Are We Bending Toward Justice?

"Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job."
-- Adlai Stevenson

Meditation: mindful of the Jewish High Holy Days in the midst of which we find ourselves, a meditation by Rabbi Jack Riemer (SLT #634)

Now is the time for turning.

The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red and orange.

The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the South.

The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for winter.

For leaves, birds, and animals turning comes instinctively.

But for us turning does not come so easily.

It takes an act of will for us to make a turn.

It means breaking with old habits.

It means admitting that we have been wrong; and this is never easy.

It means losing face; it means starting all over again; and this is always painful.

It means saying: I am sorry.

It means recognizing that we have the ability to change.  These things are hard to do.

But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday’s ways.

[Spirit of Life], help us to turn - from callousness to sensitivity, 

From hostility to love, from pettiness to purpose,…

From fear to faith.

Turn us around,…

Revive our lives, as at the beginning.

And turn us toward each other, God, for in isolation there is no life.

Reading: by Leonard Pitts, Jr. from a column that appeared on August 12, 2014, entitled “This is not just about Michael Brown”

To believe that … the windows smashed, the buildings torched, the tear gas wafting – is all about the killing of Michael Brown is to miss the point. Brown, of course, was the unarmed 18-year-old African-American man shot multiple times by a Ferguson police officer…

… This is not just about Brown. It’s about Eric Garner, choked to death in a confrontation with New York City Police. It’s about Jordan Davis, shot to death in Jacksonville because he played his music too loud. It’s about Trayvon Martin, shot to death in Sanford because a self-appointed neighborhood guardian judged him a thug. It’s about Oscar Grant, shot by a police officer in an Oakland subway station as cellphone cameras watched. It’s about Amadou Diallo, executed in that vestibule and Abner Louima, sodomized with the broomstick. It’s about Rodney King. 

And it is about the bitter sense of siege that lives in African-American men, a sense that it is perpetually open season on us. 

And that too few people outside of African America really notice, much less care. People who look like you are everyday deprived of health, wealth, freedom, opportunity, education, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence, life itself – and when you try to say this, even when you document it with academic studies and buttress it with witness testimony, people don’t want to hear it, people dismiss you, deny you, lecture you about white victimhood, chastise you for playing a so-called “race-card.”

They choke off avenues of protest, prizing silence over justice, mistaking silence for peace. And never mind that sometimes, silence simmers like water in a closed pot on a high flame.

Reading: Abe Lateiner is a white blogger based in Cambridge, MA, who is working to build community across dividing lines of class and race in his city. This is an excerpt from blog entry (RiskSomething.org ) in which he struggles with his own racism.

I wish I could tell you that my relationship with my racism is just history. But it's not...it's today, it's right now. It's every day. Every day for me is shot through with a thousand moments in which I choose to either breathe life into my own racism or allow it to wither. It's happening now, as I type these words. Way down in the gut, it's there, as usual, grunting, slobbering, pleading for breath, for food, for life, and much more often than I'd like to admit, I give my racism the sustenance it wants. It takes shape, forms into hard angles, muscles contracting as it rears up, chuckling, stronger and inflating by the second, seeking a way out, a hole out of which to discharge itself.  

My racism is alive right now, as I type these words, which I am aware, add up to a kind of begging, a desperate attempt to buy myself into some kind of anti-racist salvation. 

My racism comes out when I read an article by a Black writer and I find myself recoiling from the writer’s “anger.” 

My racism comes out when I am relieved to see that the people walking behind me on the street are White, not Black. 

My racism comes out when I realize that the four students I have labeled "difficult" in one of my classes are the only four Black students in the class… 

When I read a list of common racist behaviors and begin scrambling to defend myself.

No, I'm not over racism. Instead, I'm trying to learn how to be with racism. 

Are We Bending Toward Justice?

A Sermon Delivered on September 28, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

I can’t imagine what things are like in Ferguson, Missouri these days. Seven weeks have now passed since Michael Brown was killed.  A federal investigation is still under way. The facts about what happened that Saturday afternoon are far from certain. Accounts vary. But this much we know: Michael Brown was eighteen years old, and had just graduated from high school. He was walking on the street with a friend - not on the sidewalk - and this caught the attention of a police officer, who confronted them. There was an exchange, probably heated. At the end of it, Michael had been shot six times, and died on the street. 

I have a son, who graduated from high school just a few years ago. What if my son were killed by a police officer? I can’t imagine.

The community of Ferguson is still reeling. Ad hoc memorial shrines have been built on the street where Michael died. Flowers, pictures, candles, and stuffed animals have been placed there by grieving friends and neighbors. In this way a place of tragedy is transformed in to a sacred place of memory and hope. But not everyone agrees on how we should go about finding hope and healing. This week in the News-Gazette I read that one of the memorials was doused in gasoline and set aflame. I can’t imagine how people in Ferguson, how Michael’s family and friends feel. 

In Ferguson it seems simmering tensions have only deepened since Michael’s death. But as Leonard Pitts points out, the simmering tensions in Ferguson are not only about Michael Brown. Michael Brown is only the most recent victim of a much greater problem, a problem that is experienced by millions of Americans all across the country.

