The Balance Between

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance..."
-- Thomas Merton

Meditation: by Lynn Ungar, a poem entitled “Revelers”

Call it spare time –

dark afternoons

and the bones of trees

rattling against the sky.

We could use more hope,

or reason for hope. The sea

is rising, and bombs are planted

in the marketplace. It might

be better to just go to bed.

It might be better to

turn out the lights and wait 

for the end to come.

The only other choice 

is to dance. That and to sing

sturdy songs that have held up

across winters,

drink wine the deep red of blood

that has not been shed,

feast, tell tales of heroes who

strode or stumbled through

their own bleak times.

When in doubt, revel in the darkness.

Each act of celebration is a spark.

Gathered together

they bring back the sun.

Reading:  by historian Rachel Schnepper, from an editorial that appeared in The New York Times last week, entitled “Yuletide’s Outlaws.” (Dec. 14, 2012)

Each year, as wreaths and colored lights are hung on any structure that can support their weight, another holiday tradition begins: the bemoaning of the annual War on Christmas.

The American Family Association has called for boycotting Old Navy and the Gap for, out of political correctness, not using the term “Christmas” in their holiday advertising. Parents have criticized schools for diminishing Christmas celebrations by giving equal time to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. And the Catholic League used to have a Christmas “watch list” for naming and shaming “Christmas kill-joys.”

Anxiety over the War on Christmas is, in other words, an American tradition. But few realize how far back that tradition goes. The contemporary War on Christmas pales in comparison to the first — a war that was waged not by retailers but by Puritans who considered the destruction of Christmas necessary to the construction of their godly society.

Reading: by Annie Dillard from “An Expedition to the Pole” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 19)

It is the second Sunday in Advent.  For a year I have been attending Mass at this Catholic church.  Every Sunday for a year I have run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear.  We dancing bears have dressed ourselves in buttoned clothes; we mince around the rings on two feet.  Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws.

No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn.  Then no one could sing anyway.

There was no sermon, only announcements.

The priest proudly introduced the rascally acolyte who was going to light the two Advent candles.  As we all could plainly see, the rascally acolyte had already lighted them.

During the long intercessory prayer, the priest always reads “intentions” from the parishioners.  These are slips of paper, dropped into a box before the service begins, on which people have written their private concerns, requesting our public prayers.  The priest reads them, one by one, and we respond on cue.  “For a baby safely delivered on November twentieth,” the priest intoned, “we pray to the Lord.”  We all responded, “Lord, hear our prayer.”  Suddenly the priest broke in and confided to our bowed heads, “That’s the baby we’ve been praying for the past two months!  The woman just kept getting more and more pregnant!”  How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep from laughing out loud?  I often laugh all the way home.  Then the priest read the next intention: “For my son, that he may forgive his father.  We pray to the Lord.”  “Lord, hear our prayer,” we responded, chastened.

A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one.  In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks.  We positively glorify them. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter.  Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens.  

Reading: by Dorothee Sölle, a poem entitled “In this Night”

In this night the stars left their habitual places

And kindled wildfire tidings that spread faster than sound

In this night the shepherds left their posts

To shout the new slogans into each others clogged ears.

In this night the foxes left their warm burrows

And the lion spoke with deliberation,

“This is the end revolution.”

In this night roses fooled the earth

And began to bloom in the snow.

The Balance Between

A Sermon Delivered on December 23, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I was a child, Christmas was a time of mystery and wonder. There was something mysterious and wonderful in the simple holiday trappings and family traditions we observed. The fact that the same Christmas tree ornaments, year after year, were carefully lifted out of their boxes, unwrapped and thoughtfully placed on our Christmas tree, made the act of decoration seem to connect me with a holiday spirit reaching back to time immemorial. Though each ornament weighed only a few ounces, and barely bent the twig on which I hung it, each piece in my hand felt heavy with meaning.

I had no idea what a sacred ritual is, no conception of the theological implications of the Christmas story – the story of a helpless human infant who is the actual embodiment of an all-powerful God. I was unaware of the symbolic meaning of the evergreen tree and the candles that illuminated our home. But even without understanding any of this, unable to put any of it into words, I was still strangely touched and moved.

One piece of our familiar decorations that I especially enjoyed looking at and playing with, was an elaborate wooden candleholder. There were four candles set in square base. Between them, on a small round platform, was a little winter scene: a tiny wooden man and woman looking down on a baby in a crib. Two teeny sheep and a shepherd nearby, holding a long staff. In the center of the scene was a tall Christmas tree.

What made this Christmas display especially interesting to a playful child, was that it moved. You see, on the top of the little Christmas tree, there was a kind-of helicopter pinwheel made of horizontal wooden slats. When I lit the four candles, the warm air rising from each flame would push up through the pinwheel, and make the entire winter scene spin around slowly, the figures dancing magically, peacefully.

* * *

It would be nice if Christmas could always remain simply a time to savor a spirit of mystery and wonder, of human kindness and divine peace. It would be nice if we could forever hold on to the sense of excitement and playfulness and wide-eyed wonder we knew as children. But we can’t.

Inevitably, we grow up, and life gets a lot more complicated. As adults, we have a harder time believing in miracles and magic. Now we watch our children, as they discover the joy of gifts given and received, the sweet taste of cookies, the heart-warming stories of hope – and we share their experience vicariously.

