Who Is Your Family?

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces." 
-- George Santayana

Reading: by Rabbi Michael Lerner from The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (p. 241) 

Most people in the United States, when asked to say which social institution means the most to them, overwhelmingly choose family – and for one important reason. No matter what our own childhood experience may have been, no matter how much we had to struggle later in life to repair some of the damage done by less-than-perfect parents, almost all of us recognize that the family is the only institution in our society whose explicit goal is to provide love and caring. 

Ideally families provide our first and most enduring experiences with love, caring, and well-being. In the family, we are loved for who we are, not what we have achieved or how much money we make. Families offer us refuge from the world of work and competition, and they allow us our first taste of the deep joy that comes from sustained intimacy.

No wonder, then, that people feel so attached to family. They use words like brother and sister to address people they really care about. They talk of their closest affiliations with others “as though they were family.”

Reading: by Erma Bombeck from Family: The Ties That Bind and Gag! – Here are some of her reflections on family, while trying to corral her own family for the annual holiday photo. (p. 9) 

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

Sitting there I thought about how the years have challenged families in a way no one would have thought it possible to survive. They’ve weathered combinations of step, foster, single, adoptive, surrogate, frozen embryo, and sperm bank. They’ve multiplied divided, extended, and banded into communes. They’ve been assaulted by technology, battered by sexual revolutions, and confused by role reversals. But they’re still here – playing to a full house. 

Reading: by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh from Reconciliation: healing the inner child (p. 22) 

When we were only four years old, we probably thought: I’m only a four-year-old child, son or daughter, a little brother or sister. But in fact we were already a mother, already a father. All past and future generations were there in our body. When we take a step on the green grass of spring, we walk in such a way that allows all our ancestors to take a step with us. The peace, joy, and freedom in each step will penetrate each generation of our ancestors and descendants. We walk with the energy of mindfulness, and with each step we see countless generations of ancestors and descendants walking with us.

When we take a breath, we are light, calm, at ease. We breathe in such a way that all generations of ancestors and descendants are breathing with us… With each step we take, we see it is the step of all people in the past and future. 

When we are cooking a dish that we learned to make from our mother or father, a dish that has been handed down the generations of our family, we should look at our hands and smile because these hands are the hands of our mother, the hands of our grandmother. Those who have made this dish are making this dish now. When we’re in the kitchen cooking, we can be completely mindful; we don’t have to go to the meditation hall to practice like this…

Who Is Your Family?

A Sermon Delivered on November 24, 2013

By 

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

This week I will be visiting family for Thanksgiving. My wife, Elaine, our two kids and I will be piling into our little car and driving to Washington, D.C., where we plan to share a holiday meal with Elaine’s mother and her husband. For the first fifteen years we lived in Urbana, they would come here to see us. But they aren’t getting any younger, and traveling isn’t easy. So now it’s our turn to visit them. 

Not along ago, someone asked me to describe my family. I said, I am married and have two children, Noah and Sophia. That’s my family. 

But as I thought about it, I realized that is not entirely the truth. Elaine’s mother, Barbara, is a part of my family. And so is her husband, Jerry. Barbara and Jerry married twenty-some years ago. Among our kids’ several grandparents, Barbara and Jerry are the ones with whom our kids have spent the most time, and to whom they are closest. 

Elaine’s mother, father, siblings and cousins are all part of my family, as are my mother, brothers, and an assortment of stepparents and children, half-brothers and cousins once removed. And my family is constantly changing. 

Just this past week I realized I have a 12-year-old nephew who lives in Australia with his mother. He is the son of my only first cousin, Bastian, who lives in Switzerland. My mother, who lives in Germany, sent me a picture of this blended family, new to me. It shows five happy people: my cousin and his son, along with a younger boy, who I assume is his half-brother, and the two Australian parents. I look forward to meeting them all together some day.

* * *

Most of the time, when I use the word “family,” I am thinking of parents and children. I am thinking of the nuclear family, the nuclear family that I am raising or the family that raised me.

No matter what our family status may be today, we are deeply shaped by our family of origin. The four-year-old child we once were still exists within us. Our fears and joys, our sense of vulnerability and our sense of wonder, the unexpressed hurts and hopes of the child still exist within us. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh tells us. He says, even as adults the child within us needs a lot of compassion and attention, comforting and healing.

When we are children, our fathers and mothers are like gods. Our parents seem all-powerful and all-knowing. As children, we know they granted us life, and that we are utterly dependent on them. Our parents feed us and clothe us. They give us sustenance and safety. They provide love and care. They teach us our first lessons of life, what it is expected of us, and what we can expect of others.

And like the gods of old, our parents are not always gentle and kind. When they get angry with us, their fury feels like a divine wrath. Their unhappiness feels like an earthquake that shakes the very foundations of the world we know. When they give us the cold shoulder we feel as if we were stranded in an ice storm. 

When our parents ask us to act our age, and demand a degree of discipline and self-control, their expectations can feel overwhelming. For the child, it sometimes seems impossible to please them. And because our parents are all-powerful, all-knowing, and always right – then the child must be wrong. As children we may invariably conclude that there is something wrong with us. We are inadequate. We are flawed. We are sinful.

When we are children, it isn’t easy to understand how complicated life actually is. We see the world in straightforward terms of good and bad, right and wrong. Only as we grow older, and hopefully wiser, we realize that the world can’t be adequately understood in terms black and white, but is actually made up of countless shades of gray.

When we are young, our parents are like gods. As we grow older, our gods are like parents. And so Christians across the world pray to their “father in heaven,” or invoke the name of Mary, “mother of God.” 

* * *

Michael Lerner says that human beings are and have always been defined by some sense of the sacred, the holy, the transcendent. He says we are “theotropic.” We turn toward the sacred. We are defined by a “near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some way to unite [our] lives with a higher meaning and purpose.” We are drawn toward that aspect of the sacred, he says, “that is built upon the loving, kind and generous energy in the universe that [he calls] the “Left Hand of God.”’ 

