Serving Lovingly

When we imagine “growing spiritually” it is easy to think of that Instagram kind of spirituality- yoga, meditation, hot tea, massage -- There is a whole industry out there that wants us to believe that spiritual growth is about each individual seeker feeling peaceful and healthy and actualized. I confess, as someone who does yoga and meditates, this is an easy temptation to fall into. And while I do think I’m a better mom and a better minister and a better friend when I am calm and mindful and healthy, the past year has proven to me that my own happiness and health are not the best guideposts for our spiritual journey - no human I know is happy and healthy all the time. And more importantly, if my goal is only my own actualization, I am constrained by the smallness of my own life. What is the use of growing spiritually? Why does it matter?

Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest of truth is our sacrament,
and service is our prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve others in community,
To the end that all souls shall grow
Into harmony with creation,
Thus we do covenant with one another.

This is one version of a covenant read by many Unitarian Universalist churches all over the country. Notice that it says “Service is our prayer.” I think this is more than poetic, I think service really can be a form of spiritual practice.

Way back in the 1500s, Spanish Carmelite Nun, mystic and teacher Theresa of Avilla wrote lots of advice for her nuns, and though she lived in a very different time, the advice she gave them can still help us today on our modern spiritual journey:

“11. When I see people very anxious to know what sort of prayer they practise, covering their faces and afraid to move or think lest they should lose any slight tenderness and devotion they feel, I know how little they understand how to attain union with God since they think it consists in such things as these. No, sisters, no; our Lord expects works from us. If you see a sick sister whom you can relieve, never fear losing your devotion; compassionate her; if she is in pain, feel for it as if it were your own and, when there is need, fast so that she may eat, not so much for her sake as because you know your Lord asks it of you. This is the true union of our will with the will of God.”[From "Interior Castle]

In other words, if you are not able to attain a certain spiritual feeling in your practices, that’s okay. Those feelings are not the goal of the spiritual journey. Better to focus on compassion for others than achieving spiritual bliss. Even if your compassion for others brings up feelings that make you feel less than holy. Throughout the preceding passage she counsels us that the best way to be sure of our love of God is through our love of neighbor. And the best way to ground that love, to practice that love is through works of service and charity for others. In works of compassion, we unite our will with the will of the divine.

For the Atheists and agnostics in the group today, don’t worry -- science leads us to the same conclusion as the mystics. Research has shown that acts of helping others improve our own mental health and the good of society. For what do we grow spiritually? So that we can better serve, and we serve so that we can grow.

Part of what makes service so helpful on both the spiritual and ethical journeys, is that it encourages us to de-center ourselves. As my friend said, while we exchanged story after story about her own goals and needs constantly interrupted by the demands of her preschool daughter- “It’s not all about me.” I was also parenting a young child and I laughed with the shock of recognition, because while logically I had always known that was true, there’s nothing like showing up to work with tiny handprints on your shirt after a sleepless night, only to leave work early when the daycare calls to say your child has a fever, to really teach you in a deeper way that “it’s not all about me.”

It’s easy to do our work in a way that is, actually, all about me. We think we know what’s best for someone else, how to fix them, and if we “succeed” in fixing them it strengthens our ego- it makes us feel good about our image of ourselves. Unfortunately, building up the ego is not actually good for our spiritual growth, and in fact it’s often not good for the person we are trying to help. Your board has been studying “aspects of white supremacy culture” and one of them is paternalism- where privileged people enter a situation with persons of less privilege and give folks what we think they need, sometimes including strict rules or requirements. Our history is full of terrible examples of this, think Native boardinghouses, think colonialism.

The antidote to this is decentering ourselves. As we enter a situation where we see suffering, because we are moved and want to serve, we ask the folks right there “what do you need?”- trusting that the people who are most effected know better than anyone what they need in their own lives. We are not there to lead, but to support, to amplify, to serve. Our UUSC uses this model- we have grassroots partners around the world, and we trust their wisdom of their local situation, and their network of connections, and we go in with money and technical support for their grassroots work.

We are a congregation committed to anti-racism work, and decentering is critical here. When we reached out to Mothers helping Mothers in Elmira, we didn’t say “here’s a program we want to offer in your community” we said “please tell us what you are doing and how we can help” If we want to work to end anti-black racism, we have to center the ideas and needs of black people who are directly experiencing that racism, rooted in their direct experience and knowing and network. If we want to support disability rights, we center folks who are disabled by our environment, and ask what they need to participate fully. When we serve others, we are not the star of the story; our goal is not to be like Sandra Bullock in “the Blind Side;”  in decentering ourselves we become a supporting character.