And then even our children grow older. They lose their innocence, as life teaches them their own hard-earned lessons. Though, if we are honest with ourselves, we know even for children life is not pure simple bliss. No matter how old we are, life is filled with its share of danger as well as peace, its share hurt as well as hope. Life has always been complicated.

* * *

And, like life, Christmas is complicated, too. The holidays are supposed to be a time of peace, and yet every year, it seems, there is a War on Christmas. This is a long-standing American tradition, a conflict carried out in many different ways.

There is the battle between certain Christians who have a very particular, definitive interpretation of Christmas, and those who want to honor other traditions at this time of year: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Santa Claus, and any number of pagan practices. There is the battle between those who would like Christmas to be, above all, a spiritual experience, and those see Christmas as a commercial enterprise, the keystone of our annual retail economy. And there is the battle between those who revel in the joys of Christmas, and the Scrooges among us who feel the Christmas commotion just rubs them the wrong way.

Historians say, centuries ago a battle for Christmas was waged so fiercely, that the government actually outlawed Christmas. In the seventeenth century, the Puritans considered the holiday “nothing more than a thin Christian veneer slapped on a pagan celebration.” They thought Christmas was “superstitious at best, heretical at worst.” At the time, in England, Christmas was a kind of raucous carnival, with lots of feasting and heavy drinking, sort-of like Mardi Gras. People dressed up in costumes, and played games and pranks. Christmas had a subversive, revolutionary spirit, that, for a few days, turned established order on its head. 

The Puritans didn’t like that. So in 1647, Christmas was canceled. Churches were shut down, shops were ordered to stay open, and minsters were arrested for preaching on Christmas Day. Between 1659 and 1681, anyone caught celebrating Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay colony was fined five shillings.

The Puritan War on Christmas lasted two hundred years, until 1870, when Christmas was legally declared a federal holiday. It was only in the 1800s that Clement Moore’s poem “A Night Before Christmas” and Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” helped reshape Christmas into the gentle family celebration we know today.

* * *

The Christmas season is filled with so many competing stories, so many different feelings, so many different memories and hopes, so many dimensions of meaning. All these competing ideas and activities and impulses can sometimes seem overwhelming, and throw our lives off-kilter.  For some of us, the holidays can feel like a tug-of-war between competing claims placed upon us. How can we maintain some semblance of balance in the midst of the madness?

How can we balance the experience of the child and of the adult? How can we balance the romantic dreamer and the sober skeptic within us? How can we balance our beliefs and our doubts, our hopes and our fears? How can we find balance in the midst of all these battles?

Scholars say, in Western religion we imagine “a cosmic battle between two opposing principles and pray for the total victory of light over darkness,” of life over death. But that’s not the only way to make sense of the world. (Stephen Prothero, God is not One)

In Eastern thought, in Daoism, for instance, the principles that seem to be opposites - darkness and light, good and evil, weakness and strength, yin and yang – are not actually opposites, but rather complementary pairs, forever melting into one another. They are not opposites, but inseparable phases in an endless cycle, like the movement from day to night, from summer to winter and summer, again. 

According to this perspective “life does not move onward and upward toward a fixed pinnacle or pole.” Life bends back upon itself and comes full circle. (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions)

The poet Mary Caroline Richards describes a similar idea in a book entitled Centering. Richards is a poet, and also a potter. And because she is a potter, she uses the image of the potter’s wheel to describe her understanding of balance. 

She writes, “What I know about centering makes it impossible for me to pretend that truth is either objective or subjective; the practice of centering casts upon such dualisms another light …Centering is the image I use for the process of balance… Centering: that act which precedes all others on the potter’s wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts.”

* * *

To maintain our balance amidst the dueling demands of our lives, we need to find a way to remain centered. We need to find the still point of our turning world.

As T. S. Eliot writes:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

* * *

This is the dance we struggle to learn when we come to church. A dance that allows us to touch a stillness deep within, whenever it seems our lives are at the verge of spinning out of control. It is a dance that helps us find a center of sanity at times when the world around us seems to be going mad. 

When the merry-go-round of life is moving too fast, and the world seems to be a blur, we can regain our balance when we step toward the center. It’s like when we reach the middle of a playground carousel. We try to stand there, straight like a pivot, unwobbling. But we don’t always succeed.

Instead our efforts often look like a clumsy circus act, with us circling the ring like dancing bears. And we keep dropping onto our forepaws. The tricks we try to play around Christmas, we have been rehearsing them for two thousand years, and we still haven’t worked out the kinks. 

* * *

When I was a child, I never grew tired of watching the wooden candleholder with the tiny figures dancing slowly around the little Christmas tree that stood unmoving in the center. Some mysterious and wonderful secret seemed to be contained in that revolving winter scene. It hinted at the possibility of some kind of revolution: the possibility of a transformation from death to new life, from vague fears to certain joy.  

In mythology it’s called the “axis mundi.” The axis mundi is the center of the world, the connection between Heaven and Earth. A celestial pillar that stands at the center of the four directions, connecting the world above with the world below. The ancients sometimes imagined it as a tree, or as a mountain, or as a column of smoke rising from an eternal flame. Others imagine the place of connection between heaven and earth within our own hearts, or in the birth of a human child.

We each seek epiphanies in our own way

in daylight or dark night, 

in boughs of holly or blazing Yule fires, 

in songs of joy or acts of kindness. 

However you seek the spirit of the season, may your search be successful.

In the days to come, may you find a balance of light and love in the center of your life.

Amen.