But this benevolent force is not the only way to imagine the sacred. Lerner says many people imagine a world shaped by the “Right Hand of God.” They see “the universe as a fundamentally scary place filled with evil forces. In this view God is the avenger, the big man in heaven who can be invoke to use violence to overcome those evil forces, either now or in some future ultimate reckoning.” 

Lerner says, “seen through the frame of the Right Hand of God, the world is filled with constant dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and control others before they dominate and control us.”

Is the universe in which live – and the God who created it – basically loving, kind and generous, or scary, violent and dangerous? 

As Michael Lerner sees it, those of us on religious right believe in a world defined by the harsh Right Hand of God. Those of us on the left, who are religiously progressive, tend to see the world shaped by the nurturing and benevolent Left Hand of God. 

The seemingly irreconcilable differences between the left and right are so difficult to bridge, he says, because they are rooted and radically different frameworks through which we make sense of the world. These very basic beliefs are shaped early in our lives. They are significantly influenced by the families that raised us, and how we interpreted our experience. 

* * *

The cognitive scientist George Lakoff sees similar connections. The family is not only a powerful social institution. It is not only a symbol of our relationship with the sacred. The family is also a metaphor for the nation in which we live – or would like to live. Our notion of what an ideal family looks like, shapes our political vision of the nation. He writes: 

“Americans have two very different models of what an ideal family should be: a strict father family or a nurturant parent family. Whether or not [your] real family was like either of these – and real cases do exist by the millions – we all, nonetheless, acquire these ideal models as part of growing up in American culture. They are represented not only in our homes and communities but also in our movies, TV shows, novels, plays, fairy tales, and everyday stories. Strict and nurturant parenting are part of the fabric of everyday culture in America. When these two ideal family models are projected onto the nation by the nation-as-family metaphor, what results are two visions of what our nation should be: The strict father model is the basis of radically conservative politics and the nurturant parent model informs progressive politics.” (Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, p. 66)

The family metaphor is so powerful, because it has both both intellectual and emotional appeal. It’s visceral, because it touches into our own highly emotional family experiences. Lakoff says, 

“A simple family frame can provide the basis for a whole worldview; a way of seeing every aspect of life… Family-based… metaphors seem utterly natural and commonsensical – and hence true! [They] are mostly unconscious, which makes them hard to examine consciously. Their very invisibility gives them power.”

* * *

We have a choice in how we understand our place in the world. For each of us, life is a mixed bag. Each of us has been granted a measure of love and care, of sustenance and support. And each of us has known our share of suffering and hurt. 

Regardless what our life experience has been, we have a choice in how we understand the character of creation. We decide whether our universe is basically a cold, cruel and lonely place, or whether our world is basically benevolent, filled with beauty and wonders, and the promise of life more abundant.

And we each have a choice in how we understand our family. Our family can simply be the people closest to us: our nuclear family or the friends with whom we spend most of our time, whether blood relative or not, they may be our brothers or sisters, our parent or child. Or our family can extend to the furthest reaches of the earth, including people we have never met, and yet who are family nevertheless. 

Our family experience is intricately linked to our whole worldview. Too often it is unconscious and invisible to us, and thus constrains us. Then our family ties really do bind us and gag us. Then our elders will eternally be gods, who control our lives and our destiny with divine or demonic powers.

When we are young, we are fragile and vulnerable, and our elders seem all-powerful and indestructible in comparison. Becoming an adult means recognizing that our parents are human beings, regular people, just like us. Hopeful but flawed, in some ways gifted, but invariably imperfect. Muddling along as best we know how.

But even when we are adults, there is still a child within us, a child that needs compassion and attention, comforting and healing. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh tells us. “That child within us is not just us,” he says. “Our parents also suffered as children. Even as adults, they often didn’t know how to handle their suffering, so they make their children suffer. They were a victim of their own suffering, and then their children became victim of that suffering too… Every parent [was once a young] child, fragile and lonely.”

When we open our eyes, and look deeply, we realize that there is much more to our family than we often think. When we look deeply, we see our ancestors don’t really rule over us, but rather they exist within us. When we look deeply, we realize all past and future generations are right here in our own bodies. We are connected to all people past and future. 

Then the simple act of cooking a dish in the kitchen will remind us that our hands are the hands of our fathers and mothers. Then the simple act of sharing a meal with family and friends will be a sacred act that reminds us that we truly are brother and sister to all people.

May we be grateful for the gifts of life and love we have received,

Passed on to us from generation to generation.

And may we find ever new ways to share the blessings of our lives

with our whole family, the family of humanity.

Amen 

Guest Sermon: Renaissance

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them."
-- Henry David Thoreau

Renaissance 

A Sermon Delivered on November 17, 2013

By

Thom Thomas

Are you aware of the growth of Mega Churches in this Country?  For those who don’t know, a Mega Church is a church that has an average weekend attendance of 2000 or more. The largest mega church in the United States is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, where I was born, with more than 40,000 members every weekend.  I have to tell you, as a church leader it is difficult not to be a little envious of numbers like that.  40,000 members show up every weekend.  How do they do that?  They do it by demanding 3 things of every member. First, every member is required to show up for at least one worship service every week.  Every member is expected to bring in an annual quota of prospective members, and every member is expected to give one tenth of their total earnings every year, before taxes to the Church. These requirements are not negotiable. And what do they get for their investment of time and money? They get to be told that they have a guaranteed place in heaven, and that, by doing those few simple things they are doing all that God requires of them to make the world a better place.  

As Unitarian Universalists, we believe that rather more is required of us to make the world a better place, and though our numbers are smaller (there are something like 350,000 UU’s in the entire world, as opposed to something like 2 billion evangelical Christians) we tend to give heavily of our time and talent to organizations that promote social justice and environmental causes.  So, is that our requirement of membership, that we promote practical goodness in the world?

