.
That’s fine. If someone’s happy where they are,
we don’t try to convert them. That’s not our way.
You might still invite them to come for a visit
just as a way of getting to know you better
or to learn more about a religion they don’t know much about.
Those are good reasons to visit someone else’s church.
That could be a great thing for your friendship,
a way to share your different paths
without needing to convert one another.
But I also want to urge you,
don’t be so quick to assume other people don’t want
or don’t need a church like this.
We don’t want to put our friends on the spot:
OK, but imagine: could it be
that your friend would actually be very glad
to get an invitation to come to the church they know you go to?
Maybe they feel too shy to ask you about it.
They might be waiting for you to ask them!
Maybe they don’t want to put themselves forward
or horn in on something you’ve treated as your private thing.
And if that’s the case,
you could spend your whole lives
being too polite to share with one another
the very things that matter most to you,
just because you’re afraid of what each other will think.
And how sad would that be?!
In fact, at the heart of that fear of putting your friends on the spot,
I think there’s a much deeper fear
that we ourselves will be judged and rejected
if ever we allow someone else, even a dear friend,
to truly see our souls.
We want to protect our spiritual life, our deepest self,
from other people’s disdain or critique or rejection.
And when we tell a friend about our church,
the place we’ve chosen as our spiritual home.
it may feel very risky. It can make us feel very exposed and unsafe.
We can spin out all sorts of fearful stories:
What if they don’t like it?
What if they think it’s dumb
or they just don’t get it?
What would that say about how they feel about me?
The fears are real.
But are we going to shut ourselves down entirely
and never take the risk of revealing ourselves
to those who love us best?
In our closest relationships,
with the people who really care about us,
there are moments when we have an opportunity
to share our heart with them,
moments where something in the air shifts and shimmers
and we feel there is a safety between us,
a web of trust that allows us
to risk speaking a truth about ourselves
that we haven’t dared to say out loud, maybe ever.
What I wish for you is that in those moments
you will be brave enough to speak your truth,
and your friendship will be strong and loving enough
to receive that truth as the precious jewel it is.
And I wish for you, also, that when you speak the truth
about your soul, it will be a blessing for others too.
Albert Schweitzer reminds us that
"At times our own light goes out
and is rekindled by a spark from another person."
And it just might be
the friend you are afraid of offending
by talking about your church and your spiritual life
is the very person most in need of your light.
Could it be?
I want us to invite our friends
because I want people to have a spiritual community
where people feel connected and support one another.
But sometimes the issue takes a different form.
Sometimes what holds us back, what stops us
from telling a friend about this church which is so meaningful to us
is a fear that maybe our church community
will not be able to receive and love that friend well enough
to keep them safe and well.
We might worry about whether our friend
will be rightly seen and honored by our community.
This is a real concern
for people who don’t fit our majority demographics.
Every church has to ask itself, and ours is no exception,
is our door open to people who maybe look different,
have a different experience of life,
speak a different language?
Are we as an institution open-hearted enough
to welcome every single person who walks through those doors
and honor them and appreciate them for who they are,
not trying to change them
but allowing ourselves to be changed by them,
to make room for them to sit down and settle down
and make a home here
and have a say about what that looks like?
I know this is the kind of church we fervently want to be.
I also know there are times we get it wrong,
times we screw up and aren’t as welcoming as we want to be.
When we’re lucky, we get to talk about it
and learn how to do better next time.
This is such a huge and important thing,
how well we welcome people
when they do accept that invitation and walk through our doors—
how well and richly we are able
to see the beauty in every human soul,
how gracefully we can be a community that truly honors diversity,
how open we can be to that journey of meeting
and coming to know another human being and, over time,
deepening the connections that bind us together in community.
Of course there are at least a hundred sermons
just waiting to be preached on this alone.
For today I just want to acknowledge that, like every community,
this congregation is not perfect, and we want to get better.
We want everyone here to feel welcome,
and if you ever have any concerns about this,
if ever you hesitate to bring someone to this church
for fear of how they will be received,
I invite you to talk to me or anyone you feel safe with here.
Let’s make things right.
So much is at stake.
I want more people to visit our church,
and join, and be a part of this community,
because I believe our religion saves lives.
The message of Unitarian Universalism is so simple and so needed.
In a world crippled by hate for those who are different,
a world where religious violence shatters communities
and destroys lives every day,
this is our message:
We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people.
We believe every person is precious,
no matter who they are,
no matter what they’ve done,
no matter how much money they have
or where they come from
or what they look like
or who they love.
We know we as individuals and as congregations
get it wrong sometimes.
We’re not perfect. We know we screw up.
But the ideal is there in front of us, leading us on,
constantly challenging us to love more
and live up to our ideals more fully,
comforting us when we fall short
with the knowledge that we ourselves are loved, always.
Because we believe the ultimate truth of things is love,
infinite love for all people, all beings, everything that is.
And we are here on earth to be agents of that love.
Our work is to radiate that love in everything we do,
every day of our lives, wherever we are, whomever we’re with,
in the service of justice and compassion and truth.
That’s our call.
Every person has worth.
All are loved.
We are called to be agents of that love here and now.
That is our message.
It’s that simple.
It’s that important.
So will you take up this challenge?
One person in one month.
Just ask yourself, who needs to hear our message?
Who needs to be here who isn’t already?
Because the real question is, who doesn’t?
I am standing up here in front of you today
and tell you I want you to do something I know is scary:
bring your friends, tell them about us,
because I know this faith, your faith,
has the power to open minds
and transform hearts
and save lives.
It’s that important.
Blessings on all of us and all we love, and on all the world.
May every act performed in love bear fruit.
May all who seek be found.
