Dear President Obama

Dear President Obama,

At one point in your speech to the United Nations General Assembly from this past September, you quoted your predecessor Franklin Roosevelt, saying: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, one party, or one nation…. It cannot be a peace of large nations—or of small nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.” “The choice is ours,” you said over and over to representatives of the gathered nations of the world. “We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st; that put off hard choices, refused to look ahead, failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for. Or we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings….”

I hear this, and I can’t help but feel inspired. It’s the poem from your inauguration, where poet Elizabeth Alexander says,

What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light….

What if? We ask this as well, as Unitarian Universalists. What if more people affirmed the interdependent web of all existence, which applies as much to international affairs as to the natural world? What if more people affirmed the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all? Love, casting a widening pool of light. These are values of my own religious tradition that I am hearing in you, and I am inspired.

That’s why I’m celebrating the message you’ve been bringing to the world in the past eleven months. You remind me of one of our Unitarian Universalist ancestors: Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations during the JFK administration and also candidate for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956. (As a brief aside, it’s said that when the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed in 1961, Stevenson wrote to the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley, its first president, “Congratulations on your election as president. I know from hearsay how satisfying that can be.”) Despite not winning the Presidency, he was a great visionary who said that “It is no longer possible—if it ever was—for local communities to be more secure than the surrounding world. Our ultimate security therefore lies in making the world more and more into a community.” That’s what Adlai Stevenson said, and it’s your message too, over and over again. The mightiest word of love. Not unilateralism and militarism as a first resort, but multilateralism and diplomacy. Interdependence in world community.

Thank you for spreading values we Unitarian Universalists affirm. It’s why I think that Unitarian Universalists everywhere (whatever their party affiliations might be, whether Democratic or Republican or Independent) will have something to cheer when, on December 10th, you are in Oslo, Norway, receiving the prize—a prize which you have said you will accept as a call to all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. Warm congratulations to you!

I laughed when I heard about what happened right after you received the news. Your daughter Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it’s Bo’s birthday!” And then your other daughter Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” Kids, helping keep things in perspective. Although it sounds like you are doing fine with this on your own. “To be honest,” you said to reporters, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by the prize.” This is what you said.

Of course, the Nobel Committee disagrees. In announcing that you are the recipient, it said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” “The question we have to ask,” said Nobel committee chair Thorbjorn Jagland, “is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world. And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

It’s a controversial question—whether you have accomplished enough. Already, you have plunged into the rough waters of multiple tough issues: prohibiting the use of torture by the United States; ordering the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed; working on finding effective ways of rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan; stopping terrorism at its roots by promoting human rights, economic opportunity, and security in countries that are hurting; partnering with Russia to substantially reduce nuclear warheads and launchers; advancing the cause of two states—Israel and Palestine—living side by side in peace and security so that justice for all in the Middle East can become a reality; moving America from a bystander to a leader in international climate change negotiations; helping coordinate an international response of over $2 trillion in stimulus to bring the global economy back from the brink; and re-engaging the United Nations, joining the Human Rights Council, bringing America back to the world table. To the United Nations, in September, you said, “I have been in office for just nine months—though some days it seems a lot longer.” I wonder why. Definitely, you are not putting off any of the hard choices required to create a better world. You are plunging right in.

But I do understand why you still think you don’t deserve the award. It is only the beginning. You have only just begun. The world is still in the midst of rough waters. The shoreline is still far off. And yet, perhaps the award was given not so much to honor past accomplishment as future promise. Perhaps, as Stanford University scholar Clarence B. Jones suggests, the award is about strengthening your resolve as you go forward, encouraging you to see your vision through all the way to the very end. He saw this with Martin Luther King Jr., when he received the Peace Prize. MLK Jr. had been struggling with what to say about the Vietnam War—this man who had already fought extraordinary fights for justice and peace—and the Peace Prize convicted his conscience, pressed him to break his silence and speak out. “Just knowing that hunk of metal was in his bureau drawer,” says Clarence B. Jones, “forced someone as strong as Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly comment in a way he might otherwise not.” I think the world wants you to continue making the hard choices that need to be made. I think it wants you to stay strong, and to finish this ironman race you’ve started. As the New York Times put it, “Americans elected Mr. Obama because they wanted him to restore American values and leadership—and because they believed he could. The Nobel Prize … shows how many people around the world want the same thing.”

But this is not the first time that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has acted contrary to popular expectations. I was fascinated to learn that an early Peace Prize controversy had to do with whether non-governmental peace activists only should receive the prize, rather than heads of state and politicians. Before 1905, only private peace activists had received the award. And then came 1906. The recipient was none other than American President Theodore Roosevelt, for his efforts in helping to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Japan. People around the world screamed. What’s this? What’s this? they cried. Yet the Nobel Committee was ahead of the curve. It saw, after the turn of the century, how governments were increasingly promoting peaceful solutions for international disputes, and it wanted to encourage this even more. Private peace activists no longer owned the work exclusively. To ensure relevance for its prize, the committee risked changing with the times, together with the resulting wrath.

Today’s committee, I believe, took a similar risk. Said committee chair Thorbjorn Jagland, “Some people say—and I understand it—‘Isn’t it premature? Too early?’ Well, I’d say … that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond—all of us.” American multilateralism and diplomacy can’t wait. America modeling the kind of leadership that needs to happen in every country around the world can’t wait. Hope can’t wait. The mightiest word of love has to happen now.

Clearly, honest confusion has surrounded this year’s award. But there’s been some real ugliness as well. I mean, it seems to me that when someone gets an amazing award like a Nobel Peace Prize, a reasonable response is delight. Good for you, President Obama! Good for you, America! Delight, even if people might not be sure exactly why you got the award. The not-knowing then becomes transformed into a positive curiosity to find out why—to discover just exactly what it is you have been saying and doing on the international scene that would merit such an award. Yet from some quarters you’ve seen the absolute opposite of curiosity and delight. New York Times columnist David Brooks, calling it a joke, saying, “Nobody cares what five Norwegian guys think”—demonstrating, regrettably, an arrogant disdain for the rest of the world that is part and parcel of ugly Americanism and cowboy diplomacy. Those five Norwegians (not all guys, by the way) see how you’ve single-handedly set a new tone throughout the world, and David Brooks thinks that this is a joke?

Reminds me of something I read in U. S. News and World Report a while back. An interview with Cullen Murphy, about his book entitled Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. For a time, comparisons with Rome had been positive ones: the Pax Romana living anew in the Pax Americana, providing worldwide cultural benefits and worldwide security. But now the dominant view worries about America’s decline and compares symptoms of this to what people saw in Rome’s decline. And so the interviewer at one point says to Cullen Murphy, “You say there was an almost fatal parochialism among the Romans. Are we in danger of duplicating it?” Here’s Murphy’s reply: “I was looking the other day at one of the new Pew Center polls about ‘what Americans know.’ Americans in general aren’t that interested in, or aware of, the outside world, and increasingly even our elites don’t seem to put much stock in that kind of knowledge either. We don’t have [enough] Arabic speakers; the number of foreign correspondents continues to shrink. Compared with the Greeks, the Romans were not passionately interested in the outside world. And they were often taken by surprise. The great disaster suffered by Varus in Germany in A.D. 9, when three entire Roman legions were annihilated, stemmed partly from ignorance about the tribes they were up against.”

It’s been called “Omphalos syndrome”: the misguided belief that one’s nation and way of life is at the center (or navel) of the world. Rome had it, and suffered for it. America has it too, and we are suffering. We need to start caring about what five Norwegians think. We really do.

Ugly Americanism has come up in connection with your receiving the Peace Prize, and so has an all-consuming ugly cynicism. Writer H. L. Mencken once said, “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” This is definitely what some people have been doing around your award. Looking around for that coffin. Some of it is just blatantly racist—the presumption that the Peace Prize committee gave you the award just because you are the first African American president. And then there’s the cynicism summed up in something that Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said: you won because of “star power.” The world has a crush on you. Things are just in the honeymoon phase. It’s all illusion, smoke and mirrors.

Now, my congregation is listening in on this letter, so I say this to them as much as to you: that our Unitarian Universalist values transcend political parties. We are doing the best we can to stand on the side of love, that mightiest word, and part of our job is bringing prophetic critique to the public sphere when necessary, whether that sphere is Democratic or Republican, because our Unitarian Universalist values demand it. To be faithful to our religious call, there must be independence from political parties; we must be able to speak from out of a higher point of view of shared values. Today I bring warm congratulations to you, but when your policies and actions go contrary to our values, expect a different kind of letter. And if ever doing this becomes not OK in a Unitarian Universalist congregation—when my religion becomes a mere adjunct of the Democratic Party, and there’s absolutely no room for Republicans, or others, then I am out of here.

So when I call what Michael Steele is saying as cynical, I’m not trying to win one for the Democrats. I’m doing the best I can to speak up for that love which is

beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light….

But the “star power” comment takes the love you are trying to spread and tries to make it an unworthy thing. He’s trying to rebuild his political party, while you are trying to lead America into a new chapter of international cooperation. He says it’s just all words, but, first of all, words are a kind of action too—words change things. As a preacher, I have to believe this. Second, you know very we’ll that words alone are not enough. That’s why, over and over again, you say that “the future will be forged by deeds and not simply words,” that “the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our actions.”

On the other hand, maybe some star power is exactly what we need right now. But here, I’m talking about power to forge international consensus and move the world’s conscience. It was something we saw lacking in the previous presidential administration—how President Bush squandered the world’s goodwill after 9/11. He started a war of choice with Iraq. On such critical global issues as arms control, torture, and climate change, he stepped back from the world table, disengaged, thumbed his nose at everyone. Unilateralism, cowboy diplomacy, Omphalos syndrome. But then came the genocide in Darfur, hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced in waves of violence that showed no signs of abating. President Bush spoke movingly to this in 2007, at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “It is evil we are now seeing in Sudan—and we’re not going to back down.” He was exactly right. Yet his call went nowhere. Multilateralism and diplomacy was what solving the problem in Darfur required and continues to require—yet this had not been the established practice of the Bush administration. It was like singing a completely different tune. And then there was the accumulated skepticism and distrust of the world that drowned him out, made it impossible for his absolutely worthy message to be heard.

But it’s a different time now. How you’ve turning things around, in just eleven months, is why you’ve been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Committee wants you to see things through, this long journey you started. Your vision of four pillars, which are “fundamental to the future that we want for our children:” stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, pursuing peace, meeting the challenge of climate change, and the creation of a global economy that advances opportunity for all. “Now is the time,” you are saying, “for all of us to take our share of the responsibility for a global response to global challenges. […]The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people. They lead nations to act in opposition to the very goals that they claim to pursue…. They build up walls between us and the future that our people seek, and the time has come for those walls to come down.” The time has come. The choice is ours.

beyond marital, filial, national,
love casting a widening pool of light….

President Obama, I thank you for your inspired service, and I’ll be there with you in spirit when, on December 10th, you’re in Oslo receiving the prize. Thanks for asking What if? What if the mightiest word is love?

