The Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees recently issued an invitation for congregational leaders to weigh in on plans for our General Assembly in Phoenix, AZ in 2012--a national UU gathering to witness on immigration and racial and economic justice. Here's what I sent them--not without some anxiety about speaking up, but carefully considered and strongly felt.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
September 13, 2010
Dear members of the UUA Board,
Thanks so much for the invitation to comment on possibilities for GA 2012 in Phoenix. As the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant from South America, I have been so glad to see UUs getting involved in immigration issues.
I am sure the GA planning team will do a fantastic job creating opportunities for those of us who feel energized and excited about participating in rallies and civil disobedience actions. It's been so inspiring hearing about our clergy and lay leaders who have been taking this path. I also hope we can find ways to engage those of us, like me, who feel strongly about what's going on but are less comfortable wearing the T-shirts, chanting slogans, etc.
I've been reading Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and find myself powerfully struck by his words: "All party lines deform the doctrine which they claim to preserve" (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1989, p. 58). They helped me name a discomfort that has been surfacing in me as I follow the "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign. I want this country to welcome and embrace immigrants, and I am deeply alarmed by SB1070 and the ideas behind it. Yet, for us to claim we are "on the side of love," implying others are not, feels dangerously self-righteous to me. I worry about our getting enamored of ourselves as some sort of shining army of good, battling the evil oppressors who are Not Us. Please hear me: I don't want us to sit on our hands or stay silent about what we believe. I feel so blessed to be part of a movement with brave people willing to put themselves on the line for justice. I just hope we can practice with humility, seeking to understand the human lives of those who do not agree with us, even as we do what we need to do. I hope our GA and our continued work for justice will have room for that spirit.
Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful and courageous work. I look forward to being in Phoenix with you in 2012.
Yours in faith,
Laura Horton-Ludwig
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
What Should We Do? Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
I planned today's sermon to create an opportunity for people to rest and reflect during this Labor Day weekend, and to start framing a conversation in my congregation about the future of our music program in the wake of a beloved staff member's departure. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
What Should We Do?
Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 5, 2010
Rabbi Zusya tells us:
The Sufi poet Rumi tells us,
if we waste the gifts we are born with,
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task,
and you perform a hundred other services,
but not the one he sent you to do.
So human beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
(from "The Real Work")
And I must tell you:
these teachings have saved me, over and over again,
the call to be who we are, to embrace the gifts we have,
and let those gifts set our path
in all those times when we don’t know what to do,
the times when the path is not clear
and we struggle to figure out what is right.
Know yourself, know your own priceless gifts,
embrace them and use them for good.
That’s it.
Know yourself, know your gifts, use them for good.
And that would be the end of the sermon right there,
except that it’s all easier said than done!
We are all bombarded with messages from other people,
and the culture around us,
about who we should be and what we should be doing.
Everybody has an opinion about how we ought to spend our lives:
our parents, our spouses, children, friends,
politicians, advertisers, newscasters,
even the person next to us at the grocery store has an opinion
about what we should be doing with our precious time on earth.
Now, sometimes that barrage of advice is helpful.
If our problem is a technical question, an information-type problem,
like if I need to learn how to fix a leaky pipe,
I probably don’t want to rely too much on my inner wisdom!
In that case, advice may be just what we need.
But so many of our problems aren’t technical problems.
I’m talking about problems of values:
What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
What can I do that gives me joy
and brings more good into this world?
Questions about relationships, maybe:
How can I be a better friend, a better partner, a better parent?
How can I be happy in the place where I find myself?
Questions about life transitions:
what am I supposed to be doing in this stage of my life?
All these questions where there really is no one right answer.
No one can tell us what to do.
Or, rather, they can try,
but it’s probably not going to help all that much!
Lots of people just love to give us advice
about these kinds of problems too.
Often the advice is kindly meant.
Sometimes it’s just plain bullying.
Either way, we are drowning in advice and feedback and instructions and best practices and helpful hints,
and some of it may actually be helpful, but a lot of it is just noise
that distracts us from what is really important—
the quiet wisdom within us,
the inner voice which our experience and our faith have taught us
is our best guide we have when we are lost and confused
and struggling to find the way forward.
So today I want to talk about three spiritual practices we can use
to help us tap into that voice of wisdom inside each one of us,
to discern what we should do when it’s not obvious,
when we feel confused and really don’t know what to do.
Two of these practices are for individuals,
and one is for groups, because there are times
groups have to wrestle with these questions too.
All three practices are just different versions of the same big practice:
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
We’ll start with individuals.
The first practice is very simple.
If you are struggling to figure out what to do,
you can try sitting quietly for a bit,
settle your mind and your body down,
and then write down your question—
just write it down on a piece of paper—
and now you start writing an answer—
write whatever comes into your head,
don’t think too much,
in fact the less conscious thinking the better,
because what we’re trying to do here
is bypass the conscious layers of our mind
and tap into the wisdom of the unconscious,
the wisdom within us that tends to emerge
only when we’re not grasping for it;
it has a playful quality; it may surprise us with a completely new
and perfectly right idea.
So: write your question down,
don’t think too much,
just write and see what comes.
In fact I want to give you an opportunity to try this right now.
In your order of service there should be a blank piece of paper.
If you don’t have something to write with, please raise your hand
and I will bring pencils around in a moment.
Settle your mind and your body.
Take a mindful breath in and out.
Hold your question in your mind.
Write it down.
Now just start writing—write yourself an answer,
whatever comes into your head. Just write and try not to stop.
We’ll be in silence for a couple of minutes.
Again, please raise your hand if you would like a pencil.
Please begin.
(Silence. Ring bell to bring people back.)
I hope that practice will open up some new insights for you.
The beauty of it is that it’s so simple,
and it helps you turn inward to discern what you should do,
not somebody else, but you—
because so often, there isn’t one “Right Answer”
that’s right for every person.
We have to look within ourselves to discern what’s right for us,
how we can use our gifts. As Rabbi Zusya reminds us,
we can’t all be Moses, and there’s no need to try.
What we can be is ourselves, as fully as we can.
That’s the first practice.
The second practice I want to tell you about today
is the one Parker Palmer talked about in our second reading.
Remember he was trying to figure out if he should take that new job,
and he got a bunch of friends together to help him decide?
This is a very old tradition that comes to us from the Quakers.
It’s called a “Clearness Committee,”
and it’s a very safe and powerful way of asking for help
from people we trust, as we wrestle with these hard questions.
Because sometimes our own inner resources are not quite enough.
Sometimes we do need the help of friends
to get past our habitual ways of thinking, our fears,
our self-judgments.
The Clearness Committee is a way of asking for help
without triggering that flood of well-meaning advice
and judgment and criticism that is not helpful.
In a nutshell, in a Clearness Committee,
you invite a few friends whom you trust
to meet with you for a long conversation, three hours long.
You tell them about the problem you are struggling with,
and they try to help, and the absolutely critical rule is,
they are only allowed to ask questions--no advice-giving at all--
and the questions have to be open and honest,
like the one we heard in the reading:
“What would you like best about this new thing?”
Veiled advice in the form of a question is absolutely not allowed!
The pace is relaxed and gentle. Silence is OK.
Everybody tries to be attentive to the focus person
and open themselves up to be helpful to that person.
And, as we saw in the reading, tremendous insight can come forth
simply through the power of the right question at the right time,
echoing in the silence and calling up the truth that lies within us,
waiting to be evoked in a space of safety and trust.
We don’t have time to practice this today,
but this is something you can try for yourself, maybe for a friend—
it doesn’t cost anything except your time, your care,
and your willingness to be present and open.
If you want to know more about Clearness Committees,
you might visit http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee.
That’s the second practice.
Last but not least, I want to talk very briefly
about discernment practices for groups,
because here we are in a group, this congregation,
and we too, as a group, are constantly having to ask ourselves,
what are we supposed to be doing?
What is our mission?