Amen.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Sources of Our Faith: Earth-Centered Traditions
Here's the sermon I gave today, the last of a series on the six "Sources of Our Faith" found in the Unitarian Universalist Association's Purposes & Principles statement. One of our Pagan congregants brought her home altar to church and showed it to the children during our "Time for All Ages"--a lovely service if I do say so. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
P.S. If you want to read the other sermons in the series, you can find them here:
Transcending Mystery and Wonder: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100221.pdf
Prophetic Women and Men: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100523.pdf
Wisdom from the World's Religions: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100321.pdf
Jewish and Christian Teachings: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100404.pdf
Humanist Teachings: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100613.pdf
***
The Sources of Our Faith:
Earth-Centered Traditions
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 15, 2010
Living in California has changed me.
I never thought I would have a Goddess Tarot app on my iPhone.
But I do now.
I got my iPhone as a practical tool. It’s got my calendar, to-do list,
phone numbers and addresses, and that is the only reason I wanted it.
None of this silly time-wasting computer game stuff for me, oh, no!
But one day not so long ago,
I came across a mention of this little app,
a little software program you can download onto your phone.
Just for fun, I told myself, I’d give it a try.
It’s research!
And it was free, so why not?
So today now I have an app on my phone,
with beautiful pictures of ancient goddesses
and inspirational messages which in truth are a little corny
but which also, sometimes, touch me
and help me feel creative
about facing whatever might be coming in the future.
Whether the tarot part can actually predict the future,
oh, gosh, I have no idea.
But I like thinking about the goddesses
and the inspiration they give me to look at the challenges in my life
from a different perspective,
and maybe to get in touch with inner resources
I hadn’t realized I had.
And, truthfully, I feel a little shy telling you all this,
but I want you to have a flavor of where I’m coming from
on this Sunday when we have the chance to immerse ourselves
in the last one of the six traditions
that we formally claim as sources of our religion
in our statement of Purposes and Principles.
In our worship over the last few months,
we’ve engaged with all six sources:
our direct experience of mystery and wonder,
without which religion is only an intellectual exercise;
the words and deeds of prophetic women and men
whose lives challenge us to do justice and practice love,
without which religion is only a pretty fantasy
of no use to those in need;
wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us
in our ethical and spiritual lives,
and here we claim that freedom which is so central to our tradition,
the freedom to explore and learn from the teachings
of all the great religious leaders of the world;
humanist teachings which call us to use our powers of reason
and embrace what science tells us about our world,
without which religion is irrelevant
and incapable of helping us solve the problems of our society;
and, today, Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life
and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
Now, there are a whole lot of religious traditions
all around the world that are Earth-centered,
that teach us to live in harmony with the natural world,
not least the Native American religions that grew up on this land
and flourished for thousands of years
and are still hanging on in spite of everything.
That would be a whole lot of sermons right there.
But today
I want to talk about one Earth-centered tradition in particular,
because of the history of how our formal statement of sources
came to be written
and who thought it was important
for Earth-centered teachings to be in there.
The original statement of sources was adopted
along with our Seven Principles in 1985.
At that time, there were only five sources.
The list stopped with humanist teachings.
But now fast-forward ten years to 1995,
when something new has been welling up
among Unitarian Universalists.
In fact, it’s happening all over, not just among UUs.
Groups of people are getting together
and putting together creative new rituals
and calling themselves Pagans,
practitioners of a religion that is simultaneously very new
and very old, grounded in the rhythms of the seasons,
celebrating the cycles of the year
with carefully constructed rituals;
a religion that finds mystery and magic all around us,
revering the wildness of the animals and plants, rocks and rivers;
attuned to the secret whisperings of the heart,
seeking to burst the bounds of a materialist culture
which says science knows all that can be known;
drawing on intuition, emotion, subtly perceived flows of energy;
daring to be extravagantly beautiful;
drawing on the ancient myths of Gods and Goddesses,
inviting its followers to touch the divine energies within themselves.
Paganism today isn’t just one thing.
There isn’t any central hierarchy
or even a formal association like we have.
Different Pagan groups believe different things
and practice in different ways.
There is no Pagan creed.
In that sense it’s very like our Unitarian Universalist tradition,
only a little less organized.
But there are some common themes—
maybe you could say, too, a common feeling-tone.
Ritual is very important.
Many Pagans believe rituals,
when they are done with a focused intent and a belief in their power,
can actually change the structure of the material world.
Ritual works. Material objects have spiritual power.
Words have power.
And what words! There’s a fearlessness about Pagan liturgies:
the ritual language has this wonderful extravagant lushness:
I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among the stars
and the mysteries of the waters
(Doreen Valiente, adapted by Starhawk, Singing the Living Tradition #517)—
that reading we shared earlier: this is wild stuff.
You can’t write like this without a freedom, a wildness inside you,
a willingness to go deep and be drawn down deep.
There’s also an understanding in the Pagan community
that, in some way, what they’re doing is going back to old traditions,
ancient ways that were known to our foremothers and fathers,
around the world but especially the Celtic lands of Europe—
Ireland, Wales, Scotland—
long before Christianity came to be.
Now, in all honesty I do need to tell you,
in the academic world there is a very lively debate
whether contemporary Pagan rituals and beliefs
can really be traced back to religions of the ancient past.
And I would say, on a purely scholarly, historical-fact level,
I have my doubts about how close the connection is.
But as a person of faith,
to me, it really doesn’t matter a whole lot
whether Pagan spirituality today
is exactly the same kind of spirituality
that our ancient ancestors experienced.
The real question is,
does my religion help me live a better life here in this moment?
Still, I know that for a lot of Pagans,
being able to trace their spiritual ancestry back into the distant past
feels profoundly important as a way of legitimating who they are
in a culture that may not understand or respect their religion.
I get that.