When we take on an attitude of service, decentering ourselves, it not only makes us better allies, better at supporting others, but it is also an important part of growing spiritually. Jung says that the journey in the second half of life is about loosening the grasp of ego, realizing that it’s not all about us, and that we are deeply connected to one another and to something greater than ourselves.

Now there is a paradox here that I have been struggling with recently. As a white cis middle-class woman, I know that my work for justice needs to involve decentering myself. But, I also know that women over 50 are often invisibilized in our society. Consider the stereotypical mom, who selflessly gives up her own agenda for her children’s success- whether or not we have ever parented, this is an archetype we all have to deal with. In our youth obsessed culture, it’s easy for the experiences of older folks to be overlooked. It’s easy for people who do the quiet supportive work of service and care to be overlooked. It occurred to me that if we don’t center ourselves no one else will. So this is a challenge of serving lovingly- How do we decenter ourselves and advocate for ourselves at the same time? How do we be of service knowing that no matter how much we pour out our own personal life essence, there will still be hunger, and racism, and suffering?

The spiritual traditions offer us 2 pieces of wisdom about that. First, non-attachment to outcome. The practice of Karma Yoga in the Hindu tradition is about service, yes, about doing our work that makes the world go, yes, but it is about doing that work in a way that is not attached to outcome. Last fall I spent an evening in parking lot of the United Methodist Church where a community group  was handing out dinners, the food pantry was giving out food staples, and Project Grow was giving out tomato seedlings to anyone who wanted to grow their own fresh organic tomatoes. We ran out of dinners early, but because we had been rationing our seedlings too tightly, we did not give away as many tomato plants as we had hoped. Non-attachment to outcome looks like this- letting go, with some sadness, of the fact that other hungry people could were not fed, and let go, with hope and trust, of what happens to all those seedlings, adopted or not, once they left our hands. I do my part and let go- it’s not all about me.

The other wisdom of so many spiritual traditions is that we are not alone. Today’s message is not a call to do more; many of you have told us how you feel exhausted and burnt out, how you feel you have no more to give. I feed the person in front of me, I work to disrupt racism in the spaces where I live. I listen to the troubles of a friend, I serve as I am able, and trust that other people are doing the same, and that we are all woven together in a web of connection that holds us when we rest, and when we ourselves are in need. This is the moral of “Chickens to the Rescue” – the wisdom the chickens know - that the need is endless, and so they take their day of rest, hoping, trusting, that the other farm animals, and of course the farm family, will take their turn to serve.

“Live ethically, serve lovingly and grow spiritually.” The more I think about these 3 ideas the more I see that they balance each other like the 3 legs of a stool. Growing Spiritually help us become our best selves, and grow in connection to that which is greater than us. Living ethically helps us understand and discern who and what we serve, and helps us develop the integrity that is an important part of spiritual growth. Service embodies and grounds our ethics and our spiritual growth. It is where the rubber meets the road. Let us serve in a way that reminds us “it’s not all about us” – when we are serving we are not the hero of the story, we are the supporting characters helping the stars to shine. Service doesn’t have to be big Nobel prize winning acts, because it is the “small acts of great kindness” that support us in our ordinary lives, day in and day out. Let us serve in a way that is not attached to outcomes- a practice that helps our souls learn that we are not in control, and that we are part of something bigger. And let our practice include laying down our work whenever it is time to rest and renew and grow. We serve so that we can live and grow, and we grow and live so that we can serve.

 

Living Ethically

Events of the past 2 years have caused me to feel… adrift. Things I thought I could count on, things I didn’t even know could change have changed. What does it all mean? What can we believe in? What matters? One particularly challenging day I was asking myself those questions and I realized- living ethically seems to matter. What a relief it is to hear about the actions of ethical people on the news, to deal with people living ethically in my own life, and to use ethical principles to guide my own actions in this quixotic world. Over the course of my life my views about whether or not there is a god and other metaphysical questions have changed, but In the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in, it was clear that no matter what else you believe, what we humans choose to do… matters.

