Sermons

Poisoning Our Own Wells
10-24-2010
Rev. Douglas Taylor

We call our planet Mother Earth. Many people, indeed many of us here gathered feel our spiritual connection with the earth. There is that amazing photo from a generation back of an astronaut floating in space looking back at earth. In the shot we can see the astronaut’s tether line and I almost imagine it to be like an umbilical cord. It’s not a bad metaphor. I wonder how long people could live without Mother Earth.

I read Science Fiction and one of the standard formulas for such stories is space exploration. In these stories we have figured out how to synthetically manufacture what we normally rely upon the earth for: air to breath, sunlight, food, water. But I wonder: would the synthetic stuff really work over time. I don’t doubt that it can work over the span of a year or two. Astronauts have done this and have thrived. But I really wonder how far we could remove ourselves from the earth, cut the umbilical cord and float free, and still survive. Carl Sagan wrote “We are the local embodiment of a cosmos grown to self-awareness.” Our living is wholly and completely dependant on the earth.

I’m not saying anything dramatic or profound. But … doesn’t it seem like we take it for granted at times? Not just the beauty of it all when we pave paradise and put up a parking lot, but the basic survival necessity of it when we poison the land and the air and the water because we think of it like the lollipop (in the children’s story): disposable. We can always get another lollipop; we can always get more water, more air, more earth. It’s all over the place.

The latest example involves the Marcellus Shale region under parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and other states. The region contains the largest natural gas reserve in the country. The debate over the extraction of this gas has been significant. My very fine colleague just to the south of us across the PA border, Rev. Darcey Laine, preached a sermon here recently in which she talked about the Precautionary Principle. In that sermon my colleague lifted up the wise position of proceeding with extra caution when there was a significant degree of risk, such as we face now.

There are several vocal people in this congregation who have been fighting against the planned extraction of the Marcellus natural gas. And there are people in the congregation who have sold or leased their land to the company. It reminds me of other events in the life of this church when, for example, we protested Walmart. I came out forcefully declaring my commitment to never shop at Walmart again until they changed their impoverishing ways. And yet there were people in the congregation who secretly told me they could not make a similar pledge because they could not afford to stop shopping at Walmart.

Personal economics plays a part, and good people make hard decisions. I have friends who are facing foreclosure and bankruptcy on their farm – a common story of late – and the option of selling or leasing a portion of the land for natural gas extraction is the piece that could make the difference for the family. And yet I speak out against hydro-fracking; it is a dangerous proposition and a morally short-sighted one. But I must admit I do not know what I would do if I were in my friends’ shoes facing foreclosure.

The way this religious community works is that we demand that we each live by our faith as it is made known to us, to act and choose with integrity. I can witness to what I known based on my understanding, but you are under no obligation to agree with me. You don’t have to hate hydro-fracking or support gay-marriage or oppose the war or vote republican to be a member of this congregation! Our principles lead many of us to side with the general patterns of liberal and progressive issues; but there is no creed or law or social agenda you must adhere to to be here. I “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,” I speak for the streams and the wells and the health of our young. You must only heed the voice of your conscience, not the voice of an external religious authority. And I must do the same.

Let me tell you what I believe to be true. The natural gas extraction process known as hydro-fracking is dangerous to our Mother Earth and to all of us living on the earth where the process will be used. My fear is that short-sighted greed and an unhealthy gluttony for cheap energy will push our society to take high-stakes risks that threaten our environment and the public health. I am very concerned about this process and I would go so far as to say it is morally corrupt.

Hydro-fracking is not new – it’s a technique that has been used for decades. But what is new within the past few years is a twist to the technique, interestingly: pioneered by Halliburton, (according to Sandra Steingraber in Orion magazine, “The Whole Fracking Enchilada,” Sept/Oct 2010 issue) that bores horizontally through the bedrock to pump millions of gallons of chemically-laced water to chase the gas to the surface. Because this particular version of Hydro-fracking is new there is not a whole lot of regulation and oversight. And with such a huge push happening to drill immediately, the lack of regulation is grossly irresponsible.

The movie Gasland, produced by Josh Fox, is a documentary about hydro-fracking. In the Movie, Fox visits Dimock, Pennsylvania where they have been drilling for natural gas using this method for a few years now. In Dimock, Fox met families “able to light their tap water on fire as well as suffering from numerous health issues and fearing their water wells had been contaminated.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland) On Monday evening November 1st, there will be another showing of the movie Gasland with Josh Fox at the Anderson Center.

Can’t we slow down enough to consider our options? Can we not use the precautionary principle to seriously explore and judge the risks to the environment and public health before plunging ahead? And what exactly is wrong with renewable energy sources other than the loss of income for the oil companies? Environmental activist Van Jones was clever to point out that the old way of creating energy is to pull death out of the ground, to pull coal and petroleum, plants and animals that have died and fossilized ages back. Our current energy plan is to burn death. The renewable alternatives of wind and solar energy are of life. We don’t need to wait a million years after something died to be able to turn on the light. I’m not sure why we are even considering a high-risk hunt for natural gas.

But my complaint is not just Hydro-fracking – though certainly that is the issue of the day here in Southern Tier. The bigger piece of this, for me at least, is the systemic toxification of our environment. Why is it considered even a possibility to be pouring known hazardous chemicals down into the earth? In the book Poisoned for Profit the authors write: “Since the 1930’s the number of synthetic chemicals put into commercial use has doubled every seven to eight years.” (p21) We’re talking about pesticides and growth hormones, industrial waste and heavy metals. It’s in our food, in our water, in our air and our earth. It’s in our children and in each of us. We live in a synthetic and chemical age, does anyone else find that disconcerting?

