Sermons

Civility Amidst Polarized Politics
Douglas Taylor
2-27-11

I’m gonna start by giving you all some advice. If you ever publish a letter to the editor or a guest editorial in the local paper do not, unless you are a glutton for punishment, read the posted comments of the online version for your letter. Jean Rose-Klein published a short article this week and I took a quick glance through the online comments (and here I admit I do not follow my own advice) to see the usual storm of accusation, denial, posturing, and frustrating carelessness flung across my computer screen. In fairness, I will point out that there are, among the posts ‘removed for violating the guidelines of discourse,’ a few thoughtful and interesting posts that are worth reading. Unfortunately it is not worth sifting through the garbage-posts to find them. As a forum for discussion differing views, the online anonymity style is a failure.

Our society dearly needs a functional forum where differing political and social perspectives can be shared with civility. We, the people, are too easily isolated into our homogeneous niches lest we stumble across the reality of a well stated alternative position that might cause us to engage. Today, during the service I invite you to participate in just such an open forum conversation. Following the sermon and before the closing hymn I will open up the floor for any response you might have to this topic and what I have shared. So I invite you now to consider your own life and how you are with these issues.

The reading for this morning ends with the historian’s observation “The United States only stabilized as a nation when it gave up the dream of being a one-party utopia and accepted the existence of political opposition as crucial to maintaining a democracy.” [from Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz, p314] Thus, one could extrapolate, that our current political woes may be the instability of too many of us picking that one-party utopian dream back up. According to this historical perspective, one of the great hallmarks of our nation is the Freedom of Speech and how that freedom allows different perspectives to be heard and ultimately for truth to work its way to the top of the political milieu. If, however, we stop listening to different views, stop attempting to ‘embrace error’ for the sake of promoting truth, then we grow stuck in our own conceptions and misconceptions with no way of uncovering the difference between them. It is a problem.

What we are seeing and hearing now from our elected leaders and news commentators is not good. We hear one called a fascist and another, a racist. Rude comments about lipstick on pigs pass for good-natured colloquial commentary. And the use of violence is implied when someone uses the cross hairs of a gun site to mark political opponents, and another quips ‘if they bring a knife to a fight, we’ll bring a gun.’ And then there is the back drop of the angry rallies on both sides of the political railing, each comparing the other side’s leader to ‘Hitler’

About a month and a half back the topic of political civility became a major issue. U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was holding a “Congress on your Corner” event at a local grocery store when a man opened fire killing 6 people and seriously wounding many others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Fascinatingly, rather than focusing on gun control or mental health issues, we turned our attention to the conversation of civility.

One interesting response offered by congress was to mix up the decades-tradition of segregating the chamber seating arrangements for the president’s address to Congress later that January. They decided, as a gesture of civility to honor Representative Giffords, to sit as all Republicans on one side and all Democrats on the other. I looked at a seating chart of the event and I will say I was impressed that it was not only a few lawmakers – the chamber seating was really well mixed. And, granted, while this was merely symbolic it was still remarkable.

Not that I think the January 8th shootings in Tuscan were motivated by the increase in polarizing and vitriolic political rhetoric as some have suggested. Quickly after the shooting pundits and regular people started asking, “What is the connection, if any, between political rhetoric and violent acts?” The tone of our political discourse, I suspect is not the cause, but rather another symptom of the same malady afflicting our nation. I don’t know what motivated the shooter on January 8th to take the actions he did. But to lay the blame at the feet of the former governor of Alaska, for example, is only to perpetuate the rhetoric we claim to be the problem.

A colleague of mine (Rev. Roger Fritts in his 1-0-11 sermon “Polarized) pointed out a study done a few years ago in which researchers interviewed people in prison for assassination or assassination attempts. The study did not find these assassins and would-be-assassins to be politically motivated. Instead, the finding showed that overwhelmingly these people felt invisible. Many of them, prior to their attack, struggled with job loss, failures in school or in significant relationships. Their stories are littered with experience after experience of failure. A significant goal in their choice of target was to gain instant fame. These assassins and would-be-assassins were motivated not by politics but by a desire to overcome failure through notoriety. And while I do not know if such was the case for the shooter in Tuscan last month, the profile seems to fit. [“Fame Through Assassination: A Secret Service Study” National Public Radio, Morning Edition, January 14, 2011. Alix Spiegel. http://www.npr.org/2011/01/14/132909487/famethroughassassination-a-secret-service-study]

Indirectly, however, I am sure the tone and atmosphere of violence in our society has an impact. We model for our children and for all society an acceptance of violence and meanness. Our society offers these models and reinforces the tendencies to use the vitriol and hate as common forms of discourse.

Here is a local example to chew on. At the Vestal High School a few months back there was a “Kick-a-Jew-day” that sprang up among some of the kids, spread by texting and facebook. It is a slightly more complicated story that this, but in essence several kids kicked their fellow students who were Jewish. Rather quickly I heard people jumping from a statement about ‘the awful thing these kids have done” to how “these are awful kids.” But to demonize these kids is not helpful. I am not saying there might be an explanation that would make the incident somehow acceptable. What I am saying is there might be circumstances we don’t yet know that would make the incident something other than a hate-crime perpetrated by the worst segment of our society. Demonizing the ‘other’ not helpful. Listening to people would be helpful.

We could call up any number of examples in which sides are taken, lines are drawn, and people stop listening. The pattern of polarization is so ingrained in our public process that it is hard to avoid it.

There was a big longitudinal study done recently that looked at census data and county level election results data from the past five decades. [The Big Sort, the clustering of like-minded America, Bill Bishop, 2008. And, again, my thanks to colleague rev. Roger Fritts for highlighting this book in his sermon as cited above.] The major finding of the study was that over the past 30 or 40 years Americans have been sorting themselves into homogenous geographies. In the 1950s, for example, people with college degrees were fairly evenly distributed across the United States. In recent years, college-educated people have been disproportionately concentrated major cities like Berkeley, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other such places along the east and west coast. In these communities, people tend to be more interested in politics and less likely to attend church. They tend to listen to National Public Radio, read weekly news magazines, vote Democrat, and own cats.

People without college degrees tend to be found in places like Lubbock, Texas; Gilbert, Arizona; Lafayette, Louisiana; or Allentown, Pennsylvania. These communities tend to be less densely populated and thus have bigger lawns. People in these communities watch Fox for their news, they own guns, volunteer and participate in clubs and churches, vote Republican, visit relatives a lot, and own dogs.