Don't get me wrong.  Doing practical goodness in the world is important, but is that all we are doing here?  Are we just a social service organization?  Because, if we are solely defined by the good works we do, then where does worship come in?  If my sole desire is to do good work, to try to fix the mess we have made of this planet, there are plenty of organizations I can join.  In fact, like many of you, I am a member of several such organizations.  I am also a proud member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva.  

This morning I want to spend a little time talking about the benefits, and the implications of membership. 

If you ask our fundamentalist Christian friends why they go to church, they will tell you that they come together to worship God and to pray together.  

Members of pretty much all doctrinal faiths gather regularly, and the primary stated reason for those gatherings is always worship.  So, where does that leave us? Is it possible to worship if you don't have a doctrine?   Well, “Worship” is sometimes narrowly understood as bowing down to some supposed deity. The etymology of the word, however, leads us to a far more significant activity. The root of “worship” is worthship, considering things of worth. “Religion” (religare) means to bind up, to reconnect. Worship is thus the central activity of religion because through worship we reconnect with worth. Worship is one of the primary ways in which individuals are encouraged and supported in their religious, spiritual and personal development.  Many members of other faith traditions will describe a gathering of Unitarian Universalists as a social club, a party, a debating society, or other more colorful and perhaps less flattering terms.  The truth is: any time a group of people gather together to consider the fundamental questions of existence they are engaged in worship.  

Everyone here is a seeker after truth. We have struggled and are still struggling with the fundamental questions.  You know those questions: "Why are we here?" which means both "how did we get here?" and "is there a purpose to our being here?" Why is the world the way it is?” and “Can I make it better?”  Should I make it better? What is my responsibility to the world and to my fellow creatures? 

Many of you came to this place because you were unsatisfied with the accepted answers to these questions, and because that dissatisfaction made you feel unwelcome. Many of us Found Unitarian Universalism because we were seeking, and we stayed, not because we found answers, but because we found ourselves in the company of other seekers. Being surrounded by others who don't have all the answers gives us permission to keep asking the questions.  It gives us someone to bounce our answers off of, confident that we won't be ridiculed.  Well ... let me correct that.  It is entirely possible that our answers will be ridiculed, pretty likely that they will be argued with, and almost certain that they will be questioned, but we will not be ridiculed for proposing them.  This tendency to discuss is one of the benefits of membership.  

Whatever questions you have about life, the universe and everything, be sure that someone else here is struggling with the same thing.  Whatever shy, incomplete answers you have so far developed, be sure that if you want to give voice to them someone here will listen, and then compare your answers to their own small truths, and in that comparison, each of you may find a slightly better truth.  Of course, we don't limit ourselves to introspection in our search for truth.  We tend to travel rather far and wide among the other faith traditions.  In this church there are groups who are actively studying other faith traditions, and it isn't just the adults.  Your church school curriculum encourages your young people to recognize and struggle with the big questions, and to define their own path through life.  If you have children, you know as well as I that a religious education that focuses on inclusion and respect is another benefit of membership.

So, we show up for worship because we are seekers after truth, and worship challenges our expectations.  There is another reason that members need to show up.  Have you ever come to Church because you were hoping to connect with someone on a project you are working together on, or just because you smile when you see them?  In that case you should be aware that there are people here today who came because they want to connect to you, because your presence makes them smile, or somehow lightens their burden.  Members show up because they know they will be missed if they don’t.

If I was going to make a list of requirements for membership in anything, the first item on the list would be that you have to show up.  

Another reason churches exist is to celebrate Transitions.  Life is not a straight line, and it generally lacks consistency.  I teach classes to businesses in change management.  Here is the dirty little secret of change management.  You don't manage change.  Telling someone they are going to learn to manage change is like telling the captain of a ship that you are going to teach them to manage the sea.  Any sailor knows that you don't manage the sea, you adapt to the challenges it throws at you.  Life is like an ocean crossing.  For a certain distance you sail a given bearing, and then you change your course, and then you do it again.  Every life has its own unique set of challenges, but we also have some points of transition in common. We are born, we somehow transition into adolescence, we survive adolescence and pass through into young adulthood, we fall in love, we may get married, we may have children of our own and then learn that passing through those stages is completely different than guiding our children through them.

In ancient times there was such a thing as a coming of age ceremony. Most cultures in the past, and therefore most faith traditions had a way of marking these transition points.  Our society at large pays very little attention to the difference between being a child and being an adult.  We have a legal age of majority, but our society recognizes the transition without marking it, and does nothing to help us think our way through it.   We hold naming and dedication ceremonies, our version of Christening, we celebrate marriages and we come together to memorialize those who have passed. The church is a place where we remind ourselves that we are not passing through this life alone. The word Auditorium comes from the Latin and means literally a place to be heard.  When two people who love each other make a commitment to each other to love and cherish and care for each other for the rest of their lives, they want that promise to be witnessed, and at the same time they want to enlist the aid of those who bear witness, to help them carry out their promises. Churches have always been places where we celebrate our successes, make public our promises, and share our grief. Having a place to be heard is another benefit of membership.

Another reason we come together in church is that we are not all standing in the same place on Maslow’s pyramid.  Many of you are already familiar with the Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs, but if you are not, then let me give you the stunningly oversimplified version here.  Maslow was an American psychologist who suggested that it is not possible to focus on finding ... love, for example, if you are starving to death.   He stacked basic human needs one on top of the other to form a pyramid.  At the bottom, are physiologal needs, like food and shelter. Above that is the need to feel safe. Once we are fed and we feel safe, then we can look at what Maslow termed Belonging needs.  We are social creatures, and if you deny us contact with our own kind, we go mad.  There is a reason solitary confinement is a punishment of last resort in prisons.  Above belonging needs comes Esteem needs, the need for self-respect and the respect of our fellows.  Only after one has all those needs met can you begin to chase the top level, the level of Self Actualization. 