I was certainly under the impression before doing some research that the EPA had a good handle on most of this. I was under the impression that while it was bad it was not that bad. I figured the government does regulate this stuff, after all.

But consider a few examples. Did you ever see the movie Erin Brokovich starring Julia Roberts. It’s from ten years ago and is based on the real story of investigator Erin Brokovich’s legal fight against PG&E Energy Company for allowing the industrial poison Hexavalent Chromium to leach into the groundwater and then covering it up when they found out. The Hexavalent Chromium has been linked to cancer. It’s an eye opening movie, very close to the actual events.

How about a closer example: for much of its history in Endicott, NY, IBM was leaking industrial solvents into the earth.  As I hope most of you are aware, this is what we now call the ‘plume.’ The NYS health department report tells us that “In 2002, scientists discovered a large underground chemical plume, which was releasing toxic gases into homes and offices in a 350-acre (1.4 km2) swath south of the plant. The main chemical was a liquid cleaning agent called trichloroethylene (TCE), that has been linked to cancer and other illnesses.” (http://www.health.state.ny.us/environmental/investigations/broome/health_statistics_review.htm.)

Doug Jackson is a Tennessee state senator who has a reputation as a legislator who cares about the environment. He is trying to help his community, Dickson County, deal with a TCE plume from their landfill that seems to correlate with a significant number of cases of childhood cancer. “But trying to prove causation from environmental contamination is very, very difficult,” he writes, “and legally very challenging.” Jackson goes on to explain, “We have to understand that we’re a capitalist society. To try to implement something that might be good for the public but that could create a burden, embarrassment, or hardship for the business community creates a real challenge for you if you are trying to pass legislation.” (p7)

So, proof is hard to establish. But why should the progress and profit of business take priority over public health?

Visiting Chicago during my sabbatical last year reminded me of the darker side of the city’s history that I had learned while in seminary there. Basically we took thriving marsh lands unusable to us, and transformed them into one of the renowned mega-cities of the world.  And we took land that was once beautiful to behold and transformed in into land that is literally poisonous to live in.  I remember a field trip during seminary to the south side of Chicago where we saw the public housing projects built next to the stinking sewage treatment plants. We saw a riverbank where the city refused to post a warning about the toxicity levels because they didn’t want to create panic. Did you know that things got so bad with the river, the city of Chicago needed a place to send its sewage, but couldn’t in good conscience just send in down the river into Lake Michigan, so we managed to reverse the direction the river flow.  They could so alter the natural landscape but still left the poor to live in the poisoned places.

This is a moral issue. Destroying our Mother Earth as if it is a commodity for us to use up is reprehensible. In the creation story in the Bible story of creation, God made things and each evening said it was good. God made the water and the earth and said it was good, made plants and animals and birds and fish and said it was good; made people and said it was good. (Gen 1) In the Koran God asks “The heavens and earth and everything in it, think you I made them in jest?” (23:115 and 44:38). In the Tao Te Ching, we read that from the Tao arose the Ten Thousand Things, which translates to “everything” meaning – all of it is precious, all of it is included. The earth does not include any junk. God didn’t make any junk. In the Koran, God doesn’t say, “that part over there, those people over there, I was just kidding.” No. In the Bible, it doesn’t say, on the seventh day God took the rest of the stuff and just left it lying around. No. We don’t have any junk. All of it and everyone is precious. We’re all in the solution. As grace as this all certainly seems to be, all is not lost. We can turn it around and build a new day.

We need to build a new way. And not just at the policy level, but in the grassroots as well. We have to get this one right. When we build a new energy structure in this nation with wind and solar and other renewable energy forms: we must look not only to how we can use this technology to save our economy but how we can use it to save the people too. We must seek a way to not put ourselves in the position of needing to choose between financial ruin and ruin of the good earth. We have got to say there are no throw away resources, no throw away species, no throw away toxic leftover, no throw away people, and no throw away earth.

The Precautionary Principle asks us to pause for a deep breath and consider where we can go from here. Where do we want to go from here? A new way is possible.

Together, with a focus on life, we can build a new way. Together, with a commitment to caring for our Mother Earth so that Mother Earth can in turn care for us, we can build a new way. Together, with an eye on caring for the whole planet, we can build a new way. We will build a new way, together.

In a world without end
May it be so

Why We Respect Each Other
10-10-2010
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Under the full moon on the Autumnal Equinox during a reception following a simple pagan handfasting, I fell into a conversation with a sometimes-Muslim about religious tolerance and understanding. He offered compliments for the service I had just led, and then offered compliments to Unitarian Universalism saying how much he appreciated the way we look to all the world’s religions for wisdom. He had grown up in America as a second-generation Christian Arab where most people assumed he was Muslim. Of course, he knew a lot about Islam for the culture of his parent’s homeland was so deeply influenced by that faith and many of their friends and members of their extended family were Muslim. He had developed the habit of visiting both moderate Christian as well as moderate Muslim worshiping communities out in the rural area where he now lived. He said there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation near by, though he wished he could visit one from time to time. He appreciated what a Unitarian Universalist congregation had to offer: a commitment to religious freedom, to religious tolerance and a respect for other religions.

A Pew Forum survey from 2008 reported that 65% of Americans believe that “many Religions can lead to eternal life.” (As cited in “We Are All Hindus Now” by Lisa Miller of Newsweek, August 15, 2009) This indicates willingness on the part of many Americans to not only respect other religions, but even to sample from them. People will chant “Om” while doing yoga (which comes from Hinduism), read a meditation written by the Dali Lama (who is Buddhist), and then drop in for a vespers service at the local Catholic Church in the evening.

