Sermons

A Life of Ritual and Reason

Rev. Douglas Taylor

12-17-23

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/XuSzm2soTxU

Many Unitarian Universalists are not exactly “religious” in the way so many religious people use the term. We tend toward a rational and scientific outlook. At one point, a few generations back our rational and iconoclastic tendencies grew a bit extreme. As we went smashing through old dogma and repressive traditions, we challenged anything that had the whiff of ritual or ceremony. We would not be saddled with empty symbolism and meaningless sacrament. We would not be told what to do or what to believe, thank you very much. More recent generations have a more tempered perspective about ritual and other embodied spiritual practices.

Over the past few decades, we’ve been lighting chalices in worship, doing check-ins at meetings, and lighting candles during our time of Joys and Sorrows. I remember attending an installation service for an elder colleague almost 25 years ago. He had begun his ministry back in the 70’s. The good reverend was being installed as the new minister in a nearby church. The service was underway and it was suddenly clear that the person who was going to light the chalice was not in the room – likely stuck in traffic instead. The lead minister looked around the room, shrugged and said, “let’s skip that part.” And they did.

I remember at the time feeling unsettled by the dismissal of the chalice lighting. I like rituals and appreciate their value. I was unsettled by the dismissal of the chalice lighting not because I thought it was sacrilege or irreverent, but because if we are going to have a symbol present and a ritual planned around that symbol, then we should follow through with it. And if it is unimportant and meaningless, something we can just skip over, then why bother including it in the first place?

Here’s what I think shifted in Unitarian Universalism: it wasn’t so much that in the past we didn’t want rituals and religious ceremonies, and now we do. It was a refusal of empty rituals and meaningless ceremonies. We didn’t want to be going through the motions just because that’s the way it had always been done. The rituals ought to mean something. And they ought to mean something of value to us. Today, the act of lighting the chalice is seen as a meaningful and important part of our weekly gathering.

Many Unitarian Universalists have found our faith after having left a previous religious tradition. The departure is typically around a disconnect with values and belief. When we talk about rituals and ceremony as UUs now, it is important to notice that for many people, those traditional rituals and ceremonies, while comforting, were done in the service of those values and beliefs that no longer fit. And by association, those rituals and ceremonies no longer fit or offer comfort.

In the reading this morning, from Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book The Wonder Paradox, we heard the author frame our question for non-religious people, for folks who refused the supernatural, asking – what about those useful comforting aspects of religion? Must we refuse those as well? Can non-religious people have some meaningful rituals in our lives and still have our integrity of belief or non-belief?

We Unitarian Universalists ask a similar question with a nuance. We have among us atheists and seekers who hold a non-supernatural outlook, but that is not all we have. We have pagans and people who practice an earth-centered spirituality who see the supernatural saturating our natural world – or if ‘supernatural’ is not an accurate term, at least something more than what science calls natural … saturating our natural world. And some of the theists among us will frame their belief as fully natural and others do not. So, we ask questions similar to Hecht in her book, but with certain nuances of pluralism.

Hecht’s book carries a delightful subtitle: The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. Life is weird, poetry helps. Her answers are in poetry. Many Unitarian Universalists have long agreed with this sort of answer. Poetry can carry quite profound layers of meaning in some cases, and it can bring quite poignant comfort in some cases as well. Poetry can challenge us or get us thinking or soothe our spirits or help us feel a deep connection.

And, delightfully, Hecht urges us to use poetry in a ritualistic manner. She calls us to develop a ritual pattern for using the poetry, to use poetry in the way religion uses prayers, scripture, and liturgical readings. She suggests that poetry is a form of meaning making and path for comfort amidst the vagaries and weirdness of life.

Did a friend invite you to their wedding? Have you read (p176) Guam Daosheng’s poem, “You and I Song”? Did someone in your life just have a baby? There is a great poem (p192) by Rumi that says “You were born with wings.” Did you just bump into Earth Day on the calendar? Try reading (p155-7) Joy Harjo’s “When the world as we knew it ended.” Are you worried about the fraying of the social contract in our society? Check out (p269-70) Maya Angelou’s excellent poem, “Still I Rise.” Did you just have a brush with mortality and begin pondering the meaning of it all? Go read (p 316) “A Mother in a Refugee Camp” by Chinua Achebe again. Hecht’s book is really a guidebook for crafting your own anthology and practice, a liturgy both intimate and authentic because you have made it yourself.

Last week I spoke of the importance of community. Many people – of whatever theological stripes – recognize the power and importance of religious community. Today, we talk about ritual. And I take my lead from Hecht this morning. I want to open us up to the conversation of ritual in a manner that is fitting, that serves.

Think about our time of Joys and Sorrows. The obvious ritual pieces are the lighting of candles and the reciting of the phrase “You are in our hearts” as a response to each sharing. If you are newer to our congregation, I would like you to know that this ritual has been crafted over several years in conversation. There were times when the Joys and Sorrows time was problematic. People shared on topics that were inappropriate. People would go on and on too long with their sharing. It felt like the time needed a slightly better definition to help it be the rich and potent ritual we knew it could be.

We started tinkering with it. We adjusted the opening instructions several times, trying to find the balance between light-hearted and stern, descriptive and prescriptive. We tried not lighting candles but dropping stones into water instead. We tried having everyone write their Joys and Sorrows in a book that I would read from instead of letting everyone come up individually. We tried adding a responsive phrase after each person spoke, and we went through a handful of different phrases – Hecht would recognize our use of poetry to help experience the ritual.