Michael Brown reminds me of the tragic death of Kiwane Carrington, right here in Urbana-Champaign five years ago. Kiwane was 15 years old when two white police officers wondered what he was up to on a Friday afternoon in the back yard of a friend’s house. They thought he was a burglar. There was a scuffle. The officer’s gun went off. And Kiwane was killed. 

I remember Kiwane’s tragic story well, because my son was also fifteen at the time. I attended Kiwane’s memorial service, but I couldn’t imagine how his family and friends felt.

* * *

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, that the universe has a moral arc, and it bends toward justice. “When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in the universe… Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King found this idea first expressed by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. In a sermon Parker published back in 1852 entitled “Of Justice and the Conscience,” he imagined that just as the universe is governed by laws of nature, laws of matter and electricity, it is governed by laws of morality. Just as we are all subject to the law of gravity, we are also guided by a universal moral law. 

“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right,” Parker said. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” 

* * *

Neither Theodore Parker nor Dr. King was a starry-eyed optimist. Parker was at the cutting edge of the abolitionist movement, an outspoken opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act, an advocate for the freedom and dignity of his fellow citizens suffering under slavery. And he knew there was much work to be done.

And Dr. King, who is best known for the phrase “I have a dream,” was no naïve dreamer. In his final presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, he said “I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” … Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of forces for justice. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history…. Let us be dissatisfied.” 

When King and Parker spoke of a moral universe, moral law, and moral truth, their ideas were linked to their belief in a just and loving God, whose divine purpose permeates all creation, and whose longing for good takes shape in our every human endeavor. 

This notion of a good and loving God is beautiful. And yet, how can we truly believe it, when we see so much violence and evil committed every day in the name of God? America, one nation under God, is now stepping up its military action in the Middle East, dropping bombs in order to vanquish our latest enemy, ISIS, whose soldiers are waging war for the sake of their own God. 

How can we believe in a divine and universal moral law, when both Israelites and Palestinians in Gaza take up arms against one another, all in the name of God? 

How can we imagine a single sacred morality, when black Americans and white Americans are rarely as clearly divided, as when we gather for worship on Sunday mornings, the vast majority of churches being either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white. 

* * *

In his book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright makes the case for a steady moral evolution among humans. Our moral evolution is part and parcel of our biological and social evolution. 

Looking at our human history, from our days of hunter-gatherer societies to tribal chiefdoms, from city-states to nation-states, to international alliances and a global economy, he sees a steady refinement of our moral sensibilities. 

Our greater understanding of right and wrong, and our deepening desire to do good, is symptom of our ever-growing moral imagination. “The moral imagination was “designed” by natural selection to help us exploit [win-win] opportunities, to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available, to help us find people we can do business with and do business with them.” (p. 428)

Rather than seeing neighboring tribes, cities, and nations as our enemies, we are able to recognize our common interests and our common humanity. And thus our adversaries become our allies and trading partners.

Our moral imagination is the ability to empathize with others. It is our ability to grasp that other people have hopes and dreams, just as we do. Other people long to be respected and treated fairly, just as we do. Other people want their families to live in safety, want their children to prosper, just as we do.  Other people feel pain and pleasure, grief and gratitude, just as we do.

Our moral imagination works very well when we are dealing with friends and family members. Empathizing with them comes naturally. Empathizing with people who seem strange, who look different, who live in neighborhoods we have never visited, or in countries we have never seen - that is much more difficult. 

We are naturally very good at putting ourselves in the shoes of close relatives and good friends, Robert Wright says. We are very bad at putting ourselves in the shoes of strangers, rivals and enemies. Wright offers this example. He says, imagine a good friend. 

“Your friend tells you about an arrogant prima donna at work who drives her nuts, and you are reminded of an arrogant prima donna in high school – the football star, the valedictorian – who drove you nuts. With a friend this process is automatic: you scour you memory for shared points of reference and so vicariously feel her grievance. It’s part of the deal that sustains your … relationship: you validate her gripes, she validates yours. You work towards a common perspective.

This is the work you aren’t inclined to do with rivals and enemies. They complain about some arrogant prima donna, and you just can’t relate. (Why are they such whiners?) And that’s of course especially true when they say – as a rival or enemy might – that you are an arrogant prima donna. Then you certainly aren’t struck by the parallels with that prima donna in your high school.” (p. 418)

The secret of the moral imagination, the secret of universal moral truth is this: other people are people too. Other people’s lives are just as precious as our own. Other people’s health and happiness is just as important as our health and happiness is to us. 

* * *

Well-intentioned people may be tempted to think that racism is a thing of the past. It is tempting to think that racism is history, that slavery was successfully abolished in the 19^th century, and that segregation as successfully out-lawed in the 20^th century. And it’s true, some progress was made. But the evils of injustice are still with us.

The words of Dr. King, from his last Sunday sermon delivered a week before he died, continue to ring true today: “It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle – the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.” We must challenge the myth that time heals all wounds, King says. 

“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals… And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” (“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”) 

There is a lot we can do. Anyone of us. The sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole says we can confront racism in countless ways. She offers nine easy examples on three levels: 

At the National Level, (1.) we can combat racism through national-level political channels, we can write letters and sign petitions. (2.) We can advocate for Affirmative Action practices in education and employment. (3.) We can vote for candidates who make ending racism a priority. 