For many people, the walls are growing fuzzy – the distinctions between mainline protestant churches are seen as inconsequential. For some time now, many Christians have felt free to change denominations without significant trouble. Fewer and fewer people notice the lines that once meant a great deal. More recently, we see some of this broad acceptance to be growing to include the world’s religions. As in the example of the man I spoke with under the full moon last month, it is not a problem to participate in both a Christian and a Muslim community. The differences are just not that big a deal.

And yet, while all this is true, there is remains a painfully ugly trend to use our religious differences to divide the saved from the unsaved, the faithful from the infidels, the true people of God from those who are unacceptable in God’s sight. Author and social analyst James Wiggins (from his book: In Praise of Religious Diversity) claims that virtually every armed conflict occurring on the planet today is explicitly driven by religious motives or by the memory of a preexisting religious conflict. That’s quite a claim; and yet consider suicide bombers, ethnic cleansing, inquisitions and crusades, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Muslims and Jews fighting in one land, Catholics and Protestants attacking each other in another, Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other there in another land, and the list goes on.

And that is the part of the story that gets lifted up. This violence is an undeniable part of the story of the way people of faith relate to those who are different. There are certainly many examples of our religious differences dividing us. For all the progressive and open-minded examples, for all the extensive research surveys and reports, it is still the violence that haunts us. Author and controversial Catholic priest Hans Kung has written, “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.”

There are countless religious individuals and religious communities that are willing to tolerate and even respect people of differing faiths. There are countless times when people honor the commandments to love their neighbors as themselves, to wish for their neighbors what they wish for themselves, and to refrain from offering to their neighbors anything which they themselves find hateful. There are countless times when religious people and religious communities have actually followed the peaceful precepts of their traditions.

Our own Unitarian Universalism is a religion that features tolerance in a unique way. We strive to honor and accept the difference of each individual within our own community. We do not need to take ourselves beyond our own religious community to meet someone who of different beliefs. We have humanists and pagans and theists and agnostics all mingled together in one community. Respect of other people’s beliefs is a central aspect of our faith; it is our covenant. We’ve codified it in our central statement of identity.

In our history, we look back to the most significant early royal edict of religious tolerance and see it was issued by a Unitarian. King John Sigismund of Transylvania issued the Edict of Torda in 1568 proclaiming “in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.” In practice this was a limited amount of tolerance offered, but the language was remarkably universal and planted the seeds for future Edicts of religious toleration.

But I think at times people of goodwill can go too far with such ideas. Stephen Prothero warns of such things in the reading from this morning (God Is Not One.) The goal is not to gloss over differences or dismiss the points of conflict. Our differences are worth noting. As we gather each Sunday, we are not pretending we all believe the same thing. We honor the differences. That metaphor of each of us climbing along a different path yet we all are striving for the same mountain top – that is a great metaphor. But there is a version that goes further.

Radical pluralism would acknowledge that the different religions seem to be climbing different mountains, striving for different summits. Buddhism is seeking nirvana, which is nothing like heaven. The work of being a faithful Muslim is to offer your submission to God, yet the work of being a faithful Jew is to return to God from the exile you find yourself in. Prothero spends the bulk of his recent book, God Is Not One, outlining the differences in the major religions of the world.

Prothero’s point is that it is a bad idea to focus only on the lofty commonalities at the expense of the very real differences. It is counterproductive toward the goal of mutual understanding as well as global peace. And I agree. The details of belief and practice are important. The differences matter. The reality that each of the world’s major religions has divergent claims as to what is true must not be ignored.

But consider this: perhaps our interest is not in creating one grand unified and universal religion. Oh, to be sure that has been the goal of some throughout history. That has been the exact goal of several prominent Unitarians and no small amount of Universalists throughout history. In the 1950s, for example, Universalist minister and poet Ken Patton worked to create a “religion for one world” at the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston where symbols for all the world’s religions hung around the worship space, a mural of the Andromeda Galaxy was painted on the proscenium, and a bookshelf behind the podium held the texts of all the world’s scriptures. This experiment was in a way much like the efforts to create utopian societies, and like all such experiences, it met with limited success and disbanded all too soon.

But I do not believe our goal is to create such a universal religion. I think the particulars of time and place, the details of practice and culture, are important to the religious endeavor. Day to day living is intertwined with eternity. This exact spot is an important place in the effort to experience the magnitude of all existence. This tree, this river, this building, this hour, this series of steps and movements – the particulars of time and place are the vehicle by which we each access that which transcends time and place.

Our goal is not one unified and universal religion for all people for all time. I believe instead that our goal is to meet and engage with the diversity of particularities that we may learn and grow from the experiences. That is goal of celebrating all the world’s religions. The various truth claims need not be made compatible with each other. Still, there are those who cling to the modernist view that one person’s claims at truth makes another’s claims at truth to be untrue. And certainly the idea that all claims at truth are equally true is an unmanageable idea – it doesn’t fit objective reality. Either water is hot or it is cold, but not both at the same time! Either baptism is essential or it is not. Either God is one or three or thousands, but not all of the above. Either the practice of praying five times a day is the true way or it is not. When we allow truth to be relative then it loses meaning.

Have you bumped into this idea? ‘Either I am right or you are right – but it is impossible for us both to be right!’ Therefore, why bother being respectful with people of differing religions when the real work seems to be to convince them they are not right? What do we do with that?

What I do with that is turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson. To avoid relativism of truth claims I look to the Transcendentalists. In his great essay Self-Reliance, Emerson admonishes, “Trust yourself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” The Transcendentalists such as Emerson captured the fullness of the sentiment that Experience can hold the authoritative claim above all other claims because by our intuition we run straight to the heart of God.

And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely: that the Highest dwells with him. (Oversoul)

The implication of such a connection is not only do we find no wall between us and the Divine, but in this same way we can know what is true and right and just. Emerson writes:

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. (Self-Reliance)
Thus, according to Emerson, there is a Divine moral law inscribe in the heart and conscience of every person. You recognize truth when you see it because you ‘lie in the lap’ of the source of truth.