Hurry Up and Wait

"They also serve who only stand and wait."
-- John Milton

Reading: by Henri Nouwen from a piece entitled “Waiting for God” (Watch for the Light, p. 27)

Waiting is not a very popular attitude. Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don’t just sit there and wait!” For many people waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.

In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid – afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are. …

Reading: by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney from Willpower – Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (p. 2) 

[Researchers have] come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced,  winding up in prison. …It can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering. It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed to set aside enough money for their old age.

Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they’ll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery and other virtues – even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than one million people around the world. Of the two dozen “character strengths” listed in the researcher’s questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves.

Reading:  by Marie Howe a poem entitled “Hurry”

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   

and the gas station and the green market and   

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   

as she runs along two or three steps behind me   

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.   

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

Hurry Up and Wait

A Sermon Delivered on December 2, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I was a kid, December was the longest month. I couldn’t wait for Christmas. When I was old enough to know that there would be an abundance of colorfully wrapped packages with my name on them, come Christmas Eve, but still young enough to find unspeakable joy in the prospect of receiving a few carefully selected gifts, those were the years December seemed to last the longest. I remember wishing desperately there was some way to speed up the days, and make time pass more quickly. And yet the more fervently I hoped, the slower the days seemed to drag by.

Now, as an adult, I feel just the opposite. Winter seems to be coming too quickly. It is getting dark much too early, for my taste. And I find myself savoring these unseasonably mild autumn days we are having, before the icy weather arrives in earnest.

December always seems to be marked by a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, a heightened sense of hope, but also a vague sense of fear. For the child, it was simply the fear that my holiday wishes might be disappointed. As an adult, it is the fear of time flying by too quickly, and the growing awareness that the time of our lives is limited. Winter in the world of nature itself is a reminder of our own mortality.

* * *

Today, according to the Christian calendar, is First Advent. It is the first of four Sundays before Christmas. Advent. The word comes from the Latin advenire, which means “to come,” and adventus meaning “arrival.” These are the same roots as the word adventure, which means something is “about to happen.”

In the Christian tradition, the weeks of advent are spent preparing for the arrival of the Christ child, the birth of a baby, and also in preparation for the Second Coming. The first time around Jesus arrives as child savior. The second time around, Jesus returns as judge.

Being judged is serious business. Thus in some Christian traditions advent is a period of fasting, observed just as strictly as the forty days of Lent before Easter. These weeks are a devoted to waiting. Waiting in joyful or fearful anticipation for what is to come.

* * *

Waiting is not easy. Some of us are better at it than others. This has been scientifically studied. And some of these scientific insights are striking.

Perhaps you have heard of the “marshmallow experiments.” Back in the 1960s a psychologist named Walter Mischel studied children’s ability to resist the temptations of immediate gratification.

The experiment he came up with was this: he would bring four-year-old children, one after another, into a room, sit them down at a table, and put a single marshmallow on plate right in front of them. Then he would tell the child: “You can eat this marshmallow right now, if you want. I am going to leave for a while. I have other things to do. I will be back in a few minutes. You can eat this one marshmallow, right now. But if you wait, and don’t eat it, you can have a second marshmallow when I am back. Either way, it’s up to you.” And with that he smiled and left the room.

As you might imagine, some children popped the marshmallow right into their mouths. Others managed to hold off.

Over the years this experiment has been recreated. On YouTube you can watch a clip of four-year-olds sitting at a table, looking at that single marshmallow. Some of them put their hands over their eyes, or turn away, struggling to resist. Others thoughtfully sniff and gently squeeze the marshmallow, picking and poking at it. Some nibble just a little bit. And then a little bit more. You can watch how, for some of them, the temptation is  torturous. They wince and scrunch up their faces… The experiment seems more than a little cruel.

Back in the 1960s Walter Mischel learned a bit about how young children handle delayed gratification. As it turned out, though, his research didn’t end there.

You see, Walter Mischel was a father. And his daughters happened to attend the same school on the Stanford University campus, as several of the children who participated in the original study. In the course of conversations at home around the dinner table, Mischel’s daughters would talk about their classmates, and those who had a habit of getting into trouble. Some of the names sounded familiar. Slowly, Mischel realized the kids that were struggling in school, both academically and socially, were often the same ones who as four-year-olds were the quickest to gobble down their marshmallows.

So in a follow up study Mischel tracked down hundreds of the young men and women who had participated in the marshmallow experiment. What he learned is that the four-year-olds who were able to hold out for fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, years later went on to score 210 points higher in their SATs than those who caved, and ate their marshmallow within half a minute.

The children who were patient enough to wait for fifteen minutes, grew up to be more popular among their peers and teachers, earned higher salaries, were less likely to be overweight, and had less problems with drug abuse. These men and women have been tracked now for over forty years. And the differences among them are still apparent.

* * *

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney begin their book Willpower, with an interesting observation. “However you define success,” they write, whether “a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions – it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.”

The two personal qualities that most reliably predict “positive outcomes” in life are intelligence and self-control. As far as we know, it is not possible to increase our innate intelligence. However, it is possible to improve our degree of self-control.

* * *

Some of us – by virtue of the cards we were dealt by nature or nurture – are more likely to eat that single marshmallow in one quick bite, even if we wish we could have had two instead. And some of us are better able to wait, and thus enjoy certain rewards available only to those who are patient.

