I preached this sermon on our new-member Sunday today at church. Thanks for reading & be well, all!
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Immortal Love: Why Universalism Still Matters
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 24, 2010
The other day I opened up our local newspaper
and read a letter to the editor that really shook me.
The person was writing in about a convicted murderer
who had been on death row for years.
This person was very angry
that this man had been allowed to live for so long.
She said she wanted him to be executed immediately.
And I really disagree with her about the death penalty,
but that wasn’t what upset me the most.
What really got me, the words that just about broke my heart:
were when she called this man, and I quote,
a “soulless inhuman monstrosity.”
Ouch.
(Valerie G. Nolan, Letter to the Editor, Stockton Record, October 9, 2010.)
I know this lady is not a bad person.
But her words are so counter to the religious values I hold dear,
I find I cannot in good conscience just let them go by.
So today I want to tell you how I respond to that letter.
And if I ever meet this lady,
I would love to tell her what I’m about to tell you.
You know, my reaction to that letter started in my gut.
It triggered a really strong visceral, emotional reaction.
But gut reactions have a history,
they come out of our life experience and the beliefs we’ve inherited,
and if we’re going to be able to communicate
what we feel so strongly,
especially to someone who doesn’t agree with us,
it’s very important that we can step back and reflect
and try to explain why we feel the way we do.
So I think it would help to start with some history
about how our Unitarian Universalist beliefs
about the inherent worth of every person
have evolved over the years.
And in fact I think we need to start several hundred years ago,
back when the first colonists from England
were coming over to North America.
These were people who took religion extremely seriously.
A lot of the congregations they founded back in the 17th century
eventually, years later,
morphed into the first Unitarian congregations in the United States.
So in many ways those early Puritans are our spiritual ancestors.
But they also had some beliefs
that were very different from what we believe today.
And what’s relevant for today
is that they believed in predestination. What that means is,
they believed God had already decided from the beginning of time
what would happen to people when they died.
A few lucky people would be saved,
but the vast majority would be condemned to Hell forever,
and there was nothing you could do to change your fate.
Talk about depressing!
Now, I don’t want you to think these folks were dumb;
I don’t want you to think they were horrible people;
they were people just like us
trying to figure out how the world works,
and why there is suffering,
and why it’s so hard for us to do what we know is right,
and why some people seem to have it easy
and others have it so very hard.
They came up with an explanation that made sense to them,
even though it’s hard for us to understand today.
They looked at themselves and each other, and they said,
we are so far from perfect,
we screw up so much and so often,
there’s no way we deserve to go to Heaven.
When I think of that,
when I try to imagine how it feels to judge yourself
with that kind of merciless scrutiny, what I feel most is just sad.
I think of Barbara Pescan’s poem
which we heard in our reading today:
Can we see ourselves with the eyes of compassion?
Can we allow ourselves to believe we are worthy of love,
faults and screwups and all?
Can we
Know ourselves seen
And know each other this same way
Until our restless hearts
Learn to abide
In this knowing and this love?
Can we live in this gaze of blessing?
(Barbara Pescan, “Blessing,” from Morning Watch (Skinner House, 1999).)
And this is where we come from.
This is what happened to some of those people,
those ancestors of ours
who judged themselves and their neighbors so harshly.
They began to experience life in a different way.
They began to feel a presence of compassion and love
moving in their lives,
a presence they felt as boundless compassion and immortal love.
These were the people who came to call themselves Universalists.
The early Universalists—
and now we’re in the middle of the 18th century—
weren’t so very different from their neighbors
who held on to the old beliefs.
They knew people mess up and screw up, over and over.
They had no illusions that people were ever going to be perfect
on this earth.
But something shifted in their hearts.
They began to believe their God wasn’t an angry God.
They said, no, we don’t believe that.
We think God loves us so much, everyone is going to be saved,
no matter what—
every single person on this earth,
no matter what they believe or what they’ve done—
there is nothing we can do that can alienate us from the love of God,
nothing.
They said to the parents in their midst,
when you get mad at your children, do you throw them in the fire?
Of course not?
Then how could God,
whose love is so much bigger and more perfect than our own,
condemn anyone to the flames of Hell?
No, they, said; we just do not believe God would do that.
Everyone is loved, so everyone is saved.
Salvation is universal—no one left out, no one forgotten,
every single person held and cherished
in the infinite love of the divine.
We tell this story again and again because it’s part of our sacred story.
This is who we are as a people.
Today, we use different language,
but our core belief and the certainty we feel is just the same:
every person is precious.
Nobody is going to Hell when they die.
We don’t know for sure what will happen when we die,
but we believe whatever it is,
it will happen to all of us, everyone,
and it is not going to be a bad thing.
We will be safe.
We will be well.
And when we say “we” we mean everybody.
