Today was Animal Blessing Sunday at church, and what a joy. Multiple dogs and two bunnies, and lots of photos of stay-at-home pets (including my kitty Pippin, who would not feel blessed by having to get into his carrier and be in a strange place) and remembering beloved animal companions who have died. Blessings to all creatures and all who love and care for them.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Bless You!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
October 3, 2010
A couple of nights ago,
for the first time in many years, I dreamed of my dog Winky,
beautiful, sweet Winky who was our dog when I was a little girl.
Winky was half-golden retriever, half-husky,
with a black husky back and a golden face,
and true to her ancestors, she loved to run and she loved us kids.
Winky has been dead for a very long time.
She died when I was thirteen years old.
But in my dream, she was alive again, and I thought in the dream
how wondrous it was that she had lived to be in her 30s.
I got to pet her like in the old days,
and she came and sat with me and put her head on my knee.
It was so good to see her, even in a dream.
When I woke up, I felt really blessed.
And in honor of our Blessing of the Animals Sunday,
I wanted to talk for just a little bit about,
what is a blessing?
Sometimes when we talk about blessings
we’re talking about the good and wonderful things
that other people and other creatures bring into our lives.
I felt very blessed
to have gotten to dream about my dog Winky
and remember all the things that made her so special to me.
Winky was a blessing to me.
Having her in my life brought me so much joy.
She didn’t have to do anything special; she did it just by being herself.
I loved her eyes, all soft and brown.
I loved the way she would lick my face.
When I was very little, I loved the way she would let me lie down
and put my head on her stomach, like I was her little puppy.
She was my friend, and that was a blessing.
She brought me joy.
She made me happy, just by being in my life.
That’s a blessing.
Our animal companions bless us in so many ways.
I think of my beloved cat Gingersnap,
who came along a year or so after Winky died.
Ginger blessed me all her life, in different and special ways.
She was a quiet girl.
Our Siamese cat Nick talked enough for both of them.
It wasn’t until after Nick died that Ginger talked at all,
and then it was this weird little “Hekkk” sound,
but that was her thing.
Another thing about Ginger was,
she was very picky about people.
She didn’t feel safe with a lot of people,
so the fact that she wanted to be with me made me feel very special!
By the way, when she was in her late teens,
I met the man who I ended up marrying, my husband John,
and in all seriousness I will tell you:
one of the reasons I trusted him early on
was that my cat Ginger loved him right away.
She would climb up on the couch and sit in his lap,
which she didn’t do with anyone but me.
She knew he was a good person.
Ginger blessed me, too, in helping me understand
what it means to get older.
I wasn’t around very much to see my grandparents grow old and sick.
I lived far away from them.
I couldn’t help take care of them.
But I was the one who got to take care of my sweet kitty
as her vision got dim and her hearing started to go
(and by the way, the one advantage to that
was that the vacuum cleaner was no longer a source of terror to her).
When her arthritis got really bad
and she couldn’t jump up onto the couch any more,
John and I were the ones who found a little footstool for her
so she could do it in stages and still come snuggle with us like always.
And in the twenty-first year of her life,
when I woke up one morning
and found her suddenly sick and worn out
and refusing to eat any more,
I was the one who got to hold her and pet her
and be there at that moment when her spirit just went away
and she died.
And even as I wept
it was a blessing and a holy mystery to be there in that moment.
In a culture where death is so often hidden,
kept safely away from the living,
we are still able to be with our pets in the moment of their passing.
And it is no less a mystery than any human death.
These animals: they teach us so much.
We are with them so intimately every day of our living
They connect us to the wonder of being alive and having to die.
By their very presence they witness to the flow of life itself
into so many manifold forms.
Life looks out at us from eyes that are not alone
and reminds us we are only one little bit of this world.
There is so much we don’t know,
so much we don’t understand.
To touch that beautiful strangeness in an animal,
in another person,
to befriend and love and share our lives with another creature:
that is a blessing.
And we can respond with simple words of love:
Bless you! we say to our friends, animal and human alike.
And these two little words say so much.
Bless you! we say, and what it means is,
I want so many good things for you.
I want you to be safe.
I want you to be happy and joyful.
I want you to be well in every way.
We know we can’t make these things happen just by wanting it.
We can’t make someone else happy.
We cannot always keep our loved ones safe.