Sincerely,

Rev. Anthony David, Senior Minister
The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta

Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Clear Thinking

I want to start out this morning by introducing you to a tongue-in-cheek syndrome called Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Meditation teacher Warren Lee Cohen talks about this, in his book Raising the Soul. “This is how AAADD manifests itself: I decide to wash my car. As I start towards the garage, I notice that there is mail on the hall table. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the trash can under the table, and notice that the trash can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the trash first. But then I think, since I’m going to be near the mailbox when I take out the trash anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go to my desk where I find the can of Coke that I had been drinking. I’m going to look for my checks, but first I need to move the can of Coke aside so that I don’t accidentally knock it over. I notice the Coke is getting warm and decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head towards the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye. They need to be watered. I set the Coke down on the counter, and I discover my reading glasses that I’ve been searching for all morning. I decide I’d better put them back on my desk, but first I’m going to water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly I spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we want to watch TV, we’ll be looking for the remote, but nobody will remember that it’s on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs, but first I’ll water the flowers. As I pour water on the flowers, some of it spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back down on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. At the end of the day,” concludes Warren Lee Cohen, “the car isn’t washed, the bills aren’t paid, the trash hasn’t been taken out, there is a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter, there is still only one check in my checkbook, I can’t find the remote, I can’t find my glasses, and I don’t remember what I did with the car keys. Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I’m really baffled because I know I was busy all day long, and I’m really tired, but now it’s time to check my email.”

Can you relate? It’s Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Busy all day long, but nothing really gets done, because it’s hard to maintain undivided attention on the task at hand. Hard to focus on just one thing at a time and not allow ourselves to be distracted by additional problems that inevitably pop up along the way.

And if it’s this way with the things in our outer world, how is it with the inner world of our thoughts?

The careful, deliberate, reasoned search for truth is a cornerstone of our free faith. Says the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing, “Without … inward spiritual freedom outward liberty is of little worth. What [does it matter] that I am crushed by no foreign yoke if, through ignorance and vice, through selfishness and fear, I want the command of my own mind? The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breast. The man who wants force of principle and purpose is a slave, however free the air he breathes. The mind, after all, is our only possession, or, in other words, we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” That’s what the father of Unitarianism says. A capacity to be principled and purposeful in our thinking is simply basic to our way of faith. Without it, as we sail on OUR passenger ship, we’re lost. We can’t reliably read the signs of the times, nor discover what to do next. As Channing says, we fall prey to “a narrow, dark, confused intellect, which sees everything as through a mist, gives to everything the color of its own feelings, confines itself to what coincides with its wishes, contents itself with superficial views, and thus perpetually falls into errors….” This is not free faith. This is not who we are.

This morning, we tend to our most intimate relationship: the one we have with our thoughts. What are some of the tyrants that can establish themselves in us and muddle our thinking? And how might we develop our thinking so that it can be clearer? Today’s sermon is the second installment of the “Planting Seeds of Soul” series, so remember what I said last month about “wax on/wax off.” We’re going to learn our second “wax on/wax off” exercise today, to raise Unitarian Universalist soul in this place. That’s the goal.

But first: tyrants. One that comes immediately to mind is fallacious reasoning, or patterns of thinking that are bad according to logical standards but nevertheless make an impression on people who don’t know any better. Here’s an example of what I mean. I opened my Atlanta Journal-Constitution from yesterday and read that Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal “wants the president to prove he is an American citizen.” The article clarifies: “In June 2008, Obama’s campaign office released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate … that shows he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug, 4, 1961. Government officials in Hawaii have verified that the document is official. Yet Deal and others say they still have doubts.”

In any introductory level logic class, you’d learn that this is an textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy in formation, which tries to discredit a person’s policies and viewpoints not by presenting genuine evidence against them but by attacking the person, rendering his or her character so disgusting that no matter how good the policies are, no matter how penetrating the viewpoint, no one’s paying attention, no one’s listening. This is what the Birther movement hopes for, as it continues to nurture doubts about Obama’s citizenship status even in the face of an official birth certificate….

It’s just been one ad hominem attack after another. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, joking about the similarity of Barack Obama’s name to that of the terrorist Osama bin Laden—and using the machinery of his organization to spread the joke around until it becomes no joke. Tea Party participants, carrying signs that feature Obama’s face with a Hitler mustache. A Thomas Sowell article, where he says, “Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.” Do you see the steady building pattern of character assassination here? And too many Americans are completely persuaded by it, too many Americans vulnerable. The tyrant of fallacious reasoning, securing a place in our minds, and we don’t know any better. Not as a Democrat, but as an American, does this concern me, for how can I think about what President Obama is trying to do when psychological strings are being pulled and I can’t think straight? It’s horrible for democracy.

It’s definitely been horrible for reasoned debate about health care reform. Ad hominem fallacies one after another, together with others kind of fallacies. How about this one. I spotted it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just a few days ago: “Opponents Rally Against Health Care Bill”: 35 year-old David Seward, saying, “I think health care is expensive, but I like it and I’m scared to death of the government running it … I’m worried about the bureaucracy of the federal government getting involved.” This is what he says, and besides his completely ignoring the fact that government-run Medicare is a great success, do you see the underlying false dichotomy? It’s either big government or small government, and no other alternatives are possible…. Yet the issue is not so much big government vs. small government as the right amount of government really needed to solve the problem, to cut through the greed and the waste of the third-party payer medical-industrial complex. Big government vs. small government doesn’t tell the whole truth about how to solve this problem.

I could go on and on—all the kinds of fallacious thinking that have muddied up the debate around health care reform. Rep. Candace Miller from Michigan, commenting on yesterday’s passage of the health care bill in the House, saying, “We are going to have a complete government takeover of our health care system faster than you can say, `this is making me sick,’” adding that Democrats are intent on passing “a jobs-killing, tax-hiking, deficit-exploding” bill. Sounds like a classic slippery-slope argument to me, one that says that if government takes action to reform the health care system, if it sets a public option side-by-side with multiple private options and enables some REAL competition to take place, then all of a sudden, down the slippery-slope slide we go, and all sorts of horrible, fateful consequences are sure to follow. A classic appeal to fear. I don’t care what political party you belong to. I don’t care which president is in the White House. To me, manipulative language—Republican or Democratic—doesn’t help to create a great country. “Civil institutions,” said William Ellery Channing, “are to be estimated by the free and pure minds to which they give birth.” But our institutions are not being civil, and our minds must struggle against great odds to be free and pure. What would Channing say, if he could see what we see today?

This leads us to a second inner tyrant to become aware of. Besides the tyrant of fallacious reasoning, there is the tyrant of hyperconnectedness in our interactive, digital world. Here, we become experts in skimming and scanning as we flit from Facebook to text message to email to video game—and this can leave our ability to bring a full attention to one thing at a time severely underdeveloped. It can make us unfit to think great thoughts.

Marilee Sprenger talks about this in her wonderful article entitled “Focusing the Digital Brain.” “Let’s look,” she says, “at what happens in the brain of Emily, an average teenager, as she thinks she is focusing on a homework assignment. Emily sits in front of her laptop. Her iPod is playing music by Coldplay. She has three windows open on her computer screen: her Web browser through America Online, MSN Messenger for sending instant messages and e-mail, and her word processing program. Her homework is to write about five causes of the U.S. Civil War.

As Emily is putting her heading on her paper, her cell phone rings. She quickly picks up her phone and a picture of her friend Ivy appears on the screen. ‘Hi Ivy, what’s up?’

‘You’re not going to believe who texted me,’ Ivy says. Emily squeals as she hears the name of someone Ivy is interested in dating. Just then Emily’s computer flashes, ‘You’ve got mail!’ The executive part of her brain drops the conversation with Ivy as she reads a new e-mail from another classmate asking for the homework assignment. Emily answers the e-mail as Ivy rambles on, but she realizes she should get back to work. ‘I’ll text you later, Ivy. I have to get some work done.’

Emily shifts her attention back to the word processing screen. Let’s see, where was I? Her brain must let the snippets of social conversation drop out of her working memory. Attending to the assignment causes Emily’s brain to retrieve long-term memories of her readings and lectures on the Civil War. As she begins to think about the differences between the North and the South before the Civil War, her mind drifts to picturing Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

Refocusing takes several seconds as she remembers what Mr. Montgomery told them in class about slavery. Emily types ‘causes of the Civil War’ into Google. Immediately, 12,900,000 hits come up. She clicks on the first link, realizes it doesn’t have any information she is looking for, and tries the next Web site.

Immersed in her search, she is startled by a jangle from her Blackberry. Emily sees Jackson’s text message ‘What r u doing?’ Jackson is Emily’s new love interest, so her brain floods with pleasurable chemicals as she types her reply—these chemicals make it hard to return to homework.

So it goes among the net generation. Multitasking? Not many tasks are getting done.”

Now, I quote Marilee Sprenger at length not to pick on the net generation—after all, I openly confess that I myself have a serious case of Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. In fact, whatever generation we happen to be in—whatever degree of proficiency is ours in up-to-date communication technologies—it seems that the general tenor of the times is rush and gush. Continuous partial attention. How are we going to do the deeply spiritual work of thinking clearly when we have a limited capacity for patience to follow a chain of thoughts from beginning to end—to resist interruption—to focus on one thing and allow it to unfold its secrets?

“[H]onesty of mind,” says William Ellery Channing, “bears an exact proportion to the patience, steadiness, and resolution with which we inquire.” And that’s exactly what we turn to now. Developing this patience, this steadiness, this resolution. How?

Our wax-on/wax off spiritual exercise for this month—for those of you who choose to practice it with me—is “about learning how to cultivate interest in even the most mundane object and by maintaining your undivided attention on it to increase your ability to focus on anything. This is a step in learning how to give your attention freely and completely, whatever and whenever you should choose.” (Warren Lee Cohen).

Four steps:

Step one: Choose a simple, human-made object—an object manufactured rather than one found in nature, like a cup, or a pencil, a pin, a pair of chopsticks. Warren Lee Cohen, the source of this and all the other exercises, says that the less interesting your object appears at first, the more powerful the effects of deliberately focusing on it.

Also be clear on how many objects you’ll focus on over the course of the upcoming month, and for how long each session will be. I’d recommend one object per week, for around 5 to 10 minutes, at the same time every day. Make the decision, and lay out your plan clearly in your journal. Warren Lee Cohen tells the story of a man who spent 20 years contemplating the same pair of wooden chopsticks. Each and every day, he was able to find something new and interesting to think about; and clearly, it wasn’t the chopsticks that were changing—it was him, the quality of attention he was bringing to them. If he can contemplate the same pair of chopsticks for 20 years, surely we can contemplate the same object for a week, at 10 minutes a pop….

That’s step one. Step two is when you’re actually ready to do the exercise. Situate yourself in a comfortable place, and prepare yourself for the exercise by relaxing your body, calming your mind, just like an athlete stretching before a workout, or a musician tuning up an instrument.

Step three is to place before your mind this object that you have chosen to contemplate. This object that, initially, appears boring: A cup, a pencil, a pin. Train your thinking exclusively on this object in a clear and factual way. Focus on one fact and then link it to the next—in step by step fashion, follow your thinking as you deepen your understanding and interest in this simple, ordinary, human-made thing.

For example, say you choose to focus on a pencil. (Thoreau would like that—he was a pencil maker, you know…) You might start by describe how the pencil appears and of what materials it’s made. Then you might go on to describe how these materials were processed to get them into this form—to think through all the stages of manufacture. Then you might go on to consider how the object is used. Then you might think about who invented it, and how its invention is connected with the invention of other similar things. And so on—inquire with patience, steadiness, and resolution….