How are we supposed to use our gifts,
all the good things we have going for us,
so that at the end of the day we can say,
we are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
as fully and freely as we know how to be.
We are this church, these people, as fully and freely as we can be—
not anyone else, but ourselves.
It’s so easy for churches, and people, to waste time
wishing they were some other way than the way they are.
If only we had more money...
If only more people came to church...or volunteered...or had a deeper spiritual life...
or whatever—anything to avoid dealing with what is
and embracing it and believing that what is, here and now,
is wonderful and magical and beautiful.
I believe the words of Rumi are just as true of our churches as they are of people:
[H]uman beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
But if we do that work, the work that only we can do—
if we do that and nothing else,
“there’s nothing to worry about.” All is well.
But again of course this is easier said than done!
How do we know what our work is, in this moment?
How do we sift through all the possibilities of what we might be doing
and settle on that perfectly-right,
or even pretty-much mostly-right for now, thing that we must do?
We are so lucky that the Unitarian side of our tradition
gives us an absolutely brilliant model
for discerning our work and our mission.
Once again, it is beautifully simple.
We show up.
We open our minds and hearts.
We talk.
We listen.
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
This is what our Unitarian ancestors believed:
when congregations don’t know what to do,
the wisdom of the gathered community,
meeting for thoughtful and patient and heartfelt conversation,
can and will tell us the direction we ought to go.
Maybe not in an hour or a day or a week or a month,
but if we keep talking and listening, wisdom will start to emerge.
Our Unitarian ancestors told us,
the spirit of truth can speak from anywhere.
You can’t predict who will say just the right thing,
voice just the right idea that makes the whole room sigh and say,
yes, that’s it, of course that’s it.
But if we can be with one another in a spirit of open conversation
and seeking, wisdom will emerge.
In this moment in the life of our church,
we’re about to enter one of these conversations.
The issue before us right now is about music,
the kinds of music we love and long to have in our worship.
We’ve said goodbye to a music director who served us so beautifully
for three years. We are facing financial challenges, and it isn’t clear
whether we can or should have a staff position
exactly as it’s been in the past.
But what we can do is be in the conversation.
Show up.
Open our minds and hearts to the wisdom waiting to emerge.
Talk and listen. Especially listen.
My hope is that we will embrace this time
to ponder and talk about the music that touches our spirits
and reflect our community
and offers an invitation to all those people
who aren’t here yet but may be just about to walk in the door.
I don’t have an easy answer for you.
I don’t know what we should do.
But I do believe that when hearts and minds are open
and people come together to share their best wisdom,
to embrace what is and who we are together,
a path will emerge.
We will find our way.
Today and always,
in this moment and every moment,
may we be guided by the wisdom deep within us.
May a path be found for all who seek.
And may we rejoice in this moment
which gives us the precious opportunity
to live into our gifts,
to become ever more fully that which we were always meant to be.
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
What Should We Do?
Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 5, 2010
Rabbi Zusya tells us:
When I reach the next world, they will not ask me,
“Why were you not Moses?”
Instead, they will ask me, “Why were you not Zusya?”
The Sufi poet Rumi tells us,
if we waste the gifts we are born with,
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task,
and you perform a hundred other services,
but not the one he sent you to do.
So human beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
(from "The Real Work")
And I must tell you:
these teachings have saved me, over and over again,
the call to be who we are, to embrace the gifts we have,
and let those gifts set our path
in all those times when we don’t know what to do,
the times when the path is not clear
and we struggle to figure out what is right.
Know yourself, know your own priceless gifts,
embrace them and use them for good.
That’s it.
Know yourself, know your gifts, use them for good.
And that would be the end of the sermon right there,
except that it’s all easier said than done!
We are all bombarded with messages from other people,
and the culture around us,
about who we should be and what we should be doing.
Everybody has an opinion about how we ought to spend our lives:
our parents, our spouses, children, friends,
politicians, advertisers, newscasters,
even the person next to us at the grocery store has an opinion
about what we should be doing with our precious time on earth.
Now, sometimes that barrage of advice is helpful.
If our problem is a technical question, an information-type problem,
like if I need to learn how to fix a leaky pipe,
I probably don’t want to rely too much on my inner wisdom!
In that case, advice may be just what we need.
But so many of our problems aren’t technical problems.
I’m talking about problems of values:
What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
What can I do that gives me joy
and brings more good into this world?
Questions about relationships, maybe:
How can I be a better friend, a better partner, a better parent?
How can I be happy in the place where I find myself?
Questions about life transitions:
what am I supposed to be doing in this stage of my life?
All these questions where there really is no one right answer.
No one can tell us what to do.
Or, rather, they can try,
but it’s probably not going to help all that much!
Lots of people just love to give us advice
about these kinds of problems too.
Often the advice is kindly meant.
Sometimes it’s just plain bullying.
Either way, we are drowning in advice and feedback and instructions and best practices and helpful hints,
and some of it may actually be helpful, but a lot of it is just noise
that distracts us from what is really important—
the quiet wisdom within us,
the inner voice which our experience and our faith have taught us
is our best guide we have when we are lost and confused
and struggling to find the way forward.
So today I want to talk about three spiritual practices we can use
to help us tap into that voice of wisdom inside each one of us,
to discern what we should do when it’s not obvious,
when we feel confused and really don’t know what to do.
Two of these practices are for individuals,
and one is for groups, because there are times
groups have to wrestle with these questions too.
All three practices are just different versions of the same big practice:
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
We’ll start with individuals.
The first practice is very simple.
If you are struggling to figure out what to do,
you can try sitting quietly for a bit,
settle your mind and your body down,
and then write down your question—
just write it down on a piece of paper—
and now you start writing an answer—
write whatever comes into your head,
don’t think too much,
in fact the less conscious thinking the better,
because what we’re trying to do here
is bypass the conscious layers of our mind
and tap into the wisdom of the unconscious,
the wisdom within us that tends to emerge
only when we’re not grasping for it;
it has a playful quality; it may surprise us with a completely new
and perfectly right idea.
So: write your question down,
don’t think too much,
just write and see what comes.
In fact I want to give you an opportunity to try this right now.
In your order of service there should be a blank piece of paper.
If you don’t have something to write with, please raise your hand
and I will bring pencils around in a moment.
Settle your mind and your body.
Take a mindful breath in and out.
Hold your question in your mind.
Write it down.
Now just start writing—write yourself an answer,
whatever comes into your head. Just write and try not to stop.
We’ll be in silence for a couple of minutes.
Again, please raise your hand if you would like a pencil.
Please begin.
(Silence. Ring bell to bring people back.)
I hope that practice will open up some new insights for you.
The beauty of it is that it’s so simple,
and it helps you turn inward to discern what you should do,
not somebody else, but you—
because so often, there isn’t one “Right Answer”
that’s right for every person.
We have to look within ourselves to discern what’s right for us,
how we can use our gifts. As Rabbi Zusya reminds us,
we can’t all be Moses, and there’s no need to try.
What we can be is ourselves, as fully as we can.
That’s the first practice.
The second practice I want to tell you about today
is the one Parker Palmer talked about in our second reading.
Remember he was trying to figure out if he should take that new job,
and he got a bunch of friends together to help him decide?
This is a very old tradition that comes to us from the Quakers.
It’s called a “Clearness Committee,”
and it’s a very safe and powerful way of asking for help
from people we trust, as we wrestle with these hard questions.
Because sometimes our own inner resources are not quite enough.
Sometimes we do need the help of friends
to get past our habitual ways of thinking, our fears,
our self-judgments.
The Clearness Committee is a way of asking for help
without triggering that flood of well-meaning advice
and judgment and criticism that is not helpful.
In a nutshell, in a Clearness Committee,
you invite a few friends whom you trust
to meet with you for a long conversation, three hours long.
You tell them about the problem you are struggling with,
and they try to help, and the absolutely critical rule is,
they are only allowed to ask questions--no advice-giving at all--
and the questions have to be open and honest,
like the one we heard in the reading:
“What would you like best about this new thing?”