And so what do you do with this assertion when different individuals recognize different and conflicting truths? As each tree is different from every other tree, as the coast of the northern Atlantic differs from the coast of the southern Pacific, as today’s clouds and wind patterns are not the same as they were yesterday, so too do we find our individual experiences of the holy are different yet true.

We say that every person experiences and interacts with that which is holy, with the sacred, with God, in the way that fits for that person. Each person is different, like a fingerprint. What fits you will not fit me. That is how we are designed and we honor that and find it so easy to tolerate others when we are not threatened by the differences!

In his book, The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks writes:

The human other is a trace of the divine.  As an ancient Jewish teaching puts it, “When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every person in the same image – His image – and each is different.” The Challenge to the religious imagination is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.  (p60)

Your particular connection and expression of the holy is your contribution to the pattern. The differences among us beautify the pattern of the whole. There would be no harmony if we all sang the same note. Talking with people who sound like you do is like walking around endlessly in a cul-de-sac, the challenge is absent and the beauty fades by familiarity!

It is critical to discover the divine spark within you. However, the real challenge is to see the divine spark within another, the inherent worthiness and dignity of another; to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.  It is one of the great tasks of a spiritual life: to allow yourself to be challenged from time to time by the perspective of another. It is one of the best ways to stay grounded in your otherwise private spiritual journey. Peace and understanding between people of differing faiths is critical for peace and understanding to take root in the world.

We are one in the call to seek meaning in our lives. We are one in the call to live with compassion. I am aware that this may not be enough, but it is what we have and it will serve if we allow it. Hans Kung has written, “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.” Perhaps you want to be a part of such a dialogue. Consider yourself invited into the conversation.

In a world without end, may it be so.

Service as Joy
10-3-2010
Rev. Douglas Taylor

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” I have certainly felt this at different times. I have dreamt of joy and happiness in the midst of difficulty, I have awoken to hardship, to busyness, to travail and triviality, and have wondered how I might eek out a modicum of simple pleasure amidst the constant and frenetic pace of living. I have felt that longing for joy in the face of the monotony and meaninglessness of our consumerist cultural drive for perpetual dissatisfaction.

It reminds me of that scene between Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt in the classic peanuts Christmas movie. Charlie Brown – representing all of us who have ever felt a little down or left out or caught up in our own anxiety about ourselves – Charlie Brown goes to see Lucy at her advice booth. (Hang your “the Doctor is in” sign and shake the nickels can saying “Nickels, nickels, nickels.”) Lucy tries helpfully to label him as a first step: “Are you afraid of responsibility? If you are then you have Hypengyophobia.” When that doesn’t produce anything worthwhile, Charlie Brown explains that his problem is Christmas. But that is only because it is the Christmas Peanuts movie! Really, his problem is the same one he always has: “Instead of feeling happy,” he says, “I feel sort of let down.” To which Lucy proclaims: “You need involvement!” Then she promptly gives him a leadership position! She makes him director of the school Christmas pageant. And throughout the movie it is amply clear that this was a terrible idea.

So, you now have shown up here at this congregation. You seek some connection with life, with joy. You are perhaps feeling a little let down – maybe not right at this moment, but at times you have felt Charlie-Brown-ish: a little depressed, a little lonely, a little like you don’t fit in and you long for something that is hard to express or explain. (Shake the nickels can.) What’s wrong? Hypengyophobia? You need involvement! Or, perhaps you need something more.

In his 1996 congregationally-published book, Transforming Liberal Congregation for the new millennium,” Colleague Roy Phillips presents the argument that people do not come to congregations to join committees and develop a clever campaign for balancing the budget. We come instead as seekers looking for deeper meaning and richer connections. Phillips says “People come to our congregations looking for bread. We give them the stones of busyness and pseudo-power.” (p 6) Charlie Brown just wanted some help figuring out the deeper meaning of Christmas and Lucy puts him in charge of the pageant.

By the mid 1990’s Rev Phillips was issuing the call to do away with the 1950’s model of church membership and involvement. Phillips called us to stop thinking about being members and start thinking about being ministers – to think of what we each do around here as ministries that we all take part in. Rev Phillips was not the first, nor the last to issue this call to liberal congregations or to Unitarian Universalism.

Roy Phillips uses a cartoon to demonstrate what NOT to do. There is a young couple talking to an older man standing in front of a huge bulletin board listing all the church’s committees. The old man is saying “Most people are on nine or ten committees, but since you’re new I’m sure people will understand if you only join six or seven to start.”

Phillips goes on to say, “The best part of the cartoon is the list of committees themselves: Finance Committee, Investment Committee, Board of Trustees, yes. But the list goes on … Thermostat Control Committee, Committee for More Comfortable Pews, Committee for the Promotion of Committees, Plant Watering Committee, Pigeon Control Committee.” You get the picture. If the only way to get involved is to serve on a committee, then there will be a profusion of committees. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And before I pat us on the back to say: thankfully it’s nothing like that around here – after all we have Small Group Ministry and the Fun Club and a lot of real hands-on Social Justice work – I will also say this: I actually started making a list of ways to get involved in the life of the church, of ways to serve, from casserole bakers and Beacon folders to greeters and teachers and plumbers. It was a big list. And after working on it though out the week with the idea of making it a central feature of the service, last night I finally figured it out and deleted the whole list.

I still want people to know about opportunities to serve, about places in the life of the church where it is simple to step in as well as other places where there is an opening for a person with particular gifts and skills. But I felt a huge list of ‘volunteer tasks’ would set the wrong tone. This congregation is not a pile of tasks and jobs; it is a community of connections.