But all of us, regardless of our knee-jerk reactions, regardless of our habitual inclinations, all of us have the capacity for greater self-control. Each of us has the capacity to be more patient.

One way to think about patience is as an act of willpower. Our willpower, Baumeister and Tierney write, can be built up and strengthened almost like a muscle. With steady exercise and attention, we can improve our habits. Greater patience can be taught and learned. Both scientists and religious practitioners agree on this. 

Allan Lokos, a Buddhist teacher, and author of a book entitled Patience – The Art of Peaceful Living, writes, “To become a truly patient person requires effort, and it will be difficult to sustain that effort unless you are genuinely motivated.” Thus he suggests: 

“Each day for a week, sit quietly for fine minutes and consider [why you want] to become more patient. Don’t impose reasons on yourself because they seem “right” or because others think that way. Examine your [own] personal experience. Look deeply at what matters to you. Reflect on your relationships, both personal and professional. How does your impatience or your anger affect your wife/ husband/ partner/ children/ friends? Be truthful with yourself: Would it be worth the effort to become more patient? At this point just ask the questions. Let the answers come when they are ready.” (p. 36)

* * *

Patience allows us to live more attentively, and to act more thoughtfully. 

We live much of our lives breathlessly, rushing from one activity to the next, from one worry to the next, from one desire to the next. And so, for the Buddhist, the effort to break the anxious cycle, involves, first of all, being less breathless. Many Buddhist meditation practices begin with the instruction that we should simply sit there, and breathe. Don’t do anything. Simply breathe. Don’t try to breathe fast or slow. Don’t try to breath deep or shallow. Simply breathe. And pay attention to your breathing.

Simply paying attention to our breathing is the first step in bringing us back fully to the present moment. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells her students they should “simply stay” in the present moment. Most of us have a deeply engrained habit to try to flee from the present, and become preoccupied with memories of yesterday and worries about tomorrow. Most of us are often scattered and distracted. To pause for a moment and take a breath is the first step in learning patience.

“Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream.” And thus we come back to the immediacy of our experience. (The Places that Scare You, p. 23)

The patience envisioned by the Buddhist, which can bring us more fully into the present moment, is very similar to the patience envisioned by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. He writes, 

“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.” (p. 31)

* * *

What Walter Mischel discovered studying a four-year-old’s struggle with the temptation of a marshmallow, is what it means to be patient. The patient children didn’t grit their teeth, and practice superhuman self-denial. They simply turned their attention to other things present in the room. Rather than remaining feverishly focused on dreams of marshmallow consumption – either immediate or delayed – they relaxed, and were able to realize that there is more to life than the next marshmallow fix.

* * *

Advent is a period of preparation, of anticipation and apprehension. It is a period in which it is very easy to get caught up in frantic activity or feverish worry.

For a lot of younger folks a wish list can become the focus of joyful anticipation. For older folks a bucket list can become a way to cope with our apprehension about the reality of death. And for in-between-folks an urgent to-do-list can keep us tied up in frantic activity, hurrying from one thing to the next. All of these lists are designed to help us organize our lives, but in fact they turn out distracting us from life. All of our lists pull us away from the present. All of them make us slaves to some imagined reward. Each item we cross off our list is just another marshmallow we want to pop into our mouth. 

Waiting patiently is not merely a matter of resisting temptation, it is a matter of putting aside all distractions.

Often times our waiting is filled with wishes, Henri Nouwen writes. “’I wish that I would have this job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.’ We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes.”

Waiting patiently means relaxing in the moment, and realizing that everything we need is already right here. It means knowing that what we are waiting for is growing from the ground on which we are standing. It means being fully present to this moment.

As we approach another winter solstice, and once again descend into the darkest days of the year, as we await the return of the sun, and the arrival of a new year, may we do so patiently.

Grateful for time past,

Hopeful for time future,

May our seasonal preparations bring us back to time present,

back to the fullness of our lives, right here, right now.

Amen.

Imaginary Meals

"Spread the table and contention will cease."
-- English Proverb

Meditation: by Howard Thurman from “A Litany of Thanksgiving”

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father,

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives of many who talked of days gone by when fairies and giants and all kinds of magic held sway:

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!...

Reading: by British historian Godfrey Hodgson from The Great and Godly Adventure - The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (p.xix)  

The feast [the Pilgrim Father] Edward Winslow described has come to be called the First Thanksgiving, and accounts from serious histories to commercial Web sites date the origins of Thanksgiving to the fall of 1621.  Generations of Americans have been taught that the Thanksgiving meal of today not only celebrates that feast, shared with the Indians, but replicates its menu.  It is clear that neither of these beliefs is true.  There were no turkeys.  Or cranberry sauce or pumpkins pies.  Nor did the Pilgrim Fathers call themselves Pilgrims at the time, and strictly speaking they weren’t Puritan either.  And of course it is stretching a point to call them Americans: certainly they always referred to themselves as Englishmen.

What we are seeing, when we sit down to a Thanksgiving turkey, is a prime example of what historians have come to call “the invention of tradition.”  There is absolutely no harm in that.  Indeed, Thanksgiving is one of the most innocent and happiest of American traditions.  If it is not true, as the Italian proverb says, it is well invented. 

Reading: by Frederick Buechner from Wishful Thinking – A Theological ABC  (p. 51)

Lord’s Supper

It is make-believe. You make believe that the one who breaks bread and blesses the wine is not the plump parson… but Jesus of Nazareth. You make believe that the tasteless wafer and cheap port are his flesh and blood. You make believe that by swallowing them you are swallowing his life into your life and that there is nothing in earth and heaven more important for you to do than this.