This is our Universalism for the 21st century,
and our world needs it so much.
It makes a huge difference in the way we treat other people,
or it should,
and I’m not just talking about how we relate to people one-on-one,
though that is so important.
I’m talking about public policy too.
I think of the justice system we have in this country today.
We are building more and more prisons;
we incarcerate vastly more people than any other democracy
on the face of the earth;
we have a relentless, voracious appetite for locking up people
and throwing away the key;
we thirst for the blood of murderers to be spilled
because we think it will make things right;
and I ask you: where does it come from?
What kind of belief system allows us to believe
it is morally right to consign human beings to lifelong punishment
without the hope of redemption?
I suggest to you that our prison system
based on a system of lifelong imprisonment and even execution
would be impossible without the foundation of a religious belief
in a God who is angry,
a God who desires vengeance,
a God who is willing to condemn people to horrific punishment
for all eternity.
For if God thinks this is how people should be treated,
who are we to question it?
If God is willing to condemn people to Hell,
why shouldn’t we lock them up in a hell on earth
for the rest of their lives?
And that’s not even to raise the question of racism.
Because we know, too, that our justice system
is deeply, deeply biased against people of color.
We know the statistics.
We know we are living with a system
that claims to be just but in fact is deeply racist.
And I have to wonder,
could that system of racism have arisen
without the foundation of religious beliefs
that separate people into the saved and the damned,
beliefs which divide us
and invite us to get comfortable and cozy with our prejudices,
our beliefs that “those people over there”
are somehow less than fully human, unworthy of divine love?
Years ago I was very deeply moved when I read a statement
from a Unitarian Universalist group
that works against the death penalty,
and I’d like to share it with you now. They say:
In a world that cries out for peace and understanding,
if you support capital punishment,
you have made a judgement
that thousands of incarcerated Americans
(about whom you know only what the media has told you),
are no longer human,
are no longer children of God,
and are incapable of change, reconciliation or redemption....
But we know it doesn’t have to be that way.
Beliefs can change when our hearts are touched.
And when beliefs begin to change,
our society will surely begin to change as well.
It’s inevitable.
If you ever wonder whether our faith matters to the world today,
I urge you to ask yourself:
what would our society look like
if everyone truly believed
that every person is precious in the sight of the divine?
Beloved people, I am convinced that we have a mission
in this time and this place.
We are here to witness to our faith
that every person on this earth
possesses an inherent worth and dignity
which cannot be taken away
either by their own actions or the judgments of others.
That faith does not mean we let everyone do whatever they want.
Some people are a danger to others.
It is not wrong to find ways to protect ourselves
from those among us who can’t stop themselves from hurting others.
There have to be boundaries.
We need our communities to be safe.
But let those boundaries be guarded
in a spirit of respect and compassion and hope.
***
Let me say a final word about this faith we have inherited
and which we are carrying forward today.
I fervently believe the Universalists were right
and whatever happens after we die,
it happens to all of us and it’s going to be OK.
I don’t have it in my heart to believe in Hell
or any kind of eternal punishment for anyone.
I believe those who do believe that are wrong.
But it’s not about who’s right or wrong,
because nobody really knows what’s coming.
Maybe we’ll find out when we die, or not—we just don’t know.
So it’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong.
But, as Sophia Lyon Fahs reminds us, “It matters what we believe.”
Our most basic beliefs about the nature of the divine
do so much to shape the society we live in.
If we believe in a vengeful God of punishment,
you better believe we are going to create a vengeful society
bent on punishment.
But if we live out of our faith in that love which
“has laid hold upon us, and will not let us go,”
if we live out of our faith that every person is held in that love,
what a world it would be.
Not perfect, mind you,
because we are never going to be perfect ourselves.
Not perfect. But I choose that world all the same.
And here is where we try to make it a little more real every day.
As we go forth, let us drink deep
from the love we seek to embody in this place,
this holy and imperfect human community of faith.
There are times when we will disappoint one another.
There are times when we will not be able
to bring our best selves here.
But let us never give up—
never stop trying to be a channel
for that love and compassion
which is at the very heart of our faith
and has been from the very beginning.
This is how the world changes.
We have our part to play
in a story that began many years ago,
a story that goes on and on.
Here is where we begin, again and again,
here and now,
all of us.
So may it be.
Amen.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Living with the Texts: The Upanishads
This is part of a monthly series on engaging with world scriptures. The translations from the Upanishads are by Eknath Easwaran.
The children and I had great fun telling the story of Uddalaka and Shvetaketu with homemade play-dough, sculpting different plants and animals, and asking, is this a tree or is it clay? How about this--is this a bird or is it clay? Oh, it's both! As Uddalaka says, "By knowing one lump of clay, dear one, we come to know all things made out of clay.... So through...spiritual wisdom, dear one, we come to know that all of life is one" (Chandogya Upanishad, VI.1.4-6).
