(This sermon is part of an ongoing series on the Principles of Permaculture. The 8 principles we are using come from Starhawk's "Principles of True Abundance")
Growing up in Pennsylvania, there were many things that amazed me when we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, but nothing more than the coast where the Pacific Ocean meets the land. Now as you might imagine, growing up outside Philadelphia I had been to the jersey shore on occasion, but the Pacific coast is different. Instead of these long stretches of beach where hundreds of families put up their beach umbrellas, the Pacific is edged with rocky cliffs, and the distance from water to cliff is often quite short. Those cliffs provide a more fruitful home for vegetation and wildlife than a wide expanse of sand. The most amazing thing of all was tide pools. I didn’t think I would see a real tide pool in my lifetime; I thought that was something only National Geographic photographers got to see. But within an hour or two from my house there were several different state parks where at low tide you could see these tiny eco-systems inhabited by hermit crabs, snails, lipids, muscles, even occasionally a starfish and most amazing of all, anemone- those colorful ocean flowers. Each of these little tide pools is its own world – sometimes only a couple of feet in diameter. I read in a children’s book in the state park gift shop that if you were to pick up, say, a lipid from one tide pool and put it down in another it might not survive. These amazing little critters can only live on the edge where the land and sea meet. You could see how tide pools only a few inches deep was a great habitat for a hermit crab, but only in tide pools a foot or deeper would you find a starfish. Each anemone needed it’s own piece of edge to call home, preferably in the shade, and would only open when covered by the tide.
It turns out that the edge between water and land creates the most productive eco-systems on earth [Permaculture in a nutshell p. 48) for example, plants growing immediately adjacent to rivers and streams (they call this riparian vegetation] has greater diversity and grows more densely than just a few yards further away fro the waterway. I learned a new word- “ecotone” which is an overlapping edge between two bioregions, where there is greater diversity than one bioregion could produce on its own – the mixture not only of each of the two bioregions but also those special species that can only survive in such transitional space. For example, David Holmgren, one of the originators of Permaculture, reports that in his native Australia you normally see only 2 different species of eucalyptus trees in any given area, but in the Towamba Valley where 2 bioregions overlap, he counted 13 different species [p. 225 Permaculture Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability]
But our industrial culture doesn’t value edges. We try to reduce the number of edges, for example, by creating huge multi-acre farms, or by building houses in big residential developments. Consider those suburban areas where there are literally no mixed used areas, where you must drive past a mile or more of residential housing to get to stores or libraries, or to anything besides just residential housing. This is what we are used to- it feels efficient, and tidy and safe to us. It’s easy to see the benefits – if you are a farmer with a huge field of corn you can set a giant agricultural machine to go back and forth in neat horizontal passes. If you are a developer, you can buy a big tract of land, maybe an old farm, and just fill the whole thing in with houses without having to worry about all the complexities of city planning. Permaculture, which is a theory of agricultural and cultural design focused on sustainability, shows us actually the farms I pass on my way to work with a patch of farm next to a stand of trees may have environmental benefits. The edges of farms have great habitat for birds who provide pest control, the edges are allow for cross-pollination and hybridization that might provide needed diversity in times of drought or other farm disasters.
But many of us actually moved to the suburbs because we wanted to be on that edge between the farm or the wilderness and the city. Many of us would love to live around the corner from a state park or pedestrian business center, yet we build to minimize edge. In permaculture we are advised to actually try to create more edges. Now I learned the hard way in my 5th grade math class that a square or rectangle is not the way to make the most edges. A big block of housing or a large rectangular field has the least edge possible. IN my 5th grade math class I was stuck for weeks on the assignment to “Draw they shape with the greatest perimeter (that is to say, the most edges) with an area of 25.” I sat with my graph paper day after day drawing different shapes until finally the teacher took pity on me. It turns out that the shape with the greatest perimeter is a shape like a set of stairs- those open construction where you can walk underneath. Making nooks and crannies creates the most perimeter, the most edge. Think about the clean lines of the beaches in Atlantic City, and the many nooks and crannies of the tide pools on the pacific coast. The more edge, the more robust diversity of life. So the most diverse, productive farm or garden is going to be a patchwork of plants and trees and ponds and hedges.