We arrived at our current model a few years ago. And when the pandemic hit, the whole show was turned upside down again. During the shut down we had no candles, no individual sharing, and no responsive phrase. And one person read out all the offerings at the end of the service following the postlude – which was a pragmatic solution allowing everyone plenty of time to write their Joy or Sorrow into the chat. We still had the sharing, and it was still meaningful. But most of the ritual was drained from it while we were in lockdown.

I think that experience clarified for many people – for me at least – the value of the ritual as we experience it now. We know there is a reason behind it, it’s not an empty or meaningless ritual.

Rituals are meant to be doorways into an experience. But they are not meant to be the experience, just the entrance into it. Rituals open us into deeper realities. Those realities exist with or without the rituals. Unfortunately, the rituals can also exist with or without a connection to the deeper realities. Thus, they can become meaningless or empty rituals. But when the connection is true, rituals serve as a doorway to meaningful spaces.

Rituals are something we enact. We have bodies. A significant part of what is happening in a ritual is that we are not merely thinking about it and about what it means; we are also enacting it. Our bodies are participating. Anyone who has done sports or dance, martial arts or yoga or weightlifting will recognize what I mean when I say: our bodies have a form of knowing, a wisdom – maybe it is more accurate to say our bodies have a connection to our brains that is different than what we often call ‘thinking.’ Our bodies carry memory and wisdom.

Showing up, going through the steps, lighting the candles, ringing the bells, bowing down, saying the words, closing our eyes and sitting in silence – the action we take with our bodies opens us, serves as the entrance point, is the doorway into the spaces of meaning and value. The rituals must be embodied.

Hecht’s advice to the non-religious yearning for comfort and meaning is not simply to go find a good poem. She tells people to read the poem out loud, find a particular place to read the poem, read it again on the anniversary. In other words: enact it, embody it.

In many ways, what Hecht is suggesting for an individual is similar to what we are doing as a community together in this congregation. Our community’s rituals are enacted in our bodies. It’s not enough to only share our Joys and Sorrows with each other. When we do it in the worship service together, we need to embody the work as well. So we light candles and respond with a small slip of poetry for each other.

We light our chalice and each week we say different words, but the words are important. They are a small poem of words we say that mean something – ritual and reason. We extinguish it each week reciting the same poem every week. We have our covenant and doxology words; we sing Spirit of Life together most weeks. I know people have memorized some of these and it can turn into a reciting. It is good to stop every now and then to really consider the words. Do you mean them? Are they still connected to values you actually hold? Is there integrity in the rituals and ceremonies for you? Ritual and reason! The doorways ought to take you somewhere of value, somewhere meaningful.

May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts and minds, lead us deeper in the mysteries and realities that uphold life – that we may live in our integrity and thrive together in life abundant.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

The Taming of Foxes

12-10-23

Rev. Douglas Taylor

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/aI3p8CVOvuM

“What does that mean – ‘tame’?” The Little Prince asked the fox.

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”

My sermon today is about establishing ties. The heart of our Unitarian Universalist congregation is the establishing of ties; it is about connection. There are many reasons why you who are here have chosen to keep showing up. You may be here for the amazing music or the uplifting message, you may be here for the stories or the rituals of candles and silence. It might be for the free coffee after the service, or something less tangible like the feeling of belonging or of being part of something larger than yourself. A very common reason is for community.

People do not usually join Unitarian Universalist congregations to be forgiven of their sins, or to be taught the right way to believe, or because their family expects it of them. We come – more often than not – for community, to be together with other people who share our values of respect and curiosity, compassion and justice, truth and love. Our work as a congregation is to establish ties, to build those connections, to create a congregation together.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book The Little Prince (which we used for our reading this morning,) the fox talks about this as being ‘tamed.’ To be tamed, according to the fox, is to see the one who has tamed you as unique and very important – and in turn, you become very important and unique to them. To see and be seen, to know and be known. The Fox tells the Little Prince this is what it means to be tame.

I received a new game a few days ago that relates to all of this. It was a game I supported on kickstarter over a year ago, and it finally arrived a little over a week ago. I’m very excited by this new game. It’s called “The Fox Experiment,” and the premise is based on the decades-long scientific efforts to domesticate foxes by the Soviets that began in 1958. In real life, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut gathered a group of Russian silver foxes and bred the ones that showed the most interest in humans. Each successive generation was again selected for friendliness, only the friendliest pups became parents. The hope was to recreate the thousand-year long domestication process of dogs in the span of a few decades for these foxes.

In the game, you build a deck of fox pups working to increase traits like floppy ears, wagging tails, and spots on their fur. Each new fox is given a friendliness rating in the game. The higher the friendliness rating, the more dice you get to build the next generation. In the real experiment, the scientists also gave each fox what they called a friendliness rating.

Assuming, for a moment, I am correct that our congregation’s work is to establish ties – what do you think your friendliness rating might be? The fox told de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince that to be tame was to establish ties. So maybe our UUCB mission statement should say something about taming one another?

I’m not suggesting we actually do that. “Taming” has a paternalistic tone that doesn’t sit well – as if the only value of an animal is in relation to humans. But consider this a playful entrance into the serious space in which we talk about how we are here to establish ties, to make friendly connections together.