None of us is certain of how stable our footing is on that pyramid.  At any time we can lose our job, our home, our loved ones.  We have seen a lot of that lately, and if you hang around, you will see more in the future.  Another benefit of membership is that there are people in this place who stand ready to help when life hands you those lovely little surprises.  When we first joined our church, my wife was forced to spend a summer in the hospital.  It was an ordeal for my daughter and I, but we didn't starve, because members of our church made certain that we had food in the house.  I know members here can tell similar stories.  I know still others who can tell stories of the joy of being the one providing the food, or the ride, or moving the boxes, and that, too, is a privilege of membership here. 

Second on my list of requirements for membership in any organization is the requirement for all members to “shoulder the burden.” People form organizations to do work that is too difficult for them to handle individually.  You cannot put out a fire with a single bucket of water, but a bucket brigade can effectively fight a fire, as long as every person in the brigade is willing to hold a full bucket of water long enough to pass it to the next person in line.  

Of course, Churches have other, less grand but more practical needs. These are the things that Steven Covey calls sharpening the Saw, and I call doing the dishes.  A church needs to be kept clean, someone must cook food for events, and provide childcare and teach RE classes and, make coffee and well ... do the dishes.  Every member of an organization brings unique gifts to that organization, and it is important that they apply those talents to the needs of the organization both great and small. One of the dreams you have for your organization is to hire someone to serve as a steward of your considerable pool of talent.  Identifying your reservoir of talent, and applying it to your dreams is a vital ability.  If you are looking for your mission in life, you are looking for that place where your deepest passion meets the world’s deepest need. How wonderful to have someone here to help make the introductions.  

We have been discussing the privileges and benefits of membership in churches in general and in this church in particular, but there is one other that stands apart as not just a benefit, but as the central purpose of church membership.  A church, any church, is ideally a place for Renaissance, or rebirth. Our evangelist friends tell us that you must be "born again" to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This concept of spiritual renewal is not unique to Christianity.  Every faith tradition recognizes that our spirits take a beating as we pass through this world, and they all address the need for repair.   

Heraclitus said “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” We are always in process of becoming.  No one is a finished product. Church is a place where we come together to help each other become our own best selves.  Every day is a new beginning, and every day we are reborn. Spider Robinson said "shared pain diminishes, shared joy increases.  Thus do we refute entropy" A healthy UU church is one of the greatest bargains of all time.  Where else can you bring in a pile of pain and trade it for a sack of joy?  Where else can you discuss the really big questions and really talk about them without animosity?  We come to church not to confirm our devotion to an unchanging set of absolute truths, but to have our truths challenged.  WE come to church to examine together the persons we are in process of becoming.  No matter how much it frightens us, the truth is that change is the basic stuff of life.

  

What is true of individuals is also true of the organizations we form together. This is where we shoulder the burden together.  Over the past couple of years your long range planning team has asked you to share your stories of what is wonderful about this church, and to dream big dreams about what you would like to become. I encourage you to continue this process. Come together regularly to tell stories of gratitude for the place you have created together, and to dream in detail of the place you are in process of creating. How will you build heaven here on earth if you don't have a clear idea of what heaven looks like?  Visualizing the future you want helps you to live it into reality. Over the next year, you will be changing focus, and seeking ways to make those dreams into reality. Everyone will be asked to give of your time, your talent and your treasure.  This means that you will begin to have some hard conversations around money.  Traditional wisdom is that Talking to a UU about money is like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.  

I must tell you that mega churches don’t share this reticence.  Tithing is a demand made of members, so that they can get their message out into the world. The gospel of Certainty is spreading. Religion and politics have begun to bleed into each other, and we are hearing politicians say things like "I will never compromise" and defining compromise as the place where those who disagree with me are forced to support my point of view.  In these uncertain economic times the message of certainty is attractive.   The world is changing, and this frightens us.  It feels as if the ground is moving under our feet, and we get so scared that we start to cling to a past that maybe never really existed, but there are always those who will tell us that the past was a golden age, and all that is necessary for our happiness is to hold on tight to the traditional values.  They point to a holy book, the Bible or the Koran or the Sayings of Chairman Mao or whatever, and they tell us “here is truth, here is safety, here is Certainty." They preach the Gospel.   

Gospel means “good news.”  Well, we have a gospel too, and the world needs to hear it.  Ours is the gospel of “I don’t know, and neither do you and that is all right.”  Ours is the gospel of “I respect your point of view, now here is what’s wrong with it.”  More and more the world needs a place for uncertainty, and will need it more in the future.  There must always be a place for those who comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  You have dreamed a dream of what that place ... THIS place ... will be in the future. Continue to dream.  Paint a picture of the future you want most for this place.  Work together to refine the vision, and make it as detailed as possible. Start with all the things this place already does well, and imagine a world where you can do more of what you already do well.  Dream together of how what you love most about this church, this community, this family, can help to heal the world’s pain and meet the world’s deep need.   Henry David Thoreau said “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”  

Mystery and Magic

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
-- W. B. Yeats

Unison Chalice Lighting

May the light we now kindle 

inspire us to use our powers 

to heal and not to harm,

to help and not to hinder,

to bless and not to curse,

and to serve in the spirit of love.

Meditation: by the Unitarian Universalist minister Lindsay Bates

Receive, O Mystery, the words of our hearts.

If prayer worked like magic – if I knew the words that would guarantee prayer's power – I know what I would pray:

Let life be always kind to our children.

Let sorrow not touch them.

Let them be free from fear.

Let them never suffer injustice,

     nor the persecutions of the righteous.