But our blessing reminds us to do everything we can do
to make it so.
It joins us together,
those who bless and those who receive the blessing,
joins us together in love and hope.
And that, we trust, is enough
and more than enough.
Bless you!
Amen.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Living with the Texts: Hear, O Israel!
Today's sermon is the first of a series of close readings of sacred texts. Today was the launch of our children's and youth programming for the year, and it seemed appropriate to take "teaching our children" as the sermonic focus too. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: Hear, O Israel!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 19, 2010
So what’s this about “Living with the Texts,”
the first half of my sermon title today?
The texts I’m talking about
are the great scriptures of world religions—
like the Bible, the Qur’an, the ancient Hindu texts,
the Buddhist sutras, the Tao Te Ching.
For the next nine months, I’m going to be preaching
on a different one of these texts each month,
because I think they have a lot to teach us.
Let me be clear right up front:
I’m not trying to say the Bible or any other scripture
should be the boss of our spiritual lives.
Ever since Emerson and Thoreau back in the 19th century,
we Unitarians have been saying, we get our religious authority—
we figure out what we believe and how we think we should live—
based on our own personal experience and our own inner wisdom.
Over the years, we freed ourselves from the idea
that we had to accept whatever the Bible said.
We learned to trust ourselves.
Just a couple of weeks ago I preached to you
about using our inner wisdom as a guide,
and I stand by everything I said then.
Yet I am also 100% convinced
that every one of us has a tremendous amount to learn
from the great religious books of the world—
not only the Bible but definitely including the Bible.
I’ve often talked about my personal spiritual practice
of reading sacred texts. Almost every morning, I start the day
by reading a few lines from world scriptures,
or sometimes contemporary spiritual writers,
and I go slow, but I’ve made my way
through lots of the books of Bible this way,
and some of the Asian scriptures too.
I’ve stuck with this practice for years
not because I believe every word in every scripture is true,
but because I do have faith that when something lasts that long,
if something has been meaningful to so many people for so long,
there’s something there that is worthy of our attention.
Maybe something we can learn from.
There’s a Christian practice called lectio divina—
that’s Latin for “holy reading.”
This is a way of reading scripture, or poetry,
or really any text that has some oomph and depth to it,
where you go slow, you read a few lines,
take your time, pause,
think about what the words mean to you.
What do they spark for you?
You ask questions, think some more, play with it—
basically you hang out with the text
and let it speak to your imagination.
This is the kind of reading I try to do in my morning practice,
and this the kind of reading I want to share with you today.
The first thing is, we have to find a text.
For today, I wanted to bring you a text
that could speak to the kickoff of our children’s and youth programming for the year.
Immediately I thought of the reading from Deuteronomy
that we heard as our first reading
(Deuteronomy 6:4–12).
For thousands of years, this text has been part
of the most important prayer in all of Judaism: the Shema.
Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
These are the first Hebrew words that Jewish children learn
and perhaps the last words on the lips of Jewish people
as they lie dying.
No other text from the Bible is so important for Jews.
So, for that reason alone,
I think it’s worthy of our respectful attention.
And when I realized Yom Kippur,
the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, fell on this very weekend,
the message was even clearer: this was our text.
Let me tell you first what I love about this text,
what I think we can learn from it.
I love the challenge I hear in the Shema:
teach your children about your faith.
This is so important,
but it’s easy to forget, especially in a church like this.
This congregation has been around for nearly 100 years.
We built this building back in 1930, 80 years ago this year.
Our sheer physical presence is so solid,
it’s easy to think it’ll always be here no matter what we do.
But in fact, that’s not the case.
We have to pass on our faith, our values, our beliefs to our children,
because they’re the ones who are going to carry this thing forward.
This congregation and the faith that gives it a reason for being,
everything we love about this church,
all that has to be passed down to each new generation.
Someone did it for us.
Someone planted trees of faith that today are bearing fruit for us.
As the text reminds us, we all drink from wells we did not dig.
And all of us who are blessed to make it to adulthood,
we have a collective responsibility to do some spiritual planting
and digging for the generations still to come.
Every one of us, whether or not we have children of our own,
has a vested interest in nurturing our children,
helping them grow in their own spiritual lives,
encouraging them to be Unitarian Universalists
in this moment and their whole life long.
And of course it’s not just for our church;
first and foremost it is for our children themselves.