My colleague Cynthia Snavely once summed up our faith saying, ‘Connection is our holiest word.’ The Latin root of the word ‘religion’ is ‘ligare,’ the same root for ‘Ligament,” to tie or bind, to connect! Re-ligare – or Religion – would be to re-bind, to re-connect. We Unitarian Universalist ministers do like to tease out the Latin of roots of our language now and then. 

All around us are forces pulling us apart. We live in disconnected and alienating times. There are powers that want us isolated and lonely so as to be more easily manipulated and controlled. I don’t mean this at a conspiracy theory level – it’s just become a tactic for our consumeristic culture. And we are better consumers when we are isolated and lonely. As Unitarian Universalists we make a commitment to reconnect. Our distinctive religious work as a faith community, is the work of connection.

There are a few reliable ways to build these connections here together. If you attend Sunday morning worship regularly, that is certainly a good thing. But how well do we get to know each other during that hour? Certainly we are holding the silence together, we are listening to amazing music and uplifting messages together. The candles of Joys and Sorrows opens up some invitations to connections with the other people in the room. The announcements become very important when you look at like this. But most of this hour of worship is preparation time for the connections that we make outside of this hour in our congregation.

To establish ties and deepen your relationships in this congregation, it helps to do more than just show up on Sunday mornings. Join the choir, host a table at the Art and Gift Show or help in the kitchen, teach a class, serve as an usher or on the Caring Team. One reliable way to establish ties, and to really become a member of this community, is to serve in some fashion: to offer your gift, to volunteer, to be of use in some way.

The other reliable way is to receive. Join a class, a book discussion, a workshop, or our Chalice Circles program as a way to learn something new; but often as important – it is an opportunity to meet people and get to know them … and to get known. Unitarian Universalism does not work well as a spectator religion. We are here to build community together, to participate in creating what we are as a congregation. You have a role in that process – in the giving and receiving that creates this community of connections in which we thrive.

We have a new program starting up next month: our new Chalice Circles program. You can sign up throughout December. When you join, you commit to attending once a month until the summer. Each group has facilitators and a covenant, they follow the monthly Soul Matters themes and there are activities and questions for you to respond to. If you join one of these groups, you will be invited to share your responses to questions together.

In September, when the Soul Matters theme was “Welcome,” we had questions like these:

1. Who welcomed you in when you needed it most?
2. What would you tell someone younger than yourself about welcoming in grief?
3. Do you know what it’s like to encounter a welcome that requires you to remove parts of yourself to belong? 

In October, when the Soul Matters theme was “Heritage,” we had this activity:

We all have one: a favorite family memento that holds something important about our family heritage and history. Most of the time, these mementos also keep us grounded in a value or offer us comfort or inspiration when we need it most.

So this month reflect on one of your favorite family mementos and figure out why it has such a hold on you? If possible, bring that memento with you to show to your group.

Each month, you’ll receive an activity and a handful of questions to consider – all based around the Soul Matters theme. Let me try something a little different. Instead of just posing these questions rhetorically, I’ll ask one, invite you to think a moment, and then – if you want – to turn to a neighbor to respond briefly. You are always free to pass.

In many ways, the process of our Chalice Circles involves deep listening. You spend some time thinking about what you will say in your own response, but then you spend a lot of time listening to other people’s responses. Deep listening is a key ingredient to the process. So here is this morning’s big question:

Who first offered you the gift of deep listening?

Take a moment in silence with that question: Who first offered you the gift of deep listening?

…        ~15 seconds

And if you would like, I invite you to turn to a neighbor. You can always pass – participation is never required (wave hand, to signal refusal) but always encouraged. If you would like, turn to a neighbor and take about a minute to share your response and listen their response. I’ll ring the bowl to call your attention back to the full group.

…        ~90 seconds

Rev. Scott Tayler, the lead organizer of Soul Matters, has said the model they offer for small group discussion is a discernment model. In the circle, we use a twice-around process. The first time around, you respond to your question and listen to others as they respond. There is no cross-talk or conversation.

The second time around, there can be some back and forth. We do ‘gratitudes and connections.’ It is a time to say “I really connected with what you shared because I had a similar experience,” or “I appreciate what you said because I’d never thought of it like that before,” or something else along those lines – gratitudes and connections.

It is in this second time around that we build the relationships of the group. The first time around is for your discernment and your listening. It is a powerful experience to know yourself and to be known by others.

Once a month, your group will gather. The facilitators will have shared material ahead for you to think about, they will light a candle and share opening words. You’ll have a brief check-in together: What is one thing weighing on your spirit today and one thing lifting your spirit? Then you’ll do the ‘twice-around’ process with the activity, I used the example of the Family Memento exercise. After that you’ll do the ‘twice around’ process again with the questions. From there, you close with a time for ‘likes and wishes’ and a final reading.

There is a formula, a noticeable structure to the process. “One must observe the proper rites.” The fox tells the little prince. The structure of the Chalice Circles time shapes the space for a level of sharing. In the fox’s language, it is designed to tame us. Perhaps better to say, it is to establish the ties so that we are not strangers to each other. Our Chalice Circles are a way to strengthen the heart of our community through meaning-making and simple friendships.

We are social creatures. We need each other to be fully ourselves. There is still a place and a need for us to embrace the wilder side of ourselves – to howl at the moon or get angry about injustices. We will need to be wild from time to time. And we need the balance of enough gentleness and friendliness as well – to take part in the creating of important things like community.