Veiled advice in the form of a question is absolutely not allowed!
The pace is relaxed and gentle. Silence is OK.
Everybody tries to be attentive to the focus person
and open themselves up to be helpful to that person.
And, as we saw in the reading, tremendous insight can come forth
simply through the power of the right question at the right time,
echoing in the silence and calling up the truth that lies within us,
waiting to be evoked in a space of safety and trust.
We don’t have time to practice this today,
but this is something you can try for yourself, maybe for a friend—
it doesn’t cost anything except your time, your care,
and your willingness to be present and open.
If you want to know more about Clearness Committees,
you might visit http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee.
That’s the second practice.
Last but not least, I want to talk very briefly
about discernment practices for groups,
because here we are in a group, this congregation,
and we too, as a group, are constantly having to ask ourselves,
what are we supposed to be doing?
What is our mission?
How are we supposed to use our gifts,
all the good things we have going for us,
so that at the end of the day we can say,
we are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
as fully and freely as we know how to be.
We are this church, these people, as fully and freely as we can be—
not anyone else, but ourselves.
It’s so easy for churches, and people, to waste time
wishing they were some other way than the way they are.
If only we had more money...
If only more people came to church...or volunteered...or had a deeper spiritual life...
or whatever—anything to avoid dealing with what is
and embracing it and believing that what is, here and now,
is wonderful and magical and beautiful.
I believe the words of Rumi are just as true of our churches as they are of people:
[H]uman beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
But if we do that work, the work that only we can do—
if we do that and nothing else,
“there’s nothing to worry about.” All is well.
But again of course this is easier said than done!
How do we know what our work is, in this moment?
How do we sift through all the possibilities of what we might be doing
and settle on that perfectly-right,
or even pretty-much mostly-right for now, thing that we must do?
We are so lucky that the Unitarian side of our tradition
gives us an absolutely brilliant model
for discerning our work and our mission.
Once again, it is beautifully simple.
We show up.
We open our minds and hearts.
We talk.
We listen.
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
This is what our Unitarian ancestors believed:
when congregations don’t know what to do,
the wisdom of the gathered community,
meeting for thoughtful and patient and heartfelt conversation,
can and will tell us the direction we ought to go.
Maybe not in an hour or a day or a week or a month,
but if we keep talking and listening, wisdom will start to emerge.
Our Unitarian ancestors told us,
the spirit of truth can speak from anywhere.
You can’t predict who will say just the right thing,
voice just the right idea that makes the whole room sigh and say,
yes, that’s it, of course that’s it.
But if we can be with one another in a spirit of open conversation
and seeking, wisdom will emerge.
In this moment in the life of our church,
we’re about to enter one of these conversations.
The issue before us right now is about music,
the kinds of music we love and long to have in our worship.
We’ve said goodbye to a music director who served us so beautifully
for three years. We are facing financial challenges, and it isn’t clear
whether we can or should have a staff position
exactly as it’s been in the past.
But what we can do is be in the conversation.
Show up.
Open our minds and hearts to the wisdom waiting to emerge.
Talk and listen. Especially listen.
My hope is that we will embrace this time
to ponder and talk about the music that touches our spirits
and reflect our community
and offers an invitation to all those people
who aren’t here yet but may be just about to walk in the door.
I don’t have an easy answer for you.
I don’t know what we should do.
But I do believe that when hearts and minds are open
and people come together to share their best wisdom,
to embrace what is and who we are together,
a path will emerge.
We will find our way.
Today and always,
in this moment and every moment,
may we be guided by the wisdom deep within us.
May a path be found for all who seek.
And may we rejoice in this moment
which gives us the precious opportunity
to live into our gifts,
to become ever more fully that which we were always meant to be.
Amen.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
You're Invited!
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.
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 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.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Immigration Reform: How Are We Called to Act?
Here's the sermon I gave today about Arizona's immigration law. If you can watch the video clip “UUs Stand on the Side of Love in Arizona” from http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2010/ga2010/165851.shtml, I really urge you to do that. It is so powerful to hear folks telling their own stories about how anti-immigrant sentiment has personally hurt them and their families.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
“Immigration Reform: How Are We Called to Act?”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 18, 2010
One of my favorite cartoon strips in the newspaper is called “Pickles.” It’s about an old married couple, Earl and Opal.
There was a strip the other day that showed the two of them
sitting on the porch and chatting. Opal says to Earl,
“Did you know that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees
is 96% the same?”
Earl says, “Yes, I do know that. I don’t believe it, though.”
Opal says, “You know it, but you don’t believe it?”
And Earl says, “Absolutely. I don’t believe everything I know.” (Brian Crane, “Pickles,” July 1, 2010.)
And it struck me: that sentiment is alive and well
all over the country, but especially today in Arizona,
where Governor Jan Brewer went on record last month
claiming the majority of undocumented immigrants
are not coming to this country to work,
but to smuggle drugs across the border and terrorize families. (See http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2010/06/27/jan.brewer.drug.mules.ktvk?iref=allsearch.)
Let me just say: she and I have different perspectives.
I am proud to be the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant
from South America who came here
with nothing but his own determination,
who has worked really hard to put himself through college
and become a nurse helping people who are sick and in need.
I have a very different belief
about why most people come to this country, documented or not.
In my own admittedly limited experience,
the immigrants I know—my friends, my family¬¬—
have come here to work
and make enough money to feed their families,
and to escape very scary and oppressive governments—
not to sell drugs or commit violent crimes.
Governor Brewer’s comments don’t make sense to me.
That said, I don’t want to get into a war of perceptions,
my experience versus Governor Brewer’s.
I do want to be really clear that there is no evidence
for Governor Brewer’s highly inflammatory statement
other than her own fears.
In fact, a member of the National Border Patrol Council,
a union of border control agents, has said
Governor Brewer’s comments are “clearly not the case.”
He said, they don’t “comport with reality—
that’s the nicest way to put it.” (See http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/25/arizona.immigrants.drugs/index.html?iref=allsearch.)
And you don’t have to take his word for it, either.
Governor Brewer claims immigrants
are bringing crime and violence to Arizona.
In fact, the FBI’s own statistics show that violent crime has been declining in Arizona for the past four years, even as unauthorized immigration has increased.
And on top of that, research going back nearly 100 years
has consistently shown that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. (See http://immigrationpolicy.org/issues/crime.)
These are the facts.
This is what we know.
But a lot of folks in Arizona and around the country
are awfully ready to believe some pretty wild misconceptions
about a whole group of people, fellow human beings,
rather than what they know or ought to know.
A lot of people are acting out of bias rather than fact,
fear rather than information,
fear of people who come from different countries
and look a little different
and speak different languages.
And this is a very human thing to do.
We can all get blinded by our fears now and again.
The people supporting this law are not bad people,
but they are afraid,
and I cannot condone where their fears are leading them.
Because what’s happening in Arizona,
and sadly in a lot of copycat states around the country,
is that legislators are letting their fears railroad their intellects
into passing laws that are racist and unjust.
Let me remind you of what the situation is in Arizona.
On July 29, a new law targeting undocumented immigrants
is going to take effect.
S.B. 1070, as it’s called, says that when police officers
stop or detain or arrest someone,
they have to “make a reasonable attempt”
to determine the immigration status of that person
if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that they’re undocumented.
Lots of people have already been asking,
how exactly would someone look suspiciously undocumented?
What does an undocumented person look like?
Here’s what African-American newspaper columnist
Eugene Robinson has to say about that:
“Aggressive enforcement of the law would seem to require
demanding identification from anybody who looks kind of Mexican.
Or maybe...those who look kind of Mexican and also kind of poor.
Or maybe anyone who dares visit the Mexican Consulate.” (Engene Robinson, “Arizona turns Latino citizens into second-class citizens,” Stockton Record, April 29, 2010.)