Notice that in this approach, you just jump right in. But there are alternative approaches to keep in mind. Do the one that works best for you. One alternative is to do a little research about your object first, before you start thinking about it. Another alternative is to do no research in advance but to develop questions naturally through the course of your own thought processes and then, when the time feels right, seek out answers through research. Enriched by that, return to the object and keep on thinking about it, keep on going deeper.

Finally, there’s step four. When your five or ten minutes is done, review the general direction of your thinking. What was the initial fact that grabbed your attention? Where did you go from there?

And this is the exercise. Do it along with the “review of the day” that I introduced last month. “Even if you cannot slow down the pace of your life,” says Warren Lee Cohen, “you can create regular moments of slowness or concentration each day. These can then become seeds, essential reminders of the qualities you would like to cultivate more in life.” That’s right. We’re planting seeds of soul. They look small—focusing on a boring-looking object for 10 minutes seems small—but if we do the exercises faithfully, the results will be big. Will strengthen our minds against manipulation. Will counteract Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder and counterbalance the continuous partial attention of the digital brain. “The mind, after all, is our only possession,” says William Ellery Channing; “we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” So let us energize and enlarge it. Make Channing proud!

Spending Our Lives

“Near the end of March, 1845,” says Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing….” Ever afterwards, the question of whose axe Thoreau borrowed has been an open one. Was it Emerson’s? Bronson Alcott’s? Ellery Channing’s? What we can know is that, this morning, as we contemplate our own experiment in living more simply and wisely, we borrow Thoreau’s angle of vision. We borrow the bent of his genius which, as Thoreau himself wryly admits, is “a very crooked one.” We do what he did: “see our native village as if we were a traveler passing through,” “to think new thoughts and have new imaginings, for the deepest and most original thinker is the farthest traveled.” We borrow all this from Thoreau as we begin deliberate travel through our own native village, seeing everything with new questioning eyes as we pass through. And as for where each of us ends up? Once, Thoreau tells us, “a young man of my acquaintance … told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. [But] I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account. […] I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” Robert Sullivan, in his excellent biography of Thoreau entitled The Thoreau You Don’t Know, puts it like this: “Thoreau doesn’t offer answers. His is the analysis that leads to the questions. For application purposes, you can apply Thoreau to any question, not to find the answer, but to imagine how he might pose it anew. When you ask what car to drive, imagine Thoreau asking where you are going, or if the car is driving you…”

We borrow all this, as we begin pursuing our own way. Not an axe, but an angle of vision, the bent of a genius, a way of making the familiar strange, a manner of questioning. The first chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy,” but characteristically, Thoreau invites us to use this word not in its conventional sense of wealth creation or fiscal frugality. He wants us to go straight to the ancient Greek origin of the word—oikonomia—which means caring for the household, a holistic way of living in which your use of life resources is in alignment with vital values of freedom and sustainability and beauty. “I am convinced,” he says, “both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.” “Economy,” he says, “is synonymous with philosophy.” This is how he uses the term in the first chapter of what has become, in the 155 years since it was published, sacred scripture for Unitarian Universalists today.

Economy is about how you maintain yourself on this earth. Could be a joyful pastime, but what Thoreau discovers as he travels through his own native village of Concord is people experiencing something very different. Just listen to some of his observations:

“Most men … through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. […] The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat each ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

Or this: “The childish and savage taste of men and women for new [clothing] patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.”

Or this: “As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. […] Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Or this: “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bone with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

Or this: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

All are observations Thoreau makes as he travels through his native village of Concord. One after another indicates not joyful pastime, but hardship of some kind or other, and perhaps they echo observations you yourself have made, as you’ve traveled through your own village of Atlanta or elsewhere. The rush and gush of our days; time crunch in an era of so-called time-saving devices; “no time to be anything but a machine.” Or how our culture aims at creating more wants in us (rather than focusing on genuine needs)—churns out expert consumers who are fine-tuned to fashion trends but are blind to more important trends of intellect and heart and soul. How communication technologies today are far more powerful than any of the dreams of yesterday and yet still we can question the value of what is being communicated: obnoxious opinions of know-nothing demagogues; undigested data without pattern or context or meaning—“as if the main object were to talk fast and not talk sensibly.” Or people around us, not paying attention to the evidence of their experience, unconsciously in the grip of beliefs that they have never personally questioned or tested: Thoreau’s farmer condemning vegetarianism even as the vital oxen who unfailingly plough his fields are themselves… vegetarian. Finally, all the do-gooders in our world, unconsciously in the grip of the belief that they themselves are not embroiled in the injustice that they try to ease, that they are strong while others are weak—and so through their do-gooding, they administer band-aids and aspirin, never realizing that far more is needed, radical change needed, the kind of change we need today, for example, in health care. Hardship, in the economy of our time as well as in Thoreau’s, and so no wonder the first chapter of Walden is full of sharp social critique and satire, pages howling with anger and pain. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he cries. “From the desperate city you go to the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.” In other words, to bolster your courage, you’ll have to rely on the example of furry little animals, because human examples are simply hard to come by. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” says Thoreau, “and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”

There has got to be a better way. A better way of maintaining ourselves upon this earth. In fact, that’s the core of the problem right there. People don’t think that alternatives exist. “They honestly think that there is no choice left. But,” says Thoreau, “alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” “Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.” “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” All of these, golden lines of hope. Alternatives do exist, and we can find them. But we must put ourselves out there, in some liminal, in-between space, where creative solutions can find us. Let that be our self-culture practice. We have to borrow Thoreau’s genius, which is a very crooked one, and risk being misunderstood by our family and our peers, risk harm to our reputation. Shift the nature of our business, towards trying to hear what the wind is saying.

This is what led Thoreau to borrow an axe and begin his social experiment of one at Walden Pond. To see if his humanity could be recovered from the machine-like schedule of his days. To escape the tyranny of a consumeristic culture, and peel away all artificial wants to get down to essential needs. To discover what is worth communicating—to write out his heart and soul. To test his beliefs and see which ones actually reflect and extend his real experience. Not to be a reactive do-gooder, but to better understand the evils and problems of our world—distinguish roots from branches—and attack the roots, take his axe and chop at that. “It would be of some advantage,” he says, “to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods are used to obtain them. […] For the improvements of the ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.” Thoreau goes to Walden to return to essentials, and to sanity. He is a Transcendentalist.

Now I will tell you plainly that the first time I picked up Walden, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. I was in the eighth grade, and I had heard that the book was a classic. Being a student in the gifted and talented program at my school—being a future member of my high school’s I. Q. Booster Club—how could I not want to check it out? I found it in paperback, there on a dark dusty wooden shelf, wedged in tightly among other classics. The cover was not promising—had a weird-looking guy on it with a neck beard. Did he just forget to shave his neck? What’s up with that? I flipped through the pages: tiny print, no picture. Uuugh. Then I started to read. Sentences that had way too many phrases and commas in them, each like long tangled thread. References to Greek and Roman mythology, world religions, science; allusions to stuff I could only vaguely sense. Now, I know that Thoreau is like a contemporary Unitarian Universalist preacher in that he builds the nest of his thought from many sources of insight and wisdom; now, I know that he loved puns and paradox and wordplay, enough to drive his friend and mentor Emerson crazy; now, I know he believed that “in writing, conversation should be folded many times thick.” Now, I know—but then, not at all. Walden was indigestible. I struggled with it for a time, and then gave up.

Now I am in a different place in my life. Perhaps more mature; perhaps more able to navigate his conversation folded many times thick. Definitely hungering for an alternative to the quiet desperation that is contemporary life. And voluntary simplicity as a spiritual discipline sounds very good to me. To what degree does our genuine happiness and wellbeing depend on the clothing we wear, the shelter we possess, the food we eat, the work we do. Is there a way to “get one’s living honestly, with freedom left to pursue one’s proper pursuits”? “The more you have,” says Thoreau, “the poorer you are.” We don’t own our things; our things (or our debts) own us. Simplicity preserves an ability to journey freely through life; but a richness of things weighs us down, puts the cart before the horse, distorts and distracts, “cooks us a la mode.”

At times Thoreau is tongue-in-cheek hilarious as he figures out how to live his voluntary poverty principle. “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk,” he says, “but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”

Or this story: “A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best,” Thoreau concludes,” to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

And can you imagine being his friend? “I sometimes try my acquaintances,” he says, “by such tests as this;–who could wear a patch … over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.” Is he right? Is this true? Are we so completely enslaved to keeping up appearances, when in reality all that matters is the inner person, the goodness of a heart, the clarity of a mind, the depth of a spirit?

Applying the voluntary simplicity principle in a consumeristic culture like ours seems hardly possible. Yet I wonder at the effects of at least trying. Reminds me of another story that Thoreau tells, about his axe: “One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.” That’s the story. We are the snake in its torpid state. Yet there is a spring of springs that can arouse us, and raise us up to a higher and more ethereal life.

Above all, this higher life is one of trust. “I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do,” he says. “Nature is well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well night incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do: and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith is we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert….” Perhaps the root of all evil is none other than this—our pride—and to it, we must take the axe of voluntary simplicity. Greater than anything we can do or any thing we can own is the world’s graciousness, its simple things; we can trust that life is worth living, no matter what.

This is what the first chapter of Walden is all about. Describes nothing less than a hero journey in the economy of life, picks up huge themes like suffering, the quest for healing, discovery, renewal. Thoreau’s unique angle of vision on all this is what we borrow, as we begin. I’ll close with a poem by Norah Pollard that puts it all in perfect and precise cameo:

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

On Religion: Dan Brown Has It Wrong

Like some (or perhaps even many) of you, I’m reading Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol. It’s a great read, no doubt about it. But early on, there’s this one part that really bugs me. It’s on page 30, where one of Professor Langdon’s Harvard undergraduates wonders whether Masonry is a religion. “Give it the litmus test,” says Langdon. “What are the three prerequisites for an ideology to be considered a religion?” An alert student answers, “ABC. Assure, Believe, Convert.” “Correct,” Langdon replies. “Religions assure salvation; religions believe in a precise theology; and religions convert nonbelievers.”

This is the part that bugs me. A bajillion people are going to read Dan Brown’s thriller, and most of them will swallow his definition of religion—which is a bad one—without blinking an eye. According to his definition, liberal Christianity is not a religion. Neither is Judaism, Taoism, or Unitarian Universalism. None follow the ABC formula.

But if ABC doesn’t describe Unitarian Universalism, what does?

For me, the better formula is EMC. Unitarian Universalism envisions a transformed world; Unitarian Universalism maps the way there; and Unitarian Universalism challenges people to be inner-directed and authentic in their spirituality. EMC.

Take E. Our religion envisions a future in which people respect the interdependent web of all existence as well as the inherent worth and dignity of every person that dwells within it. Our religion envisions the spread of faith communities which support a free and responsible search for truth and meaning in an empowering context of mutual acceptance and encouragement. Our religion envisions world community, grounded in democracy, in which there is peace, liberty, and justice for all. All of this comprises the transformed world which Unitarian Universalism envisions.

