Rev. Kurt Kuhwald, Consulting Minister

Here is a poem by the great Sufi poet Jelalludin Rumi. I believe that it speaks sweetly and directly to the meaning of community. I also believe that meaning is held here in this congregation, held and lived in the core of warm friendships built and sustained here. I hope that you will visit soon. The poem:

"Without a Net"
Jelaluddin Rumi


Without a net
I catch a falcon
and release it to the sky
hunting god

the wine I drink today
was never held in a clay jar

I love this world
even as I hear the great wind
of leaving it rising

for there is a grainy taste
I prefer to every idea
of heaven
human friendship


Sunday Services

Upcoming Sunday Services when I will speak:


December 21, 2008
Winter Solstice, Sweet Solstice
Rev. Kurt A. Kuhwald will speak.
Coordinator: Cynthia Johnson
Musician: Evelie Delfino Sales Posch

Join us as we return to the source of winter celebration in the Northern Hemisphere. Winter Solstice, Sweet Solstice ... the time of turning, turning from the nurturing and protective times of dark to the re-emergence of light-lit days and the rekindling of steady summer warmth. Let us lift up the ancient and the present as we celebrate Earth's journey.



I would love to talk with you about this community and about Unitarian Universalism as a force for good and for authentic transformation in these deeply troubled and radically hopeful times.

If you have nothing special to talk about, or even if you do, perhaps we could focus on this quote called "Reunion" by UU minister Rev. Barbara Pescan in her Meditation Manual, Morning Watch:

One of the old ones stood up
into the morning light
and spoke to those who had come
back to the river

---Now we have come again to this place.
My life apart from you
is not as strong.
Yes,
I have danced and
I have told the stories
at my own fire and
I have sung well, to all eight directions.

Buy when I am with you,
my friends,
I know better
who it is in me
that sings.


Come on in!

Peace to you,
Rev. Kurt

And here is a Prayer/Deep Wish based on words of Deborah Digges, consummate poet of authentic life:

To a Milkweed

Teach me to love what I've made, and judgment
in that love.

Teach me your arrogrance.
With each five-petaled horned flower teach me

how much blossoming matters
along roadsides, dry-

beds, these fields no longer cleared.
Teach me such patience at each turning, how

to live on nothing but will, its milky
juices, poison

to the others, though when its stem is broken,
bleeds. Teach me to

need the future,
and the past, that Indian summer.

Let me be tricked into believing
that by what moves in me I might be saved,

and hold to this. Hold
onto this until there's wind enough.


The Rev's Schedule

I am--generally--at the Fellowship on Mondays and Wednesdays.


My direct line in the Minister’s office is: 510-841-4003. Messages may also be left for me at the main office number 510-841-4824.

For those electronically agile, you can message me at: revkak@earthlink.net

NOTE: Please call before you come by the office for any unscheduled visit.


Recent Sermons


Endless War No More

Centering Thoughts

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach thenm to long for the endless immensity of the sea. --Antoine Saint Exupery

The Future will be one of small wars, expected to be frequent, protracted, perhaps perpetual. --Andrew Bacevich quoting War Hawks

Sixty-seven years ago, today, the United States suffered an assault on its military base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii that, soon called the "Day of Infamy," became an icon of Americana indelibly burned into the memories of those U.S. citizens alive at the time or born into that wartime era, mine included. So when I realized that on this Sunday, December seventh, 2008, it would be my responsibility to write a sermon ... the memories of that day, of that act, of that time ignited a small flame in my consciousness.

I realized, as I gave those memories space in my heart and mind, that this sermon was an opportunity, indeed, even a call, to deal with my questions about war and the use of violence.

And so I opened myself to those questions and in doing so, I was internally stormed by competing images that filled my mind and pained my heart. That inner storm raised memories that held anger and fear; memories that I realized now largely leave me with shame.
Images/Memories:

The repeated denunciation of the "sneak attack" by the Japanese Military that framed the U.S. response as morally justifiable [ became a part of my living memory and personal identity: my world, the one I inhabited and deserved, was made up of violent attack and righteous retaliation ].

Images of young American Soldiers and Sailors fighting valiantly as they were mercilessly cut down by the fighter planes and the bombers.

And later came images of the emaciated American soldiers after the defeat at Bataan in the Philippines, and the stories of horrible abuse of the prisoners by the Japanese forces—all of which fueled racist images, and caricatures of the most degrading sort, and that too became a part of my personal history.

So that is one of the terrible dynamics of war I want to lift up ... the dehumanizing process intended to render the enemy as something other than human, something other than worthy of respectful—something, in fact, deserving of violent and degrading treatment.

Part of that process has to do with the affront, the violation of being the target: as a result of our wound inflicted by the other, we react by demonizing: Only some one who is ... a beast; a demon; a horrible, horrible person, who is a member of a depraved culture ... could do such a thing—is the outer litany, which quickly and invariably becomes the inner litany.

Many reasons for waging war are and have been made, but I deeply believe that none of them are adequate ... except response to attack ... but precisely there, ...

... there in the idea of response to attack, precisely there is a point in my heart that intersects with my reasoning, that leaves me in a deep place of unknowing, that frankly, I have never resolved: When is it right to use force? And more importantly, when is it justifiable to kill another person. The most telling way to approach this because it is the most intimate and most personal, is thinking it through around one's family: Isn't it right to defend one's family from attack? Wouldn’t' I respond with force if my daughter was being attacked, or even my best friend? And wouldn't it be justifiable, if in the course of that defense, the attacker died?

These are difficult questions, but they can be raised here in the crucible of care and love, so that, together, we can share strength and hope. The power of the military-industrial-corporate complex is vast and it works is influence upon us in wide-ranging and oppressive ways. These are difficult questions, and any answers to them have wide and deep ranging consequences. In my study for this sermon I spent a lot time with a book called On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. The subtitle of his book is: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. In this deep and disturbing work, Lt. Col Grossman revealed that in warfare, 98% of the combatants will experience serious psychological effects. There are two key factors, though there are a host of others, there are two key factors that contribute to psychological trauma in warfare. The first is having to kill another person when the victim is visible to the one who kills, or whose presence is somehow truly imagined (ground troops and fighter pilots). The second is facing what Grossman calls the "Wind of Hate." That is, facing the fact that the other is trying to kill me because they hate me. (The terrible irony here is, of course, that to overcome our human aversion to killing, every military in the world knows, we must be taught to hate.)

Having to kill, and being hated so much that the other tries to kill us, so violate both our sense of humanity, and our sense of relatedness to other humans (and here I want to limit it to humans), that we are left with psychological damage that is deep and life and identity changing.

The hope in all of this is precisely that human beings are averse to killing. It is a deep part of our psyches and our genetics. May we find added strength in seeing and affirming our deep resistance.

And so ...


With the spectre of the violence of war, and with the known consequences of being in warfare ... along with the struggle that still argues itself to a seeming stalemate within me about when force and violence is justifiable, with all of that, there is a place I have come that I want to share. I first articulated it during a homily (i.e. a short sermon) that I gave as part of the chapel service led by new faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry at the beginning of this academic year. I called the homily: No Other. It is especially significant for me as a deeply felt response to the question of force and violence because it emphasizes the importance of our choice to join transformative spiritual/ethical community—as well as lifting up the ground of human-to-human, human to reality, relatedness.

[ Time was taken here to light candles for peace. ]

The title of this homily is: No Other

Two Points.

No other choice. We have, there is, finally, no other possible choice. No other choice . . . possible than to choose this community, than to choose to live our full humanity. That is why we are here. That's one.

Two: No one, not one single one, seen as other . . . that is, seen as less than I am, seen as deserving less than respect, care, absolute equality.

These two, these two at the center of our restlessness and the source of our deepest peace.

No other choice. No other choice possible.

No one, not one single one, seen as other . . . no other.

No other . . . is a wild shout that the treasure of wholeness has been sighted ... closer than we thought, warmer and more fulfilling than we have dared to hope possible.

We, here, creating an authentic place where we can finally open to our path so that we can, at last, acknowledge how love sick we are for truth, for honest human community, for just reconciliation, for an end to oppression. How love sick we are for that authenticity, for that surcease to suffering, for that natural, fully human paradise that is our birthright.

We, here, finding and creating a place for the soul-encounter we yearn for; the transformation that has been luring us since our capacity for consciousness began to fully emerge in the awestruck child we were; the hunger for engagement that has subverted our plans, and the plans for us of so many who love us, to live "normal" lives; the thirst that we have only been able to slake when we have stumbled, unknowingly, into the hidden valley where the living water of that deeper well flows with stunning abandon; the raw ache for connection even the love of and from a committed partner cannot heal---bigger even than that; the wild courage that struck our hearts when we realized that we could not, would not tolerate anyone's subjugation: any human, any animal, any ecosystem, any planet.

We here, not claiming any place other than a human place, a humble place---but claiming our place, our enormously gifted place, our place at the real table of feasting . . . feasting on truth, feasting on courage, feasting on sister and brotherhood, feasting on determination, feasting on a hospitality so radical it wipes out all the years of conditioning that have so hampered and inhibited us, so that we stand free in the conscious part of ourselves, a stance that is so simple, strong, sweet and powerful, we are not, as they say of the true prophets, recognized in our own land.

No other possibility for us. But woe unto us now, if we abandon that recognition. Hell on earth. The dark side of the Universalist vision come to pass.

But allowing the sweet truth, the gentle real and true waters of . . . surrender, surrender—a word you may never hear again in UU circles—surrender to the shock that we are ever more swiftly becoming something other than ourselves, becoming bigger, less pretentious, more courageous, less fearful, becoming something we can no longer identify because it is so free, so truly liberated from the karma of our past suffering, the power-mad concerns we have all been afflicted with that want to control everything in our lives so we can be ... comfortable, invulnerable, never stupid, always clean, constantly hip and appropriate, always interesting and never anything but loving and warmly concerned. Surrender to a self that sees through all that monkey-mind gibberish, a self that follows the deep river-runner path---a self that follows the deep river-runner path. The deep river-runner path, where nothing, nothing in all the world, is worth more than our growing knowledge about and commitment to staying thoroughly in touch with the vital, all-consuming present, the present that confidently reveals to us how to act, when to begin, what to say, who and what to love---but what it reveals is almost never in words, or at least never in words that our mother and father, nor even sometimes our best friends, would approve of, understand or welcome.