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: The Upanishads
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 17, 2010
I’m so glad to have this chance to share with you
some little taste of one of the most profound and important
collections of religious texts in the entire world,
the Upanishads, the great mystical wisdom texts of India.
This is the second one in a series of nine services this year
that I’m putting together so that we can engage
with different sacred texts from around the world.
I’ve chosen to do this because it seems to me
so many of us are hungry for understanding
about the religions of the world,
and not only for intellectual understanding—
I think there is a longing here to allow ourselves to be transformed
by the deep wisdom in these texts,
to sit at the feet of masters who were truly awakened spiritually,
and to be changed ourselves.
And, indeed, the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word “Upanishad”
is “sitting down near,”
as in sitting down next to a spiritual teacher to receive wisdom.
These are philosophical texts.
Many of them are in the form of a dialogue
between student and teacher,
conversations that address the really big questions:
what does it mean to be alive?
How is it that we are here, living and experiencing and thinking?
What is death?
Why is there anything at all?
Today I want to speak to you about the core message
that I find in the Upanishads, and why I think it matters to us,
and also share with you a few thoughts
about the practice of reading texts like these.
First let me say just a brief word
about my own experience with these texts.
I first tried to read the Upanishads about ten years ago,
and I will tell you, I found them very challenging.
The first time through I actually had to stop reading
and put them aside for a couple of years.
Because I could read the words
and understand on a surface level what they were saying,
but when I tried to take these teachings in
and understand them at a deeper gut level,
I found I wasn’t ready.
A lot of it, I just could not understand on that gut level,
and what I did understand and begin to take in,
I found myself resisting; I was afraid of it, almost,
and it was so clear to me that I was not ready.
I had to put the book down,
and I remember saying, I’m sorry, I just can’t go there right now.
A couple of years later,
having had different experiences in my life,
I went back to the Upanishads
and had a completely different experience.
I fell in love with them, the poetry
and the mystical sense of the sacred dwelling in everything,
of which you’ve already heard something
in the Story for All Ages and also the second reading today.
I tell you this not only so you can know where I’m coming from,
but also because I think this is a very common experience
when we begin to engage with sacred texts.
It’s going to be different for every one of us,
but for every one of us, there may be times in our life
when we’re just not ready to receive a text or a teaching,
and that’s OK.
It doesn’t mean we’re bad people;
it doesn’t mean we’re not smart;
it just is what it is.
There’s a story about a beginning student
who asks a master, “Please, tell me the secret of everything.”
The master says not a word, but picks up a steaming pot of tea
and pours it out onto the floor.
The student leaps back to avoid being burned.
He says, “Why did you do that?!”
The master says,
“Before you pour the tea, you have to prepare a teacup.
Before you can receive wisdom, you have to prepare your mind.”
Likewise, my own experience
is that our lives prepare us in different ways, at different times,
to receive wisdom from outside ourselves.
Spiritual practice can help.
But sometimes we’re just not ready. And that’s OK.
This is not something that can be forced.
It doesn’t need to be.
Wherever we are is OK.
That said, with deep respect for the very rich variety of experiences
and spiritualities present in this room,
let me tell you about what I understand
the core message of the Upanishads to be.
I already told you one version in today’s Story for All Ages, which came from one of the earliest and most important of the Upanishads,
called the Chandogya Upanishad.
By the way, I should mention there are about 200 Upanishads,
but there are about twelve that are the oldest
and most important in the tradition.
The Chandogya Upanishad is one of these.
In the part we heard about today,
the wise man Uddalaka is teaching his son Shvetaketu.
He tells him a Creation story,
a story about what happened “in the beginning.”
Before I read the text,
let me mention one other point about reading sacred texts.
This particular text uses the language of “he” and “him”
to try to talk about the divine Being itself,
which of course does not have a gender;
being neither male nor female, or at least not just one or the other.
When we read ancient texts,
that kind of male-gendered language is very common,
and it is going to be a huge barrier for some of us.
I want to name that,
and also give you permission to find your way around it
however you can.
Whenever you hit a word or a concept in a text like this
that feels unhelpful, hurtful, oppressive,
I want to give you permission right now to question it,
critique it, maybe play around with rewording it in your mind
to see if that helps the text come alive for you.
We have that freedom to play around and question the language that’s used, partly because we’re working with translations already—
most of us are only going to be able to read these texts
in translation, not in the original language.
But even more importantly, in the kind of reading I’m talking about,
we approach these texts not so much as scholars
but as spiritual seekers.
The whole point of engaging with these texts at all
is that they are trying to point to a spiritual reality
that cannot ever be fully put into words.
The words are a tool to help us wake up to how things truly are.
Zen Buddhists tell the story:
one night a master pointed to the moon and asked, “What is this?”