Note how I have simply reframed the Seven Principles here. The “E” part of my EMC formula touches on things we are already familiar with. And so does the “M” part. “M” maps out the way forward by naming specific spiritual disciplines which, if practiced regularly, will enable us to help make Unitarian Universalism’s inspired, future oriented-vision come true. These spiritual disciplines include worship, study, service, generosity, life in covenant-centered community, and inner-development practices like prayer or meditation. Each of these is an integral part of the map.

E, M, and, finally, C. “C” stands for “challenge”: Unitarian Universalism does not so much convert as challenge. It challenges people to face up to the fact that our transformed vision of the world is not guaranteed; we must work hard to make it so. It challenges people to be willing to grow and change over time, even if it takes us into places of chaos and messiness and grief. It challenges us to trust life and have faith that it is worth living, even in the worst of times. It challenges us to reject parroting other people’s religious ideas and to be authentic and inner-directed in what we believe and value. It challenges us to connect with the Divine Spark that is within each and all and, out of this experience of wonder and awe, to heal our world and make it whole.

This is the formula that describes our faith. Not ABC, but EMC. And do you see how closely it resembles Einstein’s famous equation: E=MC2? I think there’s an intriguing suggestion here. In our Unitarian Universalist way of religion, there is power. Dan Brown may not know it. Let’s be sure we do.

Only That Day Dawns to Which We Are Awake

“From the east comes the sun, bringing a new and unspoiled day.” So begins our responsive reading from a moment ago, by Universalist minister Clinton Lee Scott. The sun, which “has already circled the earth and looked upon distant lands and far-away peoples. It has passed over mountain ranges; it has shone upon laborers; it has beheld proud cities; it has been witness to both good and evil; it has seen.”

And what has it seen, recently?

It has seen a world in transformation because of technological innovations of the past 20 years, like the Internet, digital media, and wireless networks. Hyperconnectivity is now a way of life: the constant chatter of the Net, planetary monkey mind, videos going viral. Bad and good mixed together: smallest personal actions tracked by giant marketing and homeland security databases; but then you have Twitter posts crying foul during the recent Iranian elections, escaping all censoring by an oppressive government, gathering and galvanizing protesters for action.

The sun has seen. This too: following on the heels of rampant greed and speculation, a worldwide recession, the worst in recent memory, a domino effect of one country after another finding itself struggling with factory closures, job losses, credit crunches, Wall Street impacting and being impacted by markets thousands of miles away. Here in Atlanta, even as the larger economy improves, budgets are still tight at home, almost 10% unemployment on our streets.

The sun has seen. This as well: an arguably illegal war in Iraq, more than six years old, run poorly, with unacceptable human and financial costs, sparking more thirst for terror rather than dampening it. Though now, with the end of this war in sight, the focus shifts to the even older war in Afghanistan and its uncertain prospects. Our President juggling way too many balls right now, and this is a big one.

The sun has seen. So much to be seen. The justice principle of affordable health care for all, alive in most economically advanced countries in the world, struggling to live here in America, facing the meat-grinder of politics. Scare tactics and misinformation all over the place. Charges of “death panels.” Charges of socialism coming out of the mouths of town hall protesters, or worse. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” yells the person who doesn’t seem to realize that Medicare is a government program—a government-run, taxpayer-funded, single-payer health insurance program. Anger and despair all over. Can’t help but wonder: is politics broken? Affordable health care for all was first proposed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912—and it’s still not a done deal.

All this, the sun has seen. All of it and more. Yet, says Clinton Lee Scott, it is not overwhelmed. “Now, unsullied from its tireless journey, it comes to us, messenger of the morning, harbinger of a new day.” And really, the profound and essential question facing us is: can we join the sun in its new morning? Can we rise with it, receive its message of a new dawn? Do we believe that there can be a new morning for us in this world, despite all? Do we believe there can be a new morning in America?

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” This is a line from Henry David Thoreau. Unless the sleeper wakes up, there can be no morning, just perpetual midnight. Unless the sleeper awakens to the abundant truths and powers of the soul. Truths and powers each and every one of us is born with, establishing our freedom to respond to the trials of life with courage and creativity and generosity. Enabling us to be free in our minds and hearts even if we find ourselves surrounded with unfreedom on all sides. Empowering us to be heroes in an unheroic age. There is a dawning day that we can experience here and now—we can join the sun in its new morning—but only if we awaken to it. Only if the sleeper wakes up.

This is Transcendentalism. This is the vision that inspired our 19th century spiritual ancestors like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, and more. The sun that rises every morning symbolizing the sun within. If we can wake up to that, our lives will be transformed. And so will the world. Personal growth and social justice just two sides of the same coin of spirituality. This is Transcendentalism.

It’s a message that is as vital now as it ever was. Transcendentalism is uniquely Unitarian Universalist—it came from our people and our tradition—and we need to be giving this treasure to ourselves and to the larger world. We need to be good stewards of this. Lots of ways of breaking through with generosity, and this is a crucial one. That’s why we’re going to be focusing on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden during this year’s First Sunday services. Live with this classic of Transcendentalist spirituality all year long. Let it enter into us and change us. See where it takes us. Allow ourselves to be surprised.

So we begin. A good start is to consider what the sun in the days of the original Transcendentalists saw, as it shone specifically upon the place and time in which they lived: New England in the 1830s and 1840s—Boston and the surrounding area, especially Concord. What did the sun see?

For one thing, radical change. Before 1830, everything had been primarily local, from one’s sense of identity to working conditions and the manufacture of goods. It took time for messages to go from point A to point B. It took time to get anywhere. But this all came to an end. The invention of the telegraph allowed for news to cross far distances instantly. Then there was the railroad, newly built tracks crisscrossing the land, bringing with it a new sense of national identity. Also new economic opportunity, allowing sons and daughters to leave home to find wage-earning jobs in the cities or in the also new textile mills of New England. Leading to the transient population in cities rising at an alarming rate. Unregulated working conditions becoming worse and worse, even as more and more money was being made. Old ways lost, one by one. Old traditions and comforts and securities. Sons and daughters no longer automatically doing what their parents had done before them, and their parents before them. Radical change in every sphere of life. Bad and good consequences all mixed together.

This is what the sun saw in its journey in the 1830s and 1840s. Also this: economic meltdown. Robert Sullivan, author of the recent book The Thoreau You Don’t Know, says that “To imagine Thoreau and his writing without considering the economy is a little like thinking about The Grapes of Wrath without considering the Great Depression.” Prior to 1837, the stock market had been roaring with speculation; government had expanded the money supply, had expanded credit and loans. But the bubble popped. Said a Unitarian minister at the time, “We were in the midst of peace, apparent prosperity, and progress when, after extensive individual failures, the astounding truth burst upon us like a thunderbolt … that we were a nation of bankrupts, and a bankrupt nation.” Economics, as you can imagine, was on everyone’s mind. Just remember this when you start reading Walden for November’s sermon: the first chapter—the longest of them all—is entitled, “Economy.”

See where I’m going here? The Transcendentalists lived in a time that echoes our time with almost eerie precision. A world in transformation, economic meltdown, and also this: an illegal war. Influential writers and politicians in the 1840s believed in what they called America’s “manifest destiny,” which was (quote) “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” They were hungry for more land—land that could expand slavery in the South, mind you—and it just so happened that Mexico was struggling to maintain control of one of its territories, called Texas. Exactly the kind of situation people believing in manifest destiny wanted to take advantage of. And they did. On May 11, 1846, President James K. Polk claimed that Mexican forces had attacked American troops in United States territory, and this meant war. However, it was not true; a certain young and lanky politician from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln objected by saying, “Show me the spot!” Another politician from Georgia, Robert Toombs, cried out, “This war is nondescript…. We charge the President with usurping the war-making power… with seizing a country [namely, Texas]… which had been for centuries, and was then in the possession of the Mexicans…. Let us put a check upon this lust of dominion.” That’s what Robert Toombs said. The war was illegal, a shameless land grab.

And underlying it all was the travesty of slavery. The strangest bedfellow to the moral vision of nothing less than the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet what the sun saw in the time of the Transcendentalists was the very country we declared independence from—England—abolishing slavery in all her colonies in 1834. England, living out our expressed moral vision, while America was fighting an illegal war in order to expand slavery. America, hypocritical, not at the forefront of social change, but internally conflicted, confused, falling behind.

The times were troubling and overwhelming. Radical change, economic meltdown, illegal war, inability to live out the American moral vision of justice for all. And here is what the Transcendentalists thought: all were symptoms of spiritual and moral sleepwalking or, at the very least, not effectively solved when people are in the sleepwalking state. Albert Einstein spoke like a true Transcendentalist when he said, “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” Absolutely. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

Listen to a passage from the founding document of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, published in 1836: “[A man—and by this he means everyone] works in the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by penny wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne.” In other words, people can’t become fully human if they don’t expand their minds. If the only thing that’s real for you is surfaces; if the only way you know how to relate to the world is as something to be materially manipulated and used, sold, bought, and traded, then there will never be an end to economic meltdowns, illegal wars, and hypocritical travesties of justice—and forget about weathering the storms of radical change. You—a birthright king—will remain banished. The kingdom is rightfully yours, yet, absurdly, you think you must buy it back inch by inch. Stay locked within what Emerson calls “penny wisdom,” and that will be your fate.

And it is tragic, because so much more is possible. Besides “penny wisdom,” there is another capacity of mind: an intuitive, holistic capacity—very different. Turn it on, and at once, we vault to the throne that is our birthright. The world in our eyes becomes transformed into a place of beauty and possibility; subtle patterns of meaning step forward and we are amazed; we discover an inner freedom and peace that no external adversity can shake; we realize the difference between the ways and laws of our society and the higher law of conscience. “Crossing a bare common,” says Emerson, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perennial youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel nothing can befall me in life,– no disgrace, no calamity … which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,– all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” That is what Emerson says. Emerson has vaulted straight to his throne, and we can as well. But only if we open up to the world in a way that’s very different from “penny wisdom.” Only if we expand our minds.

In other words: “self-culture.” That’s the phase that Transcendentalists used to describe the work of waking up, and becoming fully human. Thoreau himself started on this work soon after he checked Nature out of the library at Harvard College in April of 1837, the year he graduated. Emerson’s message was received. Thoreau himself would put things like this: “Our limbs indeed have room enough but it is our souls that rust in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon.”

But how exactly do we do that—“migrate interiorly”? Given what we have already heard from Emerson—given what we already know about Thoreau—it should come as no surprise that one main answer is to submerge ourselves in nature. Stop dissecting it and start listening. Allow it to reveal to us the depths of our own souls. The Transcendentalists believed that the interdependent web of all existence is not merely a fine-tuned fitting-together of external processes and parts; nature literally has soul, and this soul speaks to the soul of humanity. This is exactly why Thoreau could say, “I feel that I draw nearest to understanding the great secret of my life in my closest intercourse with nature.” Nature is externalized mind; and mind internalized nature. Here is the truest Bible; written ones can only take a person so far. The fullest revelation of human nature is to be found in … nature.

Other self-culture practices included small group conversations, in which people could share and integrate their discoveries in nature—put the pieces together, see what was implied about their sense of self and identity, their relationships, and larger social conditions. Disciplined conversation, journal writing, walking, leisure that allows the soul to speak, and lots and lots of reading. You’ll never meet a bunch of mystics who read so much. Then there were the social experiments in enlightened living. Brook Farm comes to mind: a cooperative community consisting of teachers, students, and workers engaged in the labor of farming together with the labor of self-culture. Then there was Thoreau’s own social experiment of one: his time at Walden, lasting two years and two months.