If we are here for any length of time, I’m assuming that means
we have found something here that is important and precious to us.
I know that’s true for me.
Our message of love and respect for differences,
the way we encourage people to use their brains
and think for themselves,
the inspiration we find to open our hearts and practice justice—
our religion has given me so much hope and challenge
and inspiration and grounding—
and I want that not just for myself
but for you and for all of us
and for our children
and all the children still to come.
I think our kids need to hear from us what we find meaningful,
what we think is important,
that which touches us and opens us to the sacred in our lives.
And maybe some of this happens naturally,
in the sweet little moments that we get to share with our kids,
and in the big and scary moments all families go through.
Some of this happens naturally,
we pass on our faith in those little moments and big ones,
but I don’t want to leave it all to chance.
And I don’t think we get to take a pass
and leave it all to our religious education teachers, either,
wonderful and gifted and skilled as they are.
Let me draw us back to the text of the Shema,
because it gives us some brilliant advice
about what it takes to pass on our faith to our kids.
And in a nutshell, the advice is live your faith 24/7.
Talk about it. Make it really clear what you believe.
The text says:
Recite [these teachings] when you stay at home
and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you get up.
The Jewish tradition interprets this text
as a mandate to say the Shema twice a day,
in the morning and at night.
For us, to play with the interpretation a little—
what I hear the text telling us is, talk about your faith.
Think about what it means to you.
Tell your children what it means to you.
The text goes on:
Bind them as a sign on your hand
and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead;
inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
By the way, this is why some Jewish people wear tefillin
on their arms and their foreheads,
little pouches with passages from the Torah inside.
“A sign on your hand,” “a symbol on your forehead.”
This is why they put a mezuzah on the doorframe of their home,
a case with a scroll inside with the Shema written on it.
For us, what I hear is an invitation
to wear our faith literally on our sleeve.
Bring signs and symbols of our faith into our homes,
as reminders of what we care about,
for ourselves and also for our children.
That’s why I wear a chalice necklace every Sunday,
because I want to have some physical embodiment of my faith
that people can see, to show how important it is to me.
Maybe you have a flaming chalice in your home.
Maybe another symbol that’s meaningful to you.
Something physical, that you can see and touch,
to keep your faith and your values in front of you.
Signs and symbols to keep our faith in our minds and our hearts,
to teach our children.
But now you may be starting to wonder,
why should I do something just because the text says so?
And that’s a really good question,
especially when we’re talking about teaching our kids.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition has always said
religious education shouldn’t be about telling children what to think,
what to believe.
We teach our children what we believe to be true,
what we have found through our own search for truth,
yes, absolutely—we tell them why our faith matters to us
and we hope it will become a living spring for them too—
and we encourage them to think and feel for themselves,
to wake up to the mystery all around us,
to trust their own minds and hearts.
I hope our children will grow up Unitarian Universalist
and choose to embrace this faith as adults.
But even more than that, I hope they will grow up
to be people who love truth and justice,
who practice compassion,
people with a clear head and an open heart.
And obviously this doesn’t mean blindly accepting
whatever the Bible has to say, or any other text.
In fact, moving back to our text of the day,
there is an aspect of this text which we absolutely cannot ignore
and we absolutely do not want to follow.
To explain what I mean,
I need to tell you something about the story behind the text.
Because the Shema text is part of a story.
Moses and the Israelites have been wandering in the desert
for 40 years.
Now, at last, God has told Moses
it’s time for the people to enter the Promised Land of Canaan.
Before they cross over into Canaan,
Moses calls a time-out.
He gets all the people to gather round,
and he tells everyone they all have to be really careful
to obey God’s commands, because if they don’t,
things are going to go very badly for them.
This is the context for the Shema text.
And, OK, I know we Unitarian Universalists
aren’t that big on obedience,
but we can work with that idea theologically—
we can maybe talk about how it’s important
to keep focused on what’s really important,
to honor the commitments we’ve made, that kind of thing,
and as far as it goes that’s not wrong.
But here’s the thing.
You have to know what the God of the Israelites is commanding.
And among other things, God is commanding the Israelites
to get rid of the people in the country they are about to move into.
God very explicitly orders them to dispossess the people
of their land, their homes, everything they have,
and take it all for themselves.