It is a game you play because he said to play it. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Do this.

Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child…

Reading: by Joy Harjo a poem entitled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Imaginary Meals

A Sermon Delivered on November 18, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

For the past twenty years or so, my Thanksgiving holiday has revolved around a scrumptious meal prepared by my loving wife, and gourmet cook, Elaine. It has involved a visit from relatives – every year Elaine’s mother and her husband visit us, usually driving here from Washington, D.C., where they live. And for the past sixteen-to-eighteen years, it has included our own children.

It is very much a family holiday, full of treasured traditions: cooking a turkey of course, sensitive negotiations about what should go in the stuffing, and what kind of pies are indispensable. The traditional scheduling dilemmas, when we realize the frozen turkey didn’t thaw as quickly as it should have. Or the oven didn’t seem to cook things as thoroughly in the allotted time frame as hoped.

The Thanksgiving meal is a treasured tradition. A spectacle that begins with the purchase of ingredients and the selection of recipes days in advance. And that continues well past Thursday, as the family’s designated dishwasher works his way through piles of dishes stacked high – the good dishes, that don’t go in the dishwashing machine. And leftovers are served up, again and again. Delicious every time.

And yet, every year is somehow different. This year, especially, because the grandparents from Washington won’t be able to make the trip. None of us are getting any younger. This year medical issues make travel impossible. And this year, when I call family in Germany, I will not speak with my grandmother. She died in the spring. This year I am especially grateful for family members and friends still with us.

* * *

There was a time when we imagined our Thanksgiving was a re-enactment of a memorable meal in 1621, which involved the pilgrims in Plymouth colony, and their Native Americans friends and neighbors. We imagined the European settlers were gracious hosts, and the Native Americans honored guests at a banquet that included key ingredients: turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.

It is a good story: A band of travelers, religious refugees from Old World Europe, are in search of a new home in a New World. They reach the shores this country, but soon realize they are ill-equipped to live in this unfamiliar environment. They barely survive the first harsh winter here. They wouldn’t have made it without the kindness and support of the Natives. And so the next year, after a successful harvest, they put on a lavish feast of Thanksgiving to God, inviting into their midst the unfamiliar but friendly Wampanoag Indians. It is a timeless picture of gratitude, abundance, friendship and harmony.

Does it matter, that the story is made up? Does it matter that there was no turkey and no cranberry sauce on the table that day in 1621? Does it matter that these were inventions of imaginative writers, trying to paint a pleasant picture for an English audience, hoping to entice more of them to come to Plymouth? Does it matter that the relationship between settlers and Natives was in fact strained? And that in the years that followed they were often at war? Does it matter that the descendents of the Pilgrims were the undisputed winners, who finally drove the Indians from their land?

Despite an abundance of historical evidence that paints a much more complicated picture, we want to imagine a meal that celebrated peace and friendship – a new community in which people of differing culture and conviction joined together as one, in gratitude.

* * *

The symbolic power of sharing a meal reaches back much further than 1621. It reaches deeper than the particularities of the American Thanksgiving Day myth.

The Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong writes, 

“The sharing of food in human experience is the very basis of all human community. Our language reveals that time and again. The word companion, for example, literally means the sharing of bread with another. In the act of breast-feeding, the life of the newborn infant was not only saved but sustained and enabled to grow. In the ancient world, the death of the mother in childbirth almost always guaranteed the death of the child. Feeding another is the experience in which life, love and being are first shared. So inevitably in our social order the deepest symbol of love has always been located in the act of feeding. That is why eating together is the primary way that relationships grow and are nurtured. It is the means by which love is shared.” (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 194)

Christianity has its own version of a shared meal that symbolizes the creation of a new community. It was the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples, before his death. As the story goes, Jesus invited his friends to join him for this final meal. When they were all seated at the table Jesus calmly predicted his betrayal and execution. He asked his friends to remember him.

In several Christian traditions, this communion is celebrated as a liturgical act and sacrament. Catholics believe that when the priest blesses the wine and the bread, the food is miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Many Protestants, on the other hand, see communion as purely symbolic. There is no consensus among Christians on the meaning of communion. And even the Gospel narratives disagree on what Jesus said and did, and when it happened.

Unitarian Universalists used to celebrate the Christian communion. And, in fact, it was a disagreement about the meaning and merit of the communion celebration that brought an end to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s career as Unitarian minister. 

This is another story. Young Ralph Waldo Emerson followed in his father’s footsteps. His father, William Emerson, served the Boston’s Unitarian First Church. Ralph Waldo was called to serve as minister of Second Church. But in 1831, Emerson the younger got into a fight with members of his parish, because he refused to offer communion. For Emerson, communion was a stale and meaningless religious artifact, an empty ritual that only got in the way of a more authentic, personal experience of the sacred. 

Church leaders implored Emerson to reconsider. They asked if he might be willing to at least offer communion to parishoners, even if he himself abstained. Emerson said no, and resigned from the pulpit. He still considered himself a Unitarian minister, but never served a church, or used the title “Reverend” again. Instead he became a free-lance lecturer and author, and eloquently shared his vision of God. “The Highest dwells within us,” he said. “Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related… When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius… when it flows through our affections, it is love.”