“We must live in the present,” said Thoreau, “launch ourselves on every wave, find our eternity in each moment.” “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.” The call is to enlightened individualism. But we do the Transcendentalists a severe injustice if we mistake all this as selfishness—as an every-man-for-himself mentality—as either withdrawal from community to live in isolation, or puffing oneself up and feeling entitled to impose one’s ideas (or should I say eccentricities) upon others. Our congregations have directly suffered from such misunderstandings, as when people think that they can be perfectly fine Unitarian Universalists all by themselves, or when they are so impressed by their own brilliance that they forget to listen when others have something to say—or they simply forget to be decent. But Transcendentalist self-culture, at its best, is about self-rule and transformative human relationships; it’s about becoming free in your heart and spirit so you can help spread freedom in the larger world. Walden Pond was just on the edge of Concord, after all; just a stone’s throw away. And Thoreau went there not to repudiate society once and for all but to learn how to be in society in healthier ways.

The times were challenging, then as now. From time immemorial, the sun has circled the earth, looked upon distant lands, passed over mountain ranges, shone over laborers, beheld proud cities, witnessed both good and evil. Now, unsullied from its tireless journey, it comes to us, messenger of the morning. Let’s join it in its rise, help create a new morning in this world. Continue as never before the work of self-culture in our little corner of the universe. Learn how to transcend “penny wisdom” so we can be healed and made whole. Transcendentalism is our home-grown Unitarian Universalist spirituality that shows us how.

The Cathedral of the World

“The world has need of your theology,” said prominent Harvard theologian Diana Eck last year to one of our sister congregations in New York City. “In a world divided by race, and by religion and ideology, the very presence of a church like yours—committed to the oneness of God, the love of God, the love of neighbor, and service to humanity—is a beacon. Be bold in proclaiming it!” That’s what Diana Eck said.

But before boldness of proclamation, there must be a boldness of inner vision, of imagination. So this morning, I invite you to imagine boldly, along with me, this faith tradition, this religious movement, that the world needs. Imagine with me an image or series of images that captures our story, expresses it, telegraphs who we are and what we stand for.

For me, the boldness begins with a feeling of spaciousness, of size. I see in my mind’s eye blue sky, a bright sun, and a BIG building. Not a superdome or megamall—the values those kinds of architecture imply don’t fit. What comes to mind are the great structures of our religious past—Angkor Wat, the vast ancient Hindu temple complex in Cambodia; or Islam’s Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; or Chartres Cathedral in Paris. Architecture that serves to embody spiritual aspiration in stone and wood and glass. Spaciousness and size…..

And at this point I find myself particularly taken with the image of cathedral, so I’m going to follow up with it, trust my imagination to take me where I need to go. Unitarian Universalism is like a great massive cathedral—a cathedral of the world.

But now my inner imaginative eye—like a movie camera—swoops down and gives me a close up of the foundation of it all. I see, at the base of the cathedral, in the ground, twin foundation stones, ancient, upon which all the rest is built. Twin foundation stones: one representing Unitarianism, and the other representing Universalism.

The Unitarian stone has a date carved into it: 325AD. It represents an idea that is a lot older, but 325 AD is when it gained a definite kind of historical notoriety. The idea says that Jesus is not equal to God—Jesus is not God—God is one. Classical Unitarianism. And in 325AD, it was formally declared heretical. One of the foundation stones of the entire cathedral of the world edifice embodies … heresy.

And so does the other. Carved into it is the date 544AD, when the Universalist idea was declared heretical: the idea that God will gather up all beings into himself; no one shall be lost in hell for all time. Believe that, said the orthodox of the time, and your soul is eternally condemned.

Now pause here for a moment. This is our Unitarian Universalist cathedral of the world we are talking about, and look at how it begins: in heresy. And already we know the risks, at least theologically: our souls condemned, so say the orthodox. But there are political risks as well, since theology and politics unarguably reflect and form each other (even where there is separation of church and state). 1500 years ago, for example, to stake your claim on Unitarianism was, in essence, to reject the absolute God-ordained lordship of the emperor. Not a convenient thing to do back then when the emperor claimed his rule WAS God-ordained. In order to solidify this, in fact, he gathered up all the most important religious leaders of his day by sheer military might and charged them with defining the articles of proper Christian belief—doing this once and for all. But the religious leaders ended up dickering and dithering and multiplying distinctions and tiny differences—clarity was not happening—so the emperor essentially had to threaten them by the sword to get their act together and vote like he wanted them to: against Unitarianism and for Trinitarianism. History calls this the Council of Nicea.

Being a heretic is neither convenient nor safe. But our cathedral of the world is not built on foundations of convenience. Heresy in its most positive sense means to choose. It means to think and act on the basis of one’s personal integrity, no matter what. It is courage. That’s what our twin foundation stones say about us, who we are as a people of faith. We must never forget this. Our faith was never meant to be easy.

But now it is time to enter into the cathedral. We pass the foundation stones as we walk through massive double-doors and into a vast space. We lift up our eyes to see amazing stained glass, through which light streams and illuminates. Can you see it, in your mind’s eye?

The first piece of stained glass our eyes rest on portrays Jesus. It reminds us that Unitarianism and Universalism are ultimately responses to experiences people had of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Once he said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it in abundance,” and this is the gospel that launched us as well as so many other communities of faith, though through the long years there has been a branching effect, differences and distinctions multiplied in ways that no emperor could prevent for long, until today, one group’s definition of Christianity might be the exact opposite of another’s. As Unitarian Universalists, sometimes we grow anxious at our seeming inability to define ourselves in a once-and-for-all sort of way. But it is good to be reminded by the example of Christianity that the task of definition is hard all-around. There is no other side of the fence where the grass is greener. Even the most dogmatic, hard-line faiths have to work hard to keep their people straight.

But that’s another sermon. For now, we are gazing on and appreciating the great teacher and prophet, Jesus. Yet this is the cathedral or the world, and the wisdom we have to offer does not stop with Christianity. Today we are a more-than-Christian, post-Christian faith. Look just to the left, and you will see light streaming through a stained glass window that portrays the Buddha—perhaps that part of his life when he experiences illumination sitting at the base of a bo tree. Light shining through this, and through so many other stained glass windows. Moses with his Ten Commandments; Lao Tzu walking in remote misty mountains; Gandhi at his spinning wheel; Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. preaching “I have a dream.” Light shining and streaming through. We look up, and what we see is breathtaking. One light, many windows. Windows of the world’s great religions. Windows of prophetic women and men. Windows of science. Windows of humanism. Windows of earth-based spirituality. Windows of mysticism. Many windows, but one shining, streaming light of truth and meaning….

We have come a long way since the earliest Jesus communities of first century Palestine, or our moments of heresy in the fourth and sixth centuries. We’ve come a long way even since the 19th century, when American Unitarianism and American Universalism were Bible-centered and exclusively Christian.

And while there are many causes I could cite for this—for our expansion into a pluralistic faith—I will ask you simply to gaze upon yet another stained glass window in our cathedral of the world. There it is: it portrays the great Unitarian preacher and prophet of Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Live after the infinite Law that is in you,” he once said, “and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms.” Revelation, in other words, can’t possibly be contained just within the Hebrew or Christian Bible. The wellspring is fundamentally within each of our souls; revelation bubbles up out of the spark of the Divine in our depths. Add to this the revelation of nature, as well as the revelation embodied by the Bibles of many times and lands, such as Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita. The one light of truth is abundant; no single stained-glass window may ever contain it or control it. One light but many, many windows.

So our job, says Emerson, is to live in the light. Let the light that comes to us through so many windows of truth and wisdom go deep and awaken the sleeping source of light within. Let sleeping heretics awaken, to choose with integrity and with courage what they shall believe about God and the afterlife and ethics and so many other things. Let sleeping heretics awaken and know their hidden powers for healing and action and compassion. Said Emerson in 1836, “Our age is retrospective. It builds on the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? […] There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” In our cathedral of the world, there are already many stained glass windows, yet larger still is the space awaiting what is new. Your window, my window. Revelation is not ended. Revelation is not sealed. The journey never ends.

Yet at this point I need to acknowledge something. So far, we have seen that today’s Unitarian Universalism invites us on a great adventure of light. One light, many windows. Yet that is not all there is to our lives. And that’s not all there is in our cathedral of the world. For in our cathedral, there are plenty of shadows as well.

To understand what I mean, we need to learn a little more about Emerson’s life. Emerson’s father was a traditional minister who never blessed him. His first wife Ellen, who believed in him, who was his rock, died young … and death repeatedly struck his brothers and his own children. The man who wrote, “Hitch your wagon to a star” and “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” also wrote, “after thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning.” And then from his student days at Harvard: right in the middle of an essay he was writing about God, struggling with what those three little letters strung together refer to—his eyes failed him and he was able to see no light at all. Only after two surgeries and nine months of recuperation was he able to go back to wrestling with his theological studies.

If ever there was a man who loved light, it was Emerson. Yet the light never comes unmixed. Adversity is a part and parcel of the human condition. Shadow parts in ourselves and in our relationships lead to self-destructiveness and addictions and bad habits of every kind. Shadow parts in society and the larger world lead to structural poverty and prejudice and war. The light never comes unmixed.

Life is a great mystery. Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church puts it this way: “By the time we die, we will barely have gotten our minds wet. The wisest of us all will have but the faintest notion of what life was all about.” He goes on to say: “This counsels humility, but also oneness. … My favorite etymology speaks eloquently to this very point. Human, humane, humanitarian, humor, humility, humus.”

For me, what all of this leads to is my sense of the Unitarian Universalist religious journey as NOT a quest for certainty—NOT a quest for perfection in the here and now—but a quest for greater trust in the meaningfulness and worth of life, no matter where it leads. I need the abundance of light that streams and shines through the many windows of our cathedral of the world to encourage me, to strengthen me. I need it to waken the sleeping light within, as well, so that the abundance within me can be released. So that I can be a messenger of hope and humor to others, a messenger of compassion and peace. We live in a world that is so often unfair, and joy is weirdly and jarringly juxtaposed with every kind of woe. Randomness and senselessness and sorrow strike. Life can place so many limits on us. But there are no limits that can be placed on our human capacity to respond with courage and grace and forgiveness. There are no limits to this. Our greatest prophets and saints prove the point. Jesus. The Buddha. No limits to the abundance of the human heart to be generous in times of anxiety and fear. No limits to clarity or compassion. None.

Our cathedral of the world is all about abundance. Abundant choice, abundant light, abundant mystery, abundant capacity to respond to life with limitless love. “I have come that you might have life, and have it in abundance.”

But there is one more thing to notice, before we are done with this bold imaginative vision of who we are as a religious people—the vision we can proclaim boldly in the world. We have been looking up at the stained glass windows for a long time now, so now let’s look down at the floor. What we see is a Latin phrase: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

To me, this suggests how we see ourselves as a community of gathered seekers. It’s wonderfully infused by core American values which have themselves been shaped and formed by key Unitarian and Universalist leaders. The author of these words, for example: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Words from the Declaration of Independence—written by Thomas Jefferson, Unitarian. It’s why our community affirms the inherent worth and dignity of each person. Why our community affirms the spirituality of the work of social justice to defend human dignity and restore it when others threaten to take it away. It’s why our community affirms open conversation in the context of supportive community. It’s why we affirm each individual journey of faith because we know that the Creator has a creative connection with each and every person here and now. This is the floor upon which we stand—the covenant that unites us and makes us whole. We need not think alike to love alike.