Let’s move outside the garden into the community of persons. We can all probably call to mind a housing development or area that is single use only. They tend to be pretty quiet, and there is a singleness of purpose. I went walking near a friend’s home recently and we saw maybe one person who wasn’t in a car. Unless you are or out for a jog or a kid biking over to your friend’s house, there is no reason to go outside your house in such a neighborhood except to get into your car. But in what we call “mixed use” zoning, we might find retail stores and businesses mixed in with homes and you will find a greater bustle of activity. I moved from a neighborhood in California that was designed as a bedroom community. It was dense tracts of houses bordered by huge multi-lane roads to help people on their commutes to workplaces sometimes an hour away. Today I live in a neighborhood where people can live, and work and play and shop. It is a diverse and productive neighborhood which maximizes its edges much like the community of plants and animals we find alongside a pond or creek.
At the other edge of things, a lot of folks live out her in Bradford county because they want to be on the edge of agriculture and wilderness. I know a number of folks in this congregation have land where they raise their own food or animals, and other folks who live where they live because they can walk out their back door and right into a hike on uncultivated lands. Life is drawn to the edges.
I remember learning in high school about several different philosophical movements of western history. They always seemed start with the merchants- as the merchants opened up new trade roots or port cities, cultures from new places would meet and interact, ideas were exchanged and cross-pollination happened. It always seemed to happen the same way -- that these great intellectual and cultural growth spurts happened at the edges and overlaps of cultural eco-systems. And when I got to the San Francisco I realized that this was exactly what was happening there. At the edge of the pacific people from all over the world, but especially from the U.S., Latin America and Asia met and created amazing leaps in spirituality and theology and technology. I think it is no coincidence that West coast spirituality is considered so “far out” -- because it is born in a unique place where eastern and western theology meet and live together. I think it is no coincidence that there have been such massive technological advances in what we might call a cultural “ecotone” or that California has an the 9th largest economy in the world – it may be in part because of this tremendous cross-fertilization. Just as Holmgren found 13 species of Eucalyptus in costal eco-tone areas, there was tremendous cultural and racial and religious diversity in the valley where I used to live. My son went to a preschool in Cupertino, the town where Apple computers was born, and he was one of only 2 children in his preschool class who only spoke English. I think maybe 5 or 6 different countries of origin were represented just in his 3-year-old class.
In our political discourse right now, when we talk about “borders” the political rhetoric is all about defending them- defending them from the very diversity that makes borders valuable. We as a nation are saying that having 13 species of eucalyptus tree in the border where eco-systems meet is scary, that we feel more comfortable with the 2 species of tree we are used to.
Our US borders used to be mostly open. Until the 1790s any free white person became a citizen after 2 years. The Page Act of 1875 (Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 1873-March 1875) was the first law to really single out immigrants to exclude, and particularly focused on women from China. We were eager to have immigrants from China to bring desperately needed income and labor into California, but most analysts say that we as a country excluded Chinese women, and in fact women from all over Asia, from immigrating because of, well racism – we were afraid that Chinese families would put down roots and bring the very cultural diversity that has over the centuries been so enriching to our nation. Then in 1882 the Chinese exclusion act singled out immigrants from china who had provided so much of the labor for mining during the goldrush, and for building our railroads – this act said that Chinese Immigrants could never become citizens, and if they left the country for any reason they could never return. It was not repealed until 1943!
Then in the 1920s that we began instituting the quota system based on country. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, "In all its parts, the most basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.” Though the diversity in our country has grown, the obstacles faced by recent immigrants to our country today are exponentially more difficult than those faced by immigrants when my grandfather and my husbands father and grandfather were entering this country.
Diversity is not an unequivocally better- there are strong, stable forests that have a simple mix of species, and there are certainly strong stable communities of humans that are homogeneous. And I think I understand why, when it comes to communities of humans, we are scared of margins and edges, why we are scared of the diversity it brings. Because diversity does change a local culture. When biology or culture mixes and mingles, it creates hybridization, which creates “new local cultures of place” (Holmgren p. 219)
Think about how when someone new joins our church, it changes us. When we add a new kind of plant to our garden it changes the garden. Holmgren writes “The change and transformation of the culture mainstream is an implicit part of multiculturalism” (p. 220) And all those immigrants who have come to America over the past 400 years have made our country into what it is today. What would the America we know and love be like without our Irish heritage? Our German culture? Italian? Chinese? African? Mexican? We could not be the country we are without any of these folks. Yet back in the early days of our country Ben Franklin remarked “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” We are stunned now by Franklin’s racism against Germans, yet it is so strangely familiar that we might not be surprised to hear it on the television today. The principles of permaculture ask us to look at the margins, to look at diversity in a different way.