It is not always easy to be a member of a minority religion!
The contemporary Pagan Starhawk speaks to this,
and I want to quote her to you now:
The validity of our spiritual choices [does not] depend on documenting their origins, their antiquity, or their provenance.
...[T]he truth of our experience is valid whether it has roots thousands of years old or thirty minutes old...
there is a mythic truth whose proof is shown...
in the way it engages strong emotions, mobilizes deep life energies,
and gives us a sense of history, purpose, and place in the world.
(Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, 20th anniversary edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 4.)
I so appreciate her idea of mythic truth.
I think what she’s saying is, our religion is true—
true in the sense of trustworthy,
worthy of our trust and our loyalty—
when it touches not only our mind but our heart,
the very depths of our being.
Our religion is true when it shows us how to direct our energy
for good, for healing and justice and compassion here and now.
Our religion is true when it helps us tell a story
about who we are, where we come from, where we are going,
and that story feeds us and gives us life abundant.
And in that sense it is absolutely no surprise
that Pagan spirituality has emerged at this moment in our culture.
All around us, not just among Pagans but all of us,
there is this vast, uneasy sense
that our culture has made a terribly serious mistake
in how we relate to the Earth.
The journalist Margot Adler says most Pagan groups are in cities,
where obviously there are more people—
but more importantly, cities are where we really experience
the loss of our connection to nature.
(Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, revised & expanded edition (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 4.)
We have become alienated from the land, from natural cycles;
we have forgotten how to sense the sacredness of place;
we have taken too much
and wasted too much.
We have hurt ourselves by cutting ourselves off from wild places,
from the stars in the sky,
the creatures who share this land with us.
We have manipulated the material stuff of the earth
in ways that are harmful and destructive
to ourselves and to our fellow-creatures.
And the Pagan tradition speaks so directly to this.
It calls us to fall in love with the Earth once again,
to experience the Earth as a sacred whole,
to see ourselves not so much as stewards of the Earth,
in the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
but as beloved children of the Earth, Mother of us all.
***
This is what has been emerging all around the country
and within Unitarian Universalism too.
These are the people who, 15 years ago,
were longing for their spiritual path
to be recognized as one of many flavors
or articulations of our Unitarian Universalist faith.
They had already formed an assocation called CUUPS,
short for the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans,
and today there are multiple CUUPS chapters
in local UU congregations not too far away from us.
The closest one right now is at the UU Church of Berkeley.
I know this congregation had a Goddess exploration group here
for a number of years.
Anyway, you can see UU Pagans had been doing their thing
and getting organized.
So, as is our way, back in 1995, the people in CUUPS asked for the language of Earth-centered traditions to be added to our statement of religious sources, and as is our way, much discussion ensued, and eventually it was passed, and in retrospect of course it should be there, of course this is part of who we are.
I should say, the Pagan tradition is one that
I personally have experienced mostly from the outside.
I’m a dabbler, really.
But what I’ve witnessed has been very beautiful.
And what I want you to know
is that you don’t have to call yourself a Pagan
to draw on any of the practices or the wisdom of this tradition
if they are speaking to you.
As I’ve said, Pagans are very non-hierarchical anyway.
There’s no Pagan police that’s going to show up
and tell you you’re doing it wrong.
A huge part of the spirit of the movement
is to invite people to draw on their own creativity
and be where they need to be.
And to be clear, it’s perfectly OK from a Pagan perspective,
and from a Unitarian Universalist perspective, to be a Pagan UU.
You don’t have to choose.
If you can hold the traditions in harmony within yourself,
then blessings on that. That’s really all you need.
Let me close by telling you just a little about how that actually works
in the lives of people here in this congregation.
I spoke the other day with two Pagans
whom we are lucky to have in our congregation.
They gave me their permission to share with you what they told me
about what their religion means to them.
What they said was this:
Paganism is about finding religion in nature and the seasons
and what’s right here in front of us.
They told me, this is an Earth-centered religion
that celebrates the solstices and equinoxes as religious holidays.
They celebrate the winter solstice, the shortest day, the longest night
as Yule, a festival of hope and gratitude
for the light returning.
They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in November,
but they celebrate Samhain,
better known to most of us as Halloween,
as a day of thanks for the harvest and all that the Earth gives us.
They told me sometimes they feel defensive about their faith.
They get tired of having to explain to other people
that their religion is just as worthy of respect as anyone else’s.
Sometimes they feel harassed.
But they are where they belong.
They told me trying to be in harmony to the changing seasons
is a really important spiritual practice for them.
They talked about how changing their seasonal altar,
and just paying attention to what’s happening outside,
helps them contemplate where their lives are now,
where they might be headed.
They talked about inviting the energies of each season
to be present in their lives.
This speaks to me too.
Where the Pagan tradition speaks to me personally most deeply right now
is in its sense of time.
In a few months I’m going to be turning 40.
Those who are older may chuckle and call me an infant still;
those who are younger may not have aging on their minds at all.
But in this moment of my life,
it feels bittersweet, this growing older,
not being able to go backwards.
I find I need to believe that time itself is trustworthy,
that it’s OK to get old,
that time has a shape, and that shape is beautiful.
We all need ways to experience
“Sacred Time and Space,” in the words of our meditation,
“a way of seeing that is broad and spacious.”
(Sedonia Cahill, Circle Wisdom, quoted at http://www.worldprayers.org/)
Some of us may find it in the beautiful rituals of the Pagan tradition
created to honor the changing seasons,
the Wheel of the Year.
Just as the Christian calendar is structured around Easter and Christmas and Lent, the Christian liturgical year,
a story that returns again and again,
holding us as we change and deepen and get older,
so the Pagan Wheel of the Year invites us to experience time
in a sacred manner, the passage of our own lives
connected to the rhythms of the Earth, turning and turning,
winter to spring, summer to fall,
in a cosmic dance of days and years and lifespans
and the deep time of the universe itself.