(Numbers 33:50–56)
This is a God who has already ordered them
to exterminate whole tribes of peoples
they’ve encountered in the desert.
Now God is ordering them
to take over the homes and the cities and the entire civilization
of a people who has never done anything to hurt them.
These are the wells they did not dig.
These are the vineyards they did not plant.
Ouch.
And so we see the story of this text,
this story which we want to read
as a beautiful story of freedom and liberation and enduring faith
for the Israelites, and thus for ourselves—
the literal meaning of this story and this text is that the Israelites are becoming
a people that brutally conquers other peoples,
dispossesses them from all they have built,
exiles them from the country they had called their own.
And I so don’t want to have to tell you this is our story too.
But of course it is.
For how is it that we came to be here,
all of us on this bit of earth we call Stockton, California?
We weren’t the first people to live on this land.
We are here at the corner of Bristol and Pacific today
not only because of the legacy of religious freedom
passed on to us by our ancestors, which we celebrate and rightly so,
but also because other ancestors, or maybe even the same ones,
forcibly removed the native peoples of this place
and destroyed their culture, their traditions, their faith.
This is a hard truth,
but I know our minds and hearts are big enough to hold it.
I’m not trying to blame us or anybody else.
I just want to name it
and hold it in this space.
The story of the Israelites is our story too,
and the story of every American
whose ancestors came to this land from across the waters.
But I find I don’t want to just throw the text away, reject it entirely.
As I hold this text of the Shema in my mind and heart,
this most holy scripture for an entire people,
it echoes in my ears as a challenge, a prayer, a whispered hope:
May we teach our children the faith that we have found
through our living and our striving and our dreaming.
And let us keep our minds and our hearts as open as we can,
deeply aware of our capacity for error and cruelty and harm,
and pass this knowledge on to our children too.
May our faith be strong enough to critique itself
in the light of evolving wisdom.
May ours be a faith not fixed like letters on a page,
but one that challenges every generation
to understand more and love more,
to create justice and peace and hope
out of our most tragic failures and devastations.
The text commands us:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your might.
I know I cannot love the God fixed on that printed page,
a God who calls on one people to destroy another.
But I can love that which gives life.
I can love goodness. I can love justice.
I can love peace and compassion and wisdom.
This I can do, as best I can,
with all my heart and all my soul and all my might.
What more could I wish for us all
and for all the generations to come?
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: Hear, O Israel!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 19, 2010
So what’s this about “Living with the Texts,”
the first half of my sermon title today?
The texts I’m talking about
are the great scriptures of world religions—
like the Bible, the Qur’an, the ancient Hindu texts,
the Buddhist sutras, the Tao Te Ching.
For the next nine months, I’m going to be preaching
on a different one of these texts each month,
because I think they have a lot to teach us.
Let me be clear right up front:
I’m not trying to say the Bible or any other scripture
should be the boss of our spiritual lives.
Ever since Emerson and Thoreau back in the 19th century,
we Unitarians have been saying, we get our religious authority—
we figure out what we believe and how we think we should live—
based on our own personal experience and our own inner wisdom.
Over the years, we freed ourselves from the idea
that we had to accept whatever the Bible said.
We learned to trust ourselves.
Just a couple of weeks ago I preached to you
about using our inner wisdom as a guide,
and I stand by everything I said then.
Yet I am also 100% convinced
that every one of us has a tremendous amount to learn
from the great religious books of the world—
not only the Bible but definitely including the Bible.
I’ve often talked about my personal spiritual practice
of reading sacred texts. Almost every morning, I start the day
by reading a few lines from world scriptures,
or sometimes contemporary spiritual writers,
and I go slow, but I’ve made my way
through lots of the books of Bible this way,
and some of the Asian scriptures too.
I’ve stuck with this practice for years
not because I believe every word in every scripture is true,
but because I do have faith that when something lasts that long,
if something has been meaningful to so many people for so long,
there’s something there that is worthy of our attention.
Maybe something we can learn from.
There’s a Christian practice called lectio divina—
that’s Latin for “holy reading.”
This is a way of reading scripture, or poetry,
or really any text that has some oomph and depth to it,
where you go slow, you read a few lines,
take your time, pause,
think about what the words mean to you.
What do they spark for you?
You ask questions, think some more, play with it—
basically you hang out with the text
and let it speak to your imagination.