It is important for our balanced wellbeing to have connections with other people, to have ties with groups that nourish us and lead us deeper into ourselves in the service of that which is greater than ourselves.

Come, let us build this congregation together, that we may all thrive.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

Both Sides

Rev. Douglas Taylor

May 21, 2023

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/75Ox3CqTqBA

Joni Mitchell’s music has had a big impact on my growing up. I appreciate our choir bringing one of her songs to us this morning. This song, “Both Sides Now” captures the wistful and nuanced layers of growing up, the disillusionment, and reimagining that can happen with adolescence and adulthood.

In the song, she opens with the early, romantic imaginings about life and love. Then she unpacks the jarring realities often discovered about pain and loss – the disillusionment; the sadness of it all that can lead a person to become jaded. But then, with a twist, she reflects back on it all and chooses the romantic options anyway, saying she really doesn’t know life or love at all.

Joni’s strength as a songwriter is not limited to her lyrics – but her lyrics are certainly a key component to her work. She lays such beauty out before us, showing the highs and lows of living with such poignancy.

Many of her songs have this layer of poignancy, a sorrowful yearning. In our reading this morning from the book Bittersweet by Susan Cain, we heard about how creativity is often linked with a certain sadness or melancholy. The piece we heard from the book began with the question: “Is creativity associated with sorrow and longing, through some mysterious force?”

At other points in that chapter, Cain writes about Beethoven and what he went through creating his 9^th Symphony and particularly the section we know as the “Ode to Joy” – a piece of work so exultant and yet laced with sorrow. The author also wrote about the life of Leonard Cohan, the artist most associated with the song “Hallelujah” and whose life is certainly an example of a ‘broken hallelujah’ in many ways. Is the melancholy suffering a required cost for this level of phenomenal creativity?

Cain is quick to assure readers on this point. It is not so much suffering that is required so much as a bittersweet disposition.

We shouldn’t make the mistake of viewing darkness as the sole or even primary catalyst to creativity. [Cain writes early in the book] After all, plenty of creatives are sanguine types. And studies also show that flashes of insight are more likely to happen when we’re in a good mood. We also know that clinical depression – which we might think of as an emotional black hole obliterating all light – kills creativity. As Columbia University psychiatry professor Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.” (Cian, Bittersweet, p60)

The image of creative people as tortured souls simply is not accurate. And it is not what this book, Bittersweet, is about. I think it is more accurate to say creativity is less about sorrow and suffering and more closely linked to yearning tinged with a sadness – the sadness seems to be a necessary component, but not sufficient on its own. Susan Cain did not, after all, title her book ‘bitter.’

In her book, Cain is exploring the concept of ‘bittersweet’ as an experience and perspective. And this is not just about creative artists, it’s about all people. All of us experience grief and sorrow, loss and pain. The experience of the bittersweet is an acknowledgement of that sorrow and pain. But the goal is not to be sad. The goal is to take life whole. To allow sorrow a full share, but not the whole share.

In the Jewish book of wisdom, Kohelet – also known as Ecclesiastes – we hear that our lives are filled with beginnings and endings, with gathering and casting away, with breaking down and building up, with dancing and with mourning “and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Kohelet, like Susan Cain in her book about the bittersweet, calling us to take life whole, to not refuse portions because they are hard or laced with sorrow.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have this practice of sharing our joys and sorrows most Sundays. It is a common enough ritual among us as to be recognizable if you’ve been to other UU congregations. We invite you, share the ups and downs of your living – to recognize these happy and sad experiences as important and worthy of sharing in our worship together. One piece of the ritual I honor is that we don’t parse out the joys from the sorrows – they are all mixed together. It can be jarring to hear about a death or a grief and then swiftly move on to hear about a birthday or recovery. And occasionally someone will offer something that is both a joy and a sorrow. It is best to not draw to fine a distinction. It is best to allow all of the joys and sorrows to sit beside each other, jostling for attention and care. Because this is how life really is.

My point, Susan Cain’s point, Joni Mitchell’s point, the point of the author of Ecclesiastes is simply this: Sorrow should not be sequestered away as if it is something shameful. It is part of our living and indeed may opening us up to some of the more remarkable aspects of our living. In our sorrow, we reveal our compassion. I am, this morning, not offering an ode to sorrow. Instead, I am saying our sorrow is the signal that we care.

Consider: we have days of light and days of clouds. We live in the shadow of our losses and the bright light of new love. We all have both light and shadow. It is the way of nature and all life. It is the light we want, the joy we share with others; but sorrow and shadow are present as well. If we only see the clouds and shadows as negative, we are missing an important part of what is happening.

Think for a moment about the times you have seen sunlight, actually seen a ray of sunshine. Perhaps it was a photograph or an experience while out in nature. Can you recall? When the light shines out through a cloud bank or breaks through the trees or shines in the early morning through the window across the dust of your room; and you actually see the ray of sunlight? Have you seen that? It is as if the sun beam has a definite shape, a width and length you could measure.

The sunbeam in such an experience is clear because it is partly blocked by the trees or by clouds by the window. Unfiltered light shines everywhere; but we notice it, we see it, when it is flickering or when it is filtered through shadow, when it is a little obstructed. I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now. They are both the feathered canyons and that which blocks the sun. And really, both are worth it.

Here is the real secret. With Joni’s song we are invited to see both sides of life and love and clouds – both! We are invited to feel the joy and the sorrow, the give and take, win and lose. And the secret is the way it is presented as two options and yet the song calls us into the third option which is both. Not one or the other, but both.   