We all need that.
We all need a religion that speaks to the very depths of our being.
We all need a religion that shows us how to use our energy
for healing and justice and compassion.
We all need a religion that tells us a lifegiving story
about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.
Beloved friends, what a blessing
that we have such a rich source of faith to draw on.
May your heart be light,
your deeds be just,
and your love be for all that makes us whole,
here on this precious Earth.
Blessed be.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
P.S. If you want to read the other sermons in the series, you can find them here:
Transcending Mystery and Wonder: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100221.pdf
Prophetic Women and Men: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100523.pdf
Wisdom from the World's Religions: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100321.pdf
Jewish and Christian Teachings: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100404.pdf
Humanist Teachings: http://www.stocktonuu.org/sermons/20100613.pdf
***
The Sources of Our Faith:
Earth-Centered Traditions
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 15, 2010
Living in California has changed me.
I never thought I would have a Goddess Tarot app on my iPhone.
But I do now.
I got my iPhone as a practical tool. It’s got my calendar, to-do list,
phone numbers and addresses, and that is the only reason I wanted it.
None of this silly time-wasting computer game stuff for me, oh, no!
But one day not so long ago,
I came across a mention of this little app,
a little software program you can download onto your phone.
Just for fun, I told myself, I’d give it a try.
It’s research!
And it was free, so why not?
So today now I have an app on my phone,
with beautiful pictures of ancient goddesses
and inspirational messages which in truth are a little corny
but which also, sometimes, touch me
and help me feel creative
about facing whatever might be coming in the future.
Whether the tarot part can actually predict the future,
oh, gosh, I have no idea.
But I like thinking about the goddesses
and the inspiration they give me to look at the challenges in my life
from a different perspective,
and maybe to get in touch with inner resources
I hadn’t realized I had.
And, truthfully, I feel a little shy telling you all this,
but I want you to have a flavor of where I’m coming from
on this Sunday when we have the chance to immerse ourselves
in the last one of the six traditions
that we formally claim as sources of our religion
in our statement of Purposes and Principles.
In our worship over the last few months,
we’ve engaged with all six sources:
our direct experience of mystery and wonder,
without which religion is only an intellectual exercise;
the words and deeds of prophetic women and men
whose lives challenge us to do justice and practice love,
without which religion is only a pretty fantasy
of no use to those in need;
wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us
in our ethical and spiritual lives,
and here we claim that freedom which is so central to our tradition,
the freedom to explore and learn from the teachings
of all the great religious leaders of the world;
humanist teachings which call us to use our powers of reason
and embrace what science tells us about our world,
without which religion is irrelevant
and incapable of helping us solve the problems of our society;
and, today, Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life
and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
Now, there are a whole lot of religious traditions
all around the world that are Earth-centered,
that teach us to live in harmony with the natural world,
not least the Native American religions that grew up on this land
and flourished for thousands of years
and are still hanging on in spite of everything.
That would be a whole lot of sermons right there.
But today
I want to talk about one Earth-centered tradition in particular,
because of the history of how our formal statement of sources
came to be written
and who thought it was important
for Earth-centered teachings to be in there.
The original statement of sources was adopted
along with our Seven Principles in 1985.
At that time, there were only five sources.
The list stopped with humanist teachings.
But now fast-forward ten years to 1995,
when something new has been welling up
among Unitarian Universalists.
In fact, it’s happening all over, not just among UUs.
Groups of people are getting together
and putting together creative new rituals
and calling themselves Pagans,
practitioners of a religion that is simultaneously very new
and very old, grounded in the rhythms of the seasons,
celebrating the cycles of the year
with carefully constructed rituals;
a religion that finds mystery and magic all around us,
revering the wildness of the animals and plants, rocks and rivers;
attuned to the secret whisperings of the heart,
seeking to burst the bounds of a materialist culture
which says science knows all that can be known;
drawing on intuition, emotion, subtly perceived flows of energy;
daring to be extravagantly beautiful;
drawing on the ancient myths of Gods and Goddesses,
inviting its followers to touch the divine energies within themselves.
Paganism today isn’t just one thing.
There isn’t any central hierarchy
or even a formal association like we have.
Different Pagan groups believe different things
and practice in different ways.
There is no Pagan creed.
In that sense it’s very like our Unitarian Universalist tradition,
only a little less organized.
But there are some common themes—
maybe you could say, too, a common feeling-tone.
Ritual is very important.
Many Pagans believe rituals,
when they are done with a focused intent and a belief in their power,
can actually change the structure of the material world.
Ritual works. Material objects have spiritual power.
Words have power.
And what words! There’s a fearlessness about Pagan liturgies:
the ritual language has this wonderful extravagant lushness:
I who am the beauty of the green earth
and the white moon among the stars
and the mysteries of the waters
(Doreen Valiente, adapted by Starhawk, Singing the Living Tradition #517)—
that reading we shared earlier: this is wild stuff.
You can’t write like this without a freedom, a wildness inside you,
a willingness to go deep and be drawn down deep.
There’s also an understanding in the Pagan community
that, in some way, what they’re doing is going back to old traditions,
ancient ways that were known to our foremothers and fathers,
around the world but especially the Celtic lands of Europe—
Ireland, Wales, Scotland—
long before Christianity came to be.
Now, in all honesty I do need to tell you,
in the academic world there is a very lively debate
whether contemporary Pagan rituals and beliefs
can really be traced back to religions of the ancient past.
And I would say, on a purely scholarly, historical-fact level,
I have my doubts about how close the connection is.