In short, we are clustering not only based on educational level or working class vs. middle class. We have been, over the past few decades, sorting ourselves into geographic clusters of like-mindedness. One pertinent observation from the research is that like-minded groups tend to enforce conformity and grow more extreme through a self-reinforcing loop. Mixed company tends to moderate while like-minded company tends to polarize. As political liberals and conservatives keep themselves in enclaves, they grow more zealous and become more distrustful of each other. Churches, even our diversity-loving liberal Unitarian Universalist churches, do not escape this clustering of like-mindedness. Many is the time I have heard a person comment about how great it is to have found a church home and to be around like-minded people. And yet, mixed company tends to moderate while like-minded company tends to polarize.

So, what can we do about it? The simple answer is to meet people who disagree with you. My mother tells a compelling story about that. My mother is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and when I was 18 she moved to Syracuse to serve the May memorial Unitarian Universalist Society as their Minister of Religious Education. During her years in Syracuse she also volunteered at the Planned Parenthood Center, serving on its board and as its President. She says the response she got from members of the congregation was mixed. Some would ask:

“What’s in it for us? You are taking time away from focusing on us to work for Planned Parenthood. And, I don’t agree with everything they do there.” Others would say, “Thank you for representing us as a congregation with the hard work to do at Planned Parenthood.”

Reflecting on that she writes:

Sometimes I felt like I did represent May Memorial; sometimes I felt I represented Unitarian Universalism and the UUA; but most of the time I was answering a personal call to work for the rights of women to maintain control over their reproductive choices, and for girls and women to receive the medical care they needed for healthy sexuality, pregnancy, and overall health. I received many a threatening phone call, and the Director and Medical Director wore bullet proof vests to work each day. I stood facing the Lambs of Christ protesters who came to demonstrate in front of our building, and I wrote letters to the editor.

She then tells of a program she became involved in called Common Ground for Life and Choice. It was a conference she attended, a conference for those who stood for life and those who stood for choice to come together and share peaceful and constructive dialogue.

We spent the first part of the conference just talking to one another about our lives apart from this topic. Then we were given colored dots to put on our name tags: blue for choice and green for life. By that time, however we had begun to relate to one another in caring ways that made it difficult to hate someone who differed from us on this issue.

There were guidelines they had all agreed to such as ‘no inflammatory language’ and ‘no language that made the others in the group uncomfortable.

It was an amazing experience. From it I developed a very powerful relationship with a young woman who was Pro-Life. We went on a radio talk show to share our beliefs. I remember one caller was angry that we could even talk with one another much less understand and respect the other’s beliefs. We held a Sunday morning Adult discussion Forum at my church together and she was treated with respect and listened to with compassion. Her Pastor would not allow us to come to her Christian fundamentalist congregation to have the same dialogue. I always regretted that for I do believe it could have begun a bridge of understanding.

Following this conference one of the women who had stood outside of the Planned Parenthood Center said she had never thought that those of us inside the building were frightened of them. But I told her we were, in part because of the murders of Planned Parenthood personnel in Brookline, MA and in Florida, and because our Center had experienced a buteric acid attack. I know that in Syracuse, at least for a time, the volatile environment eased and the work that came out of the Conference and the dialogues between those of us who were Pro-choice and Pro-Life helped many who were open to listening with respect came to a deeper understanding of all the dimensions of this issue.

It is possible to have an effect; it is possible to engage with people – even with people who seem to be so very far from your perspective. It is possible to impact the public discourse around you.

So, what are we to do? We could start by treating each other more gently and hospitable. Let us practice among ourselves. We could extend that hospitality to every person we find in this space: from the person we don’t recognize and might be new on Sunday morning to the person wandering the halls on a weekday evening looking for their meeting room. Take this generous and hospitable spirit of civility out to your work places and schools, to the coffee shops and shopping centers, to the multitude of places where you might bump into a person with a different perspective to offer. And then, speak up and listen in turn.

In a world without end,
may it be so.

You Are in My Prayers
1-23-11
Rev. Douglas Taylor

During my first or second year in ministry, I was attending an interfaith clergy gathering with another Unitarian Universalist colleague. The organizer of the gathering turned to my UU colleague and asked him if he would lead the group in an opening prayer. My colleague replied, without missing a beat, “Well, I really am not very good at that sort of thing, but –” and he smiled glancing over at me “– but Douglas always has a prayer in his back pocket.”

My initial thought, as I smiled back and gathered myself to lead the interfaith clergy in prayer, was that my colleague had pulled a fast one on me! But I could roll with it. Later, as we drove away together from the event my UU colleague confessed that he was really uncomfortable being asked to lead prayer like that. He told me how glad he was in that moment that I had come with him this time because he knew I was comfortable leading prayer like that. What I had initially perceived as a mildly irritating trick was actually a shy compliment.

So for the rest of the trip back across town I pondered that statement. “Am I comfortable leading prayer? I hadn’t thought so before.”

And I thought back to a similar comment another colleague offered. When we were in seminary at Meadville Lombard, a handful of us arranged to meet three times a week for early morning meditation in one of the empty classrooms. We would arrive silently, before breakfast, someone would lit a candle and keep time. After fifteen minutes we would extinguish the candle, hold hands briefly and then disperse back to our apartments to get ready for classes.

One of my classmates was quite effusive about how valuable these fifteen minutes of silence were to her. “Douglas, you have silence a lot, you can tap that whenever. But this is very new to me. Fifteen minutes feels very long and agonizing, I am so grateful I am not alone in the room because I don’t think I could last three minutes without the rest of you there.” She was single, I had two young kids back home – and I was the one with easy access to silence? But when I am honest with myself, what my friend said of me is true. Being silent is simple for me, and to turn the silence toward silent prayer is not a difficult step.

So I am developing a sense of myself that is line with others see in me: I am one for whom silence is like a second skin. I am one who travels with a prayer in my pocket. But I am also, I must admit, someone who has trouble with prayer – well, with some kinds of prayer – ok, with one particular kind of prayer: Petitionary prayer or intercessory prayer.

That’s the kind of prayer in which a person asks God to do something or change something. “Please, God make me pass this test, save the plane from crashing, get my team into the finals.” I don’t like this kind of prayer because it implies that God is an entity that tinkers with history and physics to suit the wishes of the faithful.