A few years ago, I bumped into and took great solace in a blog post by Richard Rohr. Rohr is a process theologian I find to be very accessible. He was writing about order and disorder through a metaphor of “three boxes.” We begin, our theologian claims, with order. We call it normal. That is his first box. We then experience a disruption, a time of disorder, something that upsets the way we want things to be. This is the second box. And, he continues, if we keep at it, we can find our way into reorder. This is not a return to who things used to be; it is instead a reordering of toward the future given what has happened. Richard Rohr wrote, “Whenever we’re led out of normalcy into sacred, open space, it’s going to feel like suffering, because it is letting go of what we’re used to.” https://cac.org/the-three-boxes-2016-12-06/

Essentially, he was advocating for the value of disorder. He could have as easily written about imperfection or suffering or grief. He picked a more neutral concept: disorder. The second box in his metaphor of ‘three boxes’ is disorder. You could equally think of it as the progression from thesis and antithesis into synthesis. Or perhaps: sunlight and clouds, and the sunbeams that arise from the interplay of light and shadow.

This is not meant as a moral judgment about light vs darkness, joy vs sorrow, order vs disorder. Instead, it is an acknowledgment of comfort and discomfort, and the values of each. “This is always painful at some level,” Rohr writes in his blog, describing the move from the first box ‘order’ to the second box ‘disorder’; “But part of us has to die if we are ever to grow larger” In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (NIV; John 12:24)

Joni Mitchell’s song describes her child-like, romantic imaginings about life and love. She then reveals the jarring disillusionment and hurt, the sadness of it all that can lead a person to become jaded. That’s Rohr’s second box: the disorder. And Joni Mitchell’s song then, suggests not simply a return to the first perspective but an appreciation of the original romantic view through the lens of the lived heartbreak and sorrow.

The goal is never to remain in the grief or the jaded heartbreak. The goal is take life whole; to live all of it. Listen to this piece from writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown.  

Put your attention on suffering – which is constant and everywhere – and it is all you will see. Joy will come, and laughter, but you will find it brief, possibly a distraction.

Put your attention on joy, being connected and feeling whole, and you will find it everywhere. Your heart will still break. You will know grief. But you will find it a reasonable cost for the random abundance of miracles, and the soft wild rhythms of love.

Brown is sharing here the same message I take from Joni Mitchell’s song. You can look at both sides now, from suffering and joy, and still somehow, it is the joy we will recall. In the song, Joni calls them illusions. Her early romantic versions of clouds and love and life are – according to her – illusions. This is the one big point on which I would argue with the amazing Joni Mitchell.

Yes, clouds are not really feathered canyons. Seeing them as angel’s hair is indeed a playful illusion. I will concede those descriptions of clouds as illusions. But to say the dizzy dancing way we feel when we are in love is a illusion is simply not true. It is certainly not all there is to being in love, but that exciting ‘falling in love’ time is not an illusion. And, I would argue, the counter part she offers of ‘if you care, don’t let them know – don’t give yourself away,’ is not to be commended as a better way to show love. That is more about protecting your broken heart than it is about the illusion of love. Certainly, your heart can be broken if you give it away – that part of what Joni is saying is true. But that’s what it is to love. That’s not naive or delusional, that’s just the risk we take when we love.

And so it is with life too. Life is meant to be a risk of love and faith. It is not something to be done shielded and in fear. The better way, living openly and with all the tears and fears that go with it is not an illusion. That is, as I say, the better way.

And when Joni ends each chorus saying she recalls the open and vulnerable way best – that is what Adrienne Marie Brown is saying too. Approach from the side of joy, Brown says, but be open and vulnerable to both the sorrow and the joy in life and all will be well. It will be bittersweet, to be sure. But that is how life is.

Consider the interplay of light and shadow, the dynamic interchange of joy and sorrow, the wild poignancy of your living. Be not locked into what has always been. It is not safety we find in being well-shielded from sorrow and loss, but stagnation and death. Release your fears, trust that the risks of sorrow and sadness are worth it more often than not.

In so doing, our lives will be both a little more bitter and a little more sweet. And what’s more – they will be whole. Let us have faith that such a life will lead us deeper into the fullness of living.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

The Fire in Your Bowl

November 27, 2022

Rev. Douglas Taylor

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/q5Vr9Jr5Hq8

A few weeks back we had our monthly Soul Matters Small Group Ministry with the Athens, Binghamton, and Cortland congregations. The theme for the month was around Change; and one of the questions struck me. I’d thought I might have it as my focus question that evening but instead, as I read it again, I thought, “Oh, that’s a whole sermon.” So, I answered a different question for the evening discussion. That bigger question, the one that first caught me but I waited to answer, was this:

It’s what many of us fear the most: becoming reconciled to injustice, resigned to fear and despair, lulled into a life of apathy. Have you put in enough strategies to avoid this fate?

Are you doing enough to avoid this reconciliation and resignation? There is a lot of trouble out in the world, many things that tempt us into despair, much that breaks our hearts. The phrases in that question are drawn from a poem titled “I Am Afraid of Nealy Everything” by an anonymous author. And, while I am not, (afraid of nearly everything – that is) I do find this poem compelling.

I Am Afraid of Nearly Everything                   by Anonymous

I am afraid of nearly everything:

of darkness,

hunger,

war,

children mutilated.