But as a person of faith,
to me, it really doesn’t matter a whole lot
whether Pagan spirituality today
is exactly the same kind of spirituality
that our ancient ancestors experienced.
The real question is,
does my religion help me live a better life here in this moment?
Still, I know that for a lot of Pagans,
being able to trace their spiritual ancestry back into the distant past
feels profoundly important as a way of legitimating who they are
in a culture that may not understand or respect their religion.
I get that.
It is not always easy to be a member of a minority religion!
The contemporary Pagan Starhawk speaks to this,
and I want to quote her to you now:
The validity of our spiritual choices [does not] depend on documenting their origins, their antiquity, or their provenance.
...[T]he truth of our experience is valid whether it has roots thousands of years old or thirty minutes old...
there is a mythic truth whose proof is shown...
in the way it engages strong emotions, mobilizes deep life energies,
and gives us a sense of history, purpose, and place in the world.
(Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, 20th anniversary edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 4.)
I so appreciate her idea of mythic truth.
I think what she’s saying is, our religion is true—
true in the sense of trustworthy,
worthy of our trust and our loyalty—
when it touches not only our mind but our heart,
the very depths of our being.
Our religion is true when it shows us how to direct our energy
for good, for healing and justice and compassion here and now.
Our religion is true when it helps us tell a story
about who we are, where we come from, where we are going,
and that story feeds us and gives us life abundant.
And in that sense it is absolutely no surprise
that Pagan spirituality has emerged at this moment in our culture.
All around us, not just among Pagans but all of us,
there is this vast, uneasy sense
that our culture has made a terribly serious mistake
in how we relate to the Earth.
The journalist Margot Adler says most Pagan groups are in cities,
where obviously there are more people—
but more importantly, cities are where we really experience
the loss of our connection to nature.
(Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, revised & expanded edition (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 4.)
We have become alienated from the land, from natural cycles;
we have forgotten how to sense the sacredness of place;
we have taken too much
and wasted too much.
We have hurt ourselves by cutting ourselves off from wild places,
from the stars in the sky,
the creatures who share this land with us.
We have manipulated the material stuff of the earth
in ways that are harmful and destructive
to ourselves and to our fellow-creatures.
And the Pagan tradition speaks so directly to this.
It calls us to fall in love with the Earth once again,
to experience the Earth as a sacred whole,
to see ourselves not so much as stewards of the Earth,
in the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
but as beloved children of the Earth, Mother of us all.
***
This is what has been emerging all around the country
and within Unitarian Universalism too.
These are the people who, 15 years ago,
were longing for their spiritual path
to be recognized as one of many flavors
or articulations of our Unitarian Universalist faith.
They had already formed an assocation called CUUPS,
short for the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans,
and today there are multiple CUUPS chapters
in local UU congregations not too far away from us.
The closest one right now is at the UU Church of Berkeley.
I know this congregation had a Goddess exploration group here
for a number of years.
Anyway, you can see UU Pagans had been doing their thing
and getting organized.
So, as is our way, back in 1995, the people in CUUPS asked for the language of Earth-centered traditions to be added to our statement of religious sources, and as is our way, much discussion ensued, and eventually it was passed, and in retrospect of course it should be there, of course this is part of who we are.
I should say, the Pagan tradition is one that
I personally have experienced mostly from the outside.
I’m a dabbler, really.
But what I’ve witnessed has been very beautiful.
And what I want you to know
is that you don’t have to call yourself a Pagan
to draw on any of the practices or the wisdom of this tradition
if they are speaking to you.
As I’ve said, Pagans are very non-hierarchical anyway.
There’s no Pagan police that’s going to show up
and tell you you’re doing it wrong.
A huge part of the spirit of the movement
is to invite people to draw on their own creativity
and be where they need to be.
And to be clear, it’s perfectly OK from a Pagan perspective,
and from a Unitarian Universalist perspective, to be a Pagan UU.
You don’t have to choose.
If you can hold the traditions in harmony within yourself,
then blessings on that. That’s really all you need.
Let me close by telling you just a little about how that actually works
in the lives of people here in this congregation.
I spoke the other day with two Pagans
whom we are lucky to have in our congregation.
They gave me their permission to share with you what they told me
about what their religion means to them.
What they said was this:
Paganism is about finding religion in nature and the seasons
and what’s right here in front of us.
They told me, this is an Earth-centered religion
that celebrates the solstices and equinoxes as religious holidays.
They celebrate the winter solstice, the shortest day, the longest night
as Yule, a festival of hope and gratitude
for the light returning.
They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in November,
but they celebrate Samhain,
better known to most of us as Halloween,
as a day of thanks for the harvest and all that the Earth gives us.
They told me sometimes they feel defensive about their faith.
They get tired of having to explain to other people
that their religion is just as worthy of respect as anyone else’s.
Sometimes they feel harassed.
But they are where they belong.
They told me trying to be in harmony to the changing seasons
is a really important spiritual practice for them.
They talked about how changing their seasonal altar,
and just paying attention to what’s happening outside,
helps them contemplate where their lives are now,
where they might be headed.
They talked about inviting the energies of each season
to be present in their lives.
This speaks to me too.
Where the Pagan tradition speaks to me personally most deeply right now
is in its sense of time.
In a few months I’m going to be turning 40.
Those who are older may chuckle and call me an infant still;
those who are younger may not have aging on their minds at all.
But in this moment of my life,
it feels bittersweet, this growing older,
not being able to go backwards.
I find I need to believe that time itself is trustworthy,
that it’s OK to get old,
that time has a shape, and that shape is beautiful.
We all need ways to experience
“Sacred Time and Space,” in the words of our meditation,
“a way of seeing that is broad and spacious.”
(Sedonia Cahill, Circle Wisdom, quoted at http://www.worldprayers.org/)
Some of us may find it in the beautiful rituals of the Pagan tradition
created to honor the changing seasons,
the Wheel of the Year.