I heard about a minister who became upset with a woman when she described how her son had survived a particularly deadly military action because she had prayed for him. The minister asked her if she thought the other soldiers’ mothers had not prayed enough or been faithful enough. He asked her if she really thought the soldiers who did not survive had died only for the fact that they did not have mothers who prayed for them as she had done for her son.

And yet I will tell people, I have told some of you, “You are in my prayers.” I feel as though I identify with the women in the story who prayed for her son’s safety – not so much the smug satisfaction that seems to be there after the fact. But certainly the fervent wish that my prayers will be answered: that health will be restored, pain eased, relationships reconciled. Yet I don’t experience God as a wish-granting genie that I keep in my personal prayer bottle. “You are in my prayers,” I say. What does that mean? I struggle with this.

I don’t know if it ever crosses your mind. I don’t know how many of you here are people who pray. Maybe you struggle with it too. I am always surprised by the larger than expected number of us who pray. The stereotype is that we don’t – or if we do, our prayers are “to whom it may concern.” Maybe you have long ago dismissed prayer – you are not a praying person. I wonder if maybe what people reject when they reject prayer is this particular type of prayer, this intercessory and petitionary prayer. I was reading recently that there are five basic types of prayer: “Wow,” “Thank you,” “Sorry,” “Please,” and “____.” Of course some will tell you the number is really 2 or 22, but I like five. “Wow,” “Thank you,” “Sorry,” “Please,” and “____.”

“Wow” is a prayer of praise, a hallelujah. It is the prayer of amazement and wonder and appreciation – like applause. It leads well into “Thank you.” “Thank you” is a prayer of gratitude – perhaps the most easily understood. “Sorry” is the prayer of confession, the prayer for seeking to set things right again. “Sorry” is a hard one to do not because Unitarian Universalists find it theologically challenging but because all humans find it hard to say ‘I have done something wrong and I want to make it right.’ “Please” is the prayer of supplication and intersession, the petitionary prayer. This is a hard one. And it is the one most people think of when they think of prayer. This is the help me, heal me, hold me prayer; the change-this-bad-thing-to-good prayer. “Please” is the type of prayer Flip Wilson is poking fun at when he said, “I’m going to pray now, does anyone want anything?” It is the one I most have trouble with. “Wow,” “Thank you,” “Sorry,” “Please,” and “____.” The final type is silence.

Silence is included in the list of five here. An argument could be made that silence is not prayer, it is meditation; it is listening not speaking. Prayer is supposed to be a spoken experience; it is putting words out there, right? Theologian Soren Kierkegaard tells a story of a man who thought prayer was talking. But he grew more and more quiet until he realized that prayer is listening. I imagine the majority of us do not have a problem with a practice of meditative listen, of sharing silence in a reverent fashion. I suspect some of you would balk at calling it prayer.

In our regular liturgy each Sunday I mark the prayer and meditation time as moving through three phases: first with words, followed by silence, and the singing of a hymn. All three are forms of meditation or prayer. But I note a difference between the element I call a prayer and the next element which I call silence. And yet, it is more than merely the absence of noise. It is silence of a certain quality. Jacob Trapp writes about it in this meditation:

Let this house be quiet. Let our minds be quiet.
Let the quietness of the hills, the quietness of deep waters, be also in us:
So quiet that the noise of passing events and present anxieties,
of random recollections and wondering thoughts, is stilled;
So quiet that the marvelous stillness is like music;
So quiet that we feel the very being which is the life of us all;
So quiet that we are renewed, we feel at one with all others,
at home in a tabernacle of stillness;
So quiet that we sense the ripples of this pool of quietness and healing
pass through us and out to the farthest star.

Silent prayer or meditation in its simplicity can be the most open and accessible form. It even eliminates the difficulty involved for atheists, humanists, and other non-theists among us because there is not an assumed ‘other’ listening to our prayers because the prayer is silent.

But take a second look at some of these other types of prayer. “Wow” can be a natural, spontaneous, overflow of appreciation with life. Kate Braestrup describes a moment in her book when she pulled over to the side of the road to watch a sunrise. Braestrup is a chaplain with the Maine Warden Service and was on her way to a search-and-rescue happening several hours from her home. Knowing full well the fear, anxiety, and sorrow awaiting her arrival, Braestrup still had to pull over the car and watch in amazement as the world worked its way through a stunning sunrise. She writes:

I pulled the car onto the verge and turned off the motor. I sat gazing at the dark water, rocks wrapped in light from a pale sky. Consumed by a yearning whose object I couldn’t identify, I could think of no way to respond to it, though I badly wanted to respond. So I sat there and let the sun rise.” (Beginner’s Grace, p 33)

She confessed she wished she would have responded by “composing a splendid prayer and leaping from my warm car to sing it, three beside the frosted road.” (Ibid p33) But all she could do was murmur, inarticulately, “Wow.”

I can manage a prayer of “Wow” from time to time. Often when it takes on words it becomes a “Thank you” prayer. “Oh, we give thanks for the precious day.” When I remember to say grace before a meal it is a “Thank you.” E E Cumming’s poem with the opening line “I thank you god for most this amazing day” is a good example of a prayer of thanks. You can find that one in our hymnals, number 504. All of the selections from 493 through 524 are prayers that might serve for us. Take a look. You will find a disproportional amount of “Wow” and “Thank you.”

I like this one from Richard Fewkes in our hymnal number 515.

For the sun and the dawn which we did not create;
For the moon and the evening which we did not make;
For the food which we plant but cannot grow; …
I won’t read the whole prayer; you get the gist of it. For all these good and necessary things in our lives “we lift up our hearts in thanks this day.”

“Sorry” prayers are there in our hymnal. There is a small section ahead of the meditations and prayers called “Confessions.” There are exactly three prayers there – not a lot. Number 477 by Vivian Pomeroy is a prayer I have used in worship now and then. “Forgive us that often we forgive ourselves so easily and others so hardly.” I have sometimes felt we need a companion to this that acknowledges the times we are harder on crueler to ourselves than we would ever dream of being to another human being, for which we ought to seek forgiveness.