At the Community Level, (1.) when we see evidence of racism, we can say something. We can speak out. (2.) We can cross the racial divide (and other divisions) by extending gestures of kindness and hospitality to people, regardless of race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, class, or housing status. (3.) We can learn about the racism that exists in our community, and do something about it by supporting anti-racist community events, and participating in protests, rallies, and programs. 

And on an individual level, (1.) we can listen to and validate the people who share their personal experience of systemic racism. (2.) We each can have hard conversations with ourselves about the racism that lives within us. (3.) We can be mindful of the commonalities that humans share, and practice empathy.

* * *

We need to open our minds and hearts to the frightening facts and unsettling experience of what it means to be black in America. We need to open our minds and hearts to the traces of racism that exist within ourselves, that come to life in a thousand moments every day, and that take shape in our actions and inactions. 

It is hard to imagine that such injustice could exist within us and around us. It is hard to imagine what it feels like every day to be deprived of health, wealth, freedom, opportunity, education, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence.

And yet if we want to understand moral truth, and if we want to bend toward that truth, we must learn to imagine. We must learn to imagine what it’s like to walk in the shoes of others. Unless we do so, we will always be trapped in yesterday’s ways. We must learn to imagine a better way.

It may well be that the moral arc of the universe is bending toward justice. The arc of the universe is long. It is measured not in minutes but in millennia. Millions of men and women today don’t have the luxury to wait for millennia to pass. 

In our life-time today, it takes an act of will to bend toward justice. If we want to bend toward justice, we must consciously break old habits. If we want to bend toward justice, we must admit that we were wrong, and this is never easy. 

Bending toward justice means being willing to start over again. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change.

May we learn the simple moral truth,

That all people are people, just like us.

May we have the wisdom to imagine a better world,

And may we have the courage to do the work we are called to do,

For then we will truly make miracles happen.

So be it. Amen. 

Our Religious Evolution

"They always say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself."
-- Andy Warhol

Reading: a Chinese creation myth, as retold by Virginia Hamilton (In the Beginning, p. 21)

The space of the universe was in the shape of a hen’s egg. Within the egg was a great mass called no thing. Inside no thing was something not yet born. It was not yet developed, and it was called Phan Ku.

In no time, Phan Ku burst from the egg. He was the first being. He was the Great Creator. Phan Ku was the size of a giant. He grew ten feet a day and lived for eighteen thousand years. 

Hair grew all over Phan Ku. Horns curved up out of his head, and tusks jutted from his jaw. In one hand he held a chisel; and with it he carved out the world.

Phan Ku separated sky from earth. The light, pure sky was yang, and the heavy, dark weight of earth was yin. The vast Phan Ku himself filled the space between earth and sky, yin and yang.

He chiseled out earth’s rivers; he scooped out the valleys. It was easy for him to layer mountains and pile them high upon high.

Then Phan Ku placed the stars and moon in the night sky and the sun into the day…

Only when Phan Ku died was the world at last complete. The dome of the sky was made from Phan Ku’s skull. Soil was formed from his body. Rocks were made from his bones; rivers and seas from his blood. All of plant life came from Phan Ku’s hair. Thunder and lightening are the sound of his voice. The wind and the clouds are his breath. Rain was made from his sweat. And from the fleas that lived in the hair covering him came all of humankind.

The form of Phan Ku vanished in the making of the world. After he was gone, there was room then for pain, and that is how suffering came to human beings.

Reading: by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong from A Short History of Myth (p. 8) 

An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel in the face of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.

Reading: by the Unitarian Universalist minister Terasa Cooley from an article entitled “Into the Beyond,” which appeared in the UU World magazine this spring. The article has provided worthwhile food for thought for our Board of Trustees…

I believe we are on the edge of a new phase in history—a phase that requires not just new technical skills but also an entire culture shift. When printed books were introduced, a religious transformation followed—because people could read the Bible and understand it for themselves. When radio and television appeared, we developed a consumer mentality, where we shopped around for what we wanted—channels, products, even churches—but we didn’t have much say in creating them. Now, with the Internet and social media, not only can we find what we want, anywhere in the world, we also can shape what we want or even create it ourselves.

Our Religious Evolution

A Sermon Delivered on September 21, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.”

When I was a child, raised in a Unitarian Universalist home, I was taught a variety of different creation myths, in the course of the religious education classes I attended. And I liked them. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if the whole universe had hatched from a giant egg. And long before I was old enough to understand the subtleties of Eastern philosophy, I wondered about the meaning of yin and yang, and the mystery of its two toned circular symbol.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” Or at least that’s what I thought I would do. 

As a child, I caught on quickly that these stories were myths, not accounts of what actually happened at the dawn of creation. For one thing, there were so many different stories told in different parts of the world. They couldn’t all be right. 

When I was a child, I thought that once I was grown up, I would have the big questions of life all figured out. Science, I thought, provided certainty. Science would provide the definitive answers to any questions I might have. 

If I were a child today, any notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing God would be easily displaced by all-powerful technology and the all-knowing internet. True confessions: in this day and age, I spend less time reading the timeless classics of religious history, and much more time consulting the wisdom of Wikipedia. And my search for truth is powered by Google. 

My trusty, dog-eared pocket copy of the Tao te Ching now gathers dust on my bookcase. What I carry around today as a source of spiritual inspiration and insight is this – my trusty iPhone. (And now that the new iPhone 6 was released this week, my old iPhone 5 seems like a clunky relic of times long past.)