Lucy Van Pelt says “You need involvement.” And do we have the perfect task for you, we add. Rev Phillips disagrees when he says we each need to uncover our personal ministry. Rev. Erik Wikstrom also disagrees with Lucy when he writes, “Just getting involved is not enough.” On the first page of the introduction of his new book, Serving with Grace: Lay Leadership as a Spiritual Practice, Wikstrom writes:

Common wisdom holds that people come to church for a sense of belonging, and that getting involved with a committee or task force is a great way to meet people and feel more connected. You do meet people while serving on a committee, and, yes, working together in common purpose can create these bonds. But perhaps this is not really why people come to church. Though this is often why they say they come, I think there is an even deeper reason – to have their lives transformed.

We are called to serve. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Wikstrom speaks of transformation, of being transformed. Now, some of us shake our heads at a word like that for it carries the clear implication that we somehow need to be transformed … because we are somehow not good enough as we are right now. And yet transformation has always been at the heart of the quest for spiritual growth, at the heart of the religious endeavor! A Zen Buddhist master once said “You are perfect just the way you are … and you could use some improvement.” I suppose, mostly, this pokes at our ideas of ‘perfect.’ You are who you are and it is beautiful. But don’t stop: keep growing, keep improving, keep going.

Meg Barnhouse has an article entitled “Broken Buddha” in this most recent issue of UU World magazine (7/5/10) that tugs on this same concept.
I have a photograph in my online art collection [she writes] titled “Broken Buddha.” It shows the lap of a painted statue. One graceful hand has broken off and is resting on the sole of an upturned foot. I’m trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to this image. The enlightened one as imperfect, cracked, and chipped—maybe that is how my enlightenment feels. [She writes,] It is not all that shiny anymore. A piece or two might have gotten knocked off.

So there is room for improvement, at every stage, whoever you are. There is always room for transformation. Thus, it is not enough to just get involved – it is not enough to just sign up on the list of volunteer tasks. What is wanted is the building of the bonds of connection. What is wanted is the discovery of the depths of meaning. Step up and sign on to get involved with the goal of offering something of yourself, never to simply fill a slot. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” “For to be hopeless would seem so strange.” (Holly Near)

It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be big. I remember sweeping sand off the front bricks leading up the main door of the lodge at camp Unirondack. We were preparing for the next session of campers and I was sweeping the sand off the front bricks. There is sand all over that hill where the lodge sits. Within a matter of a few hours those bricks would be covered with sand again.

The director of the camp noticed this and commented to me about it. By the end of our conversations we agreed that I was not doing task. I was performing a spiritual exercise. Any small activity you do can be done in this way. As you work consider for whom you are doing it, consider it metaphorically if that fits, consider it as an offering of yourself in some small way.

With such small examples, can it not be true for larger activities as well? Teaching Sunday school, chairing a committee, organizing a fund-raising event, serving on the board: consider for whom you are doing it, consider it metaphorically if that fits, consider it as an offering of yourself. And we begin to see that the task itself is not the point. It is the connections and the meaning found in serving in this way that matters. Leadership can be a spiritual practice, a way of deepening yourself, of learning about yourself, of opening yourself to transformation. “I am open and I am willing, so lift me up to the light of change.” (Holly Near)

Now, you might be saying, “Whoa! I just want to bring some cookies I baked for coffee hour – I didn’t sign up for transformation.” To which I would say: perhaps it is more important that you brought the cookies than the fact that there were cookies. Perhaps it is more important how the board moves through its agenda than the fact that it got through the agenda. Perhaps it is more important how you sweep the sand or run the meeting, more important with whom or for whom you fold the special mailing or prepare the meal for the hungry. Perhaps the quality of our relationships, the quality of our living, is the point – not the fulfilling of the tasks.

The work of the church is not as important as the quality of the experiences – no, that’s not right. The work of the church is the quality of the experiences we have while doing the work of the church. This is not to say the cookies and the agendas and the classes and all the other tasks are unimportant. Only that there is something that is more important, and it is the reason we are a congregation in the first place: intimacy and ultimacy, richer connections and deeper meaning, to nurture your spirit and to help heal the world.

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” Consider this: becoming a leader in the life of this congregation – or perhaps more accurately being of service in the life of this congregation – can be the single most enlivening and fulfilling practice you can do here for your spirit. It can deepen your spirit and transform your life. Be open, be willing to be lifted. Cast your lot with those who – yes – perversely, and with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. And as is the case with so many of the everyday spiritual practices: all it takes is a shift in how we see the world and one another.

In a world without end
May it be so.

Repair
September 19th, 2010
Rev. Douglas Taylor

About a year and a half ago, Elwin Hope Wilson of Rock Hill, South Carolina became a small celebrity for being repentant. At the age of 72 and in deteriorating health, Wilson repented from a lifetime of racist rhetoric and activity; he had a change of heart.

An article in the associated press from April, 2009 reads:

“The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to atone for the cross burnings on Hollis Lake Road. He wants to apologize for hanging a black doll in a noose at the end of his drive, for flinging cantaloupes at black men walking down Main Street, for hurling a jack handle at the black kid jiggling the soda machine in his father’s service station, for brutally beating a 21-year-old seminary student at the bus station in 1961.”
http://www.getreligion.org/2010/03/one-mans-quest-for-redemption/

Wilson had threatened a real estate agent who had sold a nearby home to a black family, and he vehemently protested the desegregation of the local cemetery where his parents were interred. Racial epithets rang out regularly from his lips in restaurants and other public places.

But last year Wilson had a change of heart. He saw his earlier behavior as misguided and sinful. He began to seek forgiveness. He traveled to Congressman John Lewis’ Washington DC office to personally apologize for attacking the former Freedom Rider in 1961. Wilson has visited black churches and offered public declarations of repentance. He has sought reconciliation with black citizens in his community.