* * *

In the earliest Christian scriptures, the shared meal believers remember and ritually recreate is called the Eucharist. “Eucharist” comes from the Greek, and means “thanksgiving.” Because, according to Paul, in his letter to the congregation in Corinth, that’s what Jesus did first of all: he took the bread into his hands, and he gave thanks.

There is a famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, that shows Jesus seated at the center of a long table, with six disciples to his left, and six to his right. Painted in 1495, it surely has played a big part in how many Christians today imagine Jesus. Rather than Middle Eastern, Jesus and his disciples look distinctly European. No surprise that an Italian artist would invent an Italian Jesus.

Historians agree that the first Thanksgiving didn’t actually happen the way our school children learn the story. Historians agree that the last supper was not accurately described in any single Gospel story.

But a deeper and more profound truth is told in both of these Thanksgiving stories: that life a miracle. That we are sustained by powers we can’t our control, and blessed beyond our understanding. The only sensible attitude is gratitude. The most reasonable response is to share freely with others, what we freely receive.

 “The world begins at a kitchen table,” Joy Harjo says. “No matter what, we must eat to live.”

A new world begins, when we sit down together with stranger and friend in gratitude. This is not the reenactment of an ancient event. It is the creation of something completely new. It is an act of imagination, envisioning a new community, a community in which all people partake in earth’s blessings, a community in which we each share freely our gifts of love.

To sit together at a welcome table is an ancient dream. But making this dream a reality, is a creative task yet to be completed. It is an act of imagination and courage we are called to carry out today. 

* * *

To help spark our imagination, I invite you to join in a symbolic meal. I invite you to imagine us all gathered around a table. 

(Bring out cornbread and apple cider. The following is adapted from “A Cider and Cornbread Communion” by Robert Hemstreet, from The Communion Book, edited by Carl Seaburg.)

For thousands of years, men and women all over the earth have gathered on festive occasions to share in the eating of special foods and the drinking of special beverages. Our American Thanksgiving is another one of those combined seasonal and historical holidays designed to celebrate the changing of the seasons and the blessings of the Earth. 

So we celebrate and give thanks today, not with bread and wine, but with fresh apple cider and freshly baked cornbread. Both of these represent the fall harvest season and the stories told around Thanksgiving.

Think about cornbread. Native Americans taught Pilgrims how to grow corn and use it. Without corn, the Pilgrim community would have starved. And in the form of bread, corn could be kept and easily shared. 

As we share this cornbread, let us be mindful of all those whose labor, love, energy, creativity, and suffering go into the growing, distribution, and preparation of our food. 

And let us be mindful also, that this small morsel we eat now may be as much as some people get to eat this whole long day. Let us resolve to take whatever steps we can to end hunger in our neighborhoods and in our world.

(Distribute cornbread, ask folks to wait until all are served.)

As we eat of this small piece of bread, let us think of those things for which we have been thankful this year, and of those with whom we are called to share our bounty and blessings, both materially and spiritually.

* * *

Now let us consider this apple cider. As we prepare to enjoy this fresh sweet cider, let us meditate on the many symbols and meanings it evokes.

First, how good it is for friends to drink together. The sharing of a special beverage is one of humankind’s oldest rituals.

Next, let us think about what we are drinking. For most of us, cider is a seasonal drink; it’s special, an autumn treat. Some of us will probably not taste cider like this until next fall. So try to remember the taste.

Let us remember that the apple comes from a tree, long a symbol of the aspirations of humanity. Its roots search deep in the good earth, while its branches reach for the heavens.

And finally, let us remember that these apples were pressed for us. They are the products not only of the earth, but of all those people who till the soil, tend trees, pick fruit, toil in the vineyards, fields and orchards; people who we almost never see, but without whom we could not live.

(Distribute cider, ask folks to wait until all are served.)

Now, with gratitude for the earth, for life, and for love, let us enjoy. (drink) 

A Guru's God

"Says Nanak, 
The Master is a tree of contentment and forbearance; 
Righteousness its flower, enlightenment the fruit."
-- Adi Granth

Reading: by Stephen Prothero from Religious Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (2007, p. 9)

From the time of the nation’s founding, the success of the American experiment in republican government was rightly understood to rest on an educated citizenry. If suffrage was to be extended first to white males with property and eventually to men and women of all races, then it would be essential for all Americans to understand the issues on which they were voting. How could we act responsibly as citizens if we did not know how to read, if we did not know something about politics and history and science and economics?

Today, when religion is implicated in virtually every issue of national and international import, US citizens need to know something about religion, too... Unfortunately, US citizens today lack this religious literacy.

Reading:  by Jaswinder Bolina from an essay entitled “Writing Like a White Guy – On Language, Race and Poetry”

Recently, I was invited to give a few poetry readings as part of a literary festival taking place in a rural part of the country… The audiences are largely made up of kind, white-haired, white-skinned locals enthusiastic to hear us read from and speak about our work, even when they’ve never heard of most of us. They at least appreciate poetry, a rarity I’m grateful for. During the introductions that preface each event, even the organizers who’ve invited me have difficulty getting my name right, and in one school library, I enunciate it over and over again. I say, “Jas as in the first part of justice; win as in the opposite of defeat; der, which rhymes with err, meaning to be mistaken.” I say, “JasWINder,” lilting the second syllable, and smile as about a dozen audience members mouth each syllable along with me until they feel they have it right. When they do, they grin broadly. After each event, I chat with them one or two at a time, and I do my best to reflect their warmth. They’re complimentary about the work, and though I don’t expect they’re a demographic that’ll especially like my poems—even when you write poems like a white guy, you might not be writing poems everyone will like—the compliments are earnest.