We see what happens when folks abandon ethics and instead seek only personal power, wealth or comfort. Acting from an ethical core seems to matter. It matters to me- I know I feel like I am standing on solid ground when I try to live ethically. And I believe that it makes a difference in society that there are people who deal ethically with one another, even on days when it feels like we are the only ones. No matter how lost we feel, we can, in the words of Anna from Frozen 2, “do the next right thing.” In case you don’t have small children in your life, this song comes at a low and desperate time for our heroine who decides to:

“Just do the next right thing
Take a step, step again
It is all that I can to do
The next right thing

I won't look too far ahead
It's too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make”

A lot of folks have found themselves feeling hopeless and desperate, and this children’s song has resonated with this moment we are living in now. It’s increasingly clear that we are not going to wake up one day and find ourselves in the world we were living in February of 2020. Some things are lost, and some are irrevocably changed. Still, we can do “the next right thing.” By living ethically we reduce our footprint, our harm in the world, and also shape the society we are building together in our rapidly changing world. If we want a society where people tell the truth, and deal honestly and fairly and compassionately with one another, the best we can do is live ethically ourselves, to “be the change you want to see in the world.” Living Ethically is part of our mission as a congregation, because we believe that our ethical action matters, it matters to our own sense of integrity, and it matters to community.

The trouble is that our choices are very rarely perfect, and we have all had to make many imperfect choices since Covid spread to our communities. I was looking for an example that we could all relate to, and I thought about our choice to mostly be online since March of 2020. We made the choice originally, (can you remember back that far?) because we wanted to slow the spread, to “flatten the curve” as we said then. To make sure that everyone who needed hospital care could have it. In spring of 2020 the UUA recommended that we worship online until May of 2021 to protect the most vulnerable- the folks who are immune compromised, those without access to medical care, those essential workers who were exposed daily. That was not an easy choice. We love being together in person. We miss hugs, we miss ordinary conversation over a cup of coffee. We miss singing loudly together. We know that some of our members don’t have good computer or internet access, and we know that some folks have such zoom fatigue that our online services are draining. Month after month your board of trustees agonizes over this choice- knowing that there were people who had been vital members of our congregation whom we are no longer able to support with worship or fellowship. We know how lonely this time has been for many- and wonder what ministry we can offer to people who need us in this lonely difficult time? So we did other things like our phone tree calls, and small outdoor gatherings, and gift bags, and we started putting a letter in the mail each month so folks would know we were thinking of them. But any choice we made involved giving up hard things, and risk and loss. There was no perfect choice, only hard compromise with reality.

But, as Lynn Ungar says in her poem:

… you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea. 

The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.

Ethics are “that little rudder” – the choices we make even when there is no good choice. The boards of both churches revisit their decisions every month, and were working hard toward a hybrid worship, and were beginning to gather in person when the delta variant set us back. We knew many of us were vaccinated and that the risk to ourselves had gone down, but what about our children? Delta had much more serious consequences for children than previous variants. At the same time we heard the frustration and longing of folks who wanted to come back together in person. Your boards talked and wrestled and struggled, and finally decided that the UU thing to do was to protect the most vulnerable and to involve data and science in our decisions- that is why we use the “covid act now” website each week to decide. We saw communities across the country decided they were “done with Covid” before Covid was done with them. So we decided to use the data instead of community social pressure to decide.

This week in Bradford County (where the Athens Sanctuary is) the ICU is 94% full, in the “critical” range, the most full hospitals have ever been in our county. And cases are as high as they’ve been all year, as high as last spring, and so here we are on Zoom, our sanctuaries empty again this week. We could have done otherwise- there was no one right choice here, it was a choice among hard things. Other people, other churches have made other choices. 2 ethical people using conscience as their guide can make 2 different choices.

In his book “The Righteous Mind” Jonathan Haidt lays out research that shows that as much as we think we make our decisions based on data or reasoning, our decisions are actually based on a kind of moral intuition, which I suppose is the same as a conscience. Intuition is a form of cognition that helps us make the million decisions we must make every day as quickly as we need to make them. Haidt tested folks of different economic classes from different parts of the world and found that our consciences do not tell us all the same thing. Even within our UU congregations, different people are making different choices about when and where to mask, whether to get vaccinated or get boosters and when, whether to worship indoors and when. Haidt shows that even when we are all following our conscience closely, we come to different decisions.

In my experience the folks, like you, who show up at worship week after week are already committed to an ethical life. I trust that each of us is doing the best we can to follow our conscience and make ethical choices. My job as your minister is not to convince you to follow your conscience and live an ethical life, I suspect you are doing a pretty good job of that already. Our job here as a community already committed to ethical living is to support and encourage one another in making those impossible decisions in confusing times. To grow as ethical beings we don’t need to become more perfect, more strict in our ethics, I believe we need to become more humble, more compassionate, and we practice living our humble compassionate ethics all our lives. As the story "Birdsnest" taught us this morning- “The 3-year-old knows it, but the 80 year old still finds it very difficult to do.”