Today, the story of evolution has taken the place of gods like Phan Ku, who created mountains, valleys and rivers with an enormous chisel; or like Yahweh, who created humans from the dust of ground, molded clay into shape, and then blew air into our nostrils, filling us with the breath of life; or like Elohim who created everything in six days, after simply saying “Let there be light,” and there was light.

We can think of ourselves as sacred mud, shaped by God’s hands, or we can think of ourselves as human fleas, who jumped off God’s hairy back. But if anyone asks me where we humans come from, as an adult today, I would probably answer along the lines of the story Darwin told. 

The world wasn’t made by giants wielding chisels. Humans weren’t created on the same day as all other living creatures – cattle and creeping things, fish of the sea and birds of the air – all of which are subject to our dominion. But rather we are the product of a six billion year process of very gradual evolution, the amazing emergence of life and endless adaptation in the ongoing interplay between organism and environment.

The biologist Ursula Goodenough sees evolution as an epic story that can serve as the basis of a global ethos. She says, the story of evolution can help us come to terms with the ultimate questions with which humanity has forever grappled, questions like: 

- Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?

- Where did the laws of physics come from?

- Why does the universe seem so strange?

The story of evolution can inspire a sense of mystery and wonder. It can open our minds and hearts to nature’s sacred depths. (The Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 167) 

* * *

As a child, I figured myths are remnants of ancient, long-ago civilizations. Myths are stories people invented to explain the world in which they lived, before they knew better. The stories they told, before they realized the earth isn’t actually flat, but round. And that earth isn’t the center of the universe, with stars, sun and moon circling around, but is simply one planet among millions and billions of others. 

Just as evolution provides a framework to understand life’s emergence, our religious beliefs have evolved as well. 

Karen Armstrong says that our oldest myths can be traced to the far-reaches of human history. Certain myths are associated with the Paleolithic period, from 20,000 to 8,000 BCE. She calls them the myths of the hunters. In these earliest mythologies, the sacred and the secular were not two separate realms, but rather closely related. 

“When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being… Its very otherness made it holy. A stone was a… common revelation of the sacred… A tree [with its] power to effortlessly renew itself [embodied] a miraculous vitality denied to mortal men and women.” (p. 16-17) 

Other myths arose in the Neolithic period, from 8,000 to 4,000 BCE, when our ancestors formed early agricultural societies. Their emerging agricultural understanding led to a deeper appreciation for the fertile and creative energy that pervades the entire cosmos. They began to imagine the energies personified as sky gods and earth goddesses. Armstrong calls these the mythologies of the farmers. 

Still other mythologies took shape amidst the rise of early civilizations, when the first cities were built in the Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then later in China, India and Crete. 

As civilization grew more complex, the complexity of our mythologies evolved as well. And slowly the great religious traditions we know today took shape: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in the Middle East.

The sixteenth century marks the beginning of what Armstrong calls “The Great Western Transformation.” Gutenberg had just invented the printing press, which contributed to an unprecedented interest in scholarship and learning throughout Europe. An increase in literacy and easier access to books created an information explosion. And this, in turn, led to a religious transformation.   

“The Western achievement relied on the triumph of the pragmatic, scientific spirit,” Armstrong writes. 

“Efficiency was the new watchword. Everything had to work… Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh.” (p. 119)

This new period of religious evolution is particularly interesting for us, because this is when Unitarian Universalism emerged as a distinct religious movement, first in Europe and then in the United States. The first Unitarian congregations were formed in the sixteenth century, and they were infused with this new spirit of science and rationalism. 

Our Unitarian Universalist forbears distinguished themselves by approaching religious scripture in the spirit of the scientist, the scholar, and the skeptic. They challenged religious doctrines that didn’t make good sense to them. They rejected beliefs, which, from a scientific perspective, seemed like superstitious fictions, rather than solid facts. 

* * *

Today, when we say something is a myth, we often mean it isn’t true. “A watched pot never boils” – that’s a myth. Just this morning I was watching our hot water kettle, as I was making my first cup of tea – and the water boiled just fine. 

From the perspective of the rationalist, the pragmatist, the literalist – a myth is a mistake. But this in not the only way to understand the meaning of myth.

Frederick Buechner writes: 

“The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus—they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.” (Wishful Thinking, p. 65)

* * *

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child,” and I thought that being an adult meant giving up childish ways. I thought being an adult meant putting aside myth and make-believe. I thought being an adult meant being reasonable and rational, sensible and scientific. I thought a sense of mystery and wonder, curiosity and amazement were for children. I thought that once I was an adult, I would have acquired a sense of certainty, and all the questions that confounded me would be answered.

But this is not the way I experience adulthood now. Sure, as an adult I know more than I did when I was child, but I also know there is much more that I don’t know. With every year I grow older, the questions grow deeper and broader. 

The older I get, the more I can appreciate the tales of the mythical Muslim sage, the holy fool, Nasrudin: 

When Nasrudin was an old man, he was sitting in a tea shop with friends, looking back on his life, telling his story. “When I was young I was fiery – I wanted to awaken everyone. I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change the world. In midlife I awoke one day and realized my life was half over and I had changed no one. So I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change those close around me who so much needed it. Alas, now I am old and my prayer is simpler. “Allah,” I ask, “please give me the strength to at least change myself.”