The people who wrote the law keep saying,
they’re not into racial profiling, they’re not targeting Latinos,
but let’s get real.
In Arizona the vast majority of undocumented people
are Spanish-speaking Latinos and Latinas.
It seems pretty clear that the people who are going to get hassled
are people who look Latino and speak Spanish,
no matter if they are U.S. citizens
or if their families have lived here for generations.
Now, President Obama’s administration has already filed a lawsuit
arguing the Arizona law is unconstitutional
on the grounds that Arizona is usurping a function
that properly belongs to the federal government.
And if that argument is enough to get the law overturned,
I for one will rejoice.
But that’s not really why I oppose this law.
That’s not where it gets me in the gut.
And it’s not even the racial profiling aspect of this law
that gets me the most,
even though I absolutely do find it offensive and wrong and racist.
What really gets me at a gut level—
you know, that place deep in your core where your energy lives
and when you are touched you know you have to act—
what really gets me—for me, it starts with a very deep knowledge
that diversity is a good thing. It’s a joyful thing.
I want to live in a United States where people come from all over
and bring their traditions and their history and their language
and keep them alive.
We all know this country is changing.
We’ve all heard the statistics that tell us soon the United States
will not be a majority-white country any more.
Here in the Central Valley it’s already happened,
and I say that is a beautiful thing.
It is such a blessing to live in a place
where people from all different places can come together
and share with one another
and become friends and partners and family members.
Here in the Valley we are the future of the whole country,
and we know ethnic and cultural diversity is wonderful.
It’s exciting. It’s good for our kids, it’s good for all of us.
And even beyond that, here in this church,
we have inherited a faith that diversity of all kinds—
diversity of belief, of sexual orientation, of culture,
of age and gifts and every kind of human variation there is—
makes us stronger.
This is a deep knowledge that we have won
through our living in community.
I want us to find ways to witness to that knowledge,
because our country needs it, right here and right now.
If this law goes into effect,
real people in this country are going to be hurt:
real human beings,
some of whom happen to have been born in another country
where life is so much harder that they would risk everything
to come to a country where they hope they can be safe,
a place where they can earn enough for their labor
so that their families do not have to go without food or clean water
or medical care—the kind of basic necessities
most of us have the luxury of taking for granted.
Last year I told you my own family’s story.
My brother-in-law is an immigrant from Venezuela.
Where he comes from, the electricity is dicey.
You probably won’t have hot water every day.
If you don’t support Hugo Chavez, the president,
you get blacklisted.
It’s not easy there.
My brother-in-law and my sister have a six-year-old daughter,
my beautiful niece,
who was born with a congenital heart defect.
After two surgeries, she’s doing just fine now,
but she will need special medical care for the rest of her life.
Today my brother-in-law is proud to be a naturalized U.S. citizen.
But while he was going through the application process,
things got really messed up, and for a time there was a real risk
that he was going to be deported and not allowed to return, ever.
Never allowed to come back to the country where his only child
has to stay in order to get the medical care she needs.
And this is a guy who has become a bilingual nurse,
a health-care professional that our country urgently needs.
If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.
I am so grateful that his story ended well.
But I am so aware that, for so many immigrants, it’s not that way.
Workplaces are getting raided, people rounded up
and thrown into detention centers
and dumped across the border to start over as best they can.
Families are getting torn apart.
This is not the kind of country I want to live in.
The country I want to live in honors its history
and remembers that every single person within its borders
was an immigrant once:
the native peoples who came from Asia
so many thousands of years ago;
the earliest English and Spanish colonists—
the WASPiest Daughter of the American Revolution
comes from an immigrant family too;
the African slaves kidnapped and brought here against their will;
Irish and German and Italian and Chinese immigrants;
Filipino and Japanese and Norwegian and Polish;
Jewish and southeast Asian and Haitian and Cuban refugees
and a hundred other peoples:
all of us come from immigrant families
just as much as the so-called “illegal aliens”
who have risked everything to be here.
The country I want to live in has a heart of compassion
for everyone who comes here scared and desperate and brave
and in need. Because this is where we come from.
This is who we are.
If you agree with me that Arizona’s immigration law is wrong,
I urge you today to do more than just think it.
I urge you to get involved and help stop it.
The need is so clear.
In our unison reading today,
Mark Morrison-Reed spoke of what happens when you realize
your life is connected to someone else’s,
and it changes you so that you have to act. (Singing the Living Tradition #580.)
I want to show you a short video now
showing how Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix, Arizona
are already having to deal with what’s happening,
so you can hear their stories in their words.
(Video clip “UUs Stand on the Side of Love in Arizona” from http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2010/ga2010/165851.shtml)
The prophet Micah asks us:
“what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
And Mark Morrison-Reed reminds us
church is where we come to expand our vision
and share our strength.
I want our church and our faith to shine out
with compassion and respect for all people
as the struggle for immigrants’ rights goes on.
We can begin right now.
July 29, two Thursdays from now,
is the day S.B. 1070 is scheduled to take effect.
Immigrants’ rights groups have called on us to make it
a “National Day of Non-Compliance,” and I urge you to honor that
by writing a letter or making a phone call to your legislators,
telling them what you believe about immigration.
In your order of service
you’ll find a list of just a few of the ways you can get involved.
In particular I want to invite you to an after-church discussion
on August 1 to talk about how our church might respond
to immigration as a moral issue.
And I’ll tell you another thing:
Every year, Unitarian Universalists from all over the country
get together for a national convention called General Assembly.
The sites for the General Assemblies are chosen years in advance,
and it just so happens that the 2012 site is Phoenix, Arizona.
At this year’s General Assembly, the delegates realized
we simply could not ignore the coincidence.
There was no way we could just show up
and go about business as usual.
We talked about boycotting, but that didn’t feel right either.
The UU congregations in Arizona have been deeply engaged
in the struggle for immigrant rights,
and they begged us to come and be in solidarity with them
and the immigrant rights groups they’re working with.
So what we decided was, we’re going to come to Phoenix
for General Assembly, but it’s going to be something we’ve never done before: a Justice General Assembly,
focused on education and witnessing about immigration
from start to finish. We will have study trips to the border.
We will march to witness to our truth.
And we will make our presence felt in solidarity
with our immigrant brothers and sisters
in Arizona and around the country.
I hope a lot of us will be able to come and do this too.
It’s not too early to put June 20-24, 2012 on your calendars.
I am so grateful for your compassion
and your passion for justice.
Let us join together and help this country live into its promise.
Let us stand with our brothers and sisters in faith who need our help.
Let us witness with our voices and our hands and our hearts
for the dream of one nation,
with liberty and justice for all.
May this be so, starting right now.
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
“Immigration Reform: How Are We Called to Act?”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 18, 2010
One of my favorite cartoon strips in the newspaper is called “Pickles.” It’s about an old married couple, Earl and Opal.
There was a strip the other day that showed the two of them
sitting on the porch and chatting. Opal says to Earl,
“Did you know that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees
is 96% the same?”
Earl says, “Yes, I do know that. I don’t believe it, though.”
Opal says, “You know it, but you don’t believe it?”
And Earl says, “Absolutely. I don’t believe everything I know.” (Brian Crane, “Pickles,” July 1, 2010.)
And it struck me: that sentiment is alive and well
all over the country, but especially today in Arizona,
where Governor Jan Brewer went on record last month
claiming the majority of undocumented immigrants
are not coming to this country to work,
but to smuggle drugs across the border and terrorize families. (See http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2010/06/27/jan.brewer.drug.mules.ktvk?iref=allsearch.)
Let me just say: she and I have different perspectives.
I am proud to be the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant
from South America who came here
with nothing but his own determination,
who has worked really hard to put himself through college
and become a nurse helping people who are sick and in need.
I have a very different belief
about why most people come to this country, documented or not.
In my own admittedly limited experience,
the immigrants I know—my friends, my family¬¬—
have come here to work
and make enough money to feed their families,
and to escape very scary and oppressive governments—
not to sell drugs or commit violent crimes.