The student answered, “That’s the moon.”
The master said, “No, that is a finger pointing toward the moon.”
Don’t confuse the words and the stories and the teaching
with the reality they are pointing to.
Words are useless
unless they help us begin to sense the reality behind them,
the truth and the wholeness and the mystery
that can never be put into sufficiently true and real words.
All we can do is point.
So don’t let yourself get blocked by the language.
Don’t let yourself get blocked.
With that in mind, let me turn back to the text itself,
the words of Uddalaka to his son
about the beginning of the universe:
In the beginning was only Being,
One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.
This is the core message of all the Upanishads:
everything that exists,
everything we can see and touch and know and think about,
everything that has ever been and ever will be,
comes from the same source, pure Being itself,
which can never be exhausted,
which is continually replenishing and recreating the world.
We are part of this great universal oneness;
within us is a spark of pure Being which gives us life
When we die we go back to the source.
We become part of that pure Being again,
like a drop of water falling into the ocean.
We are that.
We are that.
We are that.
Let me read you another text from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad
with a very similar message:
May the Lord of Love, who projects himself
Into this universe of myriad forms,
From whom all beings come and to whom all
Return, grant us the grace of wisdom.
He is fire and the sun, and the moon
And the stars. He is the air and the sea....
He is this boy, he is that girl, he is
This man, he is that woman, and he is
This old man, too, tottering on his staff.
His face is everywhere.
He is the blue bird, he is the green bird
With red eyes; he is the thundercloud,
And he is the seasons and the seas.
He has no beginning, he has no end.
He is the source from which the worlds evolve.
This testimony from thousands of years and half a world away
has become one of my very favorites,
and I want to tell you why it matters to me.
It matters to me because sometimes I get very scared
about what we human beings are doing to our planet right now,
and I need to believe there is hope for the future.
I know I’m not the only one here
who is deeply worried about what’s happening to the environment.
Global warming is no longer just a theory; it’s a fact.
Human beings are commandeering more wild lands every day.
Animals and plants are going extinct at a terrifying rate.
Biologists tell us we are in the middle of
a massive extinction of species,
the sixth great extinction that our planet has known.
I cannot promise you that we will be able to turn things around.
I wish I could, but I can’t.
And sometimes when I think of what’s happening,
I feel so much sadness and despair and disgust
for what we are making of this world.
This is a time when you and I and all of us
are in desperate need of hope.
And one place I have found hope for myself
is in this ancient testimony of the mystics of India.
When I read the Upanishads,
I am called back to the living knowledge
that all life has come out of an inextinguishable source.
The birds, the fish, the plants, the people, the rocks and hills
and oceans and sky and everything
have come forth from the one source
which is beyond all understanding
and which permeates all things, including you, including me,
including every creature.
And when I believe that, I believe there is hope.
I know there is hope.
Because here’s the thing:
we human beings are very powerful,
probably much too powerful for our own good.
But we are nowhere near as powerful
as the force that brings forth stars and planets and galaxies
and the incredible reality of life itself.
There is something at work in this universe
that is so vast, so incredibly strong and creative—
and destructive too—
and when I ponder this I feel we are caught up in something
much, much larger than ourselves, and it is all going to be OK,
though I cannot tell you now what OK looks like
on the other side of this darkness we are living through.
I do feel hope that this material world which we love so much
is going to be OK,
maybe not in any timespan that I can understand
or hope to witness—
it may take a very long time from our human perspective,
but I do have faith in that source of creation
that life itself is going to be OK
and flourish in ways that we who are here in this moment
cannot begin to imagine.
And that doesn’t mean we get to throw up our hands
and stop working and say, “Whatever.” Not for a minute.
I believe we still absolutely have an obligation
to do whatever we can to turn around the environmental devastation
which is happening on our watch,
because it is right for us to protect the life that is here now,
because we seek to love the life that is here now,
and because despair is poison to our souls.
But we have to have hope that all will not be lost
even if we are not strong enough and smart enough.
I find that hope in the testimony of the Upanishads
that the universe is created and sustained
by a power that does not need us to save it,
which gives birth to all things
and receives all things back to itself in the end.
The Isha Upanishad tells us:
In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real.
This is a paradox.
“The world within”—
the world of awareness and pure Being itself—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We don’t get to retreat forever
to some dreamy place of mystic contemplation
and say “All will be well in the end”
and not do anything to make it so.
We can’t stop working to protect this life on earth.
Yet this world, “the world without”—
the world we see and taste and touch and know—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We have to try,
but neither should we despair if all our efforts are not enough,
because this life we experience moment to moment,
which seems so real to us, maybe seems like the only thing there is,
is not the only reality.
Behind it lies a force so great that nothing can harm it,
nothing can quench it,
nothing can destroy it.