No other.

Walking into a sensibility so deep, we see it. We see this: No one is separate from me; I am separate from no one. Walking into a growing empathy that sometimes is intolerable, because it turns the cries of a maimed Pakistani child, victim of an American bombing raid, turns those cries inward through our own hearts so that we cannot tell who is crying. No one is separate, even the person I have so disliked, perhaps hated all my life: not even them. They, too, suffered. They, too, in the words of Rumi, are a human caught in the glory and the indignity of being alive in a human body. No one is separate.

And that is our prophetic mission. To live No Other. To breathe No Other. To sleep with No Other. To eat, at every meal, with every swallow of saliva, No Other.

No other possibility for us now than this path. No other possibility for us now than to surrender to No Other. No one seen as other . . . no other.

But, thank god/dess, the drama breaks. No Other also means that life has its soft and funny, its sweet and luscious, its rapturous and silly sides as well. No other way than to be present to all that flows through us and around us ... even if our minds cry with exasperation ... for, what else is there, what else is there than to be fully located in our own precious bodies in this very moment? What else is there than to accept in the words of Henry David Thoreau: One world at a time? This world. Now. No other.

What could be more fun than that? It is, as they say, a gas. Gas from the sacred oil wells that never run out. Gas from the station where they still wipe your windows, check your oil level and fill your blessed tires with air. It's still out there, that station, that full-service station. But the gas it pumps comes from oil that is not only the organic emulsification of ancient plants and animals---it is the tender power of never ending appreciation, never ending gratitude, never ending recognition of who we really are, what we are really worth---and what our chance, our true chance now is in this life.

What I want to do is to share a poem I have read to you before, a poem about California, our worth and our chance. For it is this Bay Area Bioregion of California, not any other place, where our destinies, our worth, our chance are now grounded. It is California that will be the midwife to your contribution. This poem is called "Our Life in California." It's by Gary Young, one of the gifted members of the Fresno Poets.

Our Life in California

Near San Ardo the grasses tremble
and oak trees bend to the south against a constant wind.
Here our faith is tested
by the air that passes us ceaselessly
and takes each lost breath as we stumble through the hills.
The monotony of breathing, like our heartbeat,
is not the reassuring monotony
of the hills stacked row upon row
beyond our bearing and our ken.
The sun moves with the wind and will be gone,
but there is another light
coming from below, casting trees from the shadows.
There is a shadow beneath me
which moves as I move,
and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass
know more than I know of my duty here,
my worth and my chance.

Your chance, our chance is here and now, in this Fellowship, this city, this state, on this planet, in this moment, in this life. No other possibility than that can fully satisfy. And we are so dearly needed. May we all be courageous enough and loving enough to dare to live it.

May we all be courageous enough and loving enough to dare to live it.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.



Association Sunday: A Sermon in Two Chapters

Centering Thought

The Unitarian Universalist Association is a voluntary association of independent, self-governing congregations. Usually we call them churches, but sometimes we call them fellowships, societies or congregations.
The Commission on Appraisal of the UUA, June 1997

Why should not we have an original relation with the universe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter One: A Little Bit/Brief Overview of History about Unitarian Universalism

Today we are celebrating Association Sunday. The Association we are lifting up is the Unitarian Universalist Association, or the UUA as it is referred to by Unitarian Universalists who have an amazing penchant for acronyms. This Congregation is a participating and dues paying member of the UUA. The UUA itself is composed of @ 1100 congregations across the United States which are divided into 20 Districts. There are approximately 150 - 200,000 actual individual members of those congregations; it is commonly recognized, however, that there is a shadow population of folks, perhaps a million people in the U.S., who identify as UU ..., that is, when they are pressed to put a check in a box on some official form or another where they feel pressed to the claim of being "religious."

The theme for today's service, which has been used to focus this celebration in UU congregations all over the United States in the last two months, is Growing the Spirit. The idea was that gathering— celebratively aware of our being in a UU congregation that is associated to all other UU congregations—we would lift up what it means to "grow in spirit" as human persons, and as persons in this particular congregation, the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists.

I want to do that. I want to explore with you the meaning of growing in spirit on the journey of a human, philosophical/religious path. It is a subject worthy of our attention on a Sunday morning when we journey out of our homes looking to be with others of like minds, others who welcome us and our uniqueness, others who are as dedicated to equity and diversity as we are, others who also find that being in community gives them energy, warms their hearts, stimulates their good, deep and clear thinking, and reminds them of what is important in life.

But, since this is Association Sunday, I first want to spend a little time talking about Unitarian Universalism.

To do that, I'll begin with the words of distinguished Unitarian Universalist minister The Rev. Dr. Harry C. Meserve who died at the age of 86 in November of 2000. Meserve was an institutionalist. He once famously wrote: "It is a curious error to suppose you can carry on effectively a great liberal tradition while remaining at the same time ignorant, or almost ignorant, of the beliefs and achievements of the people who have handed that tradition over to you."

Part of what Association Sunday means to do is to connect UUs with their history. So here are a few points about UUism to fill you in.

First Unitarian Universalism represents two streams of liberal religion: the Unitarian and the Universalist. Both of them are Christian in their origins; these two streams came together in 1961 to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Both of these religious denominations had a very deep belief in the individual's right, and responsibility, to seek their own path to truth. Both of these traditions believed that using our good, analytic powers of reason was an essential part of religion. Reasoning, motivated by both doubt and love, was believed to be one of the first formidable tools of the human person as she or he sought the truth, God, God/dess, the Void, the Spirit, whatever they came to understand was at the source of life. Furthermore, reason, along with the other abundant qualities that make up our human personhood are defined as natural powers each person was gifted with so that there was no need for an intermediary between them and the divine or truth.

Emerson's quote in our first reading makes the point clearly, he reasons, through pointed inquiry, “Why should not we have an original relation with the universe?” He is arguing for a religious stance that is based on direct experience. That is, by reasoning, he reinforces what he perceives/intuits to be true.

This is a very Unitarian and Universalist thing to do. For the Unitarians it was a central religious struggle way back in the third century AD when the Council of Nicea in Turkey decided, goaded and supported by the strong political muscle of Emperor Constantine, that the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be the foundation of Christianity; in practice it would be confirmed by the recitation of the Nicean Creed. The Creed professes belief in the Trinity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and, most importantly that Jesus was of the very same substance with God, or, equal with God. Those who argued what later came to be called a Unitarian position maintained that Jesus, though divine (as we all are), was not co-equal to God.

This was a fierce controversy, much like the arguments in our times between communism and capitalism, which of course are also religious beliefs. People were killed over these differences, and Unitarianism has its own martyr, Michael Servetus, a Spaniard who wrote brilliantly and impertinently against the trinity, who was burned at the stake by John Calvin the Protestant reformer who feared Catholic reprisal if Protestantism wandered too far from Catholic dogma.

The Universalists began their struggles even earlier, a hundred years earlier, in fact, in 225, with an argument against eternal damnation by the Greek Church Father Origen. Origen advocated that everyone would (ultimately) be saved. In other words, there is no hell that is eternal. Later Universalists argued that there was no hell at all—except what we humans create for ourselves here on earth. A powerful departure from centrist church teachings that depended on Hell to keep human beings in check and behaving acceptably.

The most famous quip about the American take on the Universalist controversy was offered by Henry David Thoreau who joined Emerson as a Transcendentalist in the early eighteen hundreds. He said, "Unitarians think they are too good to be condemned by God to go to Hell and the Universalists think God is too good to condemn them to hell." A little bit of historical truth in both!

Unitarian and Universalist history has been multi-layered and complex. It has been, however, always about the right of individuals to determine for themselves what is true and what is not. The strength of that commitment, in fact, led many twentieth century Unitarians to reject God altogether, making that denunciation explicit in the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. Most of the signers of the Manifesto were Unitarian ministers.

In recent years, the President of the UUA, Rev. William Sinkford (who incidentally joins Barack Hussein Obama as a first African American leader; in Bill's case he is the first black person to lead a largely white religious denomination), Rev. Sinkford has ignited controversy in the opposite direction from his earlier humanist brothers by seeking to find and support a language of "Reverence" for our journey on this planet.

With that little overview of some of what has been at the heart of the Unitarian and Universalist religious streams, underscored by the idea of a language that would open us to the sacred through its reverent sensitivity to creation, let me open this sermon's second chapter to the subject of Growth in Spirit.

Chapter Two: Growth in Spirit

One thing that marks modern Unitarian Universalism is its dedication to open revelation. Sacred texts, profound writings, literatures from any culture and all cultures—these are all part of the written word of our UU religious/ethical path. "Growth in Spirit" as a theme for this day celebrating the bond that holds this movement together across geography and time, calls to me to celebrate its openness. So ...

I offer a few poems, then, to show the activity of Spirit alive: Gracious spirit, human spirit, spirit of life, cries of the spirit.

Here is an invocation, by poet May Sarton, a fellow traveler with UUs, that takes the raw elements of the earth as the very fountain for the one force that drives all religion and all ethics: Love. An invocation calls out, in, forth, from . . . deep powers. In modern UU circles, the invocation has gained special powers as many have claimed that the Earth, as evidenced by all its lively processes, is living . . . as well as life generating.

Invocation
Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.

Come under the strong wave
Here where the tug goes
As the tide turns and flows
Below that architrave.

Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.

Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.