When we look to the garden we see that diversity creates stability. I’ve spoken often enough from the pulpit about the vulnerability of farming with a mono-culture of crops, and how poly-culture protects against disease and pests, but let’s think about, for example, a diversity of ages. Have you ever noticed how teenagers sleep late into the morning, whereas toddlers wake at the crack of dawn? There is some research now that it is beneficial to a community for different generations to have different sleep patterns, so that someone is always awake to mind the store. Or I think of an example from a campus ministry near a church I served. When I arrived at the church I inquired at the local college about the campus ministry there. They said they had had a good group but then the leaders had all graduated. The very next year a new group of leaders matriculated, and we worked to connect them to the local congregation where folks could give them rides to church, and where our ministry team could reach out to the new leaders and support them through transitions. The campus ministry became more stable as it became more diverse with regards to age.
Another benefit of diversity, whether we are talking about diversity of biology or of ideas, is that diversity provides new solutions to problems. I’ve seen independent bands who couldn’t afford mainstream gear create sounds using anything they could use their hands on- music boxes, drums, tanks (that’s where the steel drums come from - Caribbean musicians transforming old biscuit tins or paint pans or steel oil drums into an amazing new form of instrument ) If you have infinite financial resources there is always a solution for a price, but musicians at the margins must bring creativity to their sound. Or consider the GLBT pioneers whose growth at the edges of our culture just a generation ago have changed the way we see the world. They have made this a much safer time and a place for GLBTQ folks, and just as important, their pioneering presence creates space for all of us to more freely express gender and sexuality, it creates a more diverse numbers of models and ways for us to express ourselves. Says Holmgren, “Diversity provides alternative pathways for essential ecosystem functions in the face of changing conditions.” (P. 205)
It is the edges that provide habitat for diversity, not the great rolling fields of corn and soy, but the old English gardens divided by hedgerows, gardens with a diversity of fruits and vegetables edged by woods and residential areas, a patchwork of diversity that maximizes the edge, much as I learned in my 5th grade math class. Great diversity can be supported as we increase the edge, giving a niche, a tide pool, a “local culture of place” While the dominant culture steers us toward what Holmgren calls the “Global culture of no-place “ (p. 220) in which all local languages and cultures are inevitably lost in the “melting pot,” it is up to us in the local communities where we are rooted to value and enjoy the benefits of a diverse ecology of flora and fauna, of cultures and ages. Communities with diversity have more resources and flexibility as things change.
This principle- of valuing diversity and honoring the edges, is not one which matches cleanly with one of our UU principles and purposes. And yet it seems to me an important part of who we are and how our tradition has always grown. As a people of open minds, UUs have often been at the growing edge with our ideas and have often helped bring them into the mainstream. But we also see in our history for our institutions to codify those now mainstream ideas, and to forget that the edge itself is valuable, that It produces ever more novelty and diversity and growth. Our religious tradition is not just about those ideas and principles we learned at the margins, but is also a process of remembering to turn to the edges for solutions and creativity, instead of mowing them down to create uniformity.
True abundance can be found by honoring the edges, both of our gardens, of our waterways, and of our communities. True abundance is found when we value diversity; when we think of ourselves as one living organism we don’t need to fear the competition or change diversity brings, but be grateful for the both the stability and flexibility it adds to our community, to our ecology. Consider the abundance of the thousands of unique people in our little valley, the hundreds of thousands of unique species all over the world. If that’s not abundance, I don’t know what is. Whether we are in our gardens, in beloved community, or considering national immigration policy, let us remember always to honor the edges, to see what wisdom may be found there.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
In the Beginning (Evolution Weekend; February 19, 2012)
It matters what story you tell. In the beginning of the Hebrew scriptures there are, what most contemporary scholars think of as 2 creation stories. In the first one you will recall that God said “let there be light” and there was light. And God said that it was good. My Hebrew scripture teacher in seminary points out that this is an amazing way for the Jewish and Christian sacred texts to begin- with God calling the world into being with words. It gives power to the idea that those holy scriptures are important, that words are important, that words have the power to create and to shape. The second creation story in the bible is the one where God shapes Adam out of the dirt, forms Eve from Adam’s rib, and tells them to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28 NRSV).