What is asked of us in these days
is love,
and hope,
commitment,
and trust in the life-force that moves through us.
May we use the gifts which are ours
to do works of justice and peace
and hope for all creatures,
trusting always in the power which has brought us into being
and sustains us
and will receive us in the end.
Amen.
The children and I had great fun telling the story of Uddalaka and Shvetaketu with homemade play-dough, sculpting different plants and animals, and asking, is this a tree or is it clay? How about this--is this a bird or is it clay? Oh, it's both! As Uddalaka says, "By knowing one lump of clay, dear one, we come to know all things made out of clay.... So through...spiritual wisdom, dear one, we come to know that all of life is one" (Chandogya Upanishad, VI.1.4-6).
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: The Upanishads
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 17, 2010
I’m so glad to have this chance to share with you
some little taste of one of the most profound and important
collections of religious texts in the entire world,
the Upanishads, the great mystical wisdom texts of India.
This is the second one in a series of nine services this year
that I’m putting together so that we can engage
with different sacred texts from around the world.
I’ve chosen to do this because it seems to me
so many of us are hungry for understanding
about the religions of the world,
and not only for intellectual understanding—
I think there is a longing here to allow ourselves to be transformed
by the deep wisdom in these texts,
to sit at the feet of masters who were truly awakened spiritually,
and to be changed ourselves.
And, indeed, the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word “Upanishad”
is “sitting down near,”
as in sitting down next to a spiritual teacher to receive wisdom.
These are philosophical texts.
Many of them are in the form of a dialogue
between student and teacher,
conversations that address the really big questions:
what does it mean to be alive?
How is it that we are here, living and experiencing and thinking?
What is death?
Why is there anything at all?
Today I want to speak to you about the core message
that I find in the Upanishads, and why I think it matters to us,
and also share with you a few thoughts
about the practice of reading texts like these.
First let me say just a brief word
about my own experience with these texts.
I first tried to read the Upanishads about ten years ago,
and I will tell you, I found them very challenging.
The first time through I actually had to stop reading
and put them aside for a couple of years.
Because I could read the words
and understand on a surface level what they were saying,
but when I tried to take these teachings in
and understand them at a deeper gut level,
I found I wasn’t ready.
A lot of it, I just could not understand on that gut level,
and what I did understand and begin to take in,
I found myself resisting; I was afraid of it, almost,
and it was so clear to me that I was not ready.
I had to put the book down,
and I remember saying, I’m sorry, I just can’t go there right now.
A couple of years later,
having had different experiences in my life,
I went back to the Upanishads
and had a completely different experience.
I fell in love with them, the poetry
and the mystical sense of the sacred dwelling in everything,
of which you’ve already heard something
in the Story for All Ages and also the second reading today.
I tell you this not only so you can know where I’m coming from,
but also because I think this is a very common experience
when we begin to engage with sacred texts.
It’s going to be different for every one of us,
but for every one of us, there may be times in our life
when we’re just not ready to receive a text or a teaching,
and that’s OK.
It doesn’t mean we’re bad people;
it doesn’t mean we’re not smart;
it just is what it is.
There’s a story about a beginning student
who asks a master, “Please, tell me the secret of everything.”
The master says not a word, but picks up a steaming pot of tea
and pours it out onto the floor.
The student leaps back to avoid being burned.
He says, “Why did you do that?!”
The master says,
“Before you pour the tea, you have to prepare a teacup.
Before you can receive wisdom, you have to prepare your mind.”
Likewise, my own experience
is that our lives prepare us in different ways, at different times,
to receive wisdom from outside ourselves.
Spiritual practice can help.
But sometimes we’re just not ready. And that’s OK.
This is not something that can be forced.
It doesn’t need to be.
Wherever we are is OK.
That said, with deep respect for the very rich variety of experiences
and spiritualities present in this room,
let me tell you about what I understand
the core message of the Upanishads to be.
I already told you one version in today’s Story for All Ages, which came from one of the earliest and most important of the Upanishads,
called the Chandogya Upanishad.
By the way, I should mention there are about 200 Upanishads,
but there are about twelve that are the oldest
and most important in the tradition.
The Chandogya Upanishad is one of these.
In the part we heard about today,
the wise man Uddalaka is teaching his son Shvetaketu.
He tells him a Creation story,
a story about what happened “in the beginning.”
Before I read the text,
let me mention one other point about reading sacred texts.
This particular text uses the language of “he” and “him”
to try to talk about the divine Being itself,
which of course does not have a gender;
being neither male nor female, or at least not just one or the other.
When we read ancient texts,
that kind of male-gendered language is very common,
and it is going to be a huge barrier for some of us.
I want to name that,
and also give you permission to find your way around it
however you can.
Whenever you hit a word or a concept in a text like this
that feels unhelpful, hurtful, oppressive,
I want to give you permission right now to question it,
critique it, maybe play around with rewording it in your mind
to see if that helps the text come alive for you.