Consider another distinctly American phrase that resonates with us: “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Here is the classic definition of democracy, which Abraham Lincoln famously used in his Gettysburg Address. But it’s not original with him. He got it from Theodore Parker, one of our best Unitarian preachers in the 19th century, whose services would gather literally thousands of people—he was a megachurch preacher and didn’t know it. “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” It means that through our gathered generosity of presence and service and witness and giving, we can become great. We each get a vote in this community, in some form or fashion, and to the degree that we vote, we are vital and strong. It’s good old American enterprise: You get only as much as you put in. Vote with your time and energy, because without you, this community cannot be strong. Vote with your presence. Vote with your volunteerism. Vote with your financial generosity. Don’t be fooled by all the people you see, thinking that someone else will do it so you don’t have to. Don’t think that no one will miss your single vote, since there are so many others. American democracy can’t survive such apathy, since it inevitably builds and steamrolls; and we can’t survive it here, in our Unitarian Universalist spiritual democracy. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” means everyone involved in some way, everyone informed, because everyone has a vital stake in the outcome.

The building of our cathedral of the world never ends. It needs every one of us. But it is worth it. It is bold. It symbolizes a religion which essentially says: abundance. Abundance of choice, abundance of light, abundance of mystery, abundance of humanity, abundance of involvement and enterprise in building community. The challenge for us, ultimately, is this: how shall we live in this abundance? Will we allow it to change us? Will we let it sink it, transform us from within?

Though the foundation stones are ancient, still, Unitarian Universalism itself is only a baby faith, born with the formal consolidation of Unitarianism and Universalism in the 20th century, in 1961. A new thing came to life in that year, different from anything that had ever been before. And I believe that we live in a unique moment of time, where congregations like this one can make a huge impact on the shape of our movement and its future. We need to give ourselves to the abundance of this faith and let it inspire us, create out of it. Back in 1836, Emerson asked, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? […] There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” Why not? Why not, here at UUCA? Let us imagine our faith boldly, and then proclaim it boldly—this faith that the world needs.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m indebted to the Rev. Forrest Church, who is the original source of the “one light, many windows” concept, as well as the image of “the cathedral of the world.” Together with many other Unitarian Universalists around the world, I grieve his recent death and honor his leadership in our movement.

Protesting Police Harassment of Atlanta’s GBLT Community

On September 10th, the Atlanta Police Department raided a well known gay bar, The Atlanta Eagle, and all 62 patrons were forced to lay down on the ground, be searched, and have their IDs run. Not a single patron was arrested for any charge, despite the 3 paddy wagons the APD brought with them. The Atlanta community responded with a rally to show support. I and about thirty members from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta took part.

Here’s a video of my comments at the rally:

Here are my essential comments:

My name is Rev. Anthony David. I am a pastor of a local congregation, and I want to tell you, I am proud to be here today. I am proud to serve the gay community, and I believe that the real sin here is not homosexuality, but homophobia. Homophobia is the sin, not homosexuality.

My congregation is the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, and I’d like to hear a shout out from fellow congregants who are here with me today. And if we have other Unitarian Universalists from other local congregations, I want to hear a shout out from you. And you know, we’re not the only faith community out there for which homophobia is a sin, and I want to hear a shout out from people of other faith communities who are here standing with us. I love it!

There are several points I’d like to make. One is that the police should protect the Constitutional rights of Atlanta’s residents, not violate them. When Atlanta treats people as second-class citizens, that is not right. Trust is violated, and that is tragic. We need our police, absolutely, but not in this way, not in the way that they treated people several days ago. We need our police, but not in this way. A lot of trust has been violated and a lot of reform is necessary to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.

Another point that comes to mind: Unitarian Universalists and many other people of faith believe (as I said earlier) that homophobia is the sin, not homosexuality. What is wrong is not lawful expressions of sexuality that come from mature, responsible adults. What is wrong is not the sexual identity that people are born into, who they are. What’s wrong is harassment, police or otherwise. What’s wrong is anti-gay and racist comments, profanity yelled at innocent people, people forced to lay down on the floor while handcuffed for more than an hour. This is America, this is 2009!

My last point. Unitarian Universalists and many other people of faith stand on the side of love with the BGLT community whose humanity and Constitutional rights are too often denied. We have got to stand up, we have got to unite. If it happens here, it can happen anywhere. We need to stand up and do something about this.

On Repelling Fewer People: Reflections on Multiculturalism and More

During this year’s Ministry Days and General Assembly, the trend toward multiculturalism in American society came up repeatedly—most notably in Paul Rasor’s Berry Street Lecture and UUA President Peter Morales’ campaign speeches.

Paul Rasor asks, “Is our brand of religious liberalism fatally linked to a demographic that’s fading?” In 2042, projections indicate that white people will compose only 50.8% of the population. Will we still be a faith community that is 90% white, as we are today and as we have been for the past 10 years, even after all the proactive antiracism, multiculturalism work of leaders in our denomination? “We face a major turning point: will we stand, or will we move?”

Echoing this, President Morales says, “One of our problems is we have a faith with enormous appeal, but we need to stop packaging it in Yankee culture.” We need “a new faith for a new America.”

Our congregational culture proves to be a barrier to many people who would otherwise love to be a part of us because they love what we love: the promise of personal and social transformation through free religion. Of what does this culture consist? From comments shared by Rosemary Bray McNatt, following on the heels of Paul Rasor’s lecture, this culture is a matter of aesthetic and lifestyle preferences: “We don’t own TVs, don’t like gospel and pop music and definitely don’t like rap, are unapologetic nature lovers, eat locally, say NO to shopping at Wal Mart, listen to NPR, love Garrison Keillor, read ahead in the hymnal to see if we agree with the words we are about to sing.” But, says Rosemary, “how does this allow us to encounter people whose experience of church is different? What’s their entry point into our congregations?”

I can personally attest to this. As Lead Minister of the Pathways Church project (the initial “rapid-start large church”) from 2003-2007, I was given this marching order: think outside of the Unitarian Universalist box, explore ways in which non-UU churches attract people by the thousands, and then, through trial-and error, create a church that integrates these dynamic elements. Build a new kind of Unitarian Universalist church for a new day, one that is at its core UU even as, on the surface, it might look and feel very different from what UUs are used to.

I can personally attest to what Paul, Peter, and Rosemary are getting at because the people who resisted this the most and gave me the most trouble were existing Unitarian Universalists. By contrast, people who had never heard of Unitarian Universalism before and found us (or we found them) were delighted, excited, on board and wanting more. But not existing UUs. Part of this definitely related to worship style. At Pathways, we modeled our worship after the intense, full-immersion worship favored by many evangelical and non-denominational congregations. Our music was primarily popular—one time we even did some rap—and it proved to be the golden thread that ran throughout our services, at times joyfully energizing us while, at other times, taking us to sweet silent places of prayer and reflection. Our services also appealed to multiple-learning styles in that they featured visual, dramatic, and kinesthetic components. I will never forget after one of our first services, how a 75 year-old-woman came up to me and said that it was the best worship she had ever experienced in her life. She loved the music. She loved the slice-of-life dramas. She loved the multimedia. The lesson is clear: it’s absolutely false to say that only youth and young adults prefer contemporary worship. Many people in this world hunger after worship that helps them connect with energy and joy in the idiom of contemporary American life. Many people, that is, who are not already Unitarian Universalist. I can’t tell you how many times I was “pecked to death” by people who came to us from other Unitarian Universalist congregations—people whose sense of what is proper for UU culture was mortally offended by what they were experiencing in our pews. They smelled white trash, and they sneered.

Pathways definitely taught me that Unitarian Universalism, as it is practiced in most if not all of our congregations, is an ethnic religion with cultural norms. Violate the norms, and you are in trouble. Free religion only in mind but not where freedom most fully and truly resides: in the heart and in the body.

And yet…. Even as I can personally relate to what Paul and Peter and Rosemary are saying, I feel that there are other, more significant obstacles to people entering into our faith (and staying). I am particularly struck by how all such obstacles tend to remain generally unspoken, unsaid, and unacknowledged.

One of these unspoken obstacles came to light for me during the opening events at General Assembly. During the opening plenary, outgoing UUA President Bill Sinkford reviewed the highlights of his administration’s achievements, and part of this included a recitation of injustice after injustice in the world, which he enjoined the Unitarian Universalist community to address. Then, during the opening worship that followed, he spoke of truth and reconciliation and formally apologized to representatives of local Indian tribes for what we did in the 19th century: our complicity (however ineffective) in the U. S. government’s initiative to “civilize” the indigenous tribes of Utah and elsewhere. By no means do I think that such an apology was unnecessary. By no means do I think that the evils of the world should go unchecked. Yet the whole thing, from first to last, was so solemn, so earnest, so suggestive of … overfunctioning. I sensed behind it all a larger pattern—a troubling pattern—which I will call “the Unitarian Universalist superego.”

Historically, our UU superego can be traced back to our Boston Brahmin forbearers, though the form it takes today reflects great distance from those social movers and shakers and the transformation of many years. Now it is a moralism that combines masochism with workaholism. Every evil in the world becomes our problem—its very existence suggests some kind of collaboration on our part, unwitting if not witting. And since we are interrupted Calvinists who have rejected the guilt-discharging techniques of our ancient ancestors without replacing them with anything else, the sense of guilt just builds and builds. Can’t get away from it. Our backs ache from the accumulated weight. We have become guilt-grubbers. We look for ways to kick ourselves.

The UU superego is into masochism, and it is into workaholism. We must be overachievers, in the lead attacking every social ill. Theologically, it’s not enough to become familiar with one world religious tradition—we’ve got to know them all, in addition to every liberal art and every science. Our dreams have got to be the biggest. And if we are going to do “diversity,” well, then, we’re gonna do Noah’s Ark diversity. We’re gonna gather two of every possible kind within our walls—we’re going to aspire to doing something only a God could do. We are going to act like the God that most of us don’t believe in. It’s all up to us. Poet Wendell Berry says, “Not by your will is the house carried through the night,” but we don’t believe it. It’s ALL up to us. If we don’t do it, it’s not going to happen.

Now I know that I verge upon exaggeration. I know it. Yet every time I hear a key UU voice reciting a litany of all the evils in the world, together with the message that we’ve just got to DO something, I feel the weight of the Unitarian Universalist superego: the masochism, the workaholism. What a heavy burden we place upon our shoulders. What a heavy burden we place upon the shoulders of those who come to us.

Makes me wonder what Meg Barnhouse’s surly waitress would have to say to us. “In my life,” says Meg, “I have certain things to take care of: my children, my relationships, my work, myself, and one or two causes. That’s it. Other things are not my table. I would go nuts if I tried to take care of everyone, if I tried to make everybody do the right thing. If I went through my life without ever learning to say, ‘Sorry, that’s not my table, Hon,’ I would burn out and be no good to anybody. I need to have a surly waitress inside myself that I can call on when it seems that everyone in the world is waving an empty coffee cup in my direction. My Inner Waitress looks over at them, keeping her six plates balanced and her feet moving, and says, ‘Sorry, Hon, not my table.’”