Now, there are many who applaud Mr. Wilson’s attempts at seek forgiveness and some have offered their forgiveness. Others are more surprised and even skeptical. As one Freedom Rider put it: “In the back of my mind I just keep thinking, ‘Why now?’” A question of motive arises, is this change of heart a true repentance or is Edwin Hope Wilson only scared for his eternal soul. “I’m going to hell,” he despairingly told a friend, to which his friend replied: “The Bible says that ‘If you truly ask forgiveness and you mean it in your heart, you can be saved.’” (Ibid)

I am not going to judge this man’s motives; that is not a useful avenue to pursue. Perhaps it is fear of punishment in an afterlife that led him to do the right thing, to seek forgiveness, to break his old pattern. Whatever the motivation was, what interests me is the break that happened in the cycle.

Something changed for the man and he shifted his efforts from trying to destroy and tear down others to trying to repair and build up what had been lost. “You gifts, whatever you may discover them to be, can be used to bless or curse the world.” (Rebecca Parker) For all that the human evils and horrors of our world seem immeasurably large and intractable the world goes mad one person at a time. The story of how we got to where we now are in terms of institutional racism, corporate greed, terrorism, and countless other marks of systemic evil in our world – the story of how we got here is actually a myriad of billions of individual stories large and small. The world goes mad one person at a time, and the world is saved in exactly the same way.

Elwin Wilson had a change of heart. He decided to become one of those who work to repair the world. He “cast [his] lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” (Adrienne rich) Elwin broke his old pattern, interrupted the cycle, and sought forgiveness.

And yet, for all that he is now doing the right thing, Mr. Wilson is still viewed with skepticism by some. And I get it. It seems cheap to live by a theology that seems to say you can cheat, lie, curse, hoard, hate and hurt others throughout your life and then in the eleventh hour repent and seek forgiveness – and presto your sins are absolved: you can die knowing your place in heaven is secure. It seems cheap to let mean people off on a technicality. But I will tell you this: if we are going to build a better world we’ll need to bring mean people along somehow.

And to be fair, the thin and cheap version of forgiveness that rankles is poor theology and does not hold up to the deep reality of suffering and joy and life. True forgiveness is a deep and powerful thing. Reinhold Niebuhr called forgiveness the final form of love: allowing us to see beyond our own virtuousness to standpoint of another. If we are about the work of repairing the world, then we must also be about the work of forgiveness.

A fascinating study in the role of forgiveness that I found this year comes from the world of sociobiology and game theory. In studying the human decision-making process, researchers explored the distinction between self-interest, altruism, and cooperation through a generations-old scenario called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly the dilemma goes like this:

Police arrest two men on suspicion of a serious crime. They lack, however, the evidence to convict. At most, they have enough information to prove them guilty of a lesser offence. The aim of the police, therefore, is to get at least one to inform on the other. They put them in separate rooms with no possibility of communication. They then offer each of the suspects a deal. If one informs and the other stays silent, the informant will go free and the other will receive a jail sentence of ten years. If they both inform on the other, each will receive five years. If they both stay silent, they will be found guilty only of the lesser offence, and each will face a year in prison.

It does not take long to work out that for each, the optimal decision is to inform. The result, though, is that each receives a five-year jail sentence, whereas if they had both stayed silent they would only have been imprisoned for a year. The reason neither opts for this strategy is that they cannot be sure that the other will do likewise. … It shows that two people, both acing rationally, produce a result that is bad for both of them.
(Sacks, Jonathan; The Dignity of Difference, p 145-6)

So, recognizing this is a game, not an actual criminal investigation, researchers looked for a way to broaden that scenario to allow repeated attempts at the game. What is lacking for self-interest to become ‘enlightened self-interest’ is trust. Trust is built. Thus, if there were a repetition of the scenario and the participants could discuss with each other before hand, then they could build trust – thus allowing for the best outcome for both players of this game.

How does this have anything to do with forgiveness? We’re getting there. The next step was the development of this Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game into computer games. The basic formula the programmers used to simulate human response was called “Tit-for-Tat.” ‘What you did to me, I will do to you.’ This reciprocal version was defense enough against an aggressive player but would also reward am altruistic player. One analysis put it this way, “The more aggressive programs did well in the short run but lost out in the end by provoking retaliation.” (Sack, ibid)

This reminds me of that song by Sweet Honey in the Rock (called “Prayer” on their Sacred Ground CD,)

Lord, must I do unto others before they do unto me?
Must I arm myself, to protect myself, from harm and injury?
Oh no, that is not the lesson that I learned on my mother’s knee
When she told me to “do unto others only what I’d have them do unto me.”
-Ysaye Barnwell

And isn’t that something of what is wrong with the world today? When we hear about a ‘cycle of violence’ it is this reciprocal retaliation, measure for measure, response that leads to a bad result for both sides of the conflict. The fatal weakness of a measure for measure, tit-for-tat approach is found in a spiteful opponent that leads into the spiral of retaliation.

Certainly the aggressive player hits hard and does well in the short run, but eventually everyone loses with that tactic. “What Tit-for-Tat [really] showed was the survival value of reciprocal altruism,” the long-term value of cooperation. (Sacks, ibid)

Then, in the 80’s a mathematician named Nowak devised a small modification to the original program.

Randomly, but on average once every three or so moves, it overlooked the last move of its opponent. It had to do so randomly because if its behavior was predictable it could be taken into account by a ruthless predator. None the less the strategy was effective in remedying the great defect of its predecessor, namely the trap of retaliation, while retaining its immunity to exploitation by defectors. Nowak called his program Generous. What he had done was essentially to create a computer simulation of reconciliation. Forgetting is as close as a computer gets to forgiving. (Ibid p181)

I want to come back to that point about forgetting in a minute; but first, notice this: forgiveness is the element added to the mix that makes the building of a better world possible. It breaks the cycle. It forgoes the logical choice of ‘tit-for-tat,’ of giving back as good as you got.