Governor Brewer’s comments don’t make sense to me.
That said, I don’t want to get into a war of perceptions,
my experience versus Governor Brewer’s.
I do want to be really clear that there is no evidence
for Governor Brewer’s highly inflammatory statement
other than her own fears.
In fact, a member of the National Border Patrol Council,
a union of border control agents, has said
Governor Brewer’s comments are “clearly not the case.”
He said, they don’t “comport with reality—
that’s the nicest way to put it.” (See http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/25/arizona.immigrants.drugs/index.html?iref=allsearch.)
And you don’t have to take his word for it, either.
Governor Brewer claims immigrants
are bringing crime and violence to Arizona.
In fact, the FBI’s own statistics show that violent crime has been declining in Arizona for the past four years, even as unauthorized immigration has increased.
And on top of that, research going back nearly 100 years
has consistently shown that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. (See http://immigrationpolicy.org/issues/crime.)
These are the facts.
This is what we know.
But a lot of folks in Arizona and around the country
are awfully ready to believe some pretty wild misconceptions
about a whole group of people, fellow human beings,
rather than what they know or ought to know.
A lot of people are acting out of bias rather than fact,
fear rather than information,
fear of people who come from different countries
and look a little different
and speak different languages.
And this is a very human thing to do.
We can all get blinded by our fears now and again.
The people supporting this law are not bad people,
but they are afraid,
and I cannot condone where their fears are leading them.
Because what’s happening in Arizona,
and sadly in a lot of copycat states around the country,
is that legislators are letting their fears railroad their intellects
into passing laws that are racist and unjust.
Let me remind you of what the situation is in Arizona.
On July 29, a new law targeting undocumented immigrants
is going to take effect.
S.B. 1070, as it’s called, says that when police officers
stop or detain or arrest someone,
they have to “make a reasonable attempt”
to determine the immigration status of that person
if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that they’re undocumented.
Lots of people have already been asking,
how exactly would someone look suspiciously undocumented?
What does an undocumented person look like?
Here’s what African-American newspaper columnist
Eugene Robinson has to say about that:
“Aggressive enforcement of the law would seem to require
demanding identification from anybody who looks kind of Mexican.
Or maybe...those who look kind of Mexican and also kind of poor.
Or maybe anyone who dares visit the Mexican Consulate.” (Engene Robinson, “Arizona turns Latino citizens into second-class citizens,” Stockton Record, April 29, 2010.)
The people who wrote the law keep saying,
they’re not into racial profiling, they’re not targeting Latinos,
but let’s get real.
In Arizona the vast majority of undocumented people
are Spanish-speaking Latinos and Latinas.
It seems pretty clear that the people who are going to get hassled
are people who look Latino and speak Spanish,
no matter if they are U.S. citizens
or if their families have lived here for generations.
Now, President Obama’s administration has already filed a lawsuit
arguing the Arizona law is unconstitutional
on the grounds that Arizona is usurping a function
that properly belongs to the federal government.
And if that argument is enough to get the law overturned,
I for one will rejoice.
But that’s not really why I oppose this law.
That’s not where it gets me in the gut.
And it’s not even the racial profiling aspect of this law
that gets me the most,
even though I absolutely do find it offensive and wrong and racist.
What really gets me at a gut level—
you know, that place deep in your core where your energy lives
and when you are touched you know you have to act—
what really gets me—for me, it starts with a very deep knowledge
that diversity is a good thing. It’s a joyful thing.
I want to live in a United States where people come from all over
and bring their traditions and their history and their language
and keep them alive.
We all know this country is changing.
We’ve all heard the statistics that tell us soon the United States
will not be a majority-white country any more.
Here in the Central Valley it’s already happened,
and I say that is a beautiful thing.
It is such a blessing to live in a place
where people from all different places can come together
and share with one another
and become friends and partners and family members.
Here in the Valley we are the future of the whole country,
and we know ethnic and cultural diversity is wonderful.
It’s exciting. It’s good for our kids, it’s good for all of us.
And even beyond that, here in this church,
we have inherited a faith that diversity of all kinds—
diversity of belief, of sexual orientation, of culture,
of age and gifts and every kind of human variation there is—
makes us stronger.
This is a deep knowledge that we have won
through our living in community.
I want us to find ways to witness to that knowledge,
because our country needs it, right here and right now.
If this law goes into effect,
real people in this country are going to be hurt:
real human beings,
some of whom happen to have been born in another country
where life is so much harder that they would risk everything
to come to a country where they hope they can be safe,
a place where they can earn enough for their labor
so that their families do not have to go without food or clean water
or medical care—the kind of basic necessities
most of us have the luxury of taking for granted.
Last year I told you my own family’s story.
My brother-in-law is an immigrant from Venezuela.
Where he comes from, the electricity is dicey.
You probably won’t have hot water every day.
If you don’t support Hugo Chavez, the president,
you get blacklisted.
It’s not easy there.
My brother-in-law and my sister have a six-year-old daughter,
my beautiful niece,
who was born with a congenital heart defect.
After two surgeries, she’s doing just fine now,
but she will need special medical care for the rest of her life.
Today my brother-in-law is proud to be a naturalized U.S. citizen.
But while he was going through the application process,
things got really messed up, and for a time there was a real risk
that he was going to be deported and not allowed to return, ever.
Never allowed to come back to the country where his only child
has to stay in order to get the medical care she needs.
And this is a guy who has become a bilingual nurse,
a health-care professional that our country urgently needs.
If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.
I am so grateful that his story ended well.
But I am so aware that, for so many immigrants, it’s not that way.
Workplaces are getting raided, people rounded up
and thrown into detention centers
and dumped across the border to start over as best they can.
Families are getting torn apart.
This is not the kind of country I want to live in.
The country I want to live in honors its history
and remembers that every single person within its borders
was an immigrant once:
the native peoples who came from Asia
so many thousands of years ago;
the earliest English and Spanish colonists—
the WASPiest Daughter of the American Revolution
comes from an immigrant family too;
the African slaves kidnapped and brought here against their will;
Irish and German and Italian and Chinese immigrants;
Filipino and Japanese and Norwegian and Polish;
Jewish and southeast Asian and Haitian and Cuban refugees
and a hundred other peoples:
all of us come from immigrant families
just as much as the so-called “illegal aliens”
who have risked everything to be here.
The country I want to live in has a heart of compassion
for everyone who comes here scared and desperate and brave
and in need. Because this is where we come from.
This is who we are.
If you agree with me that Arizona’s immigration law is wrong,
I urge you today to do more than just think it.
I urge you to get involved and help stop it.
The need is so clear.
In our unison reading today,
Mark Morrison-Reed spoke of what happens when you realize
your life is connected to someone else’s,
and it changes you so that you have to act. (Singing the Living Tradition #580.)
I want to show you a short video now
showing how Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix, Arizona
are already having to deal with what’s happening,
so you can hear their stories in their words.
(Video clip “UUs Stand on the Side of Love in Arizona” from http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2010/ga2010/165851.shtml)
The prophet Micah asks us:
“what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
And Mark Morrison-Reed reminds us
church is where we come to expand our vision
and share our strength.
I want our church and our faith to shine out
with compassion and respect for all people
as the struggle for immigrants’ rights goes on.
We can begin right now.
July 29, two Thursdays from now,
is the day S.B. 1070 is scheduled to take effect.
Immigrants’ rights groups have called on us to make it
a “National Day of Non-Compliance,” and I urge you to honor that
by writing a letter or making a phone call to your legislators,
telling them what you believe about immigration.
In your order of service
you’ll find a list of just a few of the ways you can get involved.
In particular I want to invite you to an after-church discussion
on August 1 to talk about how our church might respond
to immigration as a moral issue.
And I’ll tell you another thing:
Every year, Unitarian Universalists from all over the country
get together for a national convention called General Assembly.