We need to have a surly waitress within ourselves and within our movement, so we don’t burn out.

The next day, I went to Mark Morrison-Reed’s workshop entitled “The Perversity of Diversity.” In it, I was delighted to encounter a message that echoed my own sensibilities somewhat. It was my first GA workshop—I came there right after breakfast at the Radisson, during which I spent most of the time gulping coffee and writing cranky things in my journal. Mark shared his own thoughts about how UUism is an ethnic religion. He affirmed how, as a liberal religion, we are especially responsive to currents and trends in contemporary life, saying, “Rather than leading, we are reaping the rewards of a changing society. The growth of the black and Hispanic middle class has led to more blacks and Hispanics in our pews.” Mark also put his finger on how we assign ourselves incredibly ambitious goals and then, when (of course) we fall short, we fret, we self-flagellate. It’s moral workaholism, moral masochism: the UU superego. I know it well, since that’s exactly what the Pathways experience made perfectly clear. The ambitious and beautiful dreams that led to it; the incredible consternation and embarrassment and outrage that exploded when things did not unfold as expected and the small church did not become large instantly, as if it were some bag of microwave popcorn. As for the people who risked much to do a new thing: scant gratitude. Small thanks.

President Morales: “One of our problems is we have a faith with enormous appeal, but we need to stop packaging it in Yankee culture.” Yes. But more important is that our faith returns to a sense of genuine reverence, as defined by philosopher Paul Woodruff: “Reverence is the virtue that helps human beings from trying to act like God.” “Reverence and a keen eye for the ridiculous are allies: both keep people from being pompous or stuck up.” It’s Meg Barnhouse’s surly inner waitress, coaching us to loosen up. We can take ourselves way too seriously. We can become anti-liberal and inegalitarian in our enthusiasm. We can become overcontrolling of each other. We can nurture a sectarian spirit that makes us feel superior to all the other religionists who are working for world peace too. Perhaps if we talked more about God we would be better humanists. We would do a better job remembering our human limitations.

Of course we should aspire to bring healing and wholeness to the world. Of course we should incarnate our “many ways” theology and celebration of life in communities of vibrant diversity. Of course. But let this not become a moralistic burden, one we are lectured into by a superego that continually whispers in our ears that we are shameful. Our surly inner waitress needs to counter and silence our Unitarian Universalist surperego. Only then will we recognize what is and what is not our table.

Mostly, I’m talking about the need for an attitude adjustment. Resisting the anxious, perfectionistic impulse to clean up the messiness of the world. Savoring the world so that our impulse to save it flows out of a sense of abundance and love. Serving out of the deep knowledge that we exist in partnership with a grace-filled universe. “Not by your will is the house carried through the night,” says Wendell Berry:

The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.
In healing the scattered members come together.
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

What if, for example, this grace and this health were the focus of the opening worship at General Assembly, every year? Starting out, not by reciting an earnest litany of social evils and injustice, but by remembering and invoking the grace and the health in which we live and move and have our being? The President of the UUA, saying, “Here we all are, gathered together again, and the Spirit of Life is with us as well, within us and between us, leading us towards more strength and more healing and more peace. Let’s see where it takes us, in our time together. Let’s expect to be surprised. Let’s see where we go….”

The attitude adjustment is remembering always to serve out of a visceral sense of grace and abundance. Put this at our center, and our cultural ethos will be far more sustainable and far more encouraging. We will indeed repel fewer visitors and retain more members, but more importantly, we will be making our contribution to the healing of the world, and we will trust that, however imperfect or limited our contribution, the gracious universe will turn it into some good. It will be enough.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

There’s a story I go to in the Hebrew Bible when I’m in the midst of adversity, and I’m fighting for the meaning and way of my life. It’s in the book of Genesis, Chapter 32. It’s night, and Jacob is about to meet his brother, Esau, whom he hasn’t seen in many years. Last time he saw him, Esau said he’d kill him, for Jacob stole Esau’s birthright. “That same night,” says the Bible, “Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and an angel of God wrestled with him until daybreak. When the angel saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the angel said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’”

That’s the story. Life is full of initiatory experiences, and they are difficult like wrestling matches against adversaries as daunting as angels of God. But if we persist, we will prevail—even though in the process our hip might be put out of joint, and the rest of our days we bear a scar from the struggle that transformed us forever and blessed us and gave us a new name, a name that says who we really are. If we persist, we will prevail, and we will become more fully ourselves.

Today I want to talk about Unitarian Universalism’s wrestling match with the Bible: the struggle of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors to engage the Bible rationally, for the sake of freedom—and how this has determined to a great extent who we have been, who we are today, and who we may yet become in the future.

Start with Michael Servetus in the 16th century, facing a church doctrine like the Trinity (the idea that God is a unity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Servetus opposed it. Didn’t matter that it had been declared official doctrine way back in 325CE during the Council of Nicaea. Didn’t matter that, by openly opposing it, even mocking it, he could be burned at the stake. Servetus stood his ground, because he believed that the soul of Christianity was at stake. People hungered for bread, but they were being given stones by a church that had lost its way. People hungered for spiritual liberty, but the church was binding them to falsehood and error. The way out—the way to freedom—was to cut through all the add-ons and accretions of institutional history and go back to the Bible. Use the Bible as the sole standard for everything, and use reason (not church tradition) to discern exactly what this standard was.

This was Servetus, wrestling with the angel. For him, the Bible, interpreted by the light of reason, was the way to liberty. The doctrine of the Trinity represented corruption; but reason would expose it for what it was. And though, for all this, Servetus was burned as a heretic, his larger vision and hope carried on. For hundreds of years, into the 18th and 19th centuries, religious freethinkers and liberals followed his pattern of being exclusively Bible-centered and relying on reason to discern spiritual truth. So, for example, in one of the great classics of Universalism, A Treatise on Atonement, published in 1805, Hosea Ballou went through the Bible with a fine-tooth comb to argue against a prevailing idea of his day (one that still prevails for many): that Jesus died on the Cross to atone for our sins—that God requires this for people’s salvation, otherwise, we are doomed to eternal hellfire. This, argued Ballou, was patently unscriptural and against reason. For how can finite creatures like ourselves offend the infinite God? Why might our finite sins, to be wiped away, require the infinite sacrifice of the Son of God? The real issue, said Ballou, is just not about God, or God’s accepting us. The real issue is that we don’t make ourselves available to God. We don’t believe that we could ever be loved as deeply and as truly as God loves us. The problem with the atonement doctrine is similar to that of the doctrine of the Trinity: both represented ways by which the church was binding people with falsehood.

But if we wrestle with the Bible and don’t let go, it will set our spirits free. That’s what Hosea Ballou, one of the fathers of Universalism in America, believed. And so did the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing. “We regard the Scriptures,” he said in 1819, “as the records of God’s successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ.” Yet one of the things that distinguished Channing’s approach from Ballou’s and definitely from Servetus’ was his acknowledgement of the rootedness of the Bible in history, and the need for reason to take this into consideration. “We find,” says Channing, “that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application.” The Holy Spirit might have breathed inspiration into the writers of scripture, but Channing insists that “a knowledge of their feelings, and of the influences under which they were placed, is one of the preparations for understanding their writings.” Without this, you just can’t be faithful to the Bible. The result is disaster. We apply Bible insights to our day recklessly, ignoring the fact that what the Bible writers are talking about may be very different or even absolutely different from the present concern on our minds. Or we overlay present meanings onto the past. We read into the Bible our own agendas and interests and standards and make it kill when its proper function is to give life. Here’s a joke about this that Channing would have enjoyed:

A teacher asked her Sunday School class to draw pictures of their favorite Bible stories. She was puzzled by Kyle’s picture, which showed four people on an airplane, so she asked him which story it was meant to represent.

“The flight to Egypt.”

“I see,” said the teacher. “And that must be Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. But who’s the fourth person?”

“Oh, that’s Pontius–the pilot.”

The joke is not so ridiculous, however, when you consider all the ways in which people (Unitarian Universalists included) ignore Channing’s advice and do something that’s equivalent to hearing about a “flight” to Egypt and then drawing a picture of an airplane. One of these mistakes is seeing the Bible as a single book. Do this, and it’s easy to assume that everything in it belongs to a single category of writings that can be interpreted using the same rules. A classic instance of this is viewing the Bible as a science text—everything in it to be interpreted as saying something factual about the world. Genesis says the world was created in seven days, so that’s literally what happened. Genesis says that Jacob wrestled with an angel, so angels must really exist. Fundamentalists define the Bible in just these terms and swallow it whole; reverse-fundamentalists define the Bible in these same terms, but they spit it out. Tastes gross. Yet neither stop to wonder about their basic assumption. Is the Bible just one book? Or is it more like a compendium of many books that has evolved in Wikipedia-like fashion over time, involving many authors and editors, incorporating as well many different kinds of literary genres to get its various points across? This last insight is especially important to absorb. We just can’t listen correctly to what the Bible is trying to say unless we realize the genre of the piece we are encountering. Take the recent Star Trek movie—we completely misunderstand what it is all about if we classify it as a documentary and expect it to communicate literal truths about what our future holds for us. Similarly, when we see the book of Genesis as science, rather than the mythology that it is, we completely miss the point. We’ve heard the word “flight” and we’ve drawn an airplane.

Channing once said, “We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible.” It’s true. Consider yet another way in which we can hear “flight” and draw an airplane. Has to do with how people today read into the Bible an ethic of reporting history that is actually quite foreign to the mindset of the ancient Bible writers. Today, when someone makes a speech, every word can be captured on tape and transcribed accurately, so when we read about it in the newspapers—when we read “President Obama said…..”—we are expecting word-for-word accuracy. Nothing less is acceptable. But this is not the standard that ancient Bible writers followed. When reading “Jesus said…” or “Paul said…”, we have to press pause on our assumption that the words ascribed to them are the ones that literally came out of their mouths. Historians back then just had different standards than ours. Listen to what one of the best of them—the Greek writer Thucydides—had to say about this: “I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” That’s what Thucydides says—and did you hear that? “To make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation” (!!!). But this was the standard in the ancient world. “The past is a foreign country,” says writer Leslie P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.” And we’ve got to honor this.

Back in 1819, when Channing made his key points about Bible interpretation, he was building a way that was new for America (and, almost 200 years later, is still new for too many people). The occasion was an ordination sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” and it’s a defining moment in our history. Before it, if you were a Unitarian in America, you belonged to a movement that was amorphous and in the closet. It had no clear leader. It had no clear definition. The name “Unitarian” was a badge of shame. But along came Channing. He outed the movement, gave it clarity, took up the name “Unitarian” with pride. He did all of this in his 1819 sermon. And a big part of it had to do with his wrestling with the angel of the Bible. The Bible, central to Channing’s sense of what Unitarianism was all about.

But Channing’s achievement would not prove final. Within his lifetime, in the very next generation, a different sort of struggle with the Bible ensued. Not so much about how best to interpret it, but whether it is the sole source of revelation available to spiritual seekers.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is most definitely not. “Live after the infinite Law that is in you,” he says, “and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms.” Revelation, in other words, can’t possibly be contained just within the Bible. The wellspring is fundamentally within each of our souls; revelation bubbles up out of the spark of the Divine in our depths. Add to this the revelation of nature, as well as the revelation embodied by the Bibles of many times and lands, such as Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita. Ultimately the spiritual vision here is one of abundance, not scarcity. God is just too big to be contained by any single book. And it’s not only Jews or Christians who have ever wrestled with the sacred and written about it….