The “Please” prayer is not in our hymnal as much. The “Please” prayer is asking God for something, either for ourselves or for others. Please give us guidance, healing, safety, blessing—it is used to ask for all kinds of things, great and small. There is a cluster of short prayers in the hymnal that count as intercessory prayers, as “please” prayers: numbers 507, 508, and 509. The first one says:

Grant us the ability to find joy and strength not in the strident call to arms but in stretching out our arms to grasp our fellow creatures in the striving for justice and truth.

The next one reads:

Save us from weak resignation to violence, teach us that restraint is the highest expression of power, that thoughtfulness and tenderness are the mark of the strong; help us to love our enemies, not by countering their sins but by remembering our own.

And finally, the last of the three says this:

Save us, compassionate Lord from our folly, by your wisdom, from our arrogance, by your forgiving love, from our greed, by your infinite bounty, and from our insecurity, by your healing power.

These ask for help. “Please,” they say, “Help us, save us, grant us, teach us, heal us.” But if you are following along in the hymnal I am sure you’ve noticed these are listed not as Unitarian Universalist prayers, but as examples of prayers from the three western monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

There is another “Please” prayer, but it turns the formula on its head. It is number 519 written by Rabindranath Tagore. A Bengali poet and novelist from the early 1900’s who developed some loose connections with American Unitarianism after World War 1. The prayer is this:

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me know beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battle-field, but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone;
But let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

As I said, this turns the formula on its head. Instead of praying for something I don’t have or can’t have, it is calling forth qualities from within myself that need at the moment. When I offer prayers during worship they may include elements of “Wow” and “Sorry,” but often they are taken up in “Thank you” and “Please.” I often say things like,

Where there is difficulty grant us strength. Where there is adversity grant us courage. Where there is suffering grant us meaning, that we may grow not bitter for the road we travel.

Perhaps some one asked you to pray for them. Perhaps this is no trouble for you! For many of us we struggle between compassion and an honest articulation of our beliefs about God and prayer when such a request is made. I believe in love. I believe that God is the transformative power of love. And I believe this love, this God, resides within each of us.

So when I say to someone, “You are in my prayers,” I don’t mean to imply that I have a special tug on God’s ear and can put in a good word for you. I don’t mean to imply that my prayers can somehow alter the laws of physics or tips the scales of chance. I see prayer as less a statement of fact and more a poetic reflection on reality. A prayer is not a research paper or an encyclopedia entry. A prayer is a statement of compassion. Prayer is not a replacement for actions that can make a situation better; nor is it a last resort. Prayer is a way of approaching the world.

And so do I pray the sort of prayers that ask for things of God. I don’t like the implication that God is a cosmic vending machine because from all I’ve experienced God is not like that. So I continue to struggle, and somewhere between poetry and integrity I will pray. Somewhere between the words that make sense and the words that soothe, I will pray for each of you. I will pray that health will be restored, pain eased, relationships reconciled and suffering made at least meaningful.

I invite you to pray – try the silence, try the “wow” and the “thank you,” and when necessary pray the “sorry” prayer. But know that if you pray then it will come up: I invite you to pray of others, to pray for those in need. I still struggle with it. But I will pray that health will be restored, pain eased, relationships reconciled and suffering made at least meaningful. Perhaps I will meet you sometime in this struggle, in prayer.

In a world without end,
May it be so

Beloved Community
1-16-11
Rev. Douglas Taylor

I found a humorous book a few weeks ago called The Savvy Convert’s Guide to Choosing a Religion which encourages the reader to “Compare and contrast before you commit” to one of the “99 religions to choose from!” It is all in good fun but it certainly points out the consumer-angled and individual-focused nature of religion today. The book offers a side-by-side comparison for you using categories such as dietary restrictions and afterlife quality, time commitment and sex regulations. In short, the book allows a person to research the question: “What do I get out of it? What does this or that religion offer me?”

Every religion can be boiled down to such questions. One offers Inner Peace while another presents you with Enlightenment. Perhaps you are really seeking Salvation, or it could be you’re just looking for a personal Purpose in this Life. Depending on if you want Paradise, Detached Calm, or a Fully Realized Human Potential – well, just scroll through the lists and pick the best fit. Every religion has something to offer the individual.

Of course the serious religions don’t stop there. Not that you’ll necessarily see this part outlined in The Savvy Convert’s Guide, but religion is not just a private occupation. Despite Alfred North Whitehead claim that “religion is what an individual does with his solitariness,” there is often a strong ethic involved in each religion that outlines how we are to treat other people – something more than ‘restrictions’ in certain behaviors; something closer to a call to participate in creating a better world. And the best among the religions go so far as to declare not just a social ethic but also a social order. They answer the question, “What do we get out of it?” Or “What is the vision of the optimal religious society?”

There is a little tension in the practice of every religion between the individual and the community. Religion needs to keep a dynamic balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community. In religions that over-emphasize the community-aspects of faith there is a need to work a little extra to allow the individual’s needs to be addressed. And in religions such as ours that over emphasize the individual-aspects of faith there is a need to work a little extra to allow the community’s needs to be addressed.

For all that we Unitarian Universalists focus on the dignity and worth of each individual and how each person is on their own religious path, we also have a vision of religious community that rises naturally from our way of faith. Many Unitarian Universalist congregations speak of themselves as Beloved Communities, or as striving to become such. In many ways “Beloved Community” is growing into almost a cliché or at least a buzz-phrase among us.

Do we know what it means? Do you remember when I said we tend to over-emphasize the individual in our tradition? Here is a perfect example: the phrase “Beloved Community” means one thing to some people and something else to other people. This week I read articles and sermons from UU ministers stating that Beloved Community is about justice making and specifically about racial justice. I read other places that Beloved Community is basically a very healthy religious community. Some will argue that the phrase can stand in for whatever we want while others will insist we use the phrase as it was originally used. And a multitude will happily point out that our debate about Beloved Community is actually a perfect example of our version of it – because Unitarian Universalist congregations have a healthy sense of individual conscience and civil debate is one positive mark of individuals in community.

While it comes up a lot around UUs, we of course did not originate the phrase. It was popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Beloved Community was central to his efforts of racial integration. The phrase first appears in a speech he gave at the conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate the seats on the busses, and during the victory rally King reflected that the end goal of such non-violent boycotts was not simply the legislation of desegregation. He said, “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.”