Let them not know the pain of failure – 

     of a project, a love, a hope, or a dream.

Let life be to them gentle and joyful and kind.

If I knew the formula, that's what I'd pray.

But prayer isn't magic, and life will be hard. So I pray for our children – with some hope for this prayer:

May their knowledge of sorrow be tempered with joy. 

May their fear be well-balanced by courage and strength. 

May the sight of injustice spur them to just actions.

May their failures be teachers, that their spirits may grow. 

May they be gentle and joyful and kind. 

Then their lives will be magic, and life will be good.

So may it be. Blessed be. Amen.

Reading: by Adam Gollner from The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever (p. 178) 

In history, magic’s origins are inseparable from religious activity. “Magic is no other than the worship of the gods,” explained Plato. The etymology of the word magic goes back to synonyms for “priest” in Proto-Indo-European (magh) and Old Persian (magos). The priestly magi of antiquity were sages and natural philosophers – early scientists. 

Both magic and religion have always been predicated on the belief in the existence of other realms or dimensions apart from the empirical. Today, we understand religion as that branch of experience focused on venerating and approaching the beyond, whereas magic aims at controlling it and harnessing its powers for personal and communal use. In the beginning, however, we didn’t distinguish much between worshipping deities (religion) and trying to manipulate them to our ends (magic).

Reading: by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette from King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (p. 99)

…The magician – the holy man, the witch doctor, the shaman. Whatever his title, his specialty is knowing something that others don’t know. He knows, for instance, the secret movements of the stars, the phases of the moon, the north-south swings of the sun. He knows when to plant and when to harvest, or when the herds will arrive next spring. He can predict the weather. He has knowledge of medicinal herbs and poisons. He understands the hidden dynamics of the human psyche and so can manipulate other human beings, for good or ill. He is the one who can effectively bless and curse. He understands the links between the unseen world of the spirits – the Divine World – and the world of human beings and nature. It is to him that people go with their questions, problems, pains, and diseases of the body and mind. He is confessor and priest. He is the one who can think through the issues that are not obvious to other people. He is a seer and a prophet in the sense not only of predicting the future but also of seeing deeply.

Reading: by Starhawk and Hilary Valentine from The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing, and Action (p. xvi, xvii) 

All magic arises from [the] basic understanding that everything is interconnected and interdependent…  We are part of a larger movement called feminist spirituality, that critiques the patterns of domination embedded in patriarchal religions and reenvisions a spirituality that can liberate women and men…  At the core of [our] tradition is the insight that spiritual practice, personal healing, and political activism are the three legs of the cauldron in which wisdom and magic are brewed. If we truly experience all life as interconnected, then we must be concerned with what happens to the rain forests of Brazil and the topsoil in Iowa, to the child suffering in a sweatshop in Asia as well as the homeless child on our city streets. And that concern needs to be expressed not just through prayer and meditation, as powerful as they might be, but through concrete action in the world.

Mystery and Magic

A Sermon Delivered on November 10, 2013

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I was a middle school student in Germany, learning poems by heart was still considered an important aspect of a child’s education. One of the poems I learned – maybe you know it - begins like this:

Hat der alte Hexenmeister / sich doch einmal wegbegeben

Und nun sollen seine Geister /auch nach meinem Willen leben.

Or for those of you whose German is a little rusty, an English translation (by Edwin Zeydel, 1955) goes like this:

That old sorcerer has vanished / And for once has gone away!

Spirits called by him, now banished, / My commands shall soon obey.

The poem is called “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” Or, literally, “The Apprentice of Magic.” It was written by the great German poet Goethe in 1797. It’s the story of a young apprentice who is too lazy to fetch water for the bath, so he uses his new magical skills to cast a spell on the broom. He commands the broom to pick up the bucket, head down to the river and fill it, rush back and pour the water into the bath. This goes well for a while. But when the bath is full and the apprentice tells the broom to stop, he realizes he forgot the correct magic words. The broom keeps running down to the river, bringing back bucket after bucket. Soon the whole house is flooded and all hell breaks loose. Until finally the master returns home, sees the mess, and using the correct words, brings the madness to an end.

Maybe you’ve seen the Disney movie “Fantasia,” in which this story is set to music and memorably acted out by Mickey Mouse…  It’s a cautionary tale. 

* * *

When my children were younger, they didn’t learn this story of magic. They learned all about magic reading the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling, that were finding a mass audience just about when my kids were learning to read. As the books tells it, witches and wizards live all around us. They wave wands, cast spells, and fly on brooms. Mostly, they work their magic discretely, but not always. 

Harry Potter is a sad young orphan who lives with his uncaring aunt and uncle, and his cruel cousin. The story begins on his 11^th birthday, when he discovers that he himself is actually a wizard with amazing powers. He is invited to explore his hidden gifts and hone his skills at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And there a whole new world is revealed to him. 

As far as children’s literature is concerned, I thought the books were pretty good. Easy to read. Engaging. A thought-provoking storyline with characters that grapple with important questions. Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Which path should I follow? How can I find the courage to confront my deepest fears? How can I tell right from wrong, and how do I find the strength to do what’s right, even when doing so is very difficult? 

In each of the seven books, Harry is a year older and faces ever more serious challenges involved in growing up. The realities of evil and death, and even racism are sensitively addressed for a young readership. 

A few years ago our religious education program offered a Hogwart’s Summer School, that used the framework of the Harry Potter story to explore UU principles, for instance, the worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; and encouragement to spiritual growth. In our summer school, we told our children that any one of us can go to Hogwart’s by using the magic of imagination. “There are magical places around us all the time… if we use our imaginations.” The power of magic is within each of us.

 * * *

Now, magic and make-believe is all fine and well for children. But adults know that there is actually no such thing as real magic. Right? Adults, especially rational, scientific minded, mature adults like us don’t believe in magic. Right?