And one of the places that love draws us is into relationships that flash with passion, move in trajectories anchored in durability. Here is a poem that marks relational love through natural images that are right at home in the UU sacred lexicon. It is a poem by Jane Hirshfield.
To Drink
Jane Hirshfield

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek—
it is the same—
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything

Perhaps another theme that is grounded in love and that is current, to and powerfully flows through the life of UUism today is forgiveness. We have much to be forgiven for ... we have made many mistakes in our personal lives and in our national life. Perhaps one of the most poignant acts of forgiveness comes between parent and child. Here is a poem by poet Michael Blumenthal that speaks truthfully and, in the end, compassionately about forgiving his father ... forgiving his father for the demands that he, Michael, carried.

Waving Good-Bye to My Father
Michael Blumenthal

My father, folding toward the earth again, plays
his harmonica and waves his white handkerchief
as I drive off over the hills to reclaim my life.

Each time, I am sure it's the last,
but it's been this way now for twenty-five years:
my father waving and playing "Auf Wiedersehen,"
growing thin and blue as a late-summer iris,
while I, who have the heart for love but not
the voice for it, disappear into the day, wiping
the salt from my cheeks and thinking of women.
There is not frenzy like the frenzy of his happiness,
and frenzy, I know now, is never happiness:
only the loud, belated cacophony of a lost soul
having its last dance before it sleeps forever.

The truth, which always hurts, hurts now—
I have always wanted another father: one
who would sit quietly beneath the moonlight,
and in the clean, quiet emanations of some
essential manhood, speak to me of what,
a kind man myself, I wanted to hear.
Buy this is not a poem about self-pity:

As I drive off, a deep masculine quiet rises,
of its own accord, from beneath my shoes.
I turn and watch my father's white handkerchief
flutter, like an old Hasid's prayer shawl,
among the dark clouds and the trees. I disappear
into the clean, quiet resonance of my own life.

To live, dear father, is to forgive.
And I forgive.


May we all find that openness, that compassion, to forgive those we, through ignorance and human fallibility, have caused harm.

And what results from acting with integrity bubbles over into true gifting ... it happens in our human lives, lives that UUism celebrates as truly reflecting Spirit in its most concrete and magnificent form. Here is a poem that offers a vision of the chain of gifting, the power of generational connection, the efficacy of good parenting, all leading to a flourishing of "spirit" that is central to modern UU sensibilities. The poem is by gifted poet Li-Young Lee, and is called . . .

The Gift
Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here
where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury my,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

But "Growth in Spirit" also is a growth in happiness. Here is a poem written by yours truly that I think would be easily accepted within UU circles.

Today, unlike some days, I have been happy.
I don't mean at first sight happy, happy
because of some lucky purchase
escaping a traffic fine
my team won
or drinking some really good wine.

I mean really happy, down in the gut happy,
heart aching, heart stretching, chest gasping, happy.

Happy the way a child is happy when
they're thrown wildly free up beyond some grown-ups hands
trailing winds of innocence.

Happy like a mother's eyes seeing her just born.

Happy with life all the way down, down through
the pain of loss, the whining and sniveling,
way down below, into the dark, moist ground.

Today it all happened at once
all the strands of good bound up pretty
as the blaze of a rose
and it came right out all over
my heart and face right from speaking the whole story
of craziness and stupidity and wonderful
complexity, between me and that other,
that other person.
(Can I ever say one thing that is true,
that doesn't have ten or ten thousand other possible
meanings, other alternate, just-as-true truths?)

It all came from breathing out right here next to the steel-grey bay
waters (choppy just so), the horizon-wide-coast-hill-riding clouds, the wind
cold and loving as I rode
the clean wind inside
clean with truth
clear through.

Now that's happiness.


Lastly, I could not offer a sermon that lifts up "Growth in Spirit" within the UU context without including its grounding in experience. Where Christianity is a religion of belief, UUism is a religion, and ethics, of experience. It is what Emerson was getting at in the reading: No intermediary means directly experiencing, directly encountering life ... encountering life in all its gritty and messy tumult, in all its melancholy, in all its glory.

Here is a poem from Kabir, 14th century Islamic, Indian poet who was a student of a Hindu guru.

How Much Is Not True
Kabir (trans. Robert Bly)

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All gods sculpted of wood or ivory can't say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.


With that, I will end my sermon. But I want to offer this blessing: May our time together today, celebrating the deeper life of the Unitarian Universalist Association, contribute in some small way to authentic living. May we know richness, truth, honesty, and the growth that so often comes with pain when we face it with integrity and openness. That growth, then, that growth is in truth "Growth in the Spirit."

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.


November 16, 2008 - "A New World"



Centering Thought

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
--Arundhati Roy


Part One
The Uprising: Astonished by Hope

It is hard to speak these words, they carry so much charge, these words of our President-Elect. Hard, because for so many reasons they deeply, deeply stir me and challenge my equanimity. Despite my struggles about it all, about him, despite all of that, this moment, now, in our country and the world's history is so very poignant, so very, very amazing. A back family ... a BLACK family entering the White House ... stops my breath, fills my heart. So ... with that admission, I'd like to begin . . . with the words of our President-Elect.

"This victory alone is not the change we seek--it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

With these words in his campaign victory speech, President Elect Barack Hussein Obama, a black man with a Euro-American mother and a Kenyan father, repeated a campaign theme of proactive cooperative endeavor, named a process of transformation grounded in the people themselves, and offered a sense of hope on the move, hope empowered by the realization of profound accomplishment born out of a vision of and commitment to human liberation from want, from inequity. As the saying goes ... "we who believe in freedom cannot rest ... till it comes." Obama's opening words are a declaration that freedom is near, freedom is near. Or, at least, they appear to say that.

You see, throughout the campaign, I wanted to believe this man. I wanted to believe this man, but I have to admit I didn't trust him. I want, now, to believe this man, and I have to admit that I still have very, very serious doubts that he is truly committed to authentic, radical transformation. At a deeper level I have very serious doubts that authentic, radical transformation, through the agency of the usual political machinery, is really possible in this country, this country whose history is such a mixity of freedom and oppression, opportunity and denial, creativity and rigidity, rigidity backed by the focused use of state and corporate violence. And finally, I have doubts about the agenda of this country, and the whole nation-building project that it elevates into some mystic ideal, and the idea, too, that somehow the constitution actually does intend to be perfected ... when in fact the time it takes to do the perfecting allows the oppression of those it excludes, or those it can sanction as targets (not only blacks and indigenous, but Palestinians), to protect its own existence.

I want to believe that what has happened with Barack Hussein Obama's election, with the massive, overt and undeniable rejection of the Bush regime, with the unprecedented uprising of new voters—I want to believe that all of that represents authentic expressions of real desire for equity, for fairness and for a more fulfilling, common-person-grounded, democratic self-determination. I want to believe that—but what I suspect, in my gut, is that it actually represents a wave of dissatisfaction in the American people, dissatisfaction that the Ponzi scheme of this economy no longer yields enough profit and unmerited financial security—dissatisfaction that the wars have gone sour and the hoped for victory has slipped away, yet the commitment to war and militarism is no less strong, no less embedded in the psyches of the American people—despite the fact that victory in the war, if it was ever a meaningful goal, or was possible to win—that victory slipped away in explosive clouds of IEDs and suicidal humans bent on heaven, that victory slipped away leaving in their wake thousands upon thousands of young American men and women suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Brain Injury (the signature wounds of this war), not to mention the millions of Iraqis killed, wounded, or displaced. And I suspect, as well, that the fears of a looming spectre of global environmental collapse, rather than fomenting true solutions, are driving corporate feel good posturing and a misguided deification of technology, a posturing and a deification that the people readily accept no matter that its underbelly is continued greed and environmental degradation.

However ... near the end of his speech, Obama spoke to the heart of the progressive vision: "And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright—tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

Damn! He's good. Damn! But doesn't he touch into that place in our hearts that yearns for peace, for fairness, for an end to the unholy alliance of the Military-Industrial Complex that one of his predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower, strongly warned us against as he was leaving the Office of President. And I want to be touched in that place of yearning. I want to feel the radiant power of real hope, hope that we might know, in the words of Judy Chicago, we might know that "everywhere will be Eden once again."

But then I see him, this brilliant, street savvy man, in all his African American handsomeness, arguing for an expanded war in Afghanistan; then I see him condemning Palestine as the cause of its difficulties with Israel, taking the Israeli government's commitment to violence; and then I see him standing in his first press conference, standing with corporate leaders and Ex-Clinton Administration financial gurus without one representative of America's working women and men, without one labor representative. I see that and the doubts return strong and compelling. Who are these people? Where does he put his trust in financial leadership? Whatever can we expect from such an elitist crew, a crew who didn't get it right the last time around?

But, Damn! Again. Just when my doubts prevail, along comes one of our true prophets, Alice Walker offering words that reopen my heart, reopen it ever wider to the audacity of hope.

Alice Walker, wonderful African American author of The Color Purple and other works of fiction that searingly and tenderly portray the life of Black people in America, Alice Walker expressed it best in an open letter to Obama that has had wide internet dissemination. There are parts of it that are so touching, so deeply heart-felt about the black journey in the U.S., that in reading it I found it difficult to stop the tears, difficult to catch my breath. There are also parts that clearly evoke strong and rich links to the fullness of this current moment for all peoples.

I want to read the opening of the letter for you in which she speaks about the arrival of The Man ... you'll know which Man I mean as you hear her words.

Dear Brother Obama,
You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.

"Balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about." And: "We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us." The balm, the best of the spirit of Africa---where we all come from---and of the Americas, the land where our roots have gone down, down into the subsoil so that we have grown with America in our blood---that balm was the vision of embodied hope, a hope so deep it sustained itself, and continues to sustain itself, through horrifically dehumanizing oppression and violence.

I believe that that balm, that hope, so poignantly felt by black people in this country, is balm for us all. And the heart that could almost not bear to witness and to remember the journey through violent defeat after violent defeat, that heart has held us all, and now opens for us .... and, in fact, in us at this amazing time.