The sites for the General Assemblies are chosen years in advance,
and it just so happens that the 2012 site is Phoenix, Arizona.
At this year’s General Assembly, the delegates realized
we simply could not ignore the coincidence.
There was no way we could just show up
and go about business as usual.
We talked about boycotting, but that didn’t feel right either.
The UU congregations in Arizona have been deeply engaged
in the struggle for immigrant rights,
and they begged us to come and be in solidarity with them
and the immigrant rights groups they’re working with.
So what we decided was, we’re going to come to Phoenix
for General Assembly, but it’s going to be something we’ve never done before: a Justice General Assembly,
focused on education and witnessing about immigration
from start to finish. We will have study trips to the border.
We will march to witness to our truth.
And we will make our presence felt in solidarity
with our immigrant brothers and sisters
in Arizona and around the country.
I hope a lot of us will be able to come and do this too.
It’s not too early to put June 20-24, 2012 on your calendars.
I am so grateful for your compassion
and your passion for justice.
Let us join together and help this country live into its promise.
Let us stand with our brothers and sisters in faith who need our help.
Let us witness with our voices and our hands and our hearts
for the dream of one nation,
with liberty and justice for all.
May this be so, starting right now.
Amen.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Family Across Borders
This coming Sunday I'll be preaching on how we can respond to Arizona's immigration law SB 1070. In the meantime, I wanted to share a very personal sermon I gave last year for Mother's Day about how U.S. immigration law nearly tore my own family apart. I'm so very grateful that our story ended well, and all too aware that many others do not.
“Family Across Borders”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
May 10, 2009
The family I was born into has been in this country
for just about as long as any white people have,
and we are just about as WASPy as you could imagine.
Both the Hortons and the Winterses (that’s my mom’s side)
go back almost to the Mayflower.
We’ve got our share of Puritan-era Obadiahs and Ezekiels
in the family tree.
The most recent relative in my personal family tree who wasn’t born
in this country was my great-grandmother Annie MacDonald,
whose family had emigrated from Scotland to Newfoundland.
(I carry her last name as my middle name.)
So, at first glance,
it might look like my family’s story is pretty far removed
from the story of immigrant families in the U.S. today.
But, in fact, the truth is very different.
Today, my sister Amy, my brother-in-law Juan,
and their daughter Grace are living happily in Miami, Florida.
But just last year,
they found themselves struggling to keep their family together.
Juan was born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. ten years ago.
He got his green card right around the time he and my sister got married. Grace was born a couple of years after that.
Juan had always hoped to become a U.S. citizen
and began the naturalization process a couple of years ago.
Everything went smoothly until they hit a bump
in the form of a hostile, autocratic immigration agent.
In the course of one horrifying interview,
Juan was told that that Immigration had the power to deny his citizenship application and deport him permanently without recourse.
Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Saner heads prevailed,
and Juan’s application for citizenship was approved within a month.
Today he is extremely proud to be a U.S. citizen.
But for days before the good news came through,
Juan and Amy were terrified that by some horrible fluke of the process, Juan might end up getting deported
with no chance of coming back to the U.S., ever.
They didn’t know what they would do if that happened,
and I am so glad they weren’t forced to make a choice.
But many families are not so lucky.
Our government does indeed have the power to separate families,
to tear non-citizen parents away from their U.S.-born children,
in many cases with no recourse whatsoever.
Luckily my family’s story ended well,
but many undocumented immigrants threatened with deportation
are faced with a heart-rending dilemma:
do they bring their U.S.-born children to their own country of origin—a foreign country to their children—
depriving them of all the advantages they had hoped to give them
by coming to the U.S.,
or do they leave their children behind in the U.S.
and accept the heartbreak of a permanent separation?
And you should know: this is not just a few families here and there.
A new report, from which the first reading came this morning,
estimates that in the last ten years,
literally hundreds of thousands of families have been affected. (James D. Kremer, Kathleen A. Moccio, and Joseph W. Hammell, Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy (Dorsey & Whitney LLP, 2009), p. 2.)
So what would you do?
Can you imagine?
In the ancient story of the Judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16–28),
two women both say they are the true mother of a young child.
Solomon says to them both:
Cut the child in half and give half to one woman, half to the other.
The false mother accepts this, while the real mother cries out,
“No, don’t kill my child—give him to her instead.”
In the story, Solomon praises the real mother
and gives her back her child.
But our government is not King Solomon,
and no reward awaits the sacrificial choice of deported parents
who leave their children behind—
just the pain of separation and the knowledge that they are doing
the best they can to give their child a better future.
If your heart goes out to these mothers and fathers and children,
I urge you to do two things.
One is something I believe is really important,
something that we as a congregation can do much better
than our government can:
Come with me while I do some theology
about immigration and national borders, and about what it means to be born in a particular place.
This may sound a little strange—why theology?
But I believe theology is extremely important. It’s what underlies
all our social policies, all our thinking about how things should be
in our country and in the world.
Let me remind you what I mean by theology.
It’s a Greek word that literally means “speaking about the Gods”:
logy is “speaking” or “studying,” as in eulogy, or biology, or cardiology;
theo means “about the Gods,” as in monotheism or atheism.
But in the liberal religious tradition, of which this church is a part,
when we talk about theology,
it isn’t limited to that old question of whether God exists.
When we in this tradition say “theology,”
we’re talking about all the ways we as human beings
try to answer the really big questions:
questions like,
How did we come to be here? Where do we go when we die?
How are we connected to the rest of the universe?
And what should our society be like?
How are we supposed to live with other people and other beings?
Our society—any society—makes a law because collectively
we think it’s a good idea.
The why we think it’s a good idea—that’s theology,
the way we make sense of the world.
When we talk about immigration, there are always theological questions lurking just under the surface of our usual arguments.
Here are some:
Is it moral to exclude people from this country?
Is it moral for a country to defend its borders,
and if it is, why is it moral?
Is it ever right for a group to band together
and keep out others who “don’t belong”?
Let’s think about this.
The fact is, whether it’s right or not,
every human society that I know of does this,
And it’s not just a human thing.
Wolves and polar bears defend their territory; birds do; insects do too.
Animal behaviorists tell us
animals tend to defend the resources they need to live
when those resources are scarce. (See Animal Behavior Society, “Crickets and Territory Defense,” online at http://www.animalbehavior.org/ABSEducation/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior-crickets-and-territory-defense)
Probably most of us would agree territoriality in animals
isn’t immoral or wrong; it’s just instinct;
it’s just the life-force in them rising up to protect its own existence.
Well, we human beings are animals too.
The life-force is strong in us too.
There is something very basic and deep
about the urge to protect our lives.
And, bringing us back to immigration,
I think any theology of national borders has to give some due
to what I would call the divinely given urge of all beings to live—
and that includes people.
We have a deep-seated fear that letting other people onto our turf
will mean less for us—maybe so much less that we’ll die!
The truth is that immigrants actually contribute far more to our economy than they receive. Study after study shows this.
But some people still have that instinctive fear
that letting people into their country will mean less for them.
Even in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,
that fear of scarcity can get so strong,
it can even override our wish
for families to stay together and be happy and strong.
That fear sits deep inside us. We didn’t choose it; we’re born that way.
And yet, for thousands of years,
religious people and moral philosophers have been saying,
just because we have an instinct to do something,
doesn’t mean it’s right.
People are gifted with the power to examine our fears
and think before we act.
We have the power to think about how others are going to be affected by what we do.
We have the power to make moral choices.
Simply saying it’s our human instinct to defend our borders
is not going to fly as a moral argument.
One day when I was in elementary school, I instinctively pulled a chair out from under a kid who wouldn’t get out of my seat.
That doesn’t mean it was a good instinct!
Our country has been driven far more by unconscious fears of scarcity
than by generosity and compassion,
or even plain old economic reality!
I do believe everybody has the right to protect their own life.