* * *

This reminds me… Do you remember the Philippine faith healers that were in the news years ago? For a while these so-called psychic surgeons made headlines, because they claimed to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of ailments. The way they did their work, was to lay their patients on a table – not unlike an operating table – and then place their hands on the body part that hurt, or the body region that seemed to be the source of the problems. The healers would somehow detect a diseased mass, or a tumor under the skin, and then physically remove it. But they would do so without the use of scalpels or tools of any sort. They would do it with their bare hands, pressing up the flesh, until blood appeared in what seemed to be an open wound. Then after further probing, they would draw some sort of organic tissue out of the body. Finally they would remove their hands, clean off the area of the assumed incision – and amazingly, the skin had closed, was perfectly restored, as if no surgery at all had taken place.

For a stretch in the 1970s, there were several travel agencies in this country that promoted “psychic surgery tours” to the Philippines. Hundreds of desperate Americans flew to the Philippines, in hopes that they might find a miracle cure for serious illnesses – cancer, heart disease, blood clots, or blindness - which conventional medicine failed to treat successfully. 

In the end, though, these faith healers were exposed as charlatans. And the miraculous surgery was revealed to be a simple slight-of-hand trick that could easily be demonstrated by any amateur magician. It involved a cleverly concealed container with a bit of blood, and a bit of animal tissue hidden in the palm of the practitioner. The Western medical establishment concluded it was all a sham. Any cures accomplished were merely product of the placebo effect. 

I remember how fascinated I was by the unfolding coverage of all of this. First the amazing claims of the psychic surgeons, and the testimonials of those who had been healed. And then the disappointment when it all turned out to be yet another scam.

But what I remember best is a brief interview on TV with one of the Philippine healers. He readily admitted that his technique was closer to that of a stage magician than a surgeon. Nevertheless he still considered himself an authentic and successful healer. The performance with blood and imaginary incision, he explained, was something he did only for his Western visitors. His Philippine patients from surrounding villages didn’t need those magic tricks. He could heal them simply with a laying on of hands. 

The term “placebo affect” implies fakery and foolishness. But isn’t it also an acknowledgment that there are powers of healing accessible to each of us, powers we don’t understand? And even though they are mysterious, they are sometimes undeniably effective. 

A placebo isn’t real medicine, we say dismissively . It sometimes works simply because the patient believes it will… 

Think about what that says about the power of our beliefs.

* * *

Adam Gollner makes the case that what distinguishes religion from magic today, is that religion worships the mysterious, transcendent forces at the heart of existence. Magic, on the other hand, wants to harness and control these forces for personal use. In earlier days, we didn’t make this distinction. Both dimensions were combined in magical practice. 

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette say that in some ways the practice of magic gave birth to the modern sciences. Alchemy, for instance, the ancient effort to turn lowly metals into gold, or to create an elixir of life, was the forerunner of modern chemistry and physics. 

They write, “It is interesting to realize that our modern science, like the work of the ancient magicians, is also divided into two aspects. The first, “theoretical science,” is the knowing aspect of the Magician energy. The second, “applied science,” is the technological aspect of the Magician energy, the applied knowledge of how to contain and channel power.”

As they see it, we are currently living in the age of the Magician, because this is a technological age. This is the age of the Magician, because we share the Magician’s materialist wish to have power over nature. The greatest challenge we face today is to learn to wield our powers wisely and maturely.

Mature men and women know that when we seek to control the powers of nature, we often invariably exploit them. Mature people know that we have the power to effectively bless and curse. We have the power to manipulate the human psyche and the vast resources of the natural world, for good or ill.

Mature magicians know that everything is interconnected and interdependent. This is the same insight that guides the work of Starhawk and Hilary Valentine. They call themselves pagans, because they practice an earth-based spirituality rooted in respect for nature. They call themselves witches, because they trace their practice to Goddess traditions of ancient Europe and the Middle East. They identify with the victims of Witch persecutions throughout history, and challenge the negative stereotypes associated with the word Witch. And they call themselves feminists, because they believe that “neither women or men can be truly free until unequal power relations between genders are broken down.” Their analysis of power “extends to the relations between races, classes, between humans and the earth.” They see “all forms of domination as interconnected and destructive.”

For them, magical practice is not so much about controlling or changing the world, but rather about changing themselves. They write, “Magic has been defined as the art of changing consciousness at will. When we create a sacred space – which includes grounding, purifying, casting a circle and invoking the elements – we are intentionally entering an altered consciousness.” (p. 11)

This altered consciousness allows us realize how our lives are often lived shortsightedly and superficially. When we create a sacred space, our vision widens and our understanding deepens. And we can discern the path we need to follow in order to gain greater wisdom and maturity.

Each of us has the capacity to watch the movement of the stars and the phases of the moon. Each of us has insight into the hidden dynamics of the human psyche. Each of us knows there are links between the unseen world, and the world we see. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. This is the beginning of all wisdom and maturity: the awareness that we are surrounded by mystery, we are suffused with magic.

We have the power to bless or to curse, to heal or to harm, to help or to hinder. 

May the time we share in this sacred space inspire us to choose wisely.

May we be diligent apprentices, 

and may each of us in our own way strive to become masters 

in practicing the magic of love.

Amen.

Of Spirituality and Sexuality

"Body and soul are not two substances but one."
-- C. F. von Weizäcker

Reading:  by Unitarian Universalist minister Meg Riley (from a piece published by the UUA entitled “Religion, Morality and Sexuality”) 

We believe that God, or the sacred, permeates all aspects of life on this earth, and that sexuality is a very strong force in human life. We can’t know God as separate, pure, ethereal—we only know God as interwoven into our beings, our relationships, our total lives, imperfect as these may be! Human sexuality is an aspect of life which can allow us to experience God’s love for our bodies and our souls. The sacred is known in radical mutuality, interdependence, the sheer knowing that our own joy and fulfillment are inseparable from that of others.