And then, Walker goes on in her letter to raise further profound issues, yet issues that radically transcend the limits of mundane politics. She goes on raising unusual questions, questions about the fundamental meaning of existence and the paths to securing its full realization that run contrary to the usual political cant. She writes:

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters . . . . We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

Walker blows the doors away, blows the heavy, guarded doors off their hinges, the doors that lock away the underlying and so very simple keys to the whole damned mess we humans have gotten ourselves into—believing that material goods, that righteous ideas, that political correctness (of the right or the left), that community status, that competitive triumph, whether financial, psychological, theological or militarily, that empire building, that any of that can actually make us happy or safe.

Reading her words, I am given real hope, hope based on the real human capacity to find happiness, happiness that is not based on exploitation of others or the Earth, that is not based on self inflation, happiness that has, at its heart, a deep sense of integrity and a strong sense of connectedness with others, the Earth and Life.

Part Two: Stepping Out/Going Forth

Yet to keep hope alive in the public sphere, that inner happiness though deep and essential, is not sufficient. We absolutely need to be politically astute and we need to act with courage and intelligence against, as good old Bruce Springsteen once said, "the dirty ways of the world," and we need, as well, to create more humane and alternate ways. So let me offer, as a buttress to fledgling hope for a new world, a few ideas, gleaned from several sources that run counter to the nation/empire-building project that are so central to the presidency.

First, I'd like to offer these prefatory words from the people of the Applied Research Center in Oakland whose focus is on race and multicultural issues, and whose major conference "Facing Race," as I reported earlier, I attended on Friday and Saturday.

Residents of the United States are experiencing an unprecedented, inspiring, and transformational moment in our nation's history. Shouted by some in blazing daylight and whispered by others in dark corners, the lived reality of race and racism is at the center of the American conversation in ways we haven't seen in nearly half a century. Our ancestors could hardly have foreseen the swift and powerful move of a Black man to the very top rank of government. The rush of unfolding events at times obscures the deep currents that have moved us to this place. But this we know: this political moment is the fruit of centuries of struggle to create from the radical vision of democracy a liberating reality of government of, by, and for ALL the people. Far from being a post-racial moment, however, this is a time that calls for unique clarity about the possibilities and dangers we face, and for bold action that is based on our best thinking and highest hopes.

With that preface here are three points from the Applied Research Center's "Compact on Race" that we would do well to apply and to demand that President Obama use in his decision making:

❂ Address racial inequality explicitly but not necessarily exclusively. Racism must be illuminated in order to be eliminated. Challenge so-called "colorblindness," which seeks to deny the realities of racism and render people of color invisible.
❂ Propose solutions that emphasize equity and inclusion rather than diversity. It is important to distinguish the principle of equity, which is fairness, from that of diversity, which is about variety.
❂ Make racial justice a high priority in all social justice efforts. A successful progressive movement must recognize racial justice as a central component of social justice. Instead of allowing racism to drive social division and disparities, we must make racial equity the driving force for uniting and benefiting all people.

A second set of ideas and focus points I want to offer comes from Deepak Bhargava, the executive director of the Center for Community Change. Bhargava highlights, among others, two areas to which we need to commit ourselves and that need to be deeply embedded into our continued action for justice:

❂ The use of community organizing principles in our national political life. One of the most heartening things about this election is the embrace of community organizing in politics, and the embrace of politics by community organizing.
❂ Commit to the emergence of a new progressive coalition. The election results reflect the emergence of a new majority coalition, based above all in a strategy to expand the electorate. Massive turnout by African Americans, Latinos, new immigrants, young people and women provide a foundation for progressive politics and policy making for a generation.

Brief mentions, all of that, of real world actions and commitments that can support this open moment and that can realize hope by constructive action, that can take advantage of the fact that the hegemonic ideology of the Neocons has exhausted itself, that there is a moment now when focused action can have dramatic results; results that are possible even if this President-elect will be hopelessly trapped in a web of political obligations he cannot throw off, even if this President-elect is committed to a project of nation/empire building that is ultimately contrary to true human liberation.

Put those together with Alice Walker's wise suggestions, to structure our lives in such a way that there is time to know the deep enjoyment of living as a human being at ease ... combine these things, braid them together in a strand of human effort, both internally within ourselves, and externally on the political stage—do that and hope has a real chance.

And, if we dare to do so, if we step out and do our part, maybe President Barack Hussein Obama will have a chance as well.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom and Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.




September 7, 2008 - "Liquid Like Life"



Centering Thought

"Don't say, don't say there is no water.
That fountain there . . .
It is still there ans always there
with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us,
up and out through the rock."
---Denise Levertov, The Fountain

Introduction

Source for some of these words:
Rev. Linda A. Hart, UU Church of Spokane, Washington.

This is a history that I have recounted before on the occasion of the Water Ritual Service. It bears repeating. In the fall of 1980, there was a gathering of Unitarian Universalist women in East Lansing, Michigan. At the opening service for the weekend of workshops, discussions and celebrations, there was a joining of waters. One woman offered water she had collected from the Pacific Ocean that was near her home. Another woman poured water from the Mississippi River. Another brought water from the Hudson Bay and another from the Gulf of Mexico. From the many directions that all these women had come, the waters were gathered. With great ceremony and flourish the fresh and salt water was all combined into a large clear bowl. It was the genesis of a new ritual. A ritual that wonderfully evokes the Unitarian Universalist belief that religion is a living communal experience that is an expression of the fluid nature of life: open, always flowing, vital; an expression that cannot, finally be contained in texts, words, or mental images. [ Riff on the power of open systems: they are the vital ones. AND: religious movements that embody that openness .... ]

In the 28 years since that convocation of women, services like the one we will now experience are celebrated in churches, fellowships and UU societies all across the US and Canada. The appeal of the service, is simple: Everyone can take part, and our participation draws us into relationship with one of the basic elements of life, water, even as it draws us into relationship with one another. Water is common, it is powerful, it connects each to all, it is the vital basic constituent of our precious bodies. This is a plain ceremony that declares that all have something to contribute. Everyone's contributions are welcomed. Each splash of water makes the whole richer. Each journey recognized brings our lives together, filling them, as the bowls are filled, with a visible substance of our common lives.

This special Water Communion is part of our free and living faith grounded in the belief that revelation of the deep truths of human existence is not sealed, the fundamental truths of life and the very cosmos itself are not locked up in words of texts difficult to access, and often irrelevant to modern peoples--they are not bound to the life of one individual wise person, no matter how deep their teaching--the deep truths of life are instead alive and as available as water. Water the vibrant, vital substance that sustains all life on this planet. Truth, the living center that sustains a people who are committed to creating caring and creative, justice-loving religious community.

It is important to know the deeper tradition out of which the commitment to a free religious tradition comes, a tradition that was bought, not only with religious conflict, and the struggle of ideas, but with human lives, as well. It is important to know that there were individuals in the stream of Unitarian history who gave up their lives---not as a martyred sacrifice, believing that somehow their deaths would save the souls of others, but because they simply refused to stop speaking the truth, refused to stop showing up where oppression is most active. They were like mighty water torrents, rivers that would not be checked: Michael Servetus, Francis David, Norbert Capek, to name three. Servetus, a Spaniard who is credited with being the first European who described the function of pulmonary circulation was burned at the stake in 1553 by Protestant John Calvin for arguing that the trinity was not part of the Christian Scripture. Francis David, Servetus' contemporary, and adviser to Transylvanian King, John Sigismund who established the first religiously tolerant country, ultimately died in prison when he was deposed because he denied the necessity of invoking Jesus in prayer. And, Norbert Capek, 20th century Unitarian minister of a church in Prague that he created when he discovered Unitarianism on a trip the US, killed by the Nazis because he refused to stop naming their atrocities and prejudice. Add to these men's legacy, the many women who risked censure and marginalization, for demanding simple equity, like Olympia Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and also Viola Liusa, assassinated by white racists during the civil rights movement when UUs responded to Martin King's call to join the work for racial and human justice. They were all people who troubled the waters, who refused to join into a religious movement unless it let the waters of justice roll down, roll down, roll down. Their lives, all stories that inspire and also challenge us: asking us to live our values without restraint, with courage and conviction so that our sense of self is grounded in what is truly sacred, life's inviolable integrity.

So as we pour the water we consciously carried away from many different places, during our journeys this summer, carefully guarding it in the elaborate and sacred containers that make this ritual so true to our aesthetic spirit (such as film canisters and old jelly jars)--as we pour these waters together into this common bowl, another kind of chalice, another symbol for the fact that we ourselves are collected, a group of aspiring, intelligent, sensitive and caring people collecting together out of love for one another, for justice making in our world, and from a deep quickening of our spirits and our intellects--as we mingle these waters . . .

• let us enjoy our own regal capacity to create and discover meaning in the simplest of our acts together.

• let us imagine our own likeness to water, which when poured into a common bowl, freely joins the totality yet never loses its identity as water.

• let us rejoice that we stand in a faith, we have chosen a culture of faith, whose roots go back for over two thousand years and are traced in the lives of women and men who have courageously declared their right to create and discover ritual that truly satisfies their hearts and minds, even when it is counter to the sacred canons of the day.

• But most of all let us enjoy this time of sharing. Sitting here in this room, sitting near one another: seeing and hearing new and old friends, partners and companions--as we take time to create own unique Unitarian Universalist kind of Worship.

Today we'll be joining the waters that we've brought with us, but if you did not bring water, and want to join in, there is a pitcher of water here for you to blend in your symbolic water of an actual physical place you've been to this summer---no matter how far or near.

This life that is ours today is transient, fragile (O how fragile!), ephemeral. This gift of life giving water will dissipate, evaporate and be gone into the continuing cycles of life, birth and death---water to cloud to rain---turning ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.

It is only what we contribute that makes this community into the ever changing and deepening totality that it can be---and is. Without each contribution, without each bit of water, each splash, and droplet, it could not be . . . it would not exist. We all are needed to join in the work of building the fluid, vital beloved community.

So . . . here we are. Creating this particular community again, this particular morning. From east, from south, from west, from north ... we have come. From morning and new beginnings ... we have come. From the heat of mid-day, the hard labor of summer ... we have come. And from the fierce, yet joyous struggle of living ... we have come. From evening and harvest, the ripening of our efforts; from night and the blessings of rest---bearing us onward, even beyond life ... we come now to be with our sisters and brothers to celebrate the joy of being alive.