But most of all, I am afraid of what I might become:

reconciled to injustice,

resigned to fear and despair,

lulled into a life of apathy.

Unchain my hope, make me strong.

Stretch me towards the impossible, that I may work for what ought to be:

the hungry fed,

the enslaved freed,

the suffering comforted,

the peace accomplished.

And while I am not afraid of the first set of things mentioned in the poem: war, hunger – mostly I am heartbroken and angry about those things. What grips me, thought is the second set mentioned in the poem. I do find that second set of things unnerving. I do fear that I might become reconciled to injustice. There is a piece from Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail in which King says there are some things in our society against which we ought to be maladjusted. I don’t want to become reconciled to injustice, resigned to fear and despair, lulled into a life of apathy.

There are many things in our world that break our hearts or tempt us toward despair and resignation. There is a vast amount of need in the world, calling for our attention, for our action. But as Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The fear and frustration are a lot. But what the world really needs is our joy. The world needs our light and bright living. The world needs people who have come alive.

The world needs our joy? There is a strange wall between these two topics: the heartbreaking needs of the world and … joy. It is difficult to speak of fear, injustice, hunger, and suffering alongside something so bright and wonderful as joy.

Where do you find joy? Where is that brightness in your life? Set to the side for a moment all these heavy things I’ve been bringing up and give some attention to this question: Where do you find joy? Or to lean into Howard Thurman’s nuance of the question: what makes you come alive?

Many people will answer these questions with simple things: a quiet morning in the woods, holidays with family, making love, playing games with friends. Maybe your thoughts drifted toward larger events from your living – the culmination of a long project, a special trip or cruise, the birth of a child. There is joy in this world in so many places large and small. And the world needs our joy. The world needs people who have come alive.

Now turn with me to these heavier things I mentioned earlier. The things that break your heart, that spark your anger, that tempt you toward despair. If we are going to make this world a better place, if we are going to meet the world’s needs – we must be prepared to bring our joy with us to those hard places. The suggestion is not to forget about the pain. Or to only live in your bliss, neglecting the needs of others. No. The counsel from Howard Thurman and others is to not leave your joy behind, bring it with you as you go.

I shared with the children about the history and meaning of our Flaming Chalice. The symbol is still flexible, delightfully open to interpretation and reinterpretation. The fire in our bowl is spoken of as our fire of commitment, our spark of joy, our image of God, a beacon of hope, and our hearth fire of community. The way I am using the image today is as a combination of the fire of commitment and the spark of joy within each of us. Let me explain.

Earlier this month I was invited to travel to Buffalo for a healing conversation about racism and gun violence. 6 months earlier, on May 14^th of this year, a man from Conklin (near Binghamton) went up to a Tops market in Buffalo and killed 10 people. It is clear from his own writings that this was a racially motivated crime. He drove over three hours to get to a predominantly black neighborhood with the intent to kill as many black people as possible.

Our local interfaith group, The Children of Abraham, decided this was a topic that fit within our mission of building mutual trust and respect across our religious traditions. One member of our interfaith group had relationships up in Buffalo, and when the shooting happened, they reached out; and our recent trip grew from there. About a dozen of us from this area drove up to Buffalo to meet with clergy and lay leaders from the churches serving the neighborhood where the shooting took place. We shared a meal together and we shared our experiences of the event.

I and a few others talked about the vigil hosted that week in May on the Broome County Courthouse lawn – organized by the Black clergy in our area. I shared about our congregation’s serendipitous program already planned to have history professor Steve Call do a lecture on racist narratives of the history of the Civil War that foster white nationalism among us – and how that lecture and the subsequent Q & A helped bring some of our community together in awareness. 

I shared some of these things, some of these events that happened in response. I also shared some of my own feelings – about my frustration and anger, but also my desire to distance myself and my congregation from the shooter as if to say he is not an example of the people down here in Binghamton.

But he is. I shared how I wrestled with the fact that there is something in this community that allowed that man’s hate to grow and flourish. There is something in this community for which I am in part responsible.

I had a few opportunities to share. Mostly, I listened. Mostly, I held space for others to share. I heard about the vigil they had held in one of the larger sanctuaries and the crowds who showed up that night. I heard about the impact of the one grocery store in the neighborhood being closed as a crime scene for two months. I heard about the small memorial set up in the market to the ten people killed that day. I heard about how people in the neighborhood felt pressure to ‘be resilient and move on.’

One lay leader shared with us her experience of the day of the shooting. She said she’d been planning to met up with a niece at the Tops market that evening. She told us the grocery store was something of a community center – every time she went there, she saw several people she knew. When she first heard the shooting had happened, she had about 20 phone calls to make to family members to see if they were safe. Had they been at the store? Had they heard from anyone else? Did they know what was going on?

Her uncle was one of the ten people killed. Her uncle was part of a program to drive people places. “Where are you going,” he would ask, “how much money do you have?” And he would always take them where they needed to go for whatever they could pay. I am not sure if that’s why he was at the grocery store that afternoon, but it seems likely.

These were good people, normal people going about their lives. The shooter wanted to kill as many black people as possible. During my visit, I heard about the weariness settling in on them and the resignation settling in around them.

But most of all, I am afraid of what I might become: (Our poem had cautioned us,)

reconciled to injustice,

resigned to fear and despair,

lulled into a life of apathy.

The poem then turns and offers a call for something different.