Just as the Christian calendar is structured around Easter and Christmas and Lent, the Christian liturgical year,
a story that returns again and again,
holding us as we change and deepen and get older,
so the Pagan Wheel of the Year invites us to experience time
in a sacred manner, the passage of our own lives
connected to the rhythms of the Earth, turning and turning,
winter to spring, summer to fall,
in a cosmic dance of days and years and lifespans
and the deep time of the universe itself.
We all need that.
We all need a religion that speaks to the very depths of our being.
We all need a religion that shows us how to use our energy
for healing and justice and compassion.
We all need a religion that tells us a lifegiving story
about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.
Beloved friends, what a blessing
that we have such a rich source of faith to draw on.
May your heart be light,
your deeds be just,
and your love be for all that makes us whole,
here on this precious Earth.
Blessed be.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
“Surprise!”: Healing from Sudden Loss
Sometimes the sermon I prepare to give turns out not to be the most obvious or maybe even the right one for the day. Lots of folks in my congregation were celebrating the decision overturning Prop. 8 here in California that came last Wednesday afternoon, just as I was finishing up a writing process that because of other commitments needed to be finished. I wondered this morning, would it still be OK to preach what I had, which was something darker? But this is what came forth and I reminded myself, you never know what will speak to someone’s deepest need. May the secret alchemy of words and breath and presence of the gathered community be what is needed here and now.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
“Surprise!”: Healing from Sudden Loss
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 8, 2010
The poet Mary Oliver has told us,
in those words we just shared together:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods.”)
And this is hard enough, isn’t it?
This is the work of a lifetime,
and I’m not sure it ever gets easier,
though, with grace and practice, we may get better at it.
It’s harder still when the loss takes us by surprise.
I want to speak today about the losses and challenges and struggles
that come when we are not expecting them, without warning—
the moments of “Surprise!”
that aren’t fun like a birthday party is fun,
or a phone call from a long-lost friend,
or whatever else might bring us delight in that moment of surprise.
Because sometimes we do get surprises that aren’t so fun.
Maybe we find out we’ve been furloughed or laid off from our job.
Or we get our property tax assessment in the mail
and find out our home has lost even more of its value this year.
This has happened to a lot of folks in our community.
Not so fun.
Maybe we are diagnosed with a serious illness.
A relationship ends.
Someone close to us dies suddenly.
This is the kind of surprise that can shake us to the core.
We’re thrown into disequilibrium.
That which seemed to be stable
is revealed to be profoundly unstable.
Change happens,
and all of a sudden fear may be present in our bodies and our minds:
fear of loss,
fear of separation from what we love,
fear of our own death.
Questions well up out of shock and loss
and demand with a desperate urgency to be answered:
What can I really trust?
Where am I safe?
How can I stop this hurting?
And this is where religion comes in,
because the heart of all religions is to try to answer those questions
that all of us have to struggle with
at those times when the phone rings
with bad news on the other end of the line,
or when we wake up alone in the dark of night,
shivering with nameless fears.
I’ve thought a lot about what our Unitarian Universalist religion
has to offer us when we need it most.
We have come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
and many of us still take very deep comfort in faith
in a God who loves us and will never leave us:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
(Psalm 23)
This is a heritage that belongs to us as much as anyone else.
I think of our familiar benediction that begins,
For all who see God,
may God go with you.
And even those of us who are no longer able to be
in that place of faith in a God of infinite love—
we may still reach out to a presence we can scarcely name
to be with us even in the hardest and scariest times.
We may intuit that beyond this world of change and loss
there is something more real than anything else,
something that lasts, a presence we can rely on,
to which we belong forever and always in love.
And here is true safety,
no matter what is happening around us.
Here we are safe.
***
Yet, for many of us, perhaps at different points in our lives,
this may not be a path we can walk with integrity.
We may find no comfort in turning to God or a divine presence.
It’s not our fault or the fault of the universe;
it just is.
And where can we turn then?
For me, what’s been most helpful
has been turning to the Buddhist tradition,
which has looked so deeply into suffering and liberation
and which doesn’t ask us to believe in God,
or not to believe in God.
It simply asks us to practice and pay attention to what happens.
Thousands of years ago, the Buddha taught
that everything in life is always changing.
Nothing lasts, nothing is stable; everything changes.
We live our lives in this world where nothing lasts,
not even that which we love most deeply,
and so we have to learn how to let go.
This is not easy.
So, with enormous compassion for all of us
who are suffering and struggling,
the Buddha taught that we can start to free ourselves from suffering,
we can learn how to live with the pain of shock and fear and loss
and find openness and relief and the most beautiful peace,
with a practice that is so simple, you could hardly believe it:
We sit quietly
and practice simply noticing what is happening
in our mind and body,
not judging, just noticing and naming and accepting.
If we feel fear, notice where the fear is manifesting in our body.
We can pay attention in a kind way;
we can be calm and curious and ask ourselves,
what’s happening right now?
Is our chest tight? That’s fine. We don’t have to judge that.
We just name it with a sort of friendly curiosity: “Chest is tight.”
We ask: what else is happening?
Our heart is racing: we name it: “Heart beating very fast.”
Our arms are rigid: we name it: “Arms rigid.”
We feel our emotions: waves of fear radiating, pulsing:
and again we name them with kindness and acceptance:
“fear radiating through my chest.”
Anger, sadness. We name them.
We may notice these sensations and emotions ebb and flow.
They may be very intense for a time
and then back off,
and then come back, and so on, always changing.
We may start to notice that even our pain and suffering
is always changing. It comes and goes. There are moments of ease.
Everything changes, and so this pain will not last either.