This is the kind of reading I try to do in my morning practice,
and this the kind of reading I want to share with you today.
The first thing is, we have to find a text.
For today, I wanted to bring you a text
that could speak to the kickoff of our children’s and youth programming for the year.
Immediately I thought of the reading from Deuteronomy
that we heard as our first reading
(Deuteronomy 6:4–12).
For thousands of years, this text has been part
of the most important prayer in all of Judaism: the Shema.
Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
These are the first Hebrew words that Jewish children learn
and perhaps the last words on the lips of Jewish people
as they lie dying.
No other text from the Bible is so important for Jews.
So, for that reason alone,
I think it’s worthy of our respectful attention.
And when I realized Yom Kippur,
the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, fell on this very weekend,
the message was even clearer: this was our text.
Let me tell you first what I love about this text,
what I think we can learn from it.
I love the challenge I hear in the Shema:
teach your children about your faith.
This is so important,
but it’s easy to forget, especially in a church like this.
This congregation has been around for nearly 100 years.
We built this building back in 1930, 80 years ago this year.
Our sheer physical presence is so solid,
it’s easy to think it’ll always be here no matter what we do.
But in fact, that’s not the case.
We have to pass on our faith, our values, our beliefs to our children,
because they’re the ones who are going to carry this thing forward.
This congregation and the faith that gives it a reason for being,
everything we love about this church,
all that has to be passed down to each new generation.
Someone did it for us.
Someone planted trees of faith that today are bearing fruit for us.
As the text reminds us, we all drink from wells we did not dig.
And all of us who are blessed to make it to adulthood,
we have a collective responsibility to do some spiritual planting
and digging for the generations still to come.
Every one of us, whether or not we have children of our own,
has a vested interest in nurturing our children,
helping them grow in their own spiritual lives,
encouraging them to be Unitarian Universalists
in this moment and their whole life long.
And of course it’s not just for our church;
first and foremost it is for our children themselves.
If we are here for any length of time, I’m assuming that means
we have found something here that is important and precious to us.
I know that’s true for me.
Our message of love and respect for differences,
the way we encourage people to use their brains
and think for themselves,
the inspiration we find to open our hearts and practice justice—
our religion has given me so much hope and challenge
and inspiration and grounding—
and I want that not just for myself
but for you and for all of us
and for our children
and all the children still to come.
I think our kids need to hear from us what we find meaningful,
what we think is important,
that which touches us and opens us to the sacred in our lives.
And maybe some of this happens naturally,
in the sweet little moments that we get to share with our kids,
and in the big and scary moments all families go through.
Some of this happens naturally,
we pass on our faith in those little moments and big ones,
but I don’t want to leave it all to chance.
And I don’t think we get to take a pass
and leave it all to our religious education teachers, either,
wonderful and gifted and skilled as they are.
Let me draw us back to the text of the Shema,
because it gives us some brilliant advice
about what it takes to pass on our faith to our kids.
And in a nutshell, the advice is live your faith 24/7.
Talk about it. Make it really clear what you believe.
The text says:
Recite [these teachings] when you stay at home
and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you get up.
The Jewish tradition interprets this text
as a mandate to say the Shema twice a day,
in the morning and at night.
For us, to play with the interpretation a little—
what I hear the text telling us is, talk about your faith.
Think about what it means to you.
Tell your children what it means to you.
The text goes on:
Bind them as a sign on your hand
and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead;
inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
By the way, this is why some Jewish people wear tefillin
on their arms and their foreheads,
little pouches with passages from the Torah inside.
“A sign on your hand,” “a symbol on your forehead.”
This is why they put a mezuzah on the doorframe of their home,
a case with a scroll inside with the Shema written on it.
For us, what I hear is an invitation
to wear our faith literally on our sleeve.
Bring signs and symbols of our faith into our homes,
as reminders of what we care about,
for ourselves and also for our children.
That’s why I wear a chalice necklace every Sunday,
because I want to have some physical embodiment of my faith
that people can see, to show how important it is to me.
Maybe you have a flaming chalice in your home.
Maybe another symbol that’s meaningful to you.
Something physical, that you can see and touch,
to keep your faith and your values in front of you.
Signs and symbols to keep our faith in our minds and our hearts,
to teach our children.
But now you may be starting to wonder,
why should I do something just because the text says so?