Unchain my hope, make me strong

Stretch me towards the impossible, that I may work for what ought to be:

the hungry fed,

the enslaved freed,

the suffering comforted,

the peace accomplished.

You will recall, perhaps, that I promised this sermon would be about joy, about coming alive. I am grateful to have been invited into that conversation. It opens me up, I feel more alive when I can be a participant in a healing conversation like that. I’m not saying I found great joy through the experience; but I am saying I did not leave my joy back in Binghamton for this visit. It was a joy to meet a few new people, to learn about their lives and their passions, to be with them in a meaningful struggle.

There is a plan to have a dozen or so people from Buffalo come down here to Binghamton and Conklin for a similar event at the one-year anniversary. There is a plan to keep the relationships, to keep this bridge we’ve begun to build. And that is meaningful and can lead to strong neighborhoods and communities and, yes, to joy. By engaging with a meaningful struggle, a struggle for meaning in the face of suffering – we can overcome it. We can persevere together. We can come to a place of joy together. We can even find it along the way, in the struggle.

There are many things in our world that break our hearts or tempt us toward despair and resignation. There is a vast amount of need in the world, calling for our attention, for our action. But as Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The fear and frustration are a lot. But what the world really needs is our joy. The world needs our light and bright living. The world needs people who have come alive.

What is it for you? Where is your joy? What makes you come alive? Perhaps it is teaching or sharing music. It doesn’t have to be a justice issue – although it easily could be tangled up with justice-making in some way.

I find I come alive when I am invited into the sort of healing conversation I found up in Buffalo. I also found it last week when I participated with the students at the Transgender Day of Remembrance at Binghamton University. I find it every time I put together and lead a memorial service. It is about being invited into meaningful struggle with others. It is about being trusted to hold a vulnerable space open for healing. This is what makes me come alive. What is it for you?

The fire in our bowl is that light leading us on. It is the spark of passion we offer the world. It is the center of our bright living. I invite you to lean into the place of your joy, to know what fire helps you to come alive. Where we work for what ought to be:

the hungry fed,

the enslaved freed,

the suffering comforted,

the peace accomplished.

The world needs our joy. The world needs us to come alive.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

How This All Gets Better

October 30, 2022

Rev. Douglas Taylor

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/QkR_MwWl6Sk

At our Soul Matters gathering this month, our theme was Courage. One suggested question was this: “What seems more dangerous these days: Pessimism or Optimism?” I like that. It doesn’t ask the usual ‘are you a pessimist or an optimist?’ Goodness! That gets boring quickly and everyone jumps on how they’re neither pessimist nor optimist, we’re all realists these days. But that was not the question. Instead, it asks, which do you think is more dangerous?

Well, dangerous to who? To me for thinking that way? To our society that would be happy to have me prop up the status quo? Now the question is exciting again. Shall I risk too-soon surrender and needless despair with my pessimistic perspective? Or will my optimistic outlook risk unwarranted hope leading to a near-willful blindness to the suffering of others while I accept Positive Vibes Only. Which is more dangerous?

And this question is in the context of our current situation together. What seems more dangerous these days? Is it realistic to think things are getting better, or that they will soon be improving? Or might it be more realistic to anticipate that we have not yet hit bottom and things will be getting worse?

I was talking to a member of the congregation after a recent worship service in which we played a portion of the General Assembly speech by UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray. The congregant expressed some dismay at how pessimistic the speech had seemed – dire warnings for us to rally together for justice. “General Assembly occurred at the end of June,” I responded, “right when the news broke that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v Wade. Many people are feeling that the country is losing ground.”

The congregant nodded, acknowledging the point. But then continued, “Overall, though, we are making progress. We’ve been gaining ground! Things are much better today than a generation earlier.” We didn’t talk in terms of optimism and pessimism in that conversation, but the undertones were there. It made me pause and really consider the situation we are in.

Don’t get me wrong. The situation we are in is not good. The federal protections of reproductive rights are being undermined. Our country’s democracy has taken a heavy political blow with election deniers and voter suppression. Racist white nationalists are in the public sphere seeking respectability. Our society is severely divided politically. Corporations continue to post record profits while regular folks suffer economically. And globally, this pandemic is still taking lives. The climate continues to spiral in crisis. And countless other calamities abound.

But our question is not about if there is trouble today. The question is about being pessimistic or optimistic given this trouble. The question is, do we think things are going to get better or worse from here?

Enter Robert Putnam. Our reading this morning was from a new book by this political scientist, The Upswing. Putnam’s answer seems to be – yes things are going to get better if we want them to. The subtitle of the book is “How American came together a century ago and how we can do it again.”

Now, Putnam is a researcher. He didn’t look at if things were “better” or “worse.” He studied topics a little more concrete. And, his scope was vast, reviewing more than a hundred years’ worth of data. He looked at four specific metrics: economic, political, social, and cultural.

First, economic equality – when the gap between the haves and the have-nots is large, a small number of wealthy individuals find the situation better but the vast majority of people find the situation worse. When there is greater economic equality, more people are better off. The second metric was polarization in politics. You’ve probably experienced this as well, but it seems to me from all the negative political ads this year that my choices are between the corrupt fascists who will ruin the country and the radical socialists who will ruin the country. When there is more cooperation and compromise across party lines, more can be accomplished and more people are better off. Third, Putnam looked at society and if people were isolated or had cohesion. I recall an earlier one of his books, Bowling Alone, dug into that specific metric at length. His fourth metric he framed as cultural – are people focused on their responsibilities to others or on a narrower self-interest.