But this year, the Sunday Services committee decided to do something different, we wanted not only to offer and blend the waters that you brought to the sanctuary, we also wanted to bless the hands that carried it here: hands that will go on throughout the year in service to this community and to life.

So, rather than pouring in your water and recounting the story of where it came from, if you will only state your name and the place where you collected the water. Then, if you wish, we would like you to step to one of these bowls of fresh water, and two of the members of the Sunday Service committee will lave your hands with water and offer you wishes and blessing for the coming year; a third person will dry your hands before you return to your seat.


A Special Beginning

The first water that we pour into our bowl this morning is some water from right here on this property. It symbolizes the water of UU community that has been sustaining throughout the year.
Please come forward, as you are ready, and add your water, speak you name and where the water was collected.


Closing Words for the Ceremony


With this joining, of waters and of our hearts and minds, a new cycle begins . . . again.

May our lives co-mingle as clearly. . .

May our coming together be as vital . . .


May we receive what is given to us as easlily and as fluidly.


And may we, too, like this life-giving liquid, return home to just the right level, the even balance, the quiet, yet sensitive, calm.


All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté



May 25, 2008 - "Blessed Unrest"



Centering Thought

The dawn of the 21st century has witnesed two remarkable developments in our history: the appearance of systemic problems that are genuinely global in scope, and the growth of a wordwide movement that is determined to heal the wounds of the earth.
---Paul Hawken

There is an unrest in the human heart and the human mind, the human heart/mind. A deep, disturbing, unmitigated unrest. A choral sounding, vibrant and unrelenting, an unrest that is one of the most powerful characteristics of the human we can name. This is true even for those few who dwell within that peace spoken of in the wisest passages of the world's religious literature---the peace that passeth understanding---even for those few steeped in that vastly wide and pacific view, there ultimately exists a dissatisfaction, a yearning, not for their own liberation or for a cessation of inner conflict, for they have come to deeply know and largely live in that freedom---but for an end to suffering for all human kind. How can anyone be ultimately at peace when there are others who are suffering? How could anyone be satisfied when they know others are in need, are oppressed, or are living unfulfilled? The fact is, the more we grow in maturity, the more we deepen emotionally, the more wisdom we have access to, the more compassion flows in our veins, then the more fully and richly related we actually feel to others. As we mature, our freedom becomes more contingent in a deeper more profound and humane way---and also, paradoxically, in a more liberating way.

That restlessness, both to personally transform, and to foment and assist in the healing and transformation of others who suffer, that restlessness leads us to the further reaches of identity, where the world is literally lover and self . . . and the self is literally lover and world. Remember the words of Alice Walker's character "Shug" in The Color Purple. In the passage Shug is vividly recounting her journey away from an anthropomorphic white male God, into ... well, into something more. The passage goes like this:

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and cried and ran all around the house.

Joy that there is no separation. Joy at the experience of the final conscious conjunction of the unity of all life. But joy that had its origin in a deep sense of alienation, isolation, abandonment---which is, though powerful and undeniable, a trauma of conditioning not the condition of human normality. From that place of desolation, induced by, stimulated by oppression and by loss, a true shift can sometimes come, as it did for Shug. And, I submit that it rises, rather than from what seems to be a spontaneous emergence, actually from years of aching restlessness.

Restlessness not just to be free from pain, but, further, as an act of affirmation of a truth that would not let her go, would not let her go because her restlessness was leading her somewhere, somewhere bigger and wildly more fulfilling.

It is that same sense of restlessness that we all need to tap now, in our own lives and in our communities. For we live in dark times. Paul Hawkens, in his book, Blessed Unrest, in order to lay a true and stable groundwork for authentic hope, provides a sharp look into the heart of the disaster:

Global civilization is endangered by ... isms. Climatic stability may be lost for centuries to come [or forever], poverty increases, fisheries collapse, megacities teem with influxes of rural refugees, water tables fall, and hunger and malnutrition grow, even in the richest country in the world. The twentieth century saw the greatest rate of destruction to the environment in all recorded history. It was also the cruelest, harshest, and bloodiest century in history. Eighty million were slaughtered from the beginning of the century through World War II; since then, more than 23 million people (mostly civilians) have been killed in more than 149 wars. For every dollar spent on U.N. peacekeeping, $2,000 is expended for war making by member nations. Four of the five members of the U.N. Security Council which has veto power over all U.N. resolutions, are the top weapons dealers in the world: The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia.

In one day alone we pump 85 million barrels of petroleum out of the ground, and then burn it up. And on the same day we spew the waste of 27 billion pounds of [ toxic ] coal into the atmosphere. One hundred million displaced people now wander the earth without a home. One company, Wal-Mart, employs 1.8 million people. ExxonMobil made nearly $40 billion in profits, in 2006, enough money to permanently supply pure clean drinking water to the 1 billion people who need it. We have consumed 90 percent of all the big fish in the oceans.
And then Hawkens adds this little coup d'grace that exposes economic disparity and entitlement by writing:

Bill Gate's house covers one and a half acres and cost nearly $100 million.

Then he adds: "Not surprisingly, people don't know that they count in such a malordered, destabilized world, don't know that they are of value. A healthy global civilization cannot be constructed without building blocks of meaning, which are hewn of rights and respect."

And that is where Hawkens' research into a global movement for justice and environmental integrity and healing took him, and it is where I sincerely want to go, as well: To the recreation, or rather creation, of a global civilization that is healthy, built on "blocks" of ethics and commitments, suffused with nurturing and wise meaning, whose core substance is rights that guarantee human freedom and respect that honors human integrity.

That is where I deeply want to travel; that is the world I want to help build. But it is not an easy road. It has never been an easy road, we all know. Human history is shot through with violence and disorder, with greed and oppression. However, it is not enough for me to quickly lift up that human history has also been filled with peace-seeking and insightful institution building, with compassion and liberation ... it is not enough because we need more than to hear once again the story of our paradoxical nature, our flawed though creative human character.

We need more.

Eco-feminist Joanna Macy, from whose work I have spoken before in this Sanctuary, offers us a deep insight into the true transformation we really yearn for, the change we really need, that will not brook what Protestant theologians have called "cheap Grace," and what I will here call "Cheap Hope." Joanna, fully aware that our circumstances are dire, and that we might well fail, writes this about the possibility of world-wide transformation and healing:

Its risk of failure is its reality. Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart. [Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart.] We might manage to convince our selves that everything will surely turn out all right, but would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity? [Would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity?

Hawkens has made a wonderful effort to offer something more that looks beyond false hope for a positive outcome through the lens of real experience. Through fifteen years, and after almost 1,000 talks about the environment around the world he has amassed data that is hopeful and stirring about the millions of people and institutions working to ensure justice and safeguard the environment. He describes it all as a movement without a name, a movement that no one saw was coming. He says it has three basic roots: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous cultures' resistance to globalization---all of which have become intertwined. I would argue that the braid of transformation he has revealed has yet another root and dynamic, one that if not fulfilled will ultimately undermine the other three. That root is an authentic transformation of human consciousness and the human heart.

But let me say more about the strands he has pinpointed. In one of the book's early passages he names eight people who are unknown to each other, but whose justice and environmental work are all actions that, when viewed with the right lens, demonstrate a far larger effort.

From work by Clayton Thomas-Müller in the Cree nation in northern Alberta, Canada, on toxic waste "lakes so big you can see them from outer space;" to Shi Lihong, founder of Wild China, and her film documentary work on "migrants displaced by the construction of large dams;" to Rosalina Tuyuc Velázquez and the Maya-Kaqchukel people fighting for "full accountability for tens of thousands of victims of death squads in Guatemala;" to Rodrigo Baggio, teaching poor children computer skills in the favelas of Brazil on discarded computers he procured from New York, London and Toronto; to biologist Janine Benyus who speaks to 1,200 business executives at a forum in Queensland about biologically inspired industrial development; to Paul Sykes part of the fifty thousand people who tally 70 million birds in one day of the Christmas Bird Count in north America; to Sumita Dasgupta on a ten-day trek through Gujarat, India with students, engineers, journalists, farmers and tribal people exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harnessing and catchment systems to relieve drought-prone areas; to Silas Kpanan'Ayoung Siakor who "exposes links between the genocidal policies of President Charles Taylor and illegal logging in Liberia resulting in international sanctions and the introduction of certified, sustainable timber policies."

From all these Hawkens traces the outlines of a massive, effective movement for justice and environmental healing that has almost entirely escaped notice by the world's mainstream media.

Of this movement he says: "It claims no special powers and arises in small discrete ways, like blades of grass after a rain. The movement grows and spreads in every city and country, and involves virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. It is composed of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the Bananeras of Honduras, the 'poors' of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets. It provides support and meaning to billions of people in the world."

Later he says, "The industrial Revolution went unnamed for more than a century, in part because its developments did not fit conventional categories, but also because no one could define what was taking place, even though it was evident everywhere."

The world is in the grip of a transformation so profound that people can't even see it. We are awash in change so vast we have not found the right focus to grasp its breadth and outline. We are riding an outrider reality, running along side the caravan headed ever deeper in to the territories of global disorder and degradation---along side and ahead, challenging the drivers to alter their course---but, the fact is, we haven't yet grasped neither the import nor the depth of responsibility of our outrider function.

When I lifted up the fourth root of the movement, the root of the transformation of self, of consciousness, however, I did so with a special purpose; to put that requirement, to put that necessary struggle directly and clearly before us so that we could be inspired to touch it more deeply.

Beyond therapy, beyond self-help and self-improvement, there is a journey that we must engage. It is the work that is the deepest response to our inner restlessness, the blessed unrest that will not let us forget what the human endeavor is about at its most fundamental core. The excavation of our deepest values, values that coalesce around a single creative drive: the drive to love, to express love, to wrap ourselves in love, to push away all hate love, the love that draws us into relationship, over and over with what we most fear, what we most disagree with, what will challenge our rigidity and confusion, our distaste and our disorder. The love that reveals just how frightened we are of our future and the world's future, and just how determined we are to do our part, no matter how small, no matter how slow, no matter what the cost.