But, when it comes to immigration, I believe we have
a moral obligation to examine our fears—
to remind ourselves of how much we in this country really do have,
and to remember every person wants to live without fear of scarcity.
We might do well to remember the words of a fellow heretic,
the English reformer John Bradford.
He’s the one who said, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Those of us who were born in this country
can hardly help asking ourselves, why was I so lucky?
Why was I born here and not in North Korea or Darfur?
We know that people all over the world,
and indeed within this country,
are born into very different circumstances.
And we can’t help but question, why is this so?
To speak very personally,
why was I born into a wealthy family here in the U.S.
while my brother-in-law was born into a poor family in Venezuela?
Why is anyone born into the circumstances we are?
Is it chance? Is it some kind of divine plan?
We can’t know for sure, though I often wonder.
This is a mystery that we will never solve in this lifetime.
The one idea I can’t accept
is the idea that seems to underlie our current immigration policy—
the idea that those of us born into wealth and comfort
were born with some special merit, some inherent right to live a life
that’s safer and easier and better than someone else’s.
Just saying that idea out loud makes me feel awful inside.
I can’t give you any scientific proof that it’s false,
but along with the founders of this country
I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal.
In spite of their failures and, no doubt, my own,
I still hold on to that vision.
And more than that, my theology tells me
that everybody all around the world is connected.
I believe we are one human family across all the borders that divide us.
So why should any one group of us
have the right to hoard all the good stuff for ourselves?
If our brothers and sisters are in need of food to eat
and education to feed their minds, and work to support their families,
and we have those things in our country and they don’t,
can it really be right for us to tell them, “Too bad and keep out!”?
I can’t believe that’s right.
I believe everyone in the world
has just as much right to the stuff we need to live as anyone else.
I also know we can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But, as a nation, the very least we can do
is to care for the people who are here,
the people within our borders right now.
For hundreds of years,
tradition and law have divided people up into countries,
each country taking responsibility to care for its own people,
at least in theory.
Of course, sometimes the reality is pretty far from the theory,
and too many of our brothers and sisters are trapped
under governments that abuse and exploit them.
I don’t believe our system of countries is a perfect
or a divinely ordained system.
I still hold out the hope that one day human beings will create
a system of government that brings all people together
in a spirit of justice and mutual love.
But that is not the reality today.
And we have to work with what we’ve got.
So is it too much to ask that, at the very least,
we in this country care for the people who are here now?
Is it too much to ask that children who were born here,
accepted as U.S. citizens in every way, though their parents are not
should get to stay here in the only home they know
with their parents here to love and protect them?
This is very personal for me.
As some of you know, my niece was born with a heart defect.
If her dad had had to leave the U.S.,
there’s no way he and my sister would have taken her to live
in a country where she couldn’t get the medical care she needs
to stay healthy.
In all likelihood, they would have made the sacrifice
to split up their family so that Grace could grow up safe.
But what a choice!
And even that is a choice some families don’t have.
Four years ago, Maria Roa gave birth to a little girl named Hazelle. Maria and her husband Victor were both undocumented immigrants living in San Francisco. And Hazelle was born with a heart defect too.
At seventeen months, Hazelle had a heart surgery at UC San Francisco
to enlarge one of her arteries and save her life.
The doctors told her parents
she would need specialized medical care for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials told her parents
to report for deportation two weeks after the surgery date.
At the last minute they were granted a one-year reprieve. (See Amr Emam, “Ailing Toddler’s Parents Get Deportation Reprieve,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 2007, online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/13/BAGTDQVMMG1.DTL&type=health.)
But what happens after that?
Will both those parents have to leave their daughter behind?
Who would take care of her?
I’ve been trying to find out what’s happening with this family right now. I haven’t been able to yet. I’m sorry about that—but I wanted to share as much of their story as I knew because it shows so clearly the craziness of our current system.
So, on behalf of all the families who are in danger of being torn apart
by our immigration laws,
I ask you to do one more thing this week.
If your heart is touched by these families,
let us speak up together in their defense.
If you turn to your order of service, you’ll find there
a postcard that you can take home to sign and mail,
in support of a really good piece of legislation that has been stalled out
in our House of Representatives: the Child Citizen Protection Act.
This would give immigration judges
the power to stop immigrant parents from being deported
when it’s in the best interest of their U.S.-born children.
The postcard was created by an immigrant organization
called Families for Freedom (http://www.familiesforfreedom.org/),
made up of people who have intimate knowledge
of the fear of deportation.
On behalf of my family and Hazelle Roa’s family
and all the families suffering from our immigration policies,
I ask you to please consider taking this one simple step
and sending this postcard.
We can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But on this Mother’s Day, let us do what we can do
to build a land where all families are free to stay together,
where the spirit of compassion overcomes all fear,
where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Let us build that land—our land—together.
So may it be.
Amen.
“Family Across Borders”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
May 10, 2009
The family I was born into has been in this country
for just about as long as any white people have,
and we are just about as WASPy as you could imagine.
Both the Hortons and the Winterses (that’s my mom’s side)
go back almost to the Mayflower.
We’ve got our share of Puritan-era Obadiahs and Ezekiels
in the family tree.
The most recent relative in my personal family tree who wasn’t born
in this country was my great-grandmother Annie MacDonald,
whose family had emigrated from Scotland to Newfoundland.
(I carry her last name as my middle name.)
So, at first glance,
it might look like my family’s story is pretty far removed
from the story of immigrant families in the U.S. today.
But, in fact, the truth is very different.
Today, my sister Amy, my brother-in-law Juan,
and their daughter Grace are living happily in Miami, Florida.
But just last year,
they found themselves struggling to keep their family together.
Juan was born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. ten years ago.
He got his green card right around the time he and my sister got married. Grace was born a couple of years after that.
Juan had always hoped to become a U.S. citizen
and began the naturalization process a couple of years ago.
Everything went smoothly until they hit a bump
in the form of a hostile, autocratic immigration agent.
In the course of one horrifying interview,
Juan was told that that Immigration had the power to deny his citizenship application and deport him permanently without recourse.
Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Saner heads prevailed,
and Juan’s application for citizenship was approved within a month.
Today he is extremely proud to be a U.S. citizen.
But for days before the good news came through,
Juan and Amy were terrified that by some horrible fluke of the process, Juan might end up getting deported
with no chance of coming back to the U.S., ever.
They didn’t know what they would do if that happened,
and I am so glad they weren’t forced to make a choice.
But many families are not so lucky.
Our government does indeed have the power to separate families,
to tear non-citizen parents away from their U.S.-born children,
in many cases with no recourse whatsoever.
Luckily my family’s story ended well,
but many undocumented immigrants threatened with deportation
are faced with a heart-rending dilemma:
do they bring their U.S.-born children to their own country of origin—a foreign country to their children—
depriving them of all the advantages they had hoped to give them
by coming to the U.S.,
or do they leave their children behind in the U.S.
and accept the heartbreak of a permanent separation?
And you should know: this is not just a few families here and there.
A new report, from which the first reading came this morning,
estimates that in the last ten years,
literally hundreds of thousands of families have been affected. (James D. Kremer, Kathleen A. Moccio, and Joseph W. Hammell, Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy (Dorsey & Whitney LLP, 2009), p. 2.)
So what would you do?
Can you imagine?
In the ancient story of the Judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16–28),
two women both say they are the true mother of a young child.
Solomon says to them both:
Cut the child in half and give half to one woman, half to the other.
The false mother accepts this, while the real mother cries out,
“No, don’t kill my child—give him to her instead.”
In the story, Solomon praises the real mother
and gives her back her child.
But our government is not King Solomon,
and no reward awaits the sacrificial choice of deported parents
who leave their children behind—
just the pain of separation and the knowledge that they are doing
the best they can to give their child a better future.
If your heart goes out to these mothers and fathers and children,
I urge you to do two things.
One is something I believe is really important,
something that we as a congregation can do much better
than our government can:
Come with me while I do some theology
about immigration and national borders, and about what it means to be born in a particular place.