* * *

Perhaps the next step in our religious evolution is to realize that we don’t need to reject our myths, but rather we need to rediscover them, re-imagine them, re-shape them, so that their truths are relevant for our world today.

Karen Armstrong says, 

“We need myths that will help us to identify with our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’.” (p. 136)

* * *

Terasa Cooley may be right. Maybe we are on the edge of a new phase in history. She says our task today is to provide the right questions, not the right answers. “We need to encourage curiosity and create a framework for people to interpret the massive amount of information out there, not just learn facts.”

Cooley says, “in order to be relevant, our congregations must also find ways to embrace cultural and technological changes. If you like the church you have now—I’m not going to lie to you—you might not be able to keep it, at least not exactly the way it is. The church that speaks to and serves the next generation will not be the same. But that has always been true.”

* * *

 “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” This is what Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians. Even as adults we see only dimly, and our knowledge is incomplete, but we know one thing: love never ends. Paul says, faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.

Our deepest human desire is and always has been our longing for love. Love guides us towards transcendence. Love leads to ecstasy, to life lived more intensely. Love allows us to see that we are all brothers and sisters, that we are one with the whole of humanity.

May we remember the myth and greatest miracle of our evolution: that we creatures created by love, and that we have the power to create ever more love.

May we have the courage

To use our powers.

And may we use them wisely.

Amen.

Guest Sermon: Space

"Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being."
-- Thomas Merton

Reading: from Awakening Alchemist documentary called “Everything is Energy”

The solidity of the world seems indisputable.  As a fixed thing that you can see and touch, your body is also reassuringly solid.   But beginning with Einstein modern physics has assured us that this solidity is a mirage.  After all the body is made up of atoms.  These atoms are particles that are whirling at lightening speed around huge empty spaces and the particles themselves aren’t material objects.  The particles themselves are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void of energy and information. If you could see the body as it really is you’d see that 99.9999% of it is mostly empty space and the .00001% of it which you see as matter is also empty space.  If you could take all the real matter that makes up the atoms of our bodies: the protons, neutrons and electrons and press them all tightly together, they would all fit onto the tip of a needle. The matter is just an illusion, an artifact of our perceptual experiences. As you sift through this very solid looking material body you only have to go so far before you end up with a handful of nothing.  This is a scientific fact.  The essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff because an atom which is the basic unit of matter is not really a solid entity.  It’s a void. 

Reading: Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tsu

Thirty spokes unite in the hub of the wheel

It is the emptiness of the center whole

That makes it useful.

Shape clay into a bowl

It is the space within that allows it to be useful

Cut out doors and windows for a house

These created openings of space give it usefulness

Thus, physical form is beneficial

It’s usefulness comes from creating a space.

Reading: by Marv Hiles from her essay "The Way Through” No. 31, Winter 2009 

I am discovering that Silence is not a concept, an idea, not the familiar "absence of sound." Instead, I "enter" silence as if I were to open a door, cross a threshold, and enter a room. Silence is substantive, tactile, like material. I feel its layers. It has depth like water, shallow or deep. I immerse myself in it. It is like water, supportive. I lay back in it. It is buoyant or it can draw me down. I think about whether or not it has a bottom, a ground. Perhaps its bottom turns into a top at some point, just as going east eventually leads west. I feel secure in the way it totally envelops. It is pleasurable yet mysterious. ... “ancient and full of grace.”

Space

A Sermon Delivered on September 14, 2014

By

Pam Blosser

In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames, designers and film makers, created a film called “The Powers of Ten.”   This work depicted the relative dimensions of the Universe according to a logarithmic scale based on a factor of ten. It begins first with a couple having a picnic near Lake Michigan in Chicago, and then every 10 seconds it expands out 10 meters until the entire earth is in view.  The picture moves out from earth bringing our solar system into view and then our Milky Way Galaxy further and further until the entire universe is surveyed. At this point in the film the narrator explains, “This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust is what most of space looks like.  This emptiness is normal.  The richness of our neighborhood is the exception.”  The film continues, quickly returning us to the two picnickers in Chicago then entering the man’s hand to reduce inward smaller and smaller until a single atom and its quarks are observed.  “We are in the domain of universal modules”, the narrater explains.  “There are protons and neutrons in every nucleus.  Electrons in every atom.  Atoms bonded into every molecule out to the farthest galaxy.”  In a relative short period of time the film shows that we are able to view the macrocosm and the microcosm of our universe and are reminded by the narrator that both are made up of atoms.  The atom itself is in some ways similar to how the narrator explains the outermost reaches of the universe,  “This emptiness is normal.”  Emptiness is in fact, the normal condition of all of physical matter.

There is a common analogy about the structure of an atom. Imagine with me now that the nucleus of an atom is like a fly in the center of a sports stadium and the electrons are tiny, tiny gnats circling the stadium.

The truth is we live in space.  We live on a spaceship traveling, moving, floating in waves of silence.  We are made up of space.  Space is in around and through us.

The Tao states that it is the space within the form that gives it meaning  --- the hub of a wheel, a cup, a house.  These would not be what they are without the emptiness at their center.