But King was not even the one to first use the phrase, “Beloved Community.” The phrase was actually coined in the early 20th century by an obscure Idealist named Josiah Royce, founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. King, a member of that same Fellowship of reconciliation, brought the phrase into more common use. The phrase comes from Royce’s book The Problem of Christianity in which he wrote:

“Since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which will win all over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by gracious love, not of mere individuality but of communities.”

Royce saw it, not as heaven and the ‘here-after,’ but heaven on earth where hate and division were no more. He said it was a form of community we work to create here on earth marked by unity and gracious love. King, when he first used the phrase, compared it to redemption and reconciliation, words that evoke a change from disharmony and disparity to harmony and equality.

In that speech he gave at the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in ’56 King went on to say this: “It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. … It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.” What King was after was not simply the legislation of desegregation. He was after a transformation in the hearts of all people to the end that we might learn to live and love together as one people, as a Beloved Community.

The most similar metaphor I can think of to compare with “Beloved Community” is “the Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom of God is meant to convey a sense of the divinely intended order of life. In the Kingdom of God, which is not yet realized – ‘thy kingdom come’ the prayer says because it is not yet here – in the Kingdom of God there is an order of things, a harmony with the lion and the lamb laying down together in peace. Shifting the language to “Beloved Community” creates a different tone, an even more egalitarian tone. The idea at the root is still he same: there will come a time when the Divine social order is lived among all humanity – a social order that declares all equal and all included with peace and harmony. Both phrases offer that idea at the root.

But notice this also: like many of the metaphors used for God in the Bible (such as Father, Master, and Lord) King is meant to be heard as one end of a relationship. The Father has a child; the master and lord have servants; the king has subjects. There is a relationship evoked in the metaphors. Certainly it is saying “God is like this;” but it is also saying “God is like this with us.” In shifting away from the phrase Kingdom of God and toward the phrase Beloved Community we are still using a relational metaphor, but we’ve left out the hierarchy and patriarchy embedded in the older Biblical phrase.

Beloved Community was the end goal of what Martin Luther King Jr. was striving for. The specific point of struggle began around racism in America. His end goal was bigger than racial injustice. He also spoke out and marched and protested against war and poverty. He fought against all injustice and oppression. He was working to create the beloved Community with equality and justice for all.

When he said that he dreamt of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” he was talking about the equality of the Beloved Community. When he said he dreamt of the day “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” he was talking about the how we are all connected to each other as one family, as God’s children together with a song of freedom on our lips.

That’s what the Beloved Community meant to King. It looked like equality and fairness. It looked like kinship with all the care and responsibility that comes with that. He called for the “solidarity of the human family.” He insisted that “all life is interrelated.” And if only he had been caught up by the feminist movement too he would have worded this a little differently but listen graciously to this. He said, “We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

That’s what King meant by the phrase Beloved Community. Is that what we mean when we use the phrase? I think it is when we can allow ourselves to rise out of the individual focus where we tend to reside. Clarence Skinner, an early 20th century Universalist minister, author and dean of Tufts School of Religion wrote, [in his book Worship and a Well Ordered Life, in the chapter called “The Church and the Beloved Community.]

“The Beloved Community is not an organization of individuals seeking private and selfish security for their souls. It is a new adventure, a spontaneous fellowship of consecrated men seeking a new world.” Again we hear the tension between the individual and the community: on the one hand we have individuals seeking ‘private security’ while on the other we have individuals in fellowship ‘seeking a new world.’

I believe that ‘new world’ is one in which differences are honored as a way to highlight our individuality but are never used to divide us into tribes and cliques. I believe that ‘new world’ is one in which equality and fairness give balance to extremes of greed and selfishness. I believe that ‘new world’ is one in which we afford one another a little extra grace when we are trying to understand one another.

If only we could find ourselves in such a civil and gracious society today. Instead we find an ever increasing level of anger and hate, ignorance and animosity posing as civil discourse in our country. Far from Beloved, our American society squanders its greatness with destructive one-up-man-ship posing as open discourse. How much longer can we spew hatred upon people for the simple fact that they disagree with us? How much longer can we tear each other apart in partisan anger and still say we live in a great nation? How much longer can we ignore the needs of the least of these among us and continue to pretend to be decent people and decent nation? How much longer can we go on without recognizing the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood that lay just a step beyond our pride and our pity?

In 1967, after a dozen years of struggle and speeches and protests and boycotts to usher in the Beloved Community, King published a book entitled “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” And now, 2 score and 4 years later we still stand on the edge and wonder, “where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?”

My colleague Mark Morrison-Reed says, “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind us each to all.” This is the work of the Beloved Community: to unveil those bonds – to help us feel that we are all equal in all the important ways. Morrison-Reed says, “There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.”

And that, dear ones, is exactly how the conversation of Beloved Community gets us into the conversation about justice. For if there injustice anywhere it is because we are not honoring that bond, that connectedness. Yes we have our differences; we have “particulars in our own lives and in the lives of others.” The path of chaos calls us to tear those bonds, to make those differences seem insurmountable as if we can survive without our brothers and sisters. But when the bond is felt, when the relationship is recognized, then we are compelled to seek what is good for our brothers and sisters as well as for ourselves. It is not the left or the right that is destroying the fabric of our nation. It is the debate itself – the level of hate and meanness we let pass for debate. We still stand on the edge between Chaos and Community. Where do we go from here?

Let me finish the quote from Mark Morrison-Reed. He says, “It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed.” (SLT #580)

“What do I get out of it? What does this religion have to offer me?” Let me offer an answer that will not be found in the Savvy Convert’s Guide. Any religious community worthy of you will offer you the unveiling of the bonds that bind you to the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the despised. It will unveil the bonds that bind you to all those people you do not like and those with whom you disagree and those with whom you are so very, very different from in thought and interest and values. Such a religion will offer you a seat at the table of humanity and humility and will call you to welcome in the last person you might wish to join you.

The dream Dr. King cast forth into history was not a dream that equality and freedom could be easily won. It was a dream that we would grow to be better people, that we would live up to the lofty ideals we espouse, that we would become the people our world needs us to be for the dream of equality and peace to be made true.

In a world without end, may it be so.

My Soul Cries Out for Water
1-9-11
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Last week I was reading through sections of the Tao Te Ch’ing with people as part of the Jumpin’ January Spiritual Practices workshop I was leading. And as always, one concept that rises in the reflections is about how hard it is to express the inexpressible. Indeed, the first chapter of the Tao Te Ch’ing states: “The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” It seems as if we all have experiences of something sacred, something holy, yet just how we experience it is unique and very hard to express, hard to put into words. And here we have Lao Tzu, the wise soul who apprehended the Tao and the way words are a poor means to convey the deep truth of the Tao, and Lao Tzu writes down a whole book full of words as an expression of the inexpressible.