We have that freedom to play around and question the language that’s used, partly because we’re working with translations already—
most of us are only going to be able to read these texts
in translation, not in the original language.
But even more importantly, in the kind of reading I’m talking about,
we approach these texts not so much as scholars
but as spiritual seekers.
The whole point of engaging with these texts at all
is that they are trying to point to a spiritual reality
that cannot ever be fully put into words.
The words are a tool to help us wake up to how things truly are.
Zen Buddhists tell the story:
one night a master pointed to the moon and asked, “What is this?”
The student answered, “That’s the moon.”
The master said, “No, that is a finger pointing toward the moon.”
Don’t confuse the words and the stories and the teaching
with the reality they are pointing to.
Words are useless
unless they help us begin to sense the reality behind them,
the truth and the wholeness and the mystery
that can never be put into sufficiently true and real words.
All we can do is point.
So don’t let yourself get blocked by the language.
Don’t let yourself get blocked.
With that in mind, let me turn back to the text itself,
the words of Uddalaka to his son
about the beginning of the universe:
In the beginning was only Being,
One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.
This is the core message of all the Upanishads:
everything that exists,
everything we can see and touch and know and think about,
everything that has ever been and ever will be,
comes from the same source, pure Being itself,
which can never be exhausted,
which is continually replenishing and recreating the world.
We are part of this great universal oneness;
within us is a spark of pure Being which gives us life
When we die we go back to the source.
We become part of that pure Being again,
like a drop of water falling into the ocean.
We are that.
We are that.
We are that.
Let me read you another text from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad
with a very similar message:
May the Lord of Love, who projects himself
Into this universe of myriad forms,
From whom all beings come and to whom all
Return, grant us the grace of wisdom.
He is fire and the sun, and the moon
And the stars. He is the air and the sea....
He is this boy, he is that girl, he is
This man, he is that woman, and he is
This old man, too, tottering on his staff.
His face is everywhere.
He is the blue bird, he is the green bird
With red eyes; he is the thundercloud,
And he is the seasons and the seas.
He has no beginning, he has no end.
He is the source from which the worlds evolve.
This testimony from thousands of years and half a world away
has become one of my very favorites,
and I want to tell you why it matters to me.
It matters to me because sometimes I get very scared
about what we human beings are doing to our planet right now,
and I need to believe there is hope for the future.
I know I’m not the only one here
who is deeply worried about what’s happening to the environment.
Global warming is no longer just a theory; it’s a fact.
Human beings are commandeering more wild lands every day.
Animals and plants are going extinct at a terrifying rate.
Biologists tell us we are in the middle of
a massive extinction of species,
the sixth great extinction that our planet has known.
I cannot promise you that we will be able to turn things around.
I wish I could, but I can’t.
And sometimes when I think of what’s happening,
I feel so much sadness and despair and disgust
for what we are making of this world.
This is a time when you and I and all of us
are in desperate need of hope.
And one place I have found hope for myself
is in this ancient testimony of the mystics of India.
When I read the Upanishads,
I am called back to the living knowledge
that all life has come out of an inextinguishable source.
The birds, the fish, the plants, the people, the rocks and hills
and oceans and sky and everything
have come forth from the one source
which is beyond all understanding
and which permeates all things, including you, including me,
including every creature.
And when I believe that, I believe there is hope.
I know there is hope.
Because here’s the thing:
we human beings are very powerful,
probably much too powerful for our own good.
But we are nowhere near as powerful
as the force that brings forth stars and planets and galaxies
and the incredible reality of life itself.
There is something at work in this universe
that is so vast, so incredibly strong and creative—
and destructive too—
and when I ponder this I feel we are caught up in something
much, much larger than ourselves, and it is all going to be OK,
though I cannot tell you now what OK looks like
on the other side of this darkness we are living through.
I do feel hope that this material world which we love so much
is going to be OK,
maybe not in any timespan that I can understand
or hope to witness—
it may take a very long time from our human perspective,
but I do have faith in that source of creation
that life itself is going to be OK
and flourish in ways that we who are here in this moment
cannot begin to imagine.
And that doesn’t mean we get to throw up our hands
and stop working and say, “Whatever.” Not for a minute.
I believe we still absolutely have an obligation
to do whatever we can to turn around the environmental devastation
which is happening on our watch,
because it is right for us to protect the life that is here now,
because we seek to love the life that is here now,
and because despair is poison to our souls.
But we have to have hope that all will not be lost
even if we are not strong enough and smart enough.
I find that hope in the testimony of the Upanishads
that the universe is created and sustained
by a power that does not need us to save it,
which gives birth to all things
and receives all things back to itself in the end.
The Isha Upanishad tells us:
In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real.