Look around you at the space here.  The space within the structure of this sanctuary and building is what gives our experiences here meaning.  Within these walls we are moved by the beautiful music.  We listen to thought provoking and inspiring messages and are educated, enriched and transformed by their profundity.  We connect with each other here through community and our innate urge to serve each other and our cities and create together.  Within these walls is laughter, friendship and questions and answers where we seek  to understand and make sense of life --- a life that asks us to think more deeply and mindfully so we may cultivate peace, gratitude, equanimity, wonder and love.  This space, this emptiness teems with life and humanity filling our lives with meaning.

The world is filled with change.  Every day we face something different to respond to.  Our world is filled with words --- words from TV and radio announcers, words from advertisers, words from our friends, colleagues and family.  Sometimes the words are the same; sometime they change.  Between the words is silence that allows the words  to be what they are.  You are always thinking.  Sometimes your thoughts are the same and sometimes they change.  The space between your thoughts is who you are.  The silence is your birthplace.  And  the spaciousness between your words and thoughts, your presence, is what you bring to the world.

Many holy works describe silence as a doorway to the mystical.

The ancient Hindu writings the Maitri Upanishad tells us,  “There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the Supreme Mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else.”

From another sacred Hindu writing, the Atharva Veda we hear, “By the grace of wisdom and purity of mind, He can be seen, indivisible, in the silence of contemplation.”  

Confucius tells us, “Silence is the true friend that never betrays.”

From the Buddha we hear, “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and he feels the joy of the dharma.”

The Psalms, a writing for both Judaism and Christianity, tells us, “ Be still, and know that I am God.”

From the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi we are instructed, “Now be silent.  Let the One who creates the words speak.  He made the door. He made the lock.  He also made the key.”

Richard Alpert who came to be known as Ram Dass and the author of the famous book of the 1960s “Be Here Now.”  was an eloquent speaker. He once said, “One of these days you’re going to come and hear me speak, and I’m going to stand up here in complete silence the whole time.  Afterwards you’ll say to me, ‘Great talk!’” 

A few years later Ram Dass had a massive stroke.  At one of his first talks during his recovery, there were large gaps of silence as he searched for the words to say.  Upon hearing him, I thought, “How beautiful.  His talks have now become meditations and dances with silence in which we must move with him as his partner out of our intellect and into our beingness.”

Beneath the words, the glances, the movement, the tears and the laughter there is a depth of silence that is unfathomable.  How often do we allow ourselves to go there.  Most of the time we stay on the surface hardly recognizing a deeper dimension that continues to exist irresponsive of our awareness.

At the headquarters of the School of Metaphysics we have a practice of reading or reciting a sacred document every morning at 5:45 in the upper chamber of our Peace Dome.  It is called the Universal Peace Covenant.  This is a document we wrote back in the mid 1990s and it has special meaning for me.    When I participate in this ritual of reading the peace covenant, I see in my mind busy street corners in different parts of the world with the sound of traffic and the people bustling in the brightness of the sun.  The silence underneath this ever-changing busy-ness is where I place the thoughts that this covenant conveys --- supporting, comforting, giving hope and resolution.    I would like to recite the conclusion to give you an idea of its scope.  It reads, “We stand on the threshold of peace-filled understanding. We come together, all of humanity, young and old of all cultures from all nations. We vow to stand together as citizens of the Earth knowing that every question has an answer, every issue a resolution. As we stand, united in common purpose, we hereby commit ourselves in thought and action so we might know the power of peace in our lifetimes.”

Right now, right here, there is silence.  Beneath the surface of life is a spacious ground of being.  It’s inside the rain you hear outside.  It quietly waits within the rainbow of colors that surround you.  It lies beneath the smell and taste of your morning coffee. underneath the feelings of love and passion as well as disappointment and devastation.   It rests within painful, argumentative and hateful words and within the pain of bearing those words.  It waits everywhere to be heard, to be seen, to be touched.  It never goes away, constantly changing yet always the same.  It’s inside you.  It’s inside everything.  All you have to do is be still.   Let go of whatever it is you chase after because you think you don’t have it.    What’s your hurry?  Where are you going?  What are you trying to figure out?  Who are you trying to please? Who are you trying to impress?  Nothing will get done any faster because of your worry.  Nothing will be resolved because of your regret. Turn your attention away from your thoughts, away from the details of your life.  Within the silence comes forgiveness, understanding, wisdom, peace and grace. 

Right now take a long, deep breath.  Close your eyes.  and   Open the door into space.  Cross the threshold. and enter the room where everything is the spaciousness of who you are. Right here accept life as it is.  Let everything be as it is without needing to do anything.    Now slip down into the depths of your being. Feel its layers. Immerse yourself in its depth. Lay back in it. It is buoyant or it can draw you down. Feel secure in the way it totally envelops. It is pleasurable yet mysterious, ancient and full of grace.   Listen.  Listen to the light within you.  Touch the sound of space.  Be aware of awareness.  

Be aware of awareness.  

Be aware of awareness.  

Be aware of... 

Be aware....

Be.....

If Change Were Inevitable

"Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes."
-- Hugh Prather

Joys and Concerns

This is our time on Sunday mornings, to light candles of joy and concern.

We take this time to stop for a moment, take a breath,

and think about this week in our lives, with all of its ups and downs. 

Think about the people you know and love. How are they doing?