Despite this abundance, however, scarcity abounds. In Nature, Emerson says, “A man is a god in ruin. […] Man is the dwarf of himself. […] At present, man applies to nature but half his force.” This is Emerson’s constant complaint and argument. God bursts every seam, and God is within each of us, full to bursting. Yet we feel empty; we feel dry. Why? Emerson blames historical Christianity. It has “fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.” It has done this by committing the sin of idolatry. Whereas Emerson believes that Jesus continually pointed people toward their own God-like potentials of compassion and wisdom, traditional Christianity says that only Jesus gets to be God. And then it gathers up the revelations of Jesus and of select teachers, seals them up in the one and only one Bible, and says that revelation is over, it is through. No wonder people are Gods in ruin. “That which shows God out of me,” Emerson says, “makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being.” “You shall not,” Emerson characterizes traditional Christianity as saying, “own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations….”

Emerson’s message here is bruising. It’s not that he finds nothing liberating in the Bible, for he absolutely does. But he will not stand for the bullying that people can do in its name. And he will no longer abide by the exclusive Bible-centeredness of his forebearers: Servetus, Ballou, Channing. There are so many other Bibles to draw from. And above all, people must rediscover the Bible that lies within them. This is the way to freedom.

And this brings us to today. Transcendentalism expanded our spiritual universe, making the Bible just one source of the vibrant spiritual life and not THE source. Through Transcendentalism, we also learned that the Bible is not so much a record of what God says as a record of what humans have said about their long struggle for purpose and meaning in life. And perhaps because Unitarians and Universalists had engaged with the Bible so intensely and for so long, they were ready for different horizons. They felt that they had gone as far as they could with the Bible, and it was time for something new. Alternative forms of spirituality. Not Christianity, but theism. Humanism. Hinduism. Buddhism. Paganism. Blends of all these and more. Anything and everything but the Bible. In any other church or congregation, you better believe you are always going to have Bible study courses. But not in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Meaning that the current state of our wrestling match with the Bible is different than it has ever been before. A first, in our long history. The current state is disengagement. It is apathy. We no longer know the Bible. It’s become strange to us over the years. Strange, and therefore threatening, because during our sleep, the Religious Right stole it and transformed it into a set of conservative talking points. And because we didn’t know any better—because we no longer read the thing ourselves with any degree of sophistication—we took their interpretations to represent what the Bible actually says. No wonder we don’t want to read it. It’s a vicious cycle.

Which is so sad, since there is a sweet wisdom in Scripture that can make the wounded whole. There is a sweet song that can lift our hearts and make them glad. Unitarian Universalist spirituality is there within its pages. We are missing out on one of the most fascinating and rich books in existence.

We are missing out personally, and we are missing out politically. Where are our Hosea Ballous today? Where are our William Ellery Channings, who might go toe to toe with the ridiculous James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells? Bible-based arguments continue to be extremely powerful and persuasive in America for shaping the common good, but we are no longer conversant. There is still more freedom to be won, but we have a lot of work to do to step up to the challenge. Angry voices argue, for example, that the Bible condemns homosexuality. They cite proof texts, one after the other: rat-a-tat-tat. But it’s not good enough any more to just shrug them off, shrug the conversation off. They need to be troubled by a better wisdom. They need to know and we all need to know that there is no word in the original languages of the Bible that corresponds precisely to committed and mutually respectful love relationships between same-sex partners. What does the Bible truly say about homosexuality in the 21st century? Nothing. And saying this is not evading the authority or demand of scripture. It’s being faithful to it.

Besides being spiritually vibrant, I know that this congregation is and wants to be even more a social justice congregation. I think it’s great. Of course. But I would add that, as essential preparation for this, we need to know the Bible. Whatever our individual theologies and passions happen to be, we need to know the Bible so as to enable effective social witness in our time, here and now. Our wrestling with the Bible is not over, not by a long shot. It’s showing no signs of easing up. We can’t let go. We’re not done. There’s a new name out there for us, a blessing to win, but we haven’t won it yet.

The Work of This Holy Season

My Easter homily draws from the picture book by Jane Cutler entitled, The Cello of Mr. O. Publisher’s Weekly summarizes the story as follows: “’At night, from my window, I can see the white trails of tracer fire and the orange flash of mortars in the sky. I pretend I am watching shooting stars and meteors,’ says the nameless girl protagonist of Cutler’s moving and, sadly, timely story of the healing power of music in wartime. With winter approaching, food scarce and her father off fighting, the high point of the girl’s week is Wednesday, when the relief truck arrives and the community gathers. Most days, she sits with the other children under the stairs until their high energy levels send them running through the halls, where they taunt an unsociable musician named Mr. O. As the girl stands outside his apartment, she remembers how her father described the craftsmanship of Mr. O’s cello and the command performances of the cellist’s youth. When a rocket destroys the relief truck, Mr. O surprises the children by courageously playing music in the middle of the square and lifting their spirits.”

For me, a key moment in our story for today comes when Mama, referring to the war her family and community are suffering through, says, “This is not the first time in history that such a thing has happened.” And then her daughter says, “It may not be the first time it’s happened. But it is the first time it has happened to me.” Thus the fear and anger. Thus the sense of hopelessness.

And thus the crucial and indispensable work of the holy season before us: Passover in the Jewish tradition, Easter in the Christian tradition, and, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, carrying forward the universal insights of Passover and Easter as well as making our own unique contribution: the Flower Celebration. The work of this holy season is exactly like Mr. O after the rocket attack, marching out into the middle of the square where everyone can see him, and playing music—powerful reassuring notes—beautiful music that lessens anger and transforms it into energy that is more productive. Music that eases fear and strengthens courage, makes our faces shine.

This is what we are doing this morning. We march out into the middle of the square, and what we play is the complicated music of human nature and human history. With Jews around the world, we Unitarian Universalists play the music of Passover, we tell the story of the grinding, seemingly endless enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt. But then comes the tipping point: Moses, aided by the power and might of the Lord, leading the people out from bondage and into freedom. “Let my people go.”

We play the music of Passover, and we also play the music of Easter. With Christians around the world, we tell the story of the great rabbi Jesus, seen as a second Moses by his followers, who once said, “I have come that people may have life, and have it abundantly.” We play the harsh music of life in first century Palestine—the people enduring extreme social and economic oppression. We play the slow, sad music of Jesus’ last days, his devastating execution at the hands of the Romans. But suffering is not the last word here, either. Some call what happened next a miracle—resurrection. Whatever happened, it is unarguable how Jesus’ followers felt that, despite the brutality and finality of his death, his spirit was still with them, still alive and vibrant, as real as ever.  

The complicated music of human nature and human history is what we play, today: music of the Passover, music of Easter, and also the music of the Flower Celebration. We tell the story of the Unitarian minister Dr. Norbert Capek, who, serving in his native land of Czechoslovakia, created a ritual that would affirm the individuality and dignity of each person, as well as the sacredness of sharing this individuality with others, in the form of friendship and community. Ironically, this Flower Celebration ritual was born in a time that saw the emergence of a modern version of ancient Egypt or Rome in the form of the Third Reich. In 1939, the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia, and Capek was from that time on a marked man. The Nazis hounded him because he dared to preach about spiritual freedom, he dared to preach about the value of the individual, he dared to preach about the blessings to be experienced when individuals live in beloved community—ideas that simply couldn’t co-exist with Nazism. So they were just looking for an excuse to arrest him, and they found it when they learned he had been listening to forbidden British radio broadcasts. Eventually, in June of 1942, Norbert Capek was sent to the death camp in Dachau. The Nazis killed him by poison, an agonizing death that, as with Jesus, seemed final. But look at how Dr. Norbert Capek has been resurrected, in our midst. Look at how his ideals have triumphed and still live among us—in the end proven far stronger that the supposedly invincible Third Reich ever was.

This is the music we play, this morning; and ultimately it is about seeing the present in light of the past. “It is the first time it has happened to me,” says the girl in the story; but when she and we see the present in light of the past, we realize something. We realize that though the arc of the universe is so long that its bending towards justice is usually imperceptible, there are nevertheless moments in human history that stand out as unique, and you can actually see the bending. Enslaved Israelites freed. Jesus crucified and yet his spirit lives on. Norbert Capek’s death in a Nazi concentration camp, and yet the ideals he stood for still vibrant, still strong. Such stories have inspired Unitarian Universalists for hundreds of years bring healing and hope to the world, and they can continue to do so even if elements of the stories, interpreted literally, are inconsistent with current historical and scientific knowledge. You don’t have to take the stories literally to take them seriously. This is our privilege as Unitarian Universalists. Once we cut through all the literalism, we can begin asking the really relevant questions the stories suggest, such as, Who or what Pharaoh enslaves us today? What Red Sea rises up before you, and how are you going to cross it? Have you ever had a crucifixion-like experience of your own, when you have felt so down and so depleted and even destroyed that the very possibility of coming back to life again seems as absurd as the possibility of the literal resurrection of Jesus’ physical body?

We need to remember these stories, as this morning we step out into the middle of the square. Thankfully, no recent rocket attack here in Atlanta motivates this; there are no white trails of tracer fire and orange flash of mortars in our sky, as there are in too many other parts of the world. Yet war is only one variety of suffering—there are so many others evident all around us. On a personal scale, we could talk about all the ways we nurture resentments in our relationships and imagine the other person to be less than human—and so, as the children in the story did with Mr. O, we pop paper bags right outside their doors, we laugh and run away imagining their fear, we wage a more innocent and less consequential kind of war but it is war nevertheless. So many varieties of suffering. On a collective scale, we could talk about the recent string of mass killings around the country—how some suggest the underlying factor to be the dismal economy, the epidemic of layoffs and uncertainty. Bonuses for top bank executives, bubkus for the working man and woman. Glimmerings of improvement in the economy, yes, but this in itself can cause a special form of suffering, because then you wonder: are we fooling ourselves? Perhaps we only think we’ve hit bottom, and worse is yet to come?

It’s just like our story for today. War has already taken its grinding toll. The beloved father is gone, with the other fathers and older brothers. The streets of the city are broken. All the wood has been used up for heat, food and water are scarce, nothing is as it was. How could things get worse? And then … it gets worse. The relief truck is destroyed. Supplies will no longer come to the people. To get them, the people will have to walk for miles….

This is exactly when Mr. O steps out into the middle of the square and begins to play. This is exactly what the holy season before us is all about. No matter how bad it gets—even if what’s bad has a false bottom, and you break through to something worse—nevertheless, the work of Passover and Easter and our Flower Celebration is to remember that, in the face of the worst, seemingly impossible beautiful things have happened to people just like ourselves. A Moses rose up, and slaves were freed. Jesus’ spirit and sense of abundance were unkillable, and lived on. A ritual involving something as frail as flowers outlasted the might of the Third Reich. Impossible things happening. Meaning that suffering need not be the last word, unless we allow it to be. Meaning that hope is real, if we believe.

May the music of this holy season make your face shine.