Still, in all this pleasantness, the awkward moment occurs more than once. It’s some variation on a recurring question I get in town after town. The question usually comes up as a matter of small talk while I’m signing a book or shaking someone’s hand. No one delivers it better, with so much beaming warmth and unwitting irony, than the woman who says she enjoyed my poems very much and follows this quickly with an admiring “You’re so Americanized, what nationality are you?” She doesn’t pick up on the oxymoron in her question. She doesn’t hear the hint of tiredness in my reply. “I was born and raised in Chicago, but my parents are from northern India.” Once more, I ought to be offended, but I’m not really. Hers is an expression of curiosity that’s born of genuine interest rather than of sideshow spectacle. I’m the only nonwhite writer at the events I participate in. I’m the only one who gets this question. It makes me bristle, but I understand where it comes from.

Reading: by Kabir, a 15th century Indian mystic poet honored in both Hindu and Muslim traditions

Are you looking for me?  I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me instantly - 

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

[God] is the breath inside the breath.

A Guru’s God

A Sermon Delivered on November 11, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Stephen Prothero wrote the book Religious Literacy because he had the clear sense that, even though most Americans consider themselves religious, we are remarkably uninformed about religion. So, for instance, most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. Only one-third know that it was Jesus – and not Billy Graham – who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. And ten percent of Americans believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

As Unitarian Universalists we like to think of ourselves as more educated than most. My guess is we all know perfectly well that the Bible begins with the book of Genesis, that it was Jesus who sermonized on the mount, and that Joan of Arc had nothing to do with floods.

We say we draw inspiration not only from Jewish and Christian teachings, but from all the world’s great religions. That’s why we have these wall-hangings (which depict symbols of the world’s religions) displayed so prominently in our place of worship. But one religious tradition conspicuously absent is Sikhism.

* * *

Sikhs were in the news this summer, following a tragedy at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A white-supremacist gunman opened fire there, killing six worshippers and wounding three others, before turning his weapon on himself.

In the days following the tragedy, commentators wondered aloud whether the Sikhs were victims of mistaken identity – that the gunman had intended to kill Muslims. But others made the case that that is surely beside the point. The point is the attack was fueled by racism, ignorance, and hate.

For decades Sikhs have been singled out as targets for discrimination and abuse. The turban worn by many Sikh men makes a convenient target. Ninety-nine percent of people wearing turbans in the United States are Sikhs from India (according to the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, SALDEF). The turban seems to be a lightening rod for surprisingly visceral hostility.

Amardeep Singh, an English professor from Bethlehem, PA, writes, “I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral — perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimately personal and so public? Walking around Philadelphia waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn’t provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract — a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target.” (“Being Sikh in America,” New York Times, 8/1/12)

* * *

According to religious scholars, there are over twenty million Sikhs in the world today. That makes Sikhism the fifth largest religion, right after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Most of today’s Sikhs live in northern India. But several hundred thousand Sikhs live in the United States. There are more Sikhs in this country than Unitarian Universalists.

The story of the Sikh faith reaches back to 15^th century India, and the life of a man named Guru Nanak. Nanak was born in the small village of Talwandi, located in Punjab, a region in northern India right on today’s border between India and Pakistan.

The name “Punjab” means “five rivers.” The region is made up of several vast, fertile river valleys, and is marked by a long history and a rich cultural heritage. Since ancient times Punjab was shaped by Indian Hindu culture. But over the centuries, a succession of powerful rulers took control of the prosperous land: beginning with Alexander the Great, in the 4^th century BCE, the Greeks, then Persians, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, and finally the British invaded Punjab.

When Nanak was born in 1469, Punjab had been under the control of Muslim rulers for centuries. The village in which he was born lay right in the path traveled by invading armies, warring Hindu kingdoms and clans, as well as Muslim rulers. 

In the 15^th century Hindus and Muslims lived side by side. Conflicts between factions within and between both of these powerful traditions were a defining feature of the world in which Nanak grew up.

* * *

It is interesting to remember that in the same period that Hindus and Muslims were struggling for dominance in Punjab, religious strife was consuming Europe as well. Guru Nanak lived during the same period as the Christian reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. The Sikh faith developed amidst the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in northern India, just as our Unitarian forebears were developing their own religious identity in the midst of a battle being waged between Catholic and the Reformed Christianity in Europe.

Sikhs promoted religious tolerance, but were at times persecuted by both Muslims and Hindu rulers. Similarly, both Catholics and Reformers declared the first Unitarians heretics. And as Punjab was located between two religious empires, the historical home of Unitarianism in Transylvania was located on the boundary between two empires: Muslim Ottomans to the East and Christian Habsburg to the West.

* * *

Nanak was born into a Hindu family, but the midwife who delivered him was Muslim. Nanak’s father was a Hindu businessman, but he worked for a prosperous Muslim landowner. 

Nanak’s father hoped he would follow in his footsteps and have a prosperous career in business. But from an early age Nanak showed other interests. When he was seven, his teachers were surprised that he was already showing promise as a gifted poet. He was contemplative in nature, but had a penetrating mind. A bright student, he was instructed in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. As one of his teachers put it, “He is a blessed one… he grasps instantly what he hears.”