One concern I would like to share: Yesterday we learned that Kent Conrad, our Music Director passed away suddenly and unexpectedly the day before. Kent shared his gift of music with us for the past ten years. He was loved and admired by many of us. Plans for a memorial service at this point are incomplete. Many of us are in shock and disbelief. His loss is deeply felt. Please keep Kent, his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.

Reading:  by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron from Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (p. 3) 

As human beings we share a tendency to scramble for certainty whenever we realize that everything around us is in flux. In difficult times the stress of trying to find solid ground – something predictable and safe to stand on – seems to intensify. But in truth, the very nature of our existence is forever in flux. Everything keeps changing, whether we’re aware of it or not.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we’re part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

So this is where we find ourselves: right in the middle of a dilemma. And it leaves us with some provocative questions: How can we live whole-heartedly in the face of impermanence, knowing that one day we’re going to die? What is it like to realize we can never completely and finally get it all together? How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?

Reading: by Judith Sills from The Comfort Trap (p. 1)

In the high-wire act that is life, most of our time is spent huddled on a comfortable platform of our own creation. We could stay safely snuggled there – busy, preoccupied, suffering, or delighted. It is a familiar and confining harbor, and its only exit is a tightrope stretched to the next haven. Eventually, uncomfortably, the spotlight of promise moves to that next platform and our own grows painful and empty. When it does, we freeze in place. Can we risk that tightrope of change?

What will you do?

Many will look determinedly away from the tightrope. Who knows, after all, where it [really] leads? Some few will fling themselves forward, while others will inch out and back and farther out again, making wobbly, determined progress toward the light. Most will listen as hard to their audience as to their own hearts, drawing courage or caution from the chorus around them.

Of those who risk the tightrope, we know for certain some will fall. The rest will make it to a new platform, larger, richer, more satisfying than the old one. They will bring with them an enduring pride for having made the leap and a degree of pain from their loss of what was left behind. Much of what was left behind were people who were unable or unwilling to make a similar vault. They stayed stuck. What about you?

Reading: a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “In Blackwater Woods”

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over 

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

If Change Were Inevitable

A Sermon Delivered on September 7, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

If life is indeed a high-wire act, we may want to consider the story of Philippe Petit. 

Forty years ago, on the morning of August 7^th, 1974, the twenty-four year old Petit emerged from his hiding place on the 82^nd floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. He climbed to the very top, walked to the edge of the building, gazed out at New York City in the morning light, stretching out 1350 feet below. Then he stepped off the roof… and onto a wire. First one step, and then another. 

He walked the entire distance from the south tower to the north tower. Along the way he stopped and looked down at the crowds gathering far below, he kneeled, he even laid down on his back and watched airplanes pass overhead. When he reached the north tower, he turned around and did it again. He walked back and forth between the towers eight times. The whole act took forty-five minutes. Then he safely got off the wire.

* * *

Any person’s life invariably involves a certain degree of risk and danger. Every morning the alarm clock rings and we get up, we run the risk of getting up on the wrong side of bed. Driving our car across town, riding our bicycles, or even walking, we run the risk of getting into an accident. With each step we take we risk stumbling.

But stepping off the side of the World Trade Center is simply crazy. Why would anyone choose to do such a thing? It seems crazy, reckless and foolish. It would certainly be crazy, reckless and foolish if I tried a similar stunt. Even if all I tried to do was walk on a rope tied from our upstairs window at home to the garage in our back yard, I would probably lose my balance in a heartbeat, and end up breaking a leg, or worse. 

Sometimes I like to go for walks around town, strolling along the train tracks that crisscross our cities. And sometimes, on a whim, I step up onto the rail for a wobbly stretch, just to see how long I can keep my balance. I teeter unstably for only a few feet, before jumping off, just before I fall. That’s about the closest I come to a tightrope walk at this stage of my life. My “high-wire” runs solidly about six inches off the ground. And even so, it feels daring. And the moment when I lose my balance and am about to fall never fails to send a shot of adrenaline through my veins. 

* * *

Stepping out on a high-wire is what it feels like when we deal with change in our lives. It feels scary and daring. It feels risky and maybe more than a little reckless. It certainly isn’t a pleasant, comfortable feeling. That’s why most of us, if we have choice, tend to avoid change. 

It is part and parcel of human nature to continually seek out a sense of emotional comfort. And the best way to find this sense of comfort is by sticking to our familiar routines and our favorite habits. Our routines define us, Judith Sills says, 

“carving our lives into little mini-zones of emotional comfort - my coffee shop, my preference for [coffee] black, one Sweet’N Low not Equal please, my parking spot, my nightly ritual of walking the dog or stalking the bars. The soothing balm of routine defines and confines us all. We always do what we always did, unless we make a conscious, focused effort not to. This is true whether what we did felt good or bad, because in some essential way it feels like me.” (p.6)

But the sense of safety and comfort we find when we stick with the familiar has a catch: it comes with an electric fence. As long as we avoid pushing our limits, we will be blissfully oblivious to the walled platform we unwittingly create around us. But once we stretch past our comfort zone, we get an unmistakable jolt of anxiety.