We will not always feel the way we are feeling now.
As we sit quietly and pay attention,
we can also begin to speak to the suffering inside of us.
We might say gently to ourselves,
I care about you.
I care about this suffering.
I embrace this pain with compassion.
This can be deeply healing,
especially for those of us who are prone to judge ourselves
for whatever it is we’re feeling.
[This section was deeply inspired by my reading of Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (New York: Bantam, 2003).]
All this is not the work of a minute or an hour.
When we get a really bad shock,
we get thrown into confusion and fear and instability.
It takes time for us to take in what’s happening around us
and feel it and help ourselves adjust.
But with time and patience, a new way forward may emerge.
If you can stay with it, keep paying attention to what is welling up inside of us,
keep an open heart,
eventually something will be revealed,
some way that you can live creatively with what is now.
When something big changes,
I think you have to sit with the new reality, the new situation,
and allow it to reveal itself to you.
It has to let you know how it would like to be in your life,
how you might work with it with grace.
And that takes time, but if we can be in that waiting space
with compassion and love for ourselves,
something may shift inside you.
Some kind of new direction, some kind of solution may be revealed,
and all of a sudden something clicks
and your life is whole again.
And maybe we have learned to trust more deeply.
As we experience more deeply
the truth that life is always changing,
as we connect with our own ability
to work in a brave and loving way with what is now,
we may see that this new equilibrium we have found,
this new wholeness and right path will not last forever,
but it is here now
and you can dance with it now.
I say “dance,” and that surprises me a little, maybe,
but then again not really.
Years ago I spent a lot of time ballroom dancing,
and one of the most important things I learned
was how to follow a lead.
When I first started dancing,
I tried to predict what my partner was going to do.
I would try to anticipate and do the right step,
and what often happened was, I would step on my partners’ toes
and crash into them.
As I learned and became more proficient,
I found I had to clear my mind
of expectation about what was going to happen,
so that I could be available to react in the moment
to what was actually happening.
And I have found this to be true of life in a deeper way too.
If you clear your mind of expectations
about what is going to happen,
you become available to react in the present moment
to what is actually happening.
Quiet the mind.
Become aware and available to what is.
And what may emerge is a sense of peace, comfort,
expansion, and safety within your own heart.
You are your own refuge, your deepest place of safety—
and I don’t mean the small and separate you,
but that within you
which is our heart open and soft
and connected to the Great Compassion that dwells in us all.
And so we can say, because we have lived it,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me and within me.
In our teaching story today,
we heard the story of a young person who learned
that happiness is the union of all that has been given us.
[“The Zither,” retold by Margaret Silf in One Hundred Wisdom Stories from around the World (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), pp. 49–50.]
This is a strange teaching
when what we have been given includes a full measure of pain.
But Behold, I tell you a mystery.
We have sung it together many times:
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise,
for all life is a gift.
For sorrow we must bear,
for failures, pain and loss...
we come with praise and thanks
for all that is our life.
(Singing the Living Tradition #128 For All That Is Our Life.)
We sing because we know this is true,
and we know it because we have lived it,
and we have lived it because everyone has to,
because this is what it means to be alive.
The words of Mary Oliver that we shared together
come from a poem that also speaks of mystery. She speaks of
the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation...
(Mary Oliver, "In Blackwater Woods.")
So, through dislocation and loss—
through the fire of suffering,
when everything is stripped away
but that which cannot be taken from us,
we discover
infinite compassion
an open heart
our deep and holy connection to all that is
love.
***
The sermon time concluded with a guided meditation
called “Meeting Fear,” adapted from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.
Namaste: the divine in me honors the divine in you.
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
“Surprise!”: Healing from Sudden Loss
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 8, 2010
The poet Mary Oliver has told us,
in those words we just shared together:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods.”)
And this is hard enough, isn’t it?
This is the work of a lifetime,
and I’m not sure it ever gets easier,
though, with grace and practice, we may get better at it.
It’s harder still when the loss takes us by surprise.
I want to speak today about the losses and challenges and struggles
that come when we are not expecting them, without warning—
the moments of “Surprise!”
that aren’t fun like a birthday party is fun,
or a phone call from a long-lost friend,
or whatever else might bring us delight in that moment of surprise.
Because sometimes we do get surprises that aren’t so fun.
Maybe we find out we’ve been furloughed or laid off from our job.
Or we get our property tax assessment in the mail
and find out our home has lost even more of its value this year.
This has happened to a lot of folks in our community.
Not so fun.
Maybe we are diagnosed with a serious illness.
A relationship ends.
Someone close to us dies suddenly.
This is the kind of surprise that can shake us to the core.
We’re thrown into disequilibrium.
That which seemed to be stable
is revealed to be profoundly unstable.
Change happens,
and all of a sudden fear may be present in our bodies and our minds:
fear of loss,
fear of separation from what we love,
fear of our own death.
Questions well up out of shock and loss
and demand with a desperate urgency to be answered:
What can I really trust?
Where am I safe?
How can I stop this hurting?
And this is where religion comes in,
because the heart of all religions is to try to answer those questions
that all of us have to struggle with
at those times when the phone rings
with bad news on the other end of the line,
or when we wake up alone in the dark of night,
shivering with nameless fears.
I’ve thought a lot about what our Unitarian Universalist religion
has to offer us when we need it most.
We have come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
and many of us still take very deep comfort in faith
in a God who loves us and will never leave us:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
(Psalm 23)
This is a heritage that belongs to us as much as anyone else.
I think of our familiar benediction that begins,
For all who see God,
may God go with you.
And even those of us who are no longer able to be
in that place of faith in a God of infinite love—
we may still reach out to a presence we can scarcely name
to be with us even in the hardest and scariest times.