This may sound a little strange—why theology?
But I believe theology is extremely important. It’s what underlies
all our social policies, all our thinking about how things should be
in our country and in the world.
Let me remind you what I mean by theology.
It’s a Greek word that literally means “speaking about the Gods”:
logy is “speaking” or “studying,” as in eulogy, or biology, or cardiology;
theo means “about the Gods,” as in monotheism or atheism.
But in the liberal religious tradition, of which this church is a part,
when we talk about theology,
it isn’t limited to that old question of whether God exists.
When we in this tradition say “theology,”
we’re talking about all the ways we as human beings
try to answer the really big questions:
questions like,
How did we come to be here? Where do we go when we die?
How are we connected to the rest of the universe?
And what should our society be like?
How are we supposed to live with other people and other beings?
Our society—any society—makes a law because collectively
we think it’s a good idea.
The why we think it’s a good idea—that’s theology,
the way we make sense of the world.
When we talk about immigration, there are always theological questions lurking just under the surface of our usual arguments.
Here are some:
Is it moral to exclude people from this country?
Is it moral for a country to defend its borders,
and if it is, why is it moral?
Is it ever right for a group to band together
and keep out others who “don’t belong”?
Let’s think about this.
The fact is, whether it’s right or not,
every human society that I know of does this,
And it’s not just a human thing.
Wolves and polar bears defend their territory; birds do; insects do too.
Animal behaviorists tell us
animals tend to defend the resources they need to live
when those resources are scarce. (See Animal Behavior Society, “Crickets and Territory Defense,” online at http://www.animalbehavior.org/ABSEducation/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior-crickets-and-territory-defense)
Probably most of us would agree territoriality in animals
isn’t immoral or wrong; it’s just instinct;
it’s just the life-force in them rising up to protect its own existence.
Well, we human beings are animals too.
The life-force is strong in us too.
There is something very basic and deep
about the urge to protect our lives.
And, bringing us back to immigration,
I think any theology of national borders has to give some due
to what I would call the divinely given urge of all beings to live—
and that includes people.
We have a deep-seated fear that letting other people onto our turf
will mean less for us—maybe so much less that we’ll die!
The truth is that immigrants actually contribute far more to our economy than they receive. Study after study shows this.
But some people still have that instinctive fear
that letting people into their country will mean less for them.
Even in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,
that fear of scarcity can get so strong,
it can even override our wish
for families to stay together and be happy and strong.
That fear sits deep inside us. We didn’t choose it; we’re born that way.
And yet, for thousands of years,
religious people and moral philosophers have been saying,
just because we have an instinct to do something,
doesn’t mean it’s right.
People are gifted with the power to examine our fears
and think before we act.
We have the power to think about how others are going to be affected by what we do.
We have the power to make moral choices.
Simply saying it’s our human instinct to defend our borders
is not going to fly as a moral argument.
One day when I was in elementary school, I instinctively pulled a chair out from under a kid who wouldn’t get out of my seat.
That doesn’t mean it was a good instinct!
Our country has been driven far more by unconscious fears of scarcity
than by generosity and compassion,
or even plain old economic reality!
I do believe everybody has the right to protect their own life.
But, when it comes to immigration, I believe we have
a moral obligation to examine our fears—
to remind ourselves of how much we in this country really do have,
and to remember every person wants to live without fear of scarcity.
We might do well to remember the words of a fellow heretic,
the English reformer John Bradford.
He’s the one who said, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Those of us who were born in this country
can hardly help asking ourselves, why was I so lucky?
Why was I born here and not in North Korea or Darfur?
We know that people all over the world,
and indeed within this country,
are born into very different circumstances.
And we can’t help but question, why is this so?
To speak very personally,
why was I born into a wealthy family here in the U.S.
while my brother-in-law was born into a poor family in Venezuela?
Why is anyone born into the circumstances we are?
Is it chance? Is it some kind of divine plan?
We can’t know for sure, though I often wonder.
This is a mystery that we will never solve in this lifetime.
The one idea I can’t accept
is the idea that seems to underlie our current immigration policy—
the idea that those of us born into wealth and comfort
were born with some special merit, some inherent right to live a life
that’s safer and easier and better than someone else’s.
Just saying that idea out loud makes me feel awful inside.
I can’t give you any scientific proof that it’s false,
but along with the founders of this country
I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal.
In spite of their failures and, no doubt, my own,
I still hold on to that vision.
And more than that, my theology tells me
that everybody all around the world is connected.
I believe we are one human family across all the borders that divide us.
So why should any one group of us
have the right to hoard all the good stuff for ourselves?
If our brothers and sisters are in need of food to eat
and education to feed their minds, and work to support their families,
and we have those things in our country and they don’t,
can it really be right for us to tell them, “Too bad and keep out!”?
I can’t believe that’s right.
I believe everyone in the world
has just as much right to the stuff we need to live as anyone else.
I also know we can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But, as a nation, the very least we can do
is to care for the people who are here,
the people within our borders right now.
For hundreds of years,
tradition and law have divided people up into countries,
each country taking responsibility to care for its own people,
at least in theory.
Of course, sometimes the reality is pretty far from the theory,
and too many of our brothers and sisters are trapped
under governments that abuse and exploit them.
I don’t believe our system of countries is a perfect
or a divinely ordained system.
I still hold out the hope that one day human beings will create
a system of government that brings all people together
in a spirit of justice and mutual love.
But that is not the reality today.
And we have to work with what we’ve got.
So is it too much to ask that, at the very least,
we in this country care for the people who are here now?
Is it too much to ask that children who were born here,
accepted as U.S. citizens in every way, though their parents are not
should get to stay here in the only home they know
with their parents here to love and protect them?
This is very personal for me.
As some of you know, my niece was born with a heart defect.
If her dad had had to leave the U.S.,
there’s no way he and my sister would have taken her to live
in a country where she couldn’t get the medical care she needs
to stay healthy.
In all likelihood, they would have made the sacrifice
to split up their family so that Grace could grow up safe.
But what a choice!
And even that is a choice some families don’t have.
Four years ago, Maria Roa gave birth to a little girl named Hazelle. Maria and her husband Victor were both undocumented immigrants living in San Francisco. And Hazelle was born with a heart defect too.
At seventeen months, Hazelle had a heart surgery at UC San Francisco
to enlarge one of her arteries and save her life.
The doctors told her parents
she would need specialized medical care for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials told her parents
to report for deportation two weeks after the surgery date.
At the last minute they were granted a one-year reprieve. (See Amr Emam, “Ailing Toddler’s Parents Get Deportation Reprieve,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 2007, online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/13/BAGTDQVMMG1.DTL&type=health.)
But what happens after that?
Will both those parents have to leave their daughter behind?
Who would take care of her?
I’ve been trying to find out what’s happening with this family right now. I haven’t been able to yet. I’m sorry about that—but I wanted to share as much of their story as I knew because it shows so clearly the craziness of our current system.
So, on behalf of all the families who are in danger of being torn apart
by our immigration laws,
I ask you to do one more thing this week.
If your heart is touched by these families,
let us speak up together in their defense.
If you turn to your order of service, you’ll find there
a postcard that you can take home to sign and mail,
in support of a really good piece of legislation that has been stalled out
in our House of Representatives: the Child Citizen Protection Act.
This would give immigration judges
the power to stop immigrant parents from being deported
when it’s in the best interest of their U.S.-born children.
The postcard was created by an immigrant organization
called Families for Freedom (http://www.familiesforfreedom.org/),
made up of people who have intimate knowledge
of the fear of deportation.
On behalf of my family and Hazelle Roa’s family
and all the families suffering from our immigration policies,
I ask you to please consider taking this one simple step
and sending this postcard.
We can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But on this Mother’s Day, let us do what we can do
to build a land where all families are free to stay together,
where the spirit of compassion overcomes all fear,
where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Let us build that land—our land—together.
So may it be.
Amen.
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