The Industrial Revolution was, in a sense, an expression, fundamentally, of the adolescence of the human enterprise of global civilization, an adolescence of vibrancy, to be sure, but also of a developmentally and tragically limited grasp of the consequences of our actions and creations. This emerging revolution, the one we sit squarely in right now, is calling out our maturity, our spiritual and our ethical maturity, for in it we have to be fully conscious, fully conscious of the widest possible range of consequences, we have to be willing to assume responsibility for what we do in ways never before asked of us.

If we do not meet the challenge, if we shrink away, if we hide in our supposed insignificance, if we allow our frequent numbness to the world's difficulties to rock us into moral oblivion ... there is no telling how bad it will get, but it will undoubtedly be inescapably grim, grim beyond reckoning.

If we do accept the call to change, to open ourselves to the fullness of the difficulties, and thereby to the hidden and creative strengths that lie within, lie within the soft and generous satchel of the heart, wherein lives the love that will not, will never let us rest---then the creative possibilities are endless, the solidarity with human kind and the earth greater than human beings have ever before known or can imagine.

May we be courageous enough, responsible enough, eager enough, hungry enough, wise enough and above all, restless enough, to claim the love that is needed and that awaits us so openly.

May we, as a community, also find an authentic enthusiasm and our birthright bravery to step out in love . . . where we are so desperately needed.

It is in our hands.

All My Relations
Ashé, Amen, Ameen, Shalom & Blessed Be
Gracias y Namasté


April 27, 2008 - "Walking Together on this Earth"

Centering Thought

Wherever you are is home
And the earth is paradise.
---Wilfred Pelletier & Ted Poole


To get to the Pegasus bookstore in Oakland where my daughter, Caitlin, works part-time, I had to park two blocks away. Walking along those streets on that gloriously sunny, yet somewhat hazy, two weeks ago, the air was cool, the sun warm, and the streets alive with people. I was walking and asking. I was walking and asking myself, but actually far more than myself ... I was asking the Earth to show me how to celebrate, to show me how to speak words to tell its story here, today, in a sermon. I particularly wanted to talk about beauty and majesty and vastness.

It was good to turn my focus onto the beauty and the glory of it all. It was good to give my self full permission to take the outrageous beauty of the Earth as my guide knowing full well that Earth Day, which took place on Tuesday, and which inspired this sermon, Earth Day was born because the pressures of environmental problems at its inception were roiling their way into public awareness. Scholars of the on-line encyclopedia named Wikipedia have written about it this way:

Each year, the April 22 Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, [the Simon and Garfunkle song] "Bridge over Troubled Water," Apollo 13, the Beatles' last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina -- an incident not acknowledged for 18 years. At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news. But Earth Day 1970 turned that all around.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day was the public inception of a profound acknowledgment that the precious, irreplaceable Earth was in jeopardy, and that concerted, coordinated, connective action needed to be taken.

As I walked along the Rockridge streets on my way to see my daughter, I was opening my heart/mind not just to find words to lift up this incredible paradise, this Planet Earth---I hoped to find a way to frame my words so that the Earth vision I offered would somehow be richly launched out of a place of realism familiarity and depth that was not forced by my expectations of exactly how that should be done. Once at the store, while talking with Caitlin, my eye was drawn to an attractive printed page of card stock with two poems on it that was displayed on the counter. And, as I read them, I realized the Earth was speaking to me freshly and unexpectedly.

I'm sharing this with you, not to inform you about how I write sermons, but about how I am learning to experience the world---and (in terms of theology or, more accurately, cosmology), how I am becoming convinced that the world works for we conscious, reality encountering animals.

It has to do with an openness to unknowing, and also intention. There is something that happens when I set my intention openly into motion without any expectations, that joins with a larger pattern of events beyond my control and awareness, that brings into my human field of awareness lovely, fitting, powerful possibilities all directly tied to the original intention. What am I saying here?

I am saying that when I set my intention to write a sermon---with a sense of open receptiveness that is without expectations---things happen for me. Ideas I had never considered before pop up in my mind; people who know things I need to know show up with information for me, and, in this case, writings appear unexpectedly that literally yank me around and give me ways to see and express a message that needs to be spoken.

Furthermore . . .

There is the additional living fact that a sermon does need to be written for you all, you all who arrive here on Sunday morning (and, for this particular Sunday, it needed to be written about the Earth). We, here, have set that up, through the structure of the "liturgical" week of this congregation: Each Sunday, some kind of ritual takes place here that is good for the human heart---and most often during that ritual, there is a talk, a sermon. There is some probability that if such a sermon comes to truthful fruition, it will do some of you (and the writer of the sermon) some good---which means that it would immediately be good for the Earth, since you are, and the writer is, its children. Furthermore, it might also lead to your being supported to take some direct action that would be helpful in further ways for the Earth: You might be inspired, for example, to join in some legislative action to save the Pacific Salmon . . . or you might get really serious about recycling in your own home . . . or you might be willing to get involved in turning part of the property here into a demonstration garden.

I cannot stress to you enough how real I believe this process is; actually how rational it is, and also how intuitive, and how consistently it works. This process of things I need for the sermon showing up outside of my immediate knowledge, the process of the need you all bring encouraging the arrival of possibilities and information that I can use to craft a sensical sermon.

So ... what does this have to do with lifting up praises for the Earth? If you'll indulge me by returning with me to the bookstore where I stood holding the nicely designed card of two poems. A quick read of the English poem---the two were actually the same poem, one version was in English and the other in Spanish---a quick read brought with it a flash and a sense of delightful recognition. "This is just what I need," I said to my daughter.
What was even more cool was that I had not been thinking about the sermon while I was there at the bookstore at all.

Let me read the poems to you, and we'll go from there. They were written jointly by Michelle Diaz Garza age 9 and Rosa Baum, also age 9, who attend the Linscott Charter School in Watsonville, California.

There is a dark river Hay un rîo oscuro
in the gutter of the street En la alcantarilla de la calle
In front of my school. En frente de me escuela.
It was born in the rain Nacîo de la lluvia
And isn't flowing anymore. Y ya no corre mås.
It's sort of sad Se queda triste
With drops of gasoline Con gotas de gasolina
And a red wrapper Y un papel rojo
Some kid tossed Que Tiro un niño
After eating a candy. Después de comer un dulce.
But although it's sad and filthy Pero aun triste y sucio
It carries the shadow of my face Lleva la sombra de mi cara
The tattered clouds Las nubes andrajosas
And in white and black Y en blanco y negro
The whole sky. Todo el cielo.

Pero aun triste y sucio / Lleva la sombra de mi cara / Las nubes andrajosas / Y en blanco y negro / Todo el cielo.

But although it's sad and filthy / It carries the shadow of my face / The tattered clouds / And in white and black / The whole sky.

What is beautiful here is that these children saw through to the beauty. These children, through their own innate, natural powers, saw how the water, stagnant and despoiled, still reflected the power and the beauty of the world, which is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the vast Universe itself.

Their words "the whole sky" is code language, code language for two things: that the blessed Earth and its powers reflects, is a child of, the vast and creative powers and processes of the Universe; and, second, that human beings' consciousness is capable of participating in those powers, through apprehension and through joining in some process of parallel identification with the powers of what we call the natural world---which is nothing more than the world of our very beings because we are not separate from the world.

So on this Sunday, celebrating the day we set aside as the Earth's day, I want to lift up six powers of creation in this amazing, beautiful and awesome life. I'll rely on the book, The Universe Is A Green Dragon, by Cosmologist Brian Swimme.

The first creative power in the Universe Swimme identifies is Allurement. The extension of which, in the terminology of physics is Gravity---and in human language terms, is Love. Swimme expressed it this way: “The excitement in our hand as it tears open a letter from a friend is the same dynamism that spins our vast Earth through the black night and into the rosy dawn.”

Allurement evokes creativity, being and life. Love is a word that points to this alluring activity throughout the cosmos.

The second power is Sensitivity. In Swimme’s words: “The history of life can be understood as the creation of ever more sensitive creatures in a universe where there is always another dimension of beauty to be felt and savored.”
The greater our sensitivity, the greater the forming-edge tension we must deal with. Therefore, sensitivity leads not only to the experience and creation of beauty, it also carries the challenge of destructiveness and addiction.

The third power is Memory. The cosmos remembers its own way. “The elements are,” Swimme says, “frozen memory. They present to us the work of supernovas billions of years ago. The elements show us the original form given them at their emergence into the universe.”

Further, when we lift our hands . . . do that now, just lift one of your hands off your lap, above your shoulders . . . when we do that we are lifting all the thousands of years of experimentation in the evolution of limbs: it is witness to the amazing biologic experimentation that is one of Earth’s deepest stories in creativity.

And memory is the way we, and the universe itself, are able to cherish creation. It is the way that the past works in the present---bearing it forward that it may be celebrated through skillful use.

The fourth power is Adventurous Play. One of the seeming paradoxes of life for we humans is death. According to Swimme, our creativity needs our awareness of death for its energy, just as our bodies need long and muscle-taxing workouts.

He asserts that the emergent task of we humans is to become the mind and heart of the planet; which means to live in an awareness that the powers that created the Earth reflect on themselves through us. We are the earth become conscious.
And then in one of his fine bursts of poetic imagery he says, “We are to live as alluring and remembering activity, as shimmering sensitivity. And this means the cosmic dynamic revealed by the life forms: surprise and adventure. Call it play; adventurous and surprising play. That’s what life reveals; that’s what life is.”

The fifth power is Unseen Shaping. Using the image of a candle flame, Swimme challenges us to define it: Is it the light given off in all directions? The wax as it combines with oxygen at the right temperature? The chemical products resulting from this combination? All of those things taken together?