In Anthony de Mello’s book of meditations, The Song of the Bird, there is this passage:

The disciples were full of questions about God.
Said the master, “God is Unknown and Unknowable. Every statement about him, every answer to your questions, is a distortion of the truth.”
The disciples were bewildered. “Then why do you speak about him at all?”
“Why does the bird sing?” said the master.

Aristotle wrote, “Midway between the unintelligible and the commonplace, it is metaphor which most produces knowledge.” Religious language is an attempt to speak about that which is inexpressible. The natural world and our experiences of it are complex and varied.  We live and move in a complex, multi dimensional world.

Words are like maps that represent our experiences.  And it was Alfred Korzybski who coined the phrase, “the map is not the territory.”  We are like cartographers faced with the task of creating a flat map of a curved earth.  Words can be close approximations at best, never exact representations. Thus we use a form of language, religious and metaphorical, to express what we experience.

The primary purpose of such speaking, the primary use of such language is for worship. We use religious language to sing about that which is praise-worthy. Religious images and words are most useful, most powerful, in the context of religious worship.

When I was on Sabbatical last year at Meadville Lombard Theological School, I sat in on a Pragmatic Theology course. The professor would occasionally refer to Doxological language. And he would use that word strung into sentence full of words that made me run to my dictionary. But I discovered ‘doxological’ is not in the dictionary. I had to look up the root and frustratingly interpret what he was saying. I had forgotten this tendency of academics. But what I discovered was that our professor was making the case that worship was the primary use of theology and of all religious language.

Everything that can be said about God is partial and flawed and ultimately a distortion of the truth. Why speak of God at all? For doxological reasons. From all that dwell below the sky, let songs of hope and faith arise. This is a doxology. This is a song of praise. In religious language we begin to express the important things we need to say together.

And the author of the reading we heard this morning (Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology) agrees when she states, “The primary context for any discussion of religious language is worship. [One must have] a sense of the mystery surrounding existence, of the profound inadequacy of all our thoughts and words.” (p2) But for this to work, we must recognize that we are not stating scientific facts of eye witness historical accounts of reality. We are using a language of metaphor and poetry to speak about the inexpressible reality of the sacred, of the Tao, of God.

And if this were all there was to this then we would spend the rest of our morning basking in metaphor and poetic imagery. But there is a secondary context to religious language, one that – if you’ll pardon the metaphor – throws a wrench in the works. That secondary function is interpretive. By this we mean that religious language is used not only to praise what is worth, but also to interpret reality – to identify what is praiseworthy: to name it and interpret it.

And herein lays the crux of McFague’s conundrum which is the root of her whole book: Not only is it a paradoxical impossibility to use the religious language interpretively, we now do so in our modern context which makes the task that much more impossible. She explains: “We do not live in a sacramental universe in which things of this world … are understood as connected to and permeated by divine power.” (p1) People used to live in a world wherein the meaningfulness and the truth of religious language was not a question. Prior to the widespread understanding and use of modern science, people perceived the world as an example of the divine order established by God.

(At least this is how it unfolded in the West. I suppose a very similar disillusionment and de-sanctification may well have taken place in the Orient when Modernity hit there as well, but I am not enough of a student of world history to say so with certainty.) So, at least in the West, people understood that “each and every scrap of creation, both natural and human, participates in and signifies the divine order.” (p11) And that is just no longer the case. People today, generally, do not see the world as suffused with divinity. And thus religious language is irrelevant.

At least that is one possibility: irrelevancy. The other alternative is found on the conservative end of practiced religion: idolatry. Because there is so obvious a disconnect between religious language and modern reality we can either take our religious language too seriously and see the symbols and metaphors as literally true (which is the particular danger that fundamentalist and conservative religion faces) or we can take our religious language not seriously enough and see the metaphors as quaintly archaic (which is the particular danger that liberal religion in general and Unitarian Universalism in particular faces.) If we see the metaphors as literally true then they become idolatrous. If we see them as quaintly archaic they become irrelevant.

We enjoy seeing the ready critique liberal religion offers to the literalists. One of the most captivating lines from the Tao of Physics book states, “Because our representation of reality is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality.” (P 28)  Along that same line of thought, theologian Paul Tillich argues that the first step we took away from the sacramental understanding on the universe was when religion “defended its great symbols, not as symbols, but as literal stories.” (from Tillich’s Lost Dimension of Religion.) Because in doing so, it pulls the symbol down into the realm of being verified by science or history or logic.

Harder to see and enjoy is the critique leveled against liberal religion for ceding religious language to the fundamentalists because we’ve lost sight of its relevance to our lives. We, the ever-faithful iconoclasts, always ready to tear down the idols and point out that the emperor has no clothes, have unfortunately slipped allowed our most powerful words to slip away into irrelevancy.

So, of course, Tillich along with McFague and perhaps Lao Tzu as well, sees a way out of this conundrum. There is a way to use religious language without it falling into either idolatry or irrelevance. Instead, we can see religious language as metaphorical and vibrant. To think and speak metaphorically is not notice the thread of similarity between two dissimilar things or events, one of which is well known and the other less well known. We can then say “this” which we don’t know so well is like “that” which we do know. To use an old Buddhist parable, it is the finger pointing to the moon. The focus is the moon, what we understand is the pointing finger. If we focus only on the pointing finger we miss the object of the metaphor.

So we try to understand something like spiritual longing and I tell you my soul cries out for water. Well, we know what it is like to be thirsty therefore we can begin to speak about spiritual longing through the metaphor. In this same way we can begin to speak of Grace and Beloved Community and God as well as hope, fear, love, joy, and so on. Metaphor is not mere poetic adornment and ornamentation with which to add flavor or color to otherwise boring or flat language. Metaphor is our doorway into the otherwise inexpressible experiences we share.

Ultimate Reality is a mystery to which we have clues, but will never fully understand. The words we use, as Augustine is quoted to have said in the reading, are halting and inadequate. Words are helpful, but they also get in the way.