Now I come from a religious tradition that does not approach the scriptures as the literal word of God; I believe they are filled with poetry and symbol and metaphor. The stories found in the Judeo-Christian scriptures are ancient stories told person to person and occasionally edited and written down by different traditions of religious scholars. These stories have power because they are part of our shared meta-narrative. It doesn’t bother me that in the bible the whole of creation takes only seven days, when science currently estimates it took roughly 13.7 billion years. Here’s what does bother me -- that as a culture we have used this creation story as an excuse to fill the earth and subdue it. Creation stories have power. They tell us where we came from, and what role we have in this universe.
As a culture we have tended to separate the “science and how things work” part of our lives from the “religion and what does it all mean” part of our lives. So even someone who goes into a lab on Monday morning and works all week with hard data might still be living by a creation story that tells us that we are the pinnacle of creation, that it was all created just for us to fill and subdue. What if we didn’t leave science in the lab on Sunday, but brought it to church with us? Brought it right into the heart of the stories we tell one another to make meaning of our shared existence?
Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, and Tomas Berry a Catholic priest and cultural historian took on the daunting task of getting the story that science tells out of our laboratories and graduate level astrophysics classrooms, and into our hearts. They believe that we need a story that is compatible with the latest scientific truths that we can know by heart and tell our children when they ask at bedtime “where did we come from?” Says Swimme, “Every child should be told; you come out of the energy that gave birth to the universe. Its story is your story; its beginnings are your beginnings.” Swimme and Berry first attempted the daunting task of turning science into poetry and story in their ground breaking book the Universe Story and their work has spread. There is now a whole movement of storytellers who are telling stories about who we are and where we came from based on the science of evolution, the evolution of not only species but of the whole universe. Story tellers like Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd have dedicated their lives to telling and retelling the “great story” --the story of the universe. I propose that as UUs, as a people who believe in the power of science to shine a light on life, each of us needs to learn and tell this story. When I say “Adam and eve” a whole flood of stories and images come to our minds, everyone from the great painters of the Italian renaissance to the Simpsons. But when I say “the big bang” or “the Devonian extinction” my mind flashes back to some cramming I did late night before a science exam.
So today I want to tell you a few stories about who we are and where we came from that are rooted in science. This particular way of telling our story comes from Swimme and Berry in their “The Universe Story” and also from Starhawk in her book “The Earth Path.”
The first thing we were, was one. The beginning of our story, and indeed of all that is was the flaring forth from a singularity. As we heard in our children’s story this morning, all the energy that ever was and ever will be came into existence in an area smaller than the point of a pin, although that’s not really the right way of talking about it, since space and time were contained within that tiny singularity. The first thing that ever happened in this universe was emergence, birth, the unfolding and expanding of space. The foundational forces of our universe were a balance of expansion with the gravitational force which maintains a cohesion that allowed a balanced and sustainable unfolding.
The growing universe was in the beginning and to this day continues to be shaped by density waves which are amplifications of the subtle fundamental vibrations or aftershocks from the flaring forth. Within that first fraction of a second after that flaring forth photons were no longer able to leap into and out of being. The cooling universe entered a new level of stability as Neutrons and protons were able to bond and form lasting relationships. Clouds of all these newly formed particles and elements were shaped by the density waves and the first primal stars appear -- formed from cohesion of the first elements helium and hydrogen. When those primal stars died as supernovas releasing all those elements and energy, their death allowed second and third generation stars to come into being for the next 4 billion years. Even as the universe expanded and expanded, the gravitational force drew elements together to form galaxies and stars. Clouds of elements came together into billions of spiral galaxies, one of which what is now the Milky Way Galaxy. It was the death of the supernova Tiamat about 4.6 billion years ago that released nutrients that formed our own sun and planets, as she had, in turn, been born from the death of other stars.