All of these show the flame’s activity. But if you vary one of the elements, the entire display will alter, yet we will still recognize it as “flame.” “The flame,” he says, “organizes all these different materials into its own persisting process. A flame is an image of unseen organizing activity.”

So, too, is my precious self more an unseen organizing activity than a static and enduring entity. So, too, are these selves, these identities we so naively believe forge a personality of permanence. So, too, are we a vast display of energies and gifts from the wider alluvial wash of life’s streams. So, too, are we shaped and reshaped by the unseen shaping of forces grander and deeper than our egos.

The last power Swimme describes is Celebration. Turning the common and pessimistic definition of the second law of thermodynamics on its head, he argues not the gradual depletion of energy through equalization---but rather, linking it to the biologic realm, uses the observation of ethnologists who see what they call “ ‘dispersal behavior,’ where juveniles of a species are sent out in a programmed dispersal from the occupied territory of their ancestors.” In that dispersal Swimme sees exuberance---and expansion from a center with news of that center. When we’re joyous, we want to share it, spread it, offer it. “Being,” he says, “folds itself into concentrated fullness, then erupts in an explosion of joy. The artist sends forth her works; the parent lavishes care upon his children.” Celebration is an act of joyous generosity.

On this day, a tribute to the worldwide celebration by millions, perhaps billions, of our sisters and brothers on Earth Day, may we bring all those powers into fruition. And may they empower us to live in deeper harmony with each other and with the Blessed, Blessed Earth.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Amien. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

April 13, 2008 - "I'll Pass"

I'LL PASS

Opening Thought
"You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger
having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt."
---Exodus 23:9

The Letty Pogrebin reading that Nancy shared with us is telling, has a power that we would do well to attend to if we want to get the marrow of the bone, as Henry David Thoreau said it, the marrow of this moment, and particulary of this season of Passover, or Pesah---which is our subject, our teaching, for today. Pogrebin's piece opens the door to the inner sanctuary where the deepest truths and commitments of Judaism reside---burning brightly and perpetually in a simple oil lamp. It also opens the door to a deeper understanding about Judaism’s role in pointing the way for our white, affluent, largely heterosexual, able-bodied and middle-aged Unitarian Universalist Association as we strive to address issues of oppression: Oppression of the Earth, of persons of color, of women, of Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-and-Transgendered folk, of those who are physically challenged, of the old and the very young, of those among us living on the margins of economic survival.

Listen: You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.

If liberation is at the core of one’s experience, because oppression has been a reality, felt and lived, then authentic touch with all of human kind is possible. For most of us, living in the protective shelter of our modern American lives creates an illusion of security and well-being. I say illusion because even though we may be financially secure, even though we may have supportive family and friends, even though we may have, or now in retirement can say that we had) work that is meaningful, even though our spiritual life may be developing richly---and, even though we have some developed awareness of the active oppression and abuse that is abroad in our times, and can separate ourselves from it and are working for liberation from it, for our selves and for others---our felt sense of security and well-being, our heightened sense of rebellion, is based on a false sense of separateness and a naive conception of freedom. Unless . . . unless we include the marginalized of the world, not as those we are working to help liberate, but as an experience of our own personal marginalization, right in the fleshy center of our own hearts. Unless we realize at the deepest core of our beings, that if anyone, anyone, is marginalized on this planet, then we are all marginalized; then we are all powerfully marginalized away from the true center of human well-being, away from the pulsing, living fact of our own individual heart---because---hard to grasp and hold---because there is only one human heart in all the world and that is my heart, and your heart, and yours and yours. Each a single wave on the outrageous sea of human beingness. But you all know this, because today we are all good Jews here. Just as next week, when Earl lifts up some core Indian truths we will all be good Hindus. Just as last week with Rev. Lee Williamson, we were all good Christians.
So for this morning, what the Jewish consciousness of liberation, and of suffering, is telling us is that in one particular sense, in one particular sense that forms the foundation for our consciousness and the true liberation of our spirit, there is no such thing as individual well-being. We may have found a deep sense of inner peace, we may even be so "lucky" to have entered a deeply unitive consciousness---never-the-less, our well-being will ultimately rest on sand as long as anyone, any other human being, is suffering, and/or oppressed.

As I often do, I will here remind us of the passage in Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple. Remember the words of the character "Shug" where she vividly recounts her journey away from an anthropomorphic white male God into, into ... well something more. The passage goes like this:

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and cried and ran all around the house.

One of the greatest of religious gifts is this: The complete groking, the complete owning of our profound interconnectedness. So profound is our inextricable interweaving of spirit, heart and mind with all of humankind and with the planet itself, the UU Association of congregations chose to lift it up as our Seventh Principle.

Listen: “We the member congregations of the UUA covenant to affirm and promote: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

Passover celebrates having escaped. Passover celebrates that liberation from the overt power of oppression can be won. But Passover also is a reminder. For it is in this sacred celebration that we are reminded of the denigration of the human spirit under the oppression of slavery. “It is here,” in the words of Letty Pogrebin, “that emotion enters history, here that personal experience dictates compassion and justice, here that all excuses for evil behavior disappear in the intimate truth of known human pain.”

“. . . the intimate truth of known human pain.” Our connection with others through the intimacy of our pain is one of the deepest intimacies that we can know. When we deny pain, when we choose to slip by it, our pain or that of others, we deny to ourselves, and to our relationships, the deeper reaches of intimacy. Virginia Woolf told us that “Intimacy is a difficult art.” Much of the difficulty of it is the automatic pilot we set that steers us away from pain, from understanding that steers us automatically away from our unconscious privilege---privilege that is bound and determined, that is specifically designed, to keep us living “in the comfort zone.” A comfort zone that is purchased with the costly money of denial. A comfort zone that spreads from the individual's denial of their true human potential, as well as of their real fear, out into the social structure, into the culture, where its rancid floridity sustains the politics of Empire.

And, equally as deep and significant, is the fact that justice is not possible without intimacy. Without an intimate sensibility with, and in regard to, those who are experiencing injustice, as well as with those who perpetrate it, we lack the power to realize our authentic moral compass, the only compass that can guide us in our actions to mend the injury, to right the inequity, to recreate the restorative justice, the wholeness we all crave in our depths. To be whole all parts must be in intimate relationship with one another---that is, all of us must be in intimate relationship, through our respect, and respectful boundary setting, if we expect our community to be a whole one. One of the surest guides to wholeness is “the intimate truth of known human pain.”

But let me return to quoting Letty Pogrebin for in the further words that continue the previous quote, she lays out the commandment of the Spirit, of the Spirit of all Life, that cannot and will not let us settle for any attempt at permanent individual comfort when the whole is fractured, when others suffer injustice: “We are told to act justly not because it is right according to some moral abstraction, and not because God says so and will punish us if we don’t, but because we know what it feels like to be treated otherwise.”

“We know what it feels like . . . .” So what? So what if we know what it feels like to suffer? Why should that motivate us? Why can’t we go on and live our own lives. If others are suffering, so what?

It is perhaps one of the most persistent streams that has ever risen up to the consciousness of humankind, perhaps one of the strongest currents that has ever stirred the human heart. The call that we feel to respond to the suffering of others, the call that arises within us to heal our own suffering, that call is the call of the whole: the whole of our hungry psyches seeking to be made whole once again; the whole of humankind; the whole of the earth, of which humankind is a unique and powerful expression. What we feel within us when we respond to pain we see and feel that others are experiencing is a direct expression of the vastness of what we are: we are the earth, conscious and loving; the earth, acting with compassion---and knowing, as we mature, that there is no one who is not a part of us---that there is no one who is not our relative, our family, our true kin in the truest sense of the word.

Unitarian Universalists aspire to be a people, and have always aspired to be a people, who not only challenge the prevailing theologies, paradigms and philosophies of our time, committedly and proactively---we are also a people who are fully embedded in them. In this Sunday service, as we honor the tradition of Passover, and of our Judaic roots, it is a good and right thing to acknowledge our deep connection to, and participation with, that tradition. It is a good thing to acknowledge, as well, the continued connections we share with the Jewish people, and with Judaism, a people, and a tradition, strong in their religious dedication to liberation.

On this Sunday, it is good to acknowledge that there are codes of behavior that can guide us, not by moral commandment, but by the luring call of our own empathic hearts; a luring call that has been tested in the cauldron of human experience, tested and found true and lasting and trustworthy; a luring call that has survived thousands of years; a luring call that is also preserved in the particular religious tradition of Judaism that has itself known the tragic lash and the crushing forces of persecution.

Out of that tradition has evolved “A code of behavior.” registered in, as Pogrebin says, “in a single verse: You’ve been there, so you know better.” And then she italicizes her words: “Remember the pain.” “Remember the pain!!” And then she goes on: “Remember how it feels. And then take that ritual of empathy one step further. Besides repudiating the role of the oppressor, resolve to identify with the oppressed---and to act with them and for them.” Whew! Makes me want to go to Synagogue!

And notice, Pogrebin is such a careful and accurate writer, she writes, “besides repudiating the role of the oppressor. . . .” She does not write, “repudiating the oppressor!” She makes a clear distinction between the person and the act, which is, as well, right in the flow of what UUs have ever espoused. Our first principle is that we covenant to promote and affirm: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Even oppressors have worth. And how could it not be so, we ourselves, unwittingly, unconsciously, have not escaped contributing to oppression. So many of the privileges we enjoy are bought on the backs of the lowest classes and the poor, those of deeper hue, those who live and die in “Third World” countries, and the third world zones of our own country, like West Oakland, whose resources have fed our economy since the very creation of our nation state.

In the midst of this tangled and difficult complexity, in the midst of our trying to get things “right,” then, it is good and it is important to celebrate together. And to remember together. And to affirm our own worth and dignity, and our own inseparable participation in the whole of this wondrously living planet. It is good to know that our strength is strengthened, our love is deepened, our justice making is furthered when we both celebrate and remember. It is one of the great paths for lives of meaning and depth and intimacy---a way we can be truly whole---a way we can be fully human.

May it be so for each of you, and for me . . . and for all of us together.