Theoretical Physicist Werner Heisenberg once said “that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.”  Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein went a step farther saying “The limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world.” Yet through imagination and metaphor we are able to stretch beyond that limit. Metaphorical language takes us beyond such limits to begin to apprehend infinity.

Taoist sage, Chang Tzu wrote:

Fishing baskets are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the baskets; snares are employed to catch hares, but when the hares are got, men forget the snares.  Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are grasped, men forget the words.

Words get us there, and words get in the way; but they are all we have.  I firmly assert that anything we can say about the deepest, most profound levels of life must necessarily be filtered through our human language.  As a means of discussing all that is Holy, human words and concepts are hopelessly inadequate.  However, we must try because spiritual growth is important, and it can only be accomplished through dialogue with yourself, with your neighbor, and with your God.  We need words for this.

Remembering the basic concept of how metaphorical language works – we need one thing to be fairly well known and the other to be somewhat unknown or unknowable. So if we look in the Bible for our religious language it can be hit or miss. When we speak of God as a shepherd or as a king, it assumes that shepherds and kings are still in our regular daily living – and they are not. When it speaks of Jesus as the Anointed One, anointing is not a concept we experience in our daily living. We at least know what kings and shepherds are even though they are uncommon. The only anointing that happens nowadays is in religious ritual! It is a self-referencing metaphor If a metaphor is to help us understand one thing by comparing it to a well known other thing – then it is a broken metaphor if we really don’t understand either!

But that’s not all there is in the traditional Christian lexicon of metaphor. Consider the times when God is referred to as spirit – which is a word wonderfully tangled up with both breath and wind. Consider the times in scripture when God is referred to as bread or water or shelter or love. These are all in there. And do we know anything about breath and water, bread and shelter, and love? We know that these are all biological necessities for life. And so the language is comparing God to those basic elements that make living possible.

But we need not even turn back to the traditional metaphors if we don’t want. The best part of being a heretic is the freedom to uncover new images and metaphors. And perhaps you’ve noticed: we don’t talk a lot about bread and breath … or do we?

“Spirit of life, blow in the wind.” Breath and wind and spirit have always been tangled together in translation, as they are in symbol and metaphor. “Roots hold me close,” we sing, without ever questioning that this is of course a metaphor. “Wings set me free,” we sing, finding the metaphor to a powerful one that nourishes us.

And also we speak of a web of life, an interconnectedness in the universe that begins to sound a great deal like a sacramental understanding of the universe. To be sure there is a literal analogy here at the atomic level and with the laws of physics. But more importantly there is a metaphorical level where we say “this” is like “that.” The universe is like a web, you and I are connected in a way that resembles a web of thread linking all life together. Seek ye metaphors and symbols in your living that you may be thus nourished. And so I say, my soul cries out for water. Perhaps you will not hear this as a request for a glass of H2O. And perhaps you will not hear this as a mere poetical flourish on my part. Perhaps, perhaps you will hear and recognize what thirst is like. Perhaps you will hear and recognize a longing, a yearning, a thirst within yourself as well. Perhaps we can be together and say to one another, “Yes. Let us drink deeply from this well together. Let us seek to quench this thirst.”

Come, let us drink deep together.

In a world without end, may it be so.

Practicing Spirit
1-2-11
Douglas Taylor

On a hot Monday in July several years ago, my family went out hunting for dinosaur fossils. This was an activity that Keenan, our middle child now 18, had requested for his birthday party. He had turned ten years old that year back in April, but there were delays. If we had been able, for example, to coordinate sooner with the paleontologist who took us on the tour, we might not have been so hot. We invited five families to join us and we explored two different sites. We drank a lot of water that hot July day.

This took place back when we lived in D.C. and as it turns out Washington D.C. sits atop a fossil band that runs parallel to the eastern coast. Our paleontologist guide told us that this is a critical point: If you are going to try to find dinosaur fossils you should look where you can reasonably expect to be able to find some. We did not find any fossilized dinosaur bones. We found sharks’ teeth, crystals, very old rocks, and petrified wood from the time of the dinosaurs. Our paleontologist guide told us that this is a second critical point: If you do not find anything it does not mean you lack special skills or have not tried hard enough, it just means you have not been lucky enough.

Our spiritual lives can be like searching for dinosaur fossils on a hot Monday in July. If you are going to try to find spiritual nourishment, you would do well to look where you can reasonably expect to find some. For example, read the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, and the Humanist Manifesto, go to church, pray, meditate, join a Small Group, increase your charitable giving, sing in the choir, volunteer to help people in need. These are tried and true places where one can reasonable expect to find spiritual nourishment. It is known that there is a rich vein of spirit runs parallel to these activities.

And if nothing special happens, or only happens for you once in a long time, that doesn’t mean you ‘don’t get it’ or are not spiritual enough. It simply means you have hit a dry time in your spiritual life. Remember that this can still be a wonderful time if you don’t worry and you don’t stop reading, attending, singing, praying, giving, and serving as you usually do. Trust also that the dry time will end and you will find that fossil or be struck by that deep personal and spiritual insight.

And here, amidst my delightful metaphor of the free and responsible search for dinosaur fossils I want to point out the metaphorical language that keeps popping up when we talk about spirituality. Much of the language we use for engaging in a spiritual practice speaks of a search, a quest, an attempt to find something. We long to find that spiritual insight, that fossil bone, or simply an inner calm and peace. When in our UU Principles we lift up the free and responsible search it is for truth and meaning – and it is the search for meaning that is the heart of a spiritual practice.

And what is meaning, after all, but the depth dimension we make of this life ourselves! “This hour is sacred because we make it so,” (a common Call to Worship I use by Jim Wickman). Meaning is a level of depth we find in our living; it is a quality of richness. How often do we slog through life or portions of our lives just going through the motions – no passion or careful thought expended; nothing of ourselves in the tasks? But our lives are like a rich fossil bed awaiting our effort and attention. With some practice, a wealth of spirit is just waiting to flow into our living.