This is a paradox.
“The world within”—
the world of awareness and pure Being itself—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We don’t get to retreat forever
to some dreamy place of mystic contemplation
and say “All will be well in the end”
and not do anything to make it so.
We can’t stop working to protect this life on earth.
Yet this world, “the world without”—
the world we see and taste and touch and know—
is real, but it is not the only reality.
We have to try,
but neither should we despair if all our efforts are not enough,
because this life we experience moment to moment,
which seems so real to us, maybe seems like the only thing there is,
is not the only reality.
Behind it lies a force so great that nothing can harm it,
nothing can quench it,
nothing can destroy it.
What is asked of us in these days
is love,
and hope,
commitment,
and trust in the life-force that moves through us.
May we use the gifts which are ours
to do works of justice and peace
and hope for all creatures,
trusting always in the power which has brought us into being
and sustains us
and will receive us in the end.
Amen.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Bless You!
Today was Animal Blessing Sunday at church, and what a joy. Multiple dogs and two bunnies, and lots of photos of stay-at-home pets (including my kitty Pippin, who would not feel blessed by having to get into his carrier and be in a strange place) and remembering beloved animal companions who have died. Blessings to all creatures and all who love and care for them.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Bless You!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 3, 2010
A couple of nights ago,
for the first time in many years, I dreamed of my dog Winky,
beautiful, sweet Winky who was our dog when I was a little girl.
Winky was half-golden retriever, half-husky,
with a black husky back and a golden face,
and true to her ancestors, she loved to run and she loved us kids.
Winky has been dead for a very long time.
She died when I was thirteen years old.
But in my dream, she was alive again, and I thought in the dream
how wondrous it was that she had lived to be in her 30s.
I got to pet her like in the old days,
and she came and sat with me and put her head on my knee.
It was so good to see her, even in a dream.
When I woke up, I felt really blessed.
And in honor of our Blessing of the Animals Sunday,
I wanted to talk for just a little bit about,
what is a blessing?
Sometimes when we talk about blessings
we’re talking about the good and wonderful things
that other people and other creatures bring into our lives.
I felt very blessed
to have gotten to dream about my dog Winky
and remember all the things that made her so special to me.
Winky was a blessing to me.
Having her in my life brought me so much joy.
She didn’t have to do anything special; she did it just by being herself.
I loved her eyes, all soft and brown.
I loved the way she would lick my face.
When I was very little, I loved the way she would let me lie down
and put my head on her stomach, like I was her little puppy.
She was my friend, and that was a blessing.
She brought me joy.
She made me happy, just by being in my life.
That’s a blessing.
Our animal companions bless us in so many ways.
I think of my beloved cat Gingersnap,
who came along a year or so after Winky died.
Ginger blessed me all her life, in different and special ways.
She was a quiet girl.
Our Siamese cat Nick talked enough for both of them.
It wasn’t until after Nick died that Ginger talked at all,
and then it was this weird little “Hekkk” sound,
but that was her thing.
Another thing about Ginger was,
she was very picky about people.
She didn’t feel safe with a lot of people,
so the fact that she wanted to be with me made me feel very special!
By the way, when she was in her late teens,
I met the man who I ended up marrying, my husband John,
and in all seriousness I will tell you:
one of the reasons I trusted him early on
was that my cat Ginger loved him right away.
She would climb up on the couch and sit in his lap,
which she didn’t do with anyone but me.
She knew he was a good person.
Ginger blessed me, too, in helping me understand
what it means to get older.
I wasn’t around very much to see my grandparents grow old and sick.
I lived far away from them.
I couldn’t help take care of them.
But I was the one who got to take care of my sweet kitty
as her vision got dim and her hearing started to go
(and by the way, the one advantage to that
was that the vacuum cleaner was no longer a source of terror to her).
When her arthritis got really bad
and she couldn’t jump up onto the couch any more,
John and I were the ones who found a little footstool for her
so she could do it in stages and still come snuggle with us like always.
And in the twenty-first year of her life,
when I woke up one morning
and found her suddenly sick and worn out
and refusing to eat any more,
I was the one who got to hold her and pet her
and be there at that moment when her spirit just went away
and she died.
And even as I wept
it was a blessing and a holy mystery to be there in that moment.
In a culture where death is so often hidden,
kept safely away from the living,
we are still able to be with our pets in the moment of their passing.
And it is no less a mystery than any human death.
These animals: they teach us so much.
We are with them so intimately every day of our living
They connect us to the wonder of being alive and having to die.
By their very presence they witness to the flow of life itself
into so many manifold forms.
Life looks out at us from eyes that are not alone
and reminds us we are only one little bit of this world.
There is so much we don’t know,
so much we don’t understand.
To touch that beautiful strangeness in an animal,
in another person,
to befriend and love and share our lives with another creature:
that is a blessing.