But beyond his quick grasp of language, scholarship and spiritual teachings – he also had a habit of questioning the logic of traditional teachings.

A story is told, that when Nanak was eleven years old, he was encouraged to wear a janeu, a symbolic garment – a sacred thread – worn by Hindu Brahmin, a sign of their privileged caste, but Nanak refused. Instead he challenged the Brahmin priest who was conducting the initiation ceremony, and asked him what difference it makes whether or not he wear a janeu. Shouldn’t people be differentiated based on their actions and merits, rather than whether or not they wear a janeu? Nanak asked. Nanak had friends who were of lower caste, and he had no interest in setting himself apart from them. And he was also critical of the fact that only Brahmin boys, but not girls, were entitled to wear a janeu.

Nanak was known for an analytical mind and a sharp eye for empty rituals and customs. Whereas most of his Hindu and Muslim contemporaries defended their own faith, and criticized the faith of others, Nanak challenged both Hindu and Muslim convention, and lifted up what he considered the heart of both teachings, which were in fact very compatible.

As the Sikh author Patwant Singh puts it, Nanak was “impressed by the basic compassion of Hinduism and the essential brotherhood of Islam which looked upon the faithful as equals in the sight of God, Nanak emphasized the inconsistencies that detracted from these inspired origins and set the two religions on a course of hatred and intolerance.” (The Sikhs, p. 27)

When Nanak was thirty years old, he had a profound spiritual and mystical experience. At that point in his life, Nanak had a daily ritual of bathing in a river before sunrise. One morning while bathing, he suddenly disappeared. He vanished. His friends thought he had drowned. But after three days he returned, inspired by a religious vision. He had been taken up into the presence of God, and been charged by God to become a religious teacher, a guru. He told his friends the essence of his teaching was this: “There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim.” This statement is among the earliest of the sayings, songs, and poems of Nanak recorded by his followers. It was understood as a rejection of all sectarian and religious divisiveness.

Nanak believed the God of Hindu faith and Muslims’ Allah are one and the same. He imagined God similar to the Eternal Truth of Hindus, an ultimate, supreme and formless God beyond human understanding. But God is also similar to the deity imagined by Muslims, who – because of God’s mystery – cannot be portrayed in pictures. And so Nanak rejected the colorful statues and shrines of the Hindu pantheon with Rama, Krishna, Kali, and the thousands of other Hindu gods. Nanak embraced the idea of reincarnation, but rejected caste distinctions. 

In the course of the next several years, Nanak traveled widely all over India, and some say as far Mecca, preaching and teaching. Nanak conveyed his inclusive religious message not only in his words, but also in his choice of clothing. His lower dress, below the waist, was of Hindu style. His upper torso was dressed in Muslim style. After completing his travels, he returned to Punjab where he founded a city of Sikhs. Among Sikhs there were no caste distinctions. They established community kitchens, where people of all walks of life would join together for their meals. They were big believers in community service.

Guru Nanak attracted a large group of followers in his lifetime. Before he died, he passed the leadership of the Sikh movement to one of his disciples, who was then appointed Guru. The leadership of the movement was passed on from Guru to Guru for over a century. There were ten Gurus. Each of them made particular contributions to the growing tradition. They also composed devotional poems and hymns that described the wonders and blessings of the one god. These writings, along with works from other saints and sages were compiled in one book, called the Adi Granth. After the death of the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh in 1708 (130 years after the death of Guru Nanak), this sacred book itself was understood as an abiding teacher. It is called the Guru Granth Sahib. 

This sacred book is the central object in Sikh temples and worship. The essence of the Sikh faith is the belief in one God, the True Guru. “One” is the word with which worship is begun, before moving on to read from the sacred book.

As a outward expression of their faith, many Sikh men wear five pieces of symbolic dress: a comb that represents order, a dagger or small sword that indicates a commitment to justice, a steel bracelet that symbolizes the Unity of God, with no beginning and no end, baggy shorts that represent a readiness for action and spiritual freedom, and finally uncut hair, a symbol of vitality, which is kept in place with a turban.

* * *

Throughout their history, Sikhs have struggled to maintain their faith and identity, through centuries of religious and political turmoil and strife. The choice to wear a turban, as an expression of faith, even in the face of religious persecution, political domination, and racial profiling, is a courageous act.

But our heritage, our identity runs much deeper than any piece of clothing. The poet Jaswinder Bolina doesn’t wear a turban. Like his father before him, he cuts his hair short and shaves his beard. Bolina is the name of the family’s town in Punjab. Jaswinder’s father told him, if he wants to get published in America, he should change his name. “They won’t publish you if they see your name. They’ll know you’re not one of them. They’ll know your one of us.” But Jaswinder refuses. He will not hide who he is.

* * *

The Sikh believes in one God, who can be directly experienced in the human soul. As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces that create and uphold life. This mystery and wonder some of us call God.

We each have our own precious identity, whether we come from the river valleys of Punjab, or the rolling hills of Transylvania, whether come from faraway cities or the prairies of the Midwest.

Whether we worship in churches or Sikh temples, in stupas, Indian shrine rooms, synagogues or cathedrals, Kabir says, we are all searching for the same God. All the while, Kabir says, God is right here. In the next seat. God’s shoulder is right there against yours. If we really look, we will see God instantly.

May we have the wisdom to really look. 

May we see God in both stranger and friend.

With this vision firmly in our mind,

May we have the courage to live our faith,

By building a world of justice and love.

Amen.