We may intuit that beyond this world of change and loss
there is something more real than anything else,
something that lasts, a presence we can rely on,
to which we belong forever and always in love.
And here is true safety,
no matter what is happening around us.
Here we are safe.
***
Yet, for many of us, perhaps at different points in our lives,
this may not be a path we can walk with integrity.
We may find no comfort in turning to God or a divine presence.
It’s not our fault or the fault of the universe;
it just is.
And where can we turn then?
For me, what’s been most helpful
has been turning to the Buddhist tradition,
which has looked so deeply into suffering and liberation
and which doesn’t ask us to believe in God,
or not to believe in God.
It simply asks us to practice and pay attention to what happens.
Thousands of years ago, the Buddha taught
that everything in life is always changing.
Nothing lasts, nothing is stable; everything changes.
We live our lives in this world where nothing lasts,
not even that which we love most deeply,
and so we have to learn how to let go.
This is not easy.
So, with enormous compassion for all of us
who are suffering and struggling,
the Buddha taught that we can start to free ourselves from suffering,
we can learn how to live with the pain of shock and fear and loss
and find openness and relief and the most beautiful peace,
with a practice that is so simple, you could hardly believe it:
We sit quietly
and practice simply noticing what is happening
in our mind and body,
not judging, just noticing and naming and accepting.
If we feel fear, notice where the fear is manifesting in our body.
We can pay attention in a kind way;
we can be calm and curious and ask ourselves,
what’s happening right now?
Is our chest tight? That’s fine. We don’t have to judge that.
We just name it with a sort of friendly curiosity: “Chest is tight.”
We ask: what else is happening?
Our heart is racing: we name it: “Heart beating very fast.”
Our arms are rigid: we name it: “Arms rigid.”
We feel our emotions: waves of fear radiating, pulsing:
and again we name them with kindness and acceptance:
“fear radiating through my chest.”
Anger, sadness. We name them.
We may notice these sensations and emotions ebb and flow.
They may be very intense for a time
and then back off,
and then come back, and so on, always changing.
We may start to notice that even our pain and suffering
is always changing. It comes and goes. There are moments of ease.
Everything changes, and so this pain will not last either.
We will not always feel the way we are feeling now.
As we sit quietly and pay attention,
we can also begin to speak to the suffering inside of us.
We might say gently to ourselves,
I care about you.
I care about this suffering.
I embrace this pain with compassion.
This can be deeply healing,
especially for those of us who are prone to judge ourselves
for whatever it is we’re feeling.
[This section was deeply inspired by my reading of Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (New York: Bantam, 2003).]
All this is not the work of a minute or an hour.
When we get a really bad shock,
we get thrown into confusion and fear and instability.
It takes time for us to take in what’s happening around us
and feel it and help ourselves adjust.
But with time and patience, a new way forward may emerge.
If you can stay with it, keep paying attention to what is welling up inside of us,
keep an open heart,
eventually something will be revealed,
some way that you can live creatively with what is now.
When something big changes,
I think you have to sit with the new reality, the new situation,
and allow it to reveal itself to you.
It has to let you know how it would like to be in your life,
how you might work with it with grace.
And that takes time, but if we can be in that waiting space
with compassion and love for ourselves,
something may shift inside you.
Some kind of new direction, some kind of solution may be revealed,
and all of a sudden something clicks
and your life is whole again.
And maybe we have learned to trust more deeply.
As we experience more deeply
the truth that life is always changing,
as we connect with our own ability
to work in a brave and loving way with what is now,
we may see that this new equilibrium we have found,
this new wholeness and right path will not last forever,
but it is here now
and you can dance with it now.
I say “dance,” and that surprises me a little, maybe,
but then again not really.
Years ago I spent a lot of time ballroom dancing,
and one of the most important things I learned
was how to follow a lead.
When I first started dancing,
I tried to predict what my partner was going to do.
I would try to anticipate and do the right step,
and what often happened was, I would step on my partners’ toes
and crash into them.
As I learned and became more proficient,
I found I had to clear my mind
of expectation about what was going to happen,
so that I could be available to react in the moment
to what was actually happening.
And I have found this to be true of life in a deeper way too.
If you clear your mind of expectations
about what is going to happen,
you become available to react in the present moment
to what is actually happening.
Quiet the mind.
Become aware and available to what is.
And what may emerge is a sense of peace, comfort,
expansion, and safety within your own heart.
You are your own refuge, your deepest place of safety—
and I don’t mean the small and separate you,
but that within you
which is our heart open and soft
and connected to the Great Compassion that dwells in us all.
And so we can say, because we have lived it,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me and within me.
In our teaching story today,
we heard the story of a young person who learned
that happiness is the union of all that has been given us.
[“The Zither,” retold by Margaret Silf in One Hundred Wisdom Stories from around the World (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), pp. 49–50.]
This is a strange teaching
when what we have been given includes a full measure of pain.
But Behold, I tell you a mystery.
We have sung it together many times:
For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise,
for all life is a gift.
For sorrow we must bear,
for failures, pain and loss...
we come with praise and thanks
for all that is our life.
(Singing the Living Tradition #128 For All That Is Our Life.)
We sing because we know this is true,
and we know it because we have lived it,
and we have lived it because everyone has to,
because this is what it means to be alive.
The words of Mary Oliver that we shared together
come from a poem that also speaks of mystery. She speaks of
the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation...
(Mary Oliver, "In Blackwater Woods.")
So, through dislocation and loss—
through the fire of suffering,
when everything is stripped away
but that which cannot be taken from us,
we discover
infinite compassion
an open heart
our deep and holy connection to all that is
love.
***
The sermon time concluded with a guided meditation
called “Meeting Fear,” adapted from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.
Namaste: the divine in me honors the divine in you.
Amen.
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