Reading: by Carter Heyward from an article entitled “Sexuality, Love, and Justice (from Our Passion for Justice, p. 85-87) 

What might it mean – to love? I want to tell you what I am discovering, in the hope that you – each of you, all of you – will be moved to carefully consider your own experiences…

And so I speak personally, as a lesbian feminist Christian priest and teacher. I use each of these words to describe myself, because each of them has grown in an evolving sense of how I might best be a lover of sisters and brothers in the world today…. For now, these overlapping, at times interchangeable, senses of myself ignite me, excite me, infuse me with a sense not only of what love means, but also that who I am – and who you are, and who we are together – matters. If we love the world, we matter. Lovers make all the difference in the world. Lovers recreate the world.

We must begin to see that love is justice. Love does not come first, justice later... Our sexuality is our desire to participate in making love, making justice, in the world: our drive toward one another; our movement in love; our expression of being bonded together in life and death. Sexuality is expressed not only between lovers in personal relationship, but also in the work of an artist who loves her painting or her poetry, a father who loves his children, a revolutionary who loves her people…

… Where there is no justice – between two people or between thousands – there is no love. And where there is no justice/no love, sexuality is perverted into violence and violation, the effects of which most surely include rape, emotional and physical battering, relationships manipulated by control, competition, and contempt, and even war itself.

Reading: by Susan Griffin from The Eros of Everyday Life (p. 149)

Several years ago, when a group of friends gathered for dinner, we began to tell each the stories of our first sexual encounters. The psychologist Rollo May recalled himself as a gravely serious young man, shy and completely inexperienced in such matters. [A woman,] as he told us, invited him to her room... At the door she moved to embrace him, holding him close to her and then moving away, close and apart, close and apart until an irresistible force field existed between them. This was, he said, among the most erotic movements he had known. 

Time, if one pays attention, is filled with such meetings. Not only between lovers, or parent and child, but also friends, community, and the common air. Waking, my hand meets the cotton sheets on my bed, my mouth meets the water I drink as I arise, my eyes meet the morning light, shadows of clouds, the pine tree newly planted in our backyard, my ears meet the sounds of a car two blocks east. Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything.

Isn’t this what shapes our days? The paradox accounts for gravity, which is a kind of eros. The great mass of the earth curving space and time around it, the greater mass of the sun drawing the earth in an even circular motion, balanced between fusion and solitary direction.

Of Spirituality and Sexuality

A Sermon Delivered on November 3, 2013

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Last month, my wife, Elaine, and I attended this year’s three-day fall gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers in Racine, WI. As most of you know, and some may not, Elaine is also an ordained UU minister. She and I served this church as co-ministers from 1996-2001. Elaine came along to the minister’s meeting this year, because I was scheduled to deliver an hour-long talk on my life and ministry. It’s an annual custom at ministers’ meetings called an Odyssey. This year was my turn, and Elaine didn’t want to miss it. As it happened my Odyssey also involved reflections on my father’s and grandfather’s lives, both of whom were also ministers. 

But the bulk of our meeting was devoted to a different theme. Our presenter was Deb Haffner, a UU minister who is also an expert on human sexuality – sexuality education, prevention of sexual abuse and harassment, sexual justice – the whole gamut. The topic of Rev. Haffner’s presentations throughout our gathering was “Becoming a Sexually Healthy Religious Professional.” The over-arching goal was to help create sexually healthy faith communities.

* * *

Sexuality is an important aspect of ministry and congregational life. Two areas in which we have addressed sexuality here recently are in the sexual education curriculum we offer our middle schoolers, “Our Whole Lives,” and in our Welcoming Congregation efforts, which focus especially on affirming and supporting those among us who are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender. But Deb Haffner made the case that there is a lot more we could be doing in terms of education and advocacy.

As I thought about it, I realized that while I have preached on marriage equality and reproductive rights in the past, I have never preached a sermon on “sexuality.” Sexuality is a sensitive and loaded issue. And, quite frankly, I generally avoid talking about it. (In our household, whenever our children had questions about sex, my good fatherly response was: “Talk to your mother.”) But silence on sexuality isn’t the solution.

Talking with my colleagues, it became clear that many of us are reluctant to break the silence. Early on in Deb Haffner’s presentation, she introduced an ice-breaker designed to get the ministers talking to each other. We were supposed to stand up, pair up with someone, and then take turns sharing our thoughts, for one minute without interruption, on a particular word she gave us. And then split up, and team up with another colleague for same routine, with another term. The first word we talked about was “flirting.” The second was “kissing.” The third was “masturbation.”

The atmosphere in the room got pretty tense. There was a fair amount of nervous laughter. I think it is safe to say, many of us were pretty uncomfortable. The exercise certainly left me with a heightened appreciation for how challenging it can feel to break the habit of silence, and to talk about sexuality openly and straightforwardly. 

* * *

There are many reasons for our silence surrounding sexuality. Part of it has to do with the power, the complexity, and the controversy surrounding sexuality – whether in our individual lives or in our society at large. Another part of it has to do with past experiences of hurt that have never fully healed, have never been squarely confronted, and which, over the years, have become secrets.

Among my colleagues, it was striking to realize how many of our congregations still struggle with half-acknowledged histories of ministerial sexual misconduct or sexual abuse. We may like to think these sordid stories are found only among Roman Catholics, since their struggles have figured most prominently in the news. But the truth is most denominations, including Unitarian Universalists, have had their own share of troubles. 

There are so many UU ministers who serve congregations struggling with past instances of ministerial misconduct, that they have a name. These ministers call themselves “After Pastors.” 

A good friend and colleague of mine leaned over during our meeting, and confided that he has had several parishoners approach him over the years, who have told him troubling stories of past misconduct in their church. But he has not found a way to bring these stories into the open and help facilitate healing.