To live ethically requires humility, knowing that there is almost never a perfect choice, and yet choosing what we feel to be right, nevertheless. Humility is our antidote for judgementalism. I think when we look at the news, when we see angry people storming school-board meetings to share their views about mask mandates with that righteous judgementalism, we can see the harm that kind of righteous anger does to our communities, to our families, to our society. Such scenes teach us the importance of not letting the ethics that are guiding our own boat become rigid, become judgements on others. As the Christian scriptures advise “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s[a] eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? “ [Matthew 7:3]

We are imperfect, all of us. Most of our lives we live in morally grey territory- all beings eat other beings to live. All of us who walk step on other beings. Every time we speak, we risk saying something that will later turn out to have been untrue, or hurtful. Living ethically as Unitarian Universalists is not about once and for all adopting a moral code and resting into the righteousness of that code, Living ethically requires humility and empathy for others.

Humility is also an antidote for identifying too strongly with our surface goodness, “I recycle so I’m good”. If I believe that I must be perfectly good, I put myself in an impossible position. How could I admit to myself that I ever made imperfect choices? How could I grow if I couldn’t be present with the reality of my own imperfection? How could I do the hard inner work of, for example, addressing my role in systemic racism, without first being humble, without first admitting that there was room for me to grow?

Knowing that we are imperfect, can we hold that imperfection with compassion? To go back to our example, we know our choice not to worship in person is imperfect, we know people are lonely, we know humans need to be together in person for their mental health. And if we hold our own imperfect selves with compassion, can we extend that compassion and empathy to others? Yes, other churches are meeting in person right now, in the same towns where we are on zoom. I bet their leaders also agonized with their decisions. My Facebook feed is filled with ministers agonizing about their congregation’s decisions about whether and how they come together in person. We may disagree with their decision, but we are all different, our consciences tell us different things.

Let us not fall into the habit, as have so many religious groups, of believing that part of living ethically is policing others. This creates a rigidity and combativeness that has become destructive in our time. As Haidt says in his book ‘The Righteous Mind”

“No matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too. If you really want to change someone’s mind on moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way – deeply and intuitively – you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide”. [Haidt p. 58]

In Sunday school we used to say as we lit the chalice “we are UU, people with Open minds, helping hands and loving hearts.” As we commit ourselves and recommit ourselves to living ethically, let us do so with open minds and loving hearts, with Humility, empathy, and compassion, our own UU way. In this time of hard choices, we know that striving to live ethically helps ground us in our own spiritual journey and shapes the future we are all growing into together. Living Ethically means being present with the reality of what is and doing the "next right thing"

Remembrance

I grew up in a Humanist congregation, and though I saw that many cultures have traditions of relating to those who have died, I thought you had to be form a certain religious tradition or culture to have such a relationship, and didn't think that included humanists, or agnostics. It dawned on me recently that no matter what we believe, no matter what we do or don’t do, we all have a relationship with those who have died. Whether we bring flowers to their graveside and tell them about our lives, or stoically release the things that remind us of them, whether we believe their spirits are hovering about, or their molecules are repurposed into new life and only memories of them remain. When someone we love dies our relationship with their dear physical presence ends, but our relationship to their memories, their absence, their spirit (if you are so inclined), is something that changes and grows, and is as unique and evolving as our relationship to their living embodied presence had been.

my grandmother, Marie Simon

Our culture, our family traditions, inform how we think about and conduct these relationships. Perhaps in your family you were taught not to speak of the dead, lest it disturb and sadden people. My mother-in-law takes flowers once a year to all the beloved dead in the cemeteries near her. Some traditions teach that the dead can still hear and counsel and comfort us. Others believe that our relationship with the departed is like a phone call once one caller has been disconnected- when we speak with them we are really just speaking with ourselves.

I once went to hear the great teacher Ram Dass speak, and he told us that though his guru had died he spoke with him often. “But that’s all in your imagination” someone responded “yes” replied Ram Dass., as if to say that our imagination is a perfectly valid realm in with to connect to those who have departed.

Unitarian Universalism is agnostic about what happens when we die. Our beliefs are diverse and highly individual. But we all experience loss, we all experience the death of beings who are important to us, and the gift of those relationships, the power of that caring, that love, does not end with their death. I encourage you to notice how you are relating to those loved ones who have died, and allow yourself the space and creativity to shape that relationship as you need. Though we believe many different things about death and what comes after, we offer one another a space today to honor those relationships, to feel whatever feelings emerge, whatever memories in the compassionate embrace of community.

I offer these questions for your reflection:

• Who are the loved ones you are remembering today?
• How do those beloved dead continue to be a presence in your life?
• Are there any ways you would like to be more intentional about your relationship to those who have died?