In the introduction of the book Everyday Spiritual Practice, Editor Scott Alexander offers the guiding definition he used for deciding what to include in the book. He wrote that an everyday spiritual practice can be prayer or meditation, yoga or justice-making, recycling or quilting. “They are any activity or attitude in which you can regularly and intentionally engage, and which significantly deepens the quality of your relationship with the miracle of life both within and beyond you.” (p 5)

So, brushing your teeth or any number of personal hygiene rituals can be considered an “activity in which you regularly and intentionally engage.” But it is not a spiritual activity. Gardening can be just gardening, even though you do it every day in season. Sitting and staring off into space might be daydreaming rather than meditation even if you schedule it into your daily routine. These activities have the intentionality and the regularity but lack the depth implied in naming them as ‘spiritual’ practices. Alexander said it could be “any activity or attitude in which you can regularly and intentionally engage, and which significantly deepens the quality of your relationship with the miracle of life both within and beyond you.” Intentionality and regularity are important, but depth makes the difference.

And it seems to me one implication of this line of thinking is this: if you wish to begin a spiritual practice, you don’t need to choose a traditional form such as daily prayer or yoga or sitting Zen. You could as readily choose a practice you already have such as gardening or quilting and add the depth dimension to it. It may prove easier to add a depth dimension to a current practice than it would be to begin and sustain a new practice.

To be sure, the traditional practices we thinks of when we considers spiritual practices are excellent choices because, as my paleontologist guide offered, “If you are going to try to find dinosaur fossils you should look where you can reasonably expect to be able to find some.” But as Unitarian Universalist we are iconoclasts – doing religion the way it has always been done holds little interest for most people who gather here. Thus, Alexander’s point is well made: any activity in which you regularly and intentionally engage can serve when you add the depth dimension to it, when you use it to “significantly deepen the quality of your relationship” with life.

Listen to this story of cellist Pablo Casals that I found in the new Spirit in Practice curriculum from the UUA – the curriculum (as it happens) that Jeff Donahue will be leading next month (February.)

Pablo Casals, born in Vendrell, Spain to a Puerto Rican mother, is thought by many to be the greatest cellist who ever lived. His recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, made between 1936 and 1939, are considered unsurpassed to this day.
Casals’ prodigious musical talent became evident early. By the age of four he could play the violin, piano, and flute (having been taught by the church organist and choir director). When he first heard a cello at the age of 11, he decided to dedicate himself to that instrument, and he had already given a solo recital in Barcelona three years later at the age of 14. Five years later he was on the faculty of the renowned Municipal School of Music in Barcelona and was principal cellist of the Barcelona Opera House. He gained international acclaim in a career of such length that he performed in the United States for both President Theodore Roosevelt and President John F. Kennedy.
Yet even having attained such unquestionable mastery of his instrument, throughout his entire life Casals maintained a disciplined regimen of practicing for five or six hours every day. On the day he died, at the age of 96, he had already put in several hours practicing his scales. A few years earlier, when he was 93, a friend asked him why, after all he had achieved; he was still practicing as hard as ever. “Because,” Casals replied, “I think I’m making progress.”

So, practice! Casels found that the simple act of a daily routine was an essential part of the gift he had to offer the world. What would your life be like if you practiced something – anything – for five hours every day? I personally find this a daunting prospect. Even if we reduce the question to a mere 15 minutes each day.

I have, over the years, grumbled at myself that while I can manage to add a quality of depth to nearly any activity in my life, it is sustaining a regularity of practice that eludes me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve tried everything, but I have tried a lot of different practices and nothing sticks. In my self-depreciating voice I would say I am completely lacking in discipline! Alexander says a spiritual practice should have intentionality and regularity as well as depth. I can reach the depth, but the regularity is so very hard for me.

But then I read one of the early chapters in that Everyday Spirituality book. I read the chapter (entitled “Eclectic Spirituality”) in which my colleague Barbara Wells writes about her preferred spiritual practice:

“I have come to realize that my spiritual practice can best be described as “eclectic.’ I have been fed through diverse and what may seem to be conflicting ways. I have gained spiritual knowledge in places as different as a college class-room and a New Age support group. I have journaled, prayed, meditated, danced, and sung to nurture my spirit. I have worshipped alone on a mountainside and in a ballroom filled with thousands. I have gone months without doing anything that looks remotely spiritual and have prayed every day for weeks at a time. That variety has been extraordinarily fulfilling and good for my soul.
“Eclectic spiritual practice [Wells continues] goes against the prevailing view that spiritual practice is like exercise: It must be a consistent, daily regimen, or your spirit will wither and die. Because this belief is so common, I have on occasion been called to task for not being ‘spiritual enough.’ But I believe there is no one-size-fits-all spirituality.” (p29)

And so perhaps there isn’t even a one-size-fits-me spirituality! And maybe, just maybe, that is not a cop-out on my part. Maybe this can be real because the point of a spiritual practice is not to do it the way the monks and mystics of old had always done it. The point is not to go through the motions of a spiritual practice. The point is to reach that depth on a regular basis, to develop the capacity to reach that quality of depth in living on a regular basis because it will make life better. Wells, in her “Eclectic Spirituality” essay adds this, “Spiritual practice is ultimately designed for something more: to make us better people and to bring our gifts into the world.” (Ibid, p32)

I like that wrinkle in the defined purpose of spiritual practices! To bring our gifts into the world! Certainly when I think of deeply spiritual people who spend their lives in traditional spiritual practice this definition can work: the gift they bring is of peace and compassion in their interactions with all people. That kind of peace spreads. It is good stuff! It is a gift they bring the world. But that is not the only gift a person can have. There is no one-size-fits-all gift we all have (except perhaps love – but I’ll leave that argument for another morning.)

What if your gift is for laughter or organizing things or seeing connections that others might miss? What if your gift is for song or listening or building things? There is a way to tap into your gift through regular, intentional practice. You can find and bring forth that best part of yourself.

And here I lift up a delightful paradox, at least a paradox in the words we use to describe what is going on. We speak of spiritual practice as being a search, a quest, an attempt to find something. And yet, notice in the Fulghum reading I offered this morning (from All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten, “Get Found, Kid” p54-56) how sometimes we speak not of finding but of being found. Notice how sometimes we will hide things about ourselves that are too intimate or tender to share, or would make us too vulnerable. Notice how sometimes what we are searching to find is only our own selves – and thus we are found.

When we hide a part of ourselves away in shame or fear, it may well be a deep part of ourselves that is linked to our gift. Some argue that it always is. Whatever you are after when you engage in a spiritual practice, be it God or your own gift, or the deep vulnerable core of yourself – I wish you good hunting. On hot Mondays in July or cold Sundays in January, may that spiritual insight or fossil bone turn up in your search!

In a world without end,
May it be so.