And that’s a really good question,
especially when we’re talking about teaching our kids.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition has always said
religious education shouldn’t be about telling children what to think,
what to believe.
We teach our children what we believe to be true,
what we have found through our own search for truth,
yes, absolutely—we tell them why our faith matters to us
and we hope it will become a living spring for them too—
and we encourage them to think and feel for themselves,
to wake up to the mystery all around us,
to trust their own minds and hearts.
I hope our children will grow up Unitarian Universalist
and choose to embrace this faith as adults.
But even more than that, I hope they will grow up
to be people who love truth and justice,
who practice compassion,
people with a clear head and an open heart.
And obviously this doesn’t mean blindly accepting
whatever the Bible has to say, or any other text.
In fact, moving back to our text of the day,
there is an aspect of this text which we absolutely cannot ignore
and we absolutely do not want to follow.
To explain what I mean,
I need to tell you something about the story behind the text.
Because the Shema text is part of a story.
Moses and the Israelites have been wandering in the desert
for 40 years.
Now, at last, God has told Moses
it’s time for the people to enter the Promised Land of Canaan.
Before they cross over into Canaan,
Moses calls a time-out.
He gets all the people to gather round,
and he tells everyone they all have to be really careful
to obey God’s commands, because if they don’t,
things are going to go very badly for them.
This is the context for the Shema text.
And, OK, I know we Unitarian Universalists
aren’t that big on obedience,
but we can work with that idea theologically—
we can maybe talk about how it’s important
to keep focused on what’s really important,
to honor the commitments we’ve made, that kind of thing,
and as far as it goes that’s not wrong.
But here’s the thing.
You have to know what the God of the Israelites is commanding.
And among other things, God is commanding the Israelites
to get rid of the people in the country they are about to move into.
God very explicitly orders them to dispossess the people
of their land, their homes, everything they have,
and take it all for themselves.
(Numbers 33:50–56)
This is a God who has already ordered them
to exterminate whole tribes of peoples
they’ve encountered in the desert.
Now God is ordering them
to take over the homes and the cities and the entire civilization
of a people who has never done anything to hurt them.
These are the wells they did not dig.
These are the vineyards they did not plant.
Ouch.
And so we see the story of this text,
this story which we want to read
as a beautiful story of freedom and liberation and enduring faith
for the Israelites, and thus for ourselves—
the literal meaning of this story and this text is that the Israelites are becoming
a people that brutally conquers other peoples,
dispossesses them from all they have built,
exiles them from the country they had called their own.
And I so don’t want to have to tell you this is our story too.
But of course it is.
For how is it that we came to be here,
all of us on this bit of earth we call Stockton, California?
We weren’t the first people to live on this land.
We are here at the corner of Bristol and Pacific today
not only because of the legacy of religious freedom
passed on to us by our ancestors, which we celebrate and rightly so,
but also because other ancestors, or maybe even the same ones,
forcibly removed the native peoples of this place
and destroyed their culture, their traditions, their faith.
This is a hard truth,
but I know our minds and hearts are big enough to hold it.
I’m not trying to blame us or anybody else.
I just want to name it
and hold it in this space.
The story of the Israelites is our story too,
and the story of every American
whose ancestors came to this land from across the waters.
But I find I don’t want to just throw the text away, reject it entirely.
As I hold this text of the Shema in my mind and heart,
this most holy scripture for an entire people,
it echoes in my ears as a challenge, a prayer, a whispered hope:
May we teach our children the faith that we have found
through our living and our striving and our dreaming.
And let us keep our minds and our hearts as open as we can,
deeply aware of our capacity for error and cruelty and harm,
and pass this knowledge on to our children too.
May our faith be strong enough to critique itself
in the light of evolving wisdom.
May ours be a faith not fixed like letters on a page,
but one that challenges every generation
to understand more and love more,
to create justice and peace and hope
out of our most tragic failures and devastations.
The text commands us:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your might.
I know I cannot love the God fixed on that printed page,
a God who calls on one people to destroy another.
But I can love that which gives life.
I can love goodness. I can love justice.
I can love peace and compassion and wisdom.
This I can do, as best I can,
with all my heart and all my soul and all my might.
What more could I wish for us all
and for all the generations to come?
Amen.
Monday, September 13, 2010
More on immigration reform
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
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
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.
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