Forgiveness is not logical, at least not in the immediate sense. “Randomly, but on average once every three or so moves, it overlooked the last move of its opponent.” To forgive is to overlook the offense. Not to overlook it in the sense of ignoring it – as the computer must do because the computer lacks the nuanced ability to actually forgive – but instead to overlook it in the sense of looking beyond that immediate offense to a higher view. To forgive is to overlook the offense by looking at the broadest view that yet still includes the reality of the offense!

This is not about forgetting. John F. Kennedy said, “Forgive your enemies but never forget their names.” Forgiveness is not about denial or pretending the hurt never happened. Forgiveness is a powerful process of turning toward the good despite the particulars of what is wrong. Forgiveness is a moral response to injustice that does not linger in the realm of legalism and fairness – laudable though the goal of fairness is in our world! Forgiveness moves into the realm of righteousness, the realm in which we ask – how can we make right this broken relationship among us. Though I have caused you an injury, how can we look toward a better world?

Forgiveness is not an excusing or condoning, glossing over or forgetting of an injustice. Were it so, forgiveness would indeed be cheap and of little worth. But no, forgiveness is real – extraordinary and paradoxical – but entirely possible. I believe that at our best we strive for fairness in an unfair world. We strive to bring justice where there are colossal levels of injustice. Yet all too often life is not fair and people are not just. There is suffering, there is hate, there is violence and war and abuse. And so there is also kindness, and so there is also mercy, and so there is also forgiveness. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. (Julian of Norwich) For so, there is also love.

On the global stage today there are countless examples of the tit-for-tat game being played out with real lives. There is no trust and so weighing the odds, both sides decide to attack and then count-attack. This game is played with words and with legislation and with bullets and with bombs. But when we add what the computer programmer called ‘generosity,’ when every so often someone chooses to overlook their opponent’s last move, then something else begins. Another possibility opens, one that leads to repairing the damage, one that leads to forgiveness, one that builds a better world.

Consider the situations in your own life in which you find yourself injured in some way and considering your response. Consider the situations in which you have caused injury to another and, in fairness, the other could offer you measure for measure. But every so often someone chooses to overlook their opponent’s last move, and something else can begin: something that can lead to forgiveness. It really does happen; I am sure of it. I have experienced it. After all, the world goes mad one person at a time, and the world is saved in exactly the same way.

In a world without end,
may it be so

God: a Universe of Connections
Rev. Douglas Taylor
6-27-10

Do you remember the Calvin and Hobbes comic? I loved that strip when I was younger, and my kids are jealous when I tell them how a new strip came out every morning with the newspaper. There’s one where the boy and his stuffed tiger are sitting on a hillside relaxing, Hobbes the tiger turns and says, “Do you think there’s a God?” Calvin thinks for a moment and responds “Well somebody’s out to get me.” In so many ways as a kid I could relate to Calvin, but on this count I must admit my experiences and my assumptions as a child led me to different conclusions.

When I was a young child I believed that God loved me. Growing up in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, I was nurtured in a community of acceptance and affirmation. At home, despite the chaos caused by alcoholism, there was a gentle undercurrent of universalism – an unwritten base of God’s love throughout it all. At times I was uncertain about life, about myself, about my family, even about God. Yet somehow I was certain that the God I was a little unsure of was a God who loved me.

Over the years my relationship with and belief in God has shifted, faded, resurged, matured, adjusted, and in turns grown overly complicated and blindingly simple. My starting place was one in which I knew myself to be loved by God. As I grew older that surety began to fade and I experienced times of God’s absence. As a teenager I felt my own angst and depression to be more real than any competing reality including the reality of God’s love; though I occasionally still offered myself as one who believed in God … provide I could include caveats and footnotes with such a confession. In college I passed as an intellectual atheist because that was the clever attitude to hold. But I was never a committed atheist. Later as a young adult with a young family, while still in college, I began to wind my way back toward God, to turn my face again toward the depth of mystery and that early feeling of being loved by God.

One of the great attributes of a Unitarian Universalist congregation is the breadth of theological diversity and the freedom for each individual to follow their distinct path. Many people in our Unitarian Universalist congregations work to develop a theology that makes sense and is honest with the experiences they have had. Whether or not you believe in a God with a physical form or a personal nature, whether or not you believe in a transcendent creator God or an imminent Goddess, whether you call on the multiple names of the Gods and Goddesses or respectfully refuse all names, whether you believe in a Great Spirit or a series of underlying principles that comprise Ultimate Reality, you are welcome here and you are loved and you are encouraged to nourish your spirit and walk your path.

I do not often offer sermons that witness strongly to my own theological stance in terms of God. Religious belief is a matter of conscience and cannot be coerced. I usually direct my words on Sunday morning toward life and how to live well, striving to keep my words open that each hearer may find therein sustenance for whichever path they walk. I have no wish to preach at people or convert anyone to my way of seeing the world. Indeed, I do not think it would be advantageous for you to see the world or to understand God as I do. I would rather you see the world and understand God as you do. Still, this morning I will offer my own understanding as an example for your consideration and encouragement. Let me tell you about the God I love and whose love sustains and transforms me.

Strictly speaking, my understanding of God’s love is paradoxical and contradictory when considered from the perspective of logic. The God I love, the God I believe in is not an anthropomorphic deity. I am not a theist in the sense that a theist is one who believes in a personal god with whom one can have a personal relationship. I do not believe in a personal God. And yet, I have a relationship with God. Perhaps if I share with you my caveats and footnotes, it will become clear. Perhaps not.