And we can respond with simple words of love:
Bless you! we say to our friends, animal and human alike.
And these two little words say so much.
Bless you! we say, and what it means is,
I want so many good things for you.
I want you to be safe.
I want you to be happy and joyful.
I want you to be well in every way.
We know we can’t make these things happen just by wanting it.
We can’t make someone else happy.
We cannot always keep our loved ones safe.
But our blessing reminds us to do everything we can do
to make it so.
It joins us together,
those who bless and those who receive the blessing,
joins us together in love and hope.
And that, we trust, is enough
and more than enough.
Bless you!
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Bless You!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 3, 2010
A couple of nights ago,
for the first time in many years, I dreamed of my dog Winky,
beautiful, sweet Winky who was our dog when I was a little girl.
Winky was half-golden retriever, half-husky,
with a black husky back and a golden face,
and true to her ancestors, she loved to run and she loved us kids.
Winky has been dead for a very long time.
She died when I was thirteen years old.
But in my dream, she was alive again, and I thought in the dream
how wondrous it was that she had lived to be in her 30s.
I got to pet her like in the old days,
and she came and sat with me and put her head on my knee.
It was so good to see her, even in a dream.
When I woke up, I felt really blessed.
And in honor of our Blessing of the Animals Sunday,
I wanted to talk for just a little bit about,
what is a blessing?
Sometimes when we talk about blessings
we’re talking about the good and wonderful things
that other people and other creatures bring into our lives.
I felt very blessed
to have gotten to dream about my dog Winky
and remember all the things that made her so special to me.
Winky was a blessing to me.
Having her in my life brought me so much joy.
She didn’t have to do anything special; she did it just by being herself.
I loved her eyes, all soft and brown.
I loved the way she would lick my face.
When I was very little, I loved the way she would let me lie down
and put my head on her stomach, like I was her little puppy.
She was my friend, and that was a blessing.
She brought me joy.
She made me happy, just by being in my life.
That’s a blessing.
Our animal companions bless us in so many ways.
I think of my beloved cat Gingersnap,
who came along a year or so after Winky died.
Ginger blessed me all her life, in different and special ways.
She was a quiet girl.
Our Siamese cat Nick talked enough for both of them.
It wasn’t until after Nick died that Ginger talked at all,
and then it was this weird little “Hekkk” sound,
but that was her thing.
Another thing about Ginger was,
she was very picky about people.
She didn’t feel safe with a lot of people,
so the fact that she wanted to be with me made me feel very special!
By the way, when she was in her late teens,
I met the man who I ended up marrying, my husband John,
and in all seriousness I will tell you:
one of the reasons I trusted him early on
was that my cat Ginger loved him right away.
She would climb up on the couch and sit in his lap,
which she didn’t do with anyone but me.
She knew he was a good person.
Ginger blessed me, too, in helping me understand
what it means to get older.
I wasn’t around very much to see my grandparents grow old and sick.
I lived far away from them.
I couldn’t help take care of them.
But I was the one who got to take care of my sweet kitty
as her vision got dim and her hearing started to go
(and by the way, the one advantage to that
was that the vacuum cleaner was no longer a source of terror to her).
When her arthritis got really bad
and she couldn’t jump up onto the couch any more,
John and I were the ones who found a little footstool for her
so she could do it in stages and still come snuggle with us like always.
And in the twenty-first year of her life,
when I woke up one morning
and found her suddenly sick and worn out
and refusing to eat any more,
I was the one who got to hold her and pet her
and be there at that moment when her spirit just went away
and she died.
And even as I wept
it was a blessing and a holy mystery to be there in that moment.
In a culture where death is so often hidden,
kept safely away from the living,
we are still able to be with our pets in the moment of their passing.
And it is no less a mystery than any human death.
These animals: they teach us so much.
We are with them so intimately every day of our living
They connect us to the wonder of being alive and having to die.
By their very presence they witness to the flow of life itself
into so many manifold forms.
Life looks out at us from eyes that are not alone
and reminds us we are only one little bit of this world.
There is so much we don’t know,
so much we don’t understand.
To touch that beautiful strangeness in an animal,
in another person,
to befriend and love and share our lives with another creature:
that is a blessing.
And we can respond with simple words of love:
Bless you! we say to our friends, animal and human alike.
And these two little words say so much.
Bless you! we say, and what it means is,
I want so many good things for you.
I want you to be safe.
I want you to be happy and joyful.
I want you to be well in every way.
We know we can’t make these things happen just by wanting it.
We can’t make someone else happy.
We cannot always keep our loved ones safe.
But our blessing reminds us to do everything we can do
to make it so.
It joins us together,
those who bless and those who receive the blessing,
joins us together in love and hope.
And that, we trust, is enough
and more than enough.
Bless you!
Amen.
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