All My Relations.
Ashé-Amen-Amein. Shalom and Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté


March 23, 2008 - "Arcing Sunwise"

For our readings this morning we heard three great poems: from the Congregation of Abraxas, the UU community that back in the 70's experimented with creating new liturgy; from Gary Snyder, Sierra Foothills California Beat-Zen Poet, eco-scholar and mountain man; and from Mary Oliver, gentle cartographer of wild nature and the fragility of our human place in it all.

These poems give us clues on the up-side edge of the Vernal Equinox that happened somewhat over three days ago: clues about the centrality of the sun and hence about light; clues about thanksgiving as a central stance in our lives for what the Great Earth has given us; clues about how living our lives authentically means living as light and fire; clues about path: the journey, the pilgrimage, the way upon the Earth that we humans, seeking truth and authenticity, spirit and original nature, have wrought for ourselves---that transformative, "outrider" way that is outside Empire, outside the centuries of oppression of the human spirit that has taken place because of the vision and practice of violence and war as legitimate and worthy of glory, and because of a belief in the supremacy of material wealth and power over others as the supreme goals of life. That way out beyond Empire . . . called path, that way called spiritual/ethical practice.

At this Equinoxian time, in this sermon, it is my intention to focus on the experience of conscious path. What I mean by that, in the simplest terms, is the "Examined Life." What are the elements of such a life, of choosing such a path? What must we address to live consciously, richly, humanly in the fullest possible way? It seems very appropriate to me to put our attention on this most critical experience of human life during the Equinox time, the time when light is guaranteed to us because it has clearly demonstrated that its arc is sunwise, is toward longer days and an increase in light. That time when the Mescalero Apache sing: "The sunbeams stream forward, dawn boys, with shimmering shoes of yellow."

What I would like to do now is to offer two more poems, or invocations, to lay further light upon, draw clearer light from, the languaged gift of poetic vision working its way through the guts and the spirits, the hearts and the minds of fiercely focused and widely loving poets. Let me offer two more poems here on this day the Christians call Easter, here on the third day after the Earth passed the midpoint between its lowest arc to its highest arc on the horizon: the Equinox, the Equinox called Vernal here in our home in the northern hemisphere.

The first poem is another from the Congregation of Abraxas. It is an invocation that honors sleep and its restorative powers. Sleep the deep unconscious home where our dreams are born and where some believe our human Beingness intersects, or connects, with the energetic fountain of life itself. Sleep, which is the flip side of consciousness for we humans. The Abraxan prayer/poem is called Great Mystery of Sleep.

Great Mystery of sleep,
Which has safely brought us to the beginning of this day
We thank you for the refreshment you daily provide,
And for the renewing cycle of your dreams
Which shelter our fantasies, nourish our vision,
and purge our angers and fears.
We bless you for providing a new beginning
Whose perennial grace is tangible hope
for all the children of Earth
We praise the gift of another morning,
And pray that we may be worthy bearers of its trust
in the hours to come
May life protect us and surprise us
And be no more harsh than our spirits may bear
Until we rest again in the vast empty fullness
of your everlasting arms. Amen

The second poem is from the Sufi, Jalaluddin Rumi. It is an admonition to us, to we seekers after truth, we workers for justice-love; an admonition that turns the image of sleep into an image of fearsome psychological numbness so endemic in civilized human beings, the sleep of material seduction, the sleep of the enormous human powers of concentration---that morally tuned, fire our lives with honest purpose---that when asleep leave us victim to our own fears and those who abuse power and propagate fear for their own warped ends. Rumi's poem that I will now read is an admonition that calls us to a wholesome fear of the crippling powers of the human shadow, all that material we push down out of consciousness, down into the vault of denial where its life continues unabated and disturbingly thriving, even while out of our conscious view.

Rumi writes . . .

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch;
The door is round and open
Don't go back to sleep.

What do these two poems, the Abraxan witness to sleep and the Rumi admonition against it, what do these invocations truly speak about? When we step into the vibrancy of their language, with what sense do they reverberate in our hearts? What do they tell us about path, and particularly about path in our present moment, historically, collectively, psychologically, spiritually?

The piece from the Congregation of Abraxas immediately seeks the deeps . . . it is not a superficial prayer: "Great Mystery of sleep," it begins, and on the page the "M" in mystery is capitalized---which tell us that "Mystery" here is meant to raise the specter of a wide open night sky, the depth and ends of which are infinite. Which is to say that though we can describe the physical action of the Equinox, and though we have powerful theories about the physical origin of the universe we inhabit, the origin of its origin is mysterious, is fundamentally unknown. That unknown leaves us not with an intellectual void, but with a sense of openness, a quality of deep invitation and an encounter with a vast and living vitality that humbles us for good.

When we are considering conscious human path, the examined life in the words of Socrates, that image of Mystery tells us the first requirement it demands is to attend to what is larger than ourselves.

On the level of our individual lives, what is larger than our selves, with a small "s," is the world of Self, with a capital "s," that lives within us. It lives, you might say, back in the great cavern of sleep, or ... down in the depths of the living unconscious.

So ... the first requirement of path is that we must "ask for what we want" beyond our smaller selves by reaching out and down, into our larger Selves where our memories and shadowed experiences live. We must reach to where our denied creativity awaits full exposure and affirmation, where our unresolved, painful losses and assaults still writhe, seeking the light, seeking to be released. Those memories and denied qualities may be healed in a number of ways; four I want to lift up this morning are: straight catharsis of emotion in crying or yelling in a safe environment, through art work of many sorts that carry the truth and pain outward, the discovery of the Observing Self whose attention dissolves the grip of self-identity with what is superficial and temporary, or through gradual release by the expenditure of physical energy in service, that take the form of atonement, as well as the reclaiming of previously denied positive qualities.

Mary Austin early twentieth century author and ethnographer of western American Indigenous people, writes:

I am asking for the courage
To go forward through the shadow,
I am asking toward the light.

The Equinox demonstrates something else against the shortness of our human lives: The authentic human path of transformation requires loyalty. That is the second element of Path I would lift up today. We must be loyal to ourselves, just as the long elliptic of the Earth's orbit stays true over time (with only gradual and minor variations). Those long time spans at work in the Universe give lessons to us in our fleeting lives, lessons about durability, about staying long at the messy workbench of our lives. Without that commitment, covenant and loyalty, we can never sustain the exploration that is necessary. Contrary to the speed of our modern lives, the speed and the complex busyness, contrary to that, the journey of the examined human life requires a sustained inner focus. There will be times, for sure, when we lose our way, when we are distracted by demands and losses, by pressures from without and within---but in the end, it is by returning over and over and over again . . . and again to our agreement with ourselves and with Life to transform, to grow, to change, to healing that we are able to create the conditions necessary for authentic transformation.

Rumi's admonition, "Don't go back to sleep," is a call to stay focused, and loyal to the Path. In that poem he adds another dimension, as well. He says, " People are going back and forth / Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch; / The door is round and open / Don't go back to sleep.

If we are to go as deeply as we are able into ourselves, into the living fabric of our lives---so much of which is unconscious to us---if we are to take on the work of healing, of securing justice, in our selves and in the world in a sustained way, we need to join with others, the others going back and forth, as Rumi puts it "back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. That is joining together with others in the traverse back and forth across the thresholds of sanctuary and risk, of full engagement and deep rest, of intensity and ease---others who are as clear about their external work as they are about their internal work.

The third dimension of Path I am emphasizing today, then, is community: the Sangha, the blesséd sister/brotherhood, the close circle of committed others. It is also one of the major gestures of liberation in our times: to join together to break the isolation that the oppression of our modern social systems foist upon us because they cannot work their hypnotic seductions when we stand together, when we realize, fundamentally, that we are not only one family, but one ecstatic expression of the one Earth we inhabit. And harkening back to the poem by Gary Snyder, that Margaret read with such skill: One of the three things he lifts up for us is just that recognition that if we are going to make it to the next century, we must stay together.

There are two other things he points to. "Go Light." And, "Learn the Flowers." Today, "learn the flowers," calls us to the recognition that we need to come into close relationship with the Earth. It also means that we need to seek out those expressions of life that can teach us both the ease and the tenacity of the natural order. As I have written for Sunday Celebrations of the Flowers that Unitarian Universalists celebrate each year, flowers . . .

. . . show us how outrageously and radically life will evolve against the relentless conditions of the material world: bursting with color, widening the uses of cellular form, experimenting with delicacy and durability, with tenaciousness and temporality---flowers demonstrate the mysterious vivacity of life . . . that demands its place.

But the learning of the ways of the flowers also shows us---for we are exploring human Path---flowers also show us how the radical emergence against relentless conditions is our human birthright, as well. It is a deep and unequivocal given of life: we embody a mysterious vivacity, a vivacity that demands it place.

And then one more, one last thing for the morning, from Gary Snyder. He calls us to "Go Light." On the one hand that certainly means get rid of your material baggage. Do not desire more than you truly need . . . . for survival, for the uplift of your spirits, for the strengthening of your community at its heart and in the depths of its spirit. Go light, because anything more will weigh you down, and where you are going the road is difficult and you need to be agile; where you are going the burden of too many things will cost you too much.

On the other hand: “Go light,” because you are beings of light and the greatest journey requires that we match our outer life with our inner life. The work of healing and transformation means lightening up, giving up our demands, our oughts and shoulds---living fundamentally, more and more, without the burden of expectations. It means living with the growing sense that our inner core is grounded in goodness, that our selves are precious beyond measure, beyond any measure, that this earth needs us to fulfill our human journey, and that to do so . . . committing to our own personal transformation is essential. And it also means growing in our realization of, appreciation for, and engagement with our deepest impulse to expand, unfold and become more of the world as Self in its fullness, naturalness and outrageous beauty.

Remembering our Chalice Lighting words this morning, the words of Maxine Hong Kingston: "Breathe. Pay attention and tell the truth." I would end this focus on human Path by turning her words this way: "Breath. Pay attention. Live truthfully."

May we all be so courageous and blessed.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.