As Judith Sills puts it, 

“Anxiety is the invisible fence that bounds all of our lives. It is what we would do almost anything to avoid. Anxiety is the opposite of comfort and, when it comes to change, it is the heart of the matter. We always do what we always did because doing something new doesn’t usually feel good. “New” may feel anything from slightly strange to agonizing, but there are all the flavors of anxiety.” (p. 13)

Anxiety makes us uncomfortable. Choosing to change goes against our grain. There is something about the very idea of change that seems scary, if not downright crazy and reckless. 

* * *

While the act of stepping off the roof of the World Trade Center may seem both crazy and reckless, for Philippe Petit it was neither. It was risky for sure, but it was a calculated risk that followed years of meticulous planning and diligent practice. 

Petit was born in a small village fifty miles south of Paris. His father was an author and a former Army pilot. As a boy, Philippe was drawn to magic and juggling. In his teens he discovered the tightrope, and soon learned how to walk, jump, and do somersaults on a wire.

As he tells the story, he was barely eighteen years old in 1968, when, while sitting in a dentist’s office nursing a toothache, he happened to catch sight of an article in one of the newspapers lying on the waiting room table. The article was about two skyscrapers to be built in New York City, which, when finished, would stand over a hundred meters taller than the Eiffel Tower. 

Recalling that day in the dentist’s office, Petit writes, 

“Although I have been practicing only a few months, I have already announced my intention to become [a] high wire artist supreme, and wire walking has already become my obsessive, nearly fanatical new passion. So it is as a reflex that I take the pencil from behind my ear to trace a line between the two rooftops – a wire, but no wirewalker.” (Man on Wire, p. 6)

In the years that followed, Petit practiced and planned. In 1971 he walked on a wire between the two towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The towers are 226 feet tall. Two years later, in 1973, we walked between two pylons of the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia. The bridge is 440 feet tall. In the months leading up to the World Trade Center “coup,” he visited New York several times. He carefully studied the buildings’ blueprints, and even rented a helicopter to take aerial photographs. 

The cable he designed, secretly lugged to the top of the towers and then installed, weighed 450 pounds, and was stabilized by additional “guy-lines” that minimized how much the wire would sway in the wind. The long balancing poll he carried – an essential tool for a serious wirewalker - weighed 55 pounds. 

To the crowds gathering below, the sight was breathtaking and unbelievable. A person walking on a wire a quarter of a mile above their heads seemed in equal parts miracle and madness. For Philippe Petit it was the performance of a lifetime, the highpoint of his acrobatic career. The reward for years of single-minded effort and devotion to his chosen calling, the work and art he loved. 

* * *

For the Buddhist, change is not simply a risky course of action we may or may not choose to follow. Change is not a step only the most daring among us are likely to take, from the safety of solid ground to the dangers of a high-wire act. 

The solid ground is an illusion. In reality the world around us and we ourselves are constantly, continuously changing. And, yes, in Buddhist belief change is also linked to anxiety. “Whether we are aware of it or not, the ground is always shifting,” Pema Chodron writes. “Nothing lasts, including us. There are probably very few people who, at any given time, are consumed with the idea “I’m going to die,” but there is plenty of evidence that this thought, this fear, haunts us constantly.”

And that is another reason we cling so dearly to our habits and routines, our beliefs and our biases. “We grab onto a position or belief as a way of neatly explaining reality, unwilling to tolerate the uncertainty and discomfort of staying open to other possibilities,” Chodron says. “We cling to that position as our personal platform and become very dogmatic about it.” (p. 7)

But no matter how desperately we hold on to familiar habits, no matter how fervently we pray for the world to stay the same, and for the people we love to always be with us – change happens.

Or as Judith Sills puts it, “most of us will linger on the platform of our comfort zone forever, unless it collapses beneath us and life forces us onto the tightrope.” Then we have no choice but confront change. The question then is not whether we will change, but how we will change. 

In order to travel safely across the tightrope, we need to take several difficult steps. The steps are tricky and demand our attention, but with practice and persistence, any of us can learn them. Judith Sills describes seven steps. (1) First we need to face what hurts, we need to acknowledge what is painful or missing in our life. (2) Then we need to create a vision of where we hope to go from here. (3) Then we need to decide when we are ready to move forward. (4) We should examine our past, our personal history, and see what it reveals about what we need to do next. (5) We need to acknowledge what is holding us in place, what is keeping us stuck. What are we afraid of losing, and how can we minimize our losses? (6) We need to face our fears. We need to name and then overcome our anxiety. (7) And finally, we need to take action. We need to do something different. We need to choose something new. 

* * *

Change is inevitable. It is unsettling. And it invariably leads us into the unknown. This is our predicament, the Buddhist tells us. And so the question for us is, “How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?”

For each of us the path we need to take will look different. No matter what we do, the path before us is risky. We know for certain that some will fall. And yet we must move forward.  

And move we will. We will move forward on our path of life as certainly as the sun will move across the sky. We will move and change as certainly as summer will be followed by fall, and winter, and spring’s rebirth. 

If we live well, we will learn to move gracefully, hopefully, and even joyfully toward a life of compassion, kindness and love. If we live well, we will move through the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation…. whose ultimate meaning we may never know. 

To live well we may need to learn seven steps, or maybe just three: (1) to love what is mortal, (2) to hold it against our bones knowing our own life depends on it. (3) And when it comes time to let it go, to let it go.

May we have the wisdom to honor and cherish the true love we have known.

And may we have the courage to forever move toward a deeper love.

Amen.