Partly how it all works for me is that I do not begin with the idea of God and then fit my life and my experiences around the idea. It seems to me that many people do exactly that, including many Unitarian Universalists with whom I have talked. A significant number of Unitarian Universalists were raised in another tradition and were given an image and idea of God. If we begin with the image or idea of God supplied to us by someone else, our choices are to accept it or reject it. An alternative is to begin, not with a pre-established notion of God, but with our own experiences of the holy. This is critically important and lies at the heart of our Unitarian Universalism tradition. Start with your personal experiences and work what interpretations and reinterpretations you may. Don’t start with ideas and images of God. Start instead with the experiences you have of mystery and the holy. At times I still catch myself starting with an idea of God and shaping my understanding around the idea, but when possible I begin again with my experiences of the Holy.

I have had, over the course of my life, several experiences that can be classified as religious or spiritual experiences. For me they seem to fall into two types. One is the sort of experience in which I feel a presence both loving and holy. The second sort of experience has been sometimes called an “oceanic” experience, in which I’ve felt swept up in the unity of existence. For years I kept these two sorts of experiences categorized as two strictly different things. I interpreted the feeling of a loving and holy presence as the presence of God. I interpreted the experience of universal oneness as a guide to understanding how I fit into the interconnected whole of the universe. Over the past several years I have begun to name this second type of experience, the deep interconnectedness of our universe, as God – as the Ultimate Reality.

Let me take a moment with that particular phrase: Ultimate Reality. Think for a moment about everything, about the whole compass of reality. Theologian and existentialist Paul Tillich used phrases like “Ultimate Reality” in place of the word “God.” In so doing, Tillich is trying to stretch himself and others beyond preconceived ideas of God by digging back into what the idea of God is meant to symbolize.

Early in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, Tillich writes, “God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately.” (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 1973, p 211) One of the ways Tillich is remembered as a liberal theologian is in his efforts to pull the concept of God away from the notion of Divinity as a personality and help people conceive of God as a power, a force. The phrases “Ground of Being,” “Ultimate Concern,” and “Ultimate Reality” are classic Tillich trying to name God without the word “God.” God is the symbol for that which concerns us ultimately.

Tillich goes on to say,

This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him. (Ibid, p 211)

This reminds me of the passage from Emerson we read earlier together. “A person will worship something – have no doubt about that. …That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives.” (from Singing the Living Tradition Hymnal, #563) That which concerns us ultimately will determine our lives. Therefore, be wise in your choice of what concerns you ultimately.

But there is another piece of what Tillich said in that paragraph earlier that I want to look at again because it surprised me when I first read it. He wrote, “This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him.” In other words, this liberal theologian is saying, don’t start with an idea of God and then fix your experiences and your worship and your ultimate concerns around this pre-existing idea. It doesn’t start with God. Instead, look at your life, listen to your heart, heed your conscience and your inner knowing. Find what matters most to you, uncover the yearning for meaning, the anxiousness around your mortality, the passion for living that will occasionally grasp you, and there you will uncover the root of God.

We’re not talking about a being, a person or creature that looks a little like you and me, maybe with a beard and a thunderbolt. No. God is a symbol, a deep metaphor for the source of your living, for that which holds all, for the whole of which you are a part. I speak broadly and perhaps a little vaguely. But the trouble with God really began when people stopped describing God as a great symbol of faith and began to instead speak of God as a literal character in literal stories. Cast away all literal interpretations of the nature of God. They are illogical and irrational. Seek instead to source of your living; seek the whole of which you are a part. You do not need to then name it God, though many do.

We all live with the understanding that there is something greater than our individual lives at work. The whole of the universe is not simply material reality of time and space; there is also a quality of experience which we have in our living. There is a network of connections in which “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) Apostle Paul uses that exact phrase to speak of the God of Christianity in whom we live and move and have our being. But Paul says he is echoing an earlier Athenian poet who said much the same thing, though it would likely have referenced a pantheist understanding of the known world, which is closer to, (though still not quite,) what I am talking about. God is the quality of experience we find in the network of connections in which we live, move and have our being.

God is a reality more akin to beauty that to literal fact. Beauty does not exist outside of our subjective perception of it. We name beauty as a quality of experience as we sense the light falling in a particular way across the texture and color of the world or the face of one we love. These things are not beauty, they have beauty. Beauty is our name for a particular quality of experience. Similarly, there is a depth quality to living for which I use the name God.

The video clip I played this morning (“We Are All Connected” by Symphony of Science) begins with this sentence spoken by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, “We are all connected; to each other biological, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically.” I would add that divinity is the quality of experience found in these connections. Theology and science each show us truth. Science is ever searching for greater understanding of reality and religion ever striving to speak of the quality of experience felt, of the Ultimate Reality within the whole of reality.

And so, when I feel a calming and loving presence sitting with me while I am praying in a chapel during a tumultuous time in my life; when I stare meditatively at a stone on a quiet afternoon outdoors and tap into the feeling of both atoms and swirling galaxies as other aspects of myself, when I sit on the dock beside a mountain lake while a blue heron sweeps within inches of me and I catch the hint of kinship between us, when I feel the joyous energy of a common moment at home, I gather these moments around me like lifelines taping the deep wellspring of my life. And I find in these experiences a quality that I name God.

Perhaps you use another word. Or perhaps the word God symbolizes other meanings and qualities for you. Or perhaps your experiences have led you to other assumptions and interpretations. Look at your life, listen to your heart, heed your conscience and your inner knowing. Find what matters most to you, uncover the yearning for meaning, the anxiousness around your mortality, the passion for living that will occasionally grasp you, and there you will uncover the root of God.

In a world without end
May it be so.