And, truth be told, in our church right here, in the 1990s, the minister’s marriage “imploded,” ended in divorce, and then was quickly followed by a marriage to and divorce from a church member. As the minister wrote in his resignation letter soon thereafter, these events “caused some people to question and withhold their support” of his ministry. 

Today we know that romantic relationships between clergy and congregants undermine healthy boundaries, which are needed within a religious community. These boundaries foster trust and safety. To make this point perfectly clear, just this past summer UU ministers added the following statement to their Code of Conduct: “I will not engage in sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person I serve as a minister.”

By educating ourselves in any and all of these areas, we can help break the silence surrounding sexuality. We can help foster healthier attitudes and create safer communities.

It is a sad fact of our society today, that sexuality is often abused. Sexualized images of men and especially of women in movies, television, and advertisements contribute to an atmosphere in which sex is commodified, young women are objectified, even children are victimized, and sexual acts are trivialized.

So what can we do? At our ministers’ meeting last month, Rev. Haffner invited us to each fill out a “Congregational Assessment on Safe Congregations.” It asked questions like: Do we have written policies and procedures specifically on preventing sexual harassment?  Are they posted on our website? Or on a bulletin board? Do we know the state laws on reporting child abuse? Do we have support groups available to those who have suffered abuse, or do we have a list of community resources? 

And when it comes to sexual education, do we make good use of the many curricula available? The program we teach here is not limited to middle schoolers. There are curricula for Kindergarten and First Graders, Fourth through Sixth Graders, High Schoolers, Young Adults (ages 18-35), and older adults. We can also do our part to promote sound sexual education in our schools and cities. 

As a religious community we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to address sexuality.

* * *

“Sex and religion have never been separated in human history.” This is what the Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong writes in his book The Sins of the Scripture. 

“Sex and religion have moved in tandem since the dawn of human self-consciousness. Sex is such a powerful force that religion has always felt it must master and control it in order for religion to have credibility. Organized religion has also related to sexual activity as something to be feared, which in turn has led to enormous efforts throughout history to tame it, incorporate it, deny it or in some manner make it the servant of religion.” (p. 42)

Spong is critical of conservative Christians who oppose women’s reproductive rights, children’s sexual education and same-sex marriage. He sees their sexual attitudes as remnants of a very long history. Since its very beginnings Catholicism opposed what it considered “loose sexual practices” in the ancient Mediterranean world, where sexual practices were linked to fertility rituals and sacred agricultural cycles. Instead, early Christians “made the suppression of sex the first prerequisite for the holy life.” Celibacy for priests, monks and nuns is expression of a view that considered holiness and sexual practice as antithetical and mutually exclusive.

Early believers were taught that “bodies were unclean, even loathsome, and physical desire was nothing other than the mark of the evil one.” And these beliefs, in turn, were rooted in an ancient Neoplatonic worldview that “separated bodies from souls, flesh from spirit, and material things from spiritual things.”

As Spong sees it, the controversy in religious circles over sexuality is expression of an ancient “battle that pitted a religion of control and repression against a religion that celebrated the goodness of creation.”

* * *

I myself am a product of this battle between a religion of repression and control, and a religion that celebrates the blessings of creation.

My grandfather was a celibate Roman Catholic priest, who served as a military chaplain in World War I Germany. But in 1917, he met a young woman, who worked at the ticket booth of the local movie theater. She caught his eye. He asked her out. They fell in love.  So after the war, in 1919, he left the priesthood. (Good thing for me!) Two years later they were married. They started a family, and he became a liberal religious minister.

* * *

In Unitarian Universalist circles, many of us today share Spong’s opposition to a religious conservatism that suppresses sexuality. But cultivating healthy sexual attitudes and healthy sexual practices involves more than simply rejecting repression.

In the 1960s and 70s, during the so-called sexual revolution, our progressive religious beliefs seemed very compatible with the sexual permissiveness of the times. Many religious liberals imagined themselves at the forefront of a more enlightened sexuality. 

I was only a child when my father served UU congregations in that period. But I have clear recollections of how church gatherings at our home were shaped by the spirit of the swinging sixties and seventies. Alcohol was an accepted social lubricant, and the codes of conduct were much more relaxed than they are today. 

My father could be quite a party animal. I remember he was called to the UUA headquarters in Boston once, after a particular party got a little too relaxed – even by the standards of the sixties. Memories of those days help me appreciate the wisdom of current efforts to cultivate healthier sexual attitudes and practices, with clear boundaries and limits.

* * *

Sex is too powerful to be silenced or suppressed. But the answer is not to plaster our billboards with sexualized images. The answer is not to promote promiscuity.  

Sex is too profound to be trivialized and commercialized, or exploited in the marketplace and our entertainment industry. Doing so allows sexuality to be perverted into violence and violation.

Sexuality, at its best, is celebrated and honored as the sacred gift it is. Sexuality, at its best, is an expression of deep love, divine love. As such it is inseparable from justice. 

We should love our neighbors as ourselves, the scriptures say. We should respect others, as we ourselves long to be respected. We should protect others, as we ourselves want to be protected. This is the root of the Golden Rule. It is the source of the intimate connection between love and justice, health and wholeness, sexuality and the sacred. 

“Sexuality is expressed not only between lovers in personal relationship,” Carter Heyward writes, “but also in the work of an artist who loves her painting or her poetry, a father who loves his children, a revolutionary who loves her people.” Susan Griffin says eros can be experienced, as our mouth meets the water we drink, as our eyes meet the morning light, when everything we meet permeates us, and we perceive “that beautiful paradox of being” by which we are each “both solitary creature and everyone, everything.”

May our lives be guided by a spirit of health and wholeness.

May we be grounded in both body and soul.

And may our love inspire us to create a world of justice 

For everyone.

Amen.