Here is the most interesting part of all this. In charting these big trends, he noticed an unmistakable pattern in each of the four independent metrics. There is a steady rise toward “a more egalitarian, cooperative, cohesive, and altruistic nation” (p11) for several decades and then a turn followed by all four metrics falling. And they all lined up to have this rise and fall occur at the same time in the life of our nation. He shows it all on one chart and calls it an inverted U, a shift from “I” to “We” and back to “I” again.

It started in the Gilded Age, the 1890’s and early 1900’s: a very narcissistic, polarized era. That’s what he means by “I.” The measures climb until the mid-1960’s. to the more egalitarian and altruistic time which he labels “We.”

“Between the mid-1960’s and today – by scores of hard measures along multiple dimensions – we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric, and a descent into cultural narcissism.” (p11)

This research is interesting, but what are we to do with it? I do enjoy hearing a sound perspective on history. But I want to know how it will help me grapple with where we are today. What do we do with this information?

It might seem like the obvious answer is to look back at what we were doing as the trends were climbing and do more of that; look at what we were doing as the trends were falling and do less of that. But it’s not that simple.

Part of it is that simple. Looking back at the early 1900’s we can witness a progressive movement toward national shared values and the Social Gospel movement and eventually the political New Deal. In part, it is as simple as harkening back to some of those efforts and enacting them again together. We can and we should encourage the revival of communal care and mutual responsibility as a nation.

However, when we look at what happened in the 1960’s as a template for what we should not do, we do well to be more nuanced. The book even warns that it is important to realize the cohesive “We” developed over the first half of the 1900’s was fundamentally a white, male “We.” As the measures trends down from the 60’s, the country was experiencing very positive strides forward in civil rights and women’s rights, for example. The book makes the point that the part of the turn away from progress was a backlash as the progress began to include African Americans and women.

Society shifted away from increased mutual responsibility and toward increased individual freedom and rights. It is important to notice that the civil rights and women’s rights movements are part of the freedoms and diversity that have grown in our current individual-focused culture now. On the continuum between “I” and “We”, our individual rights are strongest at the “I” pole.

So, yes. We need to encourage more of the progressive steps we took during the previous climb. We need to vote and petition and push for economic and political changes that support greater economic equality and at least a chance of political pluralism across the party lines. But that’s not enough. As we build rebuild a new “We” as a nation together, we must acknowledge that the new “We” needs to be expanse enough to include the “We” that we really are today: Not only white men, but women and African Americans as well. And while Putnam’s book only goes that far, we can certainly go farther. Not only women, but non-binary and trans people and queer people as well. Not only African Americans but indigenous and immigrants and other people of color pushed to the margins still today.

And to accomplish this, the call for greater equality and mutual responsibility must be in balance. It is not so simple as to call for more “We” and less “I.” We need both. The new upswing needs to create a new “We” rather than nostalgically reach back to the “We” we used to be. The new “We” must include and honor some of the particular elements of “I” or it will not work.

This is not a foreign topic among us as Unitarian Universalists. Our faith tradition has long been strongly individualistic. We have long focused on our freedoms and on each person’s inherent worthiness and personal searching. Lately we have swung our focus together toward covenants, recognizing this need to balance the “I” with a strong “We.” Every community needs to find the balance between the freedom and the equality, that leaning too heavy in “I” or in “We” is ultimately destructive. Other faith traditions, other nations need to grapple with too much communitarian focus. Our faith tradition and this nation need to grapple with the opposite at this time in our history.

And in the end, the point is not to swing the pendulum to the other side. The point is to allow the balance to emerge – to work for and clear space for that balance to emerge. To allow Rights and diversity to flourish even as we declare shared values and work for equality together. Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest “What’s past is prologue, what to come, in yours and my discharge.” This is how this all gets better.

We must address the economic inequity and the way we’ve been pushing all the wealth up toward a miniscule percentage of people. We desperately need to find a way to reach across the political divide while exorcising the fascist-tendencies out of our system. And this pandemic has only heightened our awareness of how isolated we all have become – if that is not the work of a religious community, what is?

In the end, the question of will things improve or will things get worse is a misleading question because it implies that we simply need to wait to find out rather than acknowledging that we have a role it figuring it all out. In the end the question “What seems more dangerous these days: Pessimism or Optimism?” is a false question because the most dangerous stance is an active one of a people ready to work for the change we long to see in the world. It is a dangerous stance for the old “We” that is dying as the new “We” emerges.

Our Unitarian Universalist theology is dangerous in this way. Our theology calls us into both equality and freedom. We need to live out our faith. We are called to balance the “I” and the “We,” called to break each other out of the isolation around us, called to build coalitions across our differences – even politically, called to seek greater economic equality among all people. This is the dangerous platform I want to vote for, I want to participate in, I want to have us realize together.

As Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue, what to come, in yours and my discharge.” What is to come is ours to build! In our choir sang in our anthem (We Shall Be Known by MaMuse) we are in a time of Great Turning. It is time now; it is time now that we thrive.  In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love.

The great turning says the changes will not simply happen; it not something we can sit back and receive. We have to make the changes happen. As Shakespeare wrote: they are ours to discharge. We need to grab hold of the moral arc of the universe and help shape the new “We” we are to become; to help bend that arc toward justice; to optimistically believe that we can. That we will.

In a world without end

May it be so.