4.45 billion years ago the planets of our solar system were formed from collections of granules and gasses drawn together into 10 bands around our sun. And these bands in turn were drawn together to form planets. Our own bodies are made up, just as our planet is from Carbon, Oxygen and other elements that were ejected around that dying star Tiamat as it collapsed.
As earth formed and cooled, Aries, our first living ancestor emerged in the lightning storms and turbulent chemical interactions of earth’s oceans about 4 billion years ago. Many of this first generation of living cells, prokaryotes, became extinct quite quickly, but others are the ancestors of, for example, the bacteria alive today, because they carried within them DNA, the capacity to remember and pass on the blueprint of life. A mutation in one could be passed on for generations into the future. As they mutated they helped ensure the survival of life on earth. Because as the earth became less turbulent, the heavy mineral compounds which littered our seas and atmosphere provided a feast for our first ancestors feasted were not produced as quickly as the abundant new life could consume them. But life adapted to meet this shortage. Those early single celled organisms mutated to be able to eat the waste of their cousins, and others to eat the compounds from the decaying bodies of other life forms when they died.
But even so, they were eating and reproducing at a rate faster than the earth could produce new compounds. This would have lead to a great extinction, if it were not for Promethio, an ancestor who evolved the ability to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, (100 million years after life appeared on earth) to capture photons from the sun and turn them into energy. Some call it the most amazing technological advance in the history of life itself and this advance was made, say Swimme and Berry “Without a brain, without eyes, without hands, without blueprints, without foresight, without reflective consciousness.” (P. 90) and they were, moreover, though their DNA, able to remember and share this technological breakthrough.
All through this time, as the earth was giving birth to the first life, those life forms were changing the earth by what they took in and what they gave off. These earliest ancestors lived in a world where the oceans were brown and the atmosphere “a brownish orange” made mostly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and methane (2.5 billion years ago).
For example, all those volcanoes threw off great amounts of Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and therefore beings who could transform that Carbon dioxide into their living bodies would flourish. And whereas an atmosphere rich with carbon dioxide helps the earth to maintain heat, with all those little single celled organisms turning Carbon Dioxide into life, the whole temperature of the earth declined, creating the first major ice age about 2.3 billion years ago.
The earliest cells consumed hydrogen, which had been plentiful and air, and which had sustained life for so long. Soon, however, hydrogen was over-consumed by a growing single-celled population. Some mutated into blue-green bacteria and were able to take hydrogen from the seas, sending flinging out a toxic gas into the land and sea and air, fundamentally altering the balance of our biosphere. That toxic gas was called Oxygen, which was like poison to these early beings, breaking down fragile membranes. As the oxygen content became higher and higher, at first those cells who lived in water could survive, but soon oxygen penetrated every part of our biosphere and there was a great catastrophic extinction.
But then life mutated. A Cyano-bacterium we can call Prospero drew prosperity out of catastrophe 2 billion years ago , inventing respiration; the ability to use oxygen for fuel, using it for a kind of controlled combustion, giving it many times more energy than its ancestors. Because there was so much oxygen it prospered. This helped stabilize the balance of oxygen on the planet, but even so the atmosphere approached 21% oxygen, the level at which spontaneous combustion happens.. Imagine -- the early earth had only half a percent of oxygen, and now had 21%! Like the balance between the forces of outward propulusion and gravity whose miraculous balance allows our universe to exist, a special balance of the gasses on our planet allows life as we know it to exist.
But this cycle of mass extinction and innovation continued. The Cambrian extinctions 570 million years ago saw the loss of 80-90 percent of species, yet in the aftermath of that extinction the Eukaryotic cell was born about 2 billion years ago, a cell with a nucleus, like the cells in our own bodies. Our earliest multi-celled ancestors - jelly fish, flat worms - filled the planet 2 billion years ago after the most vast glacial extinction earth has ever seen. Then life invented the shell, giving birth to life forms like trilobites, clams, and snails 550 million years ago, and vertebrates 510 million years ago. The cycle continued as 440 million years ago the Ordovician catastrophe was followed by the evolution of insects and fish with lungs. 370 million years ago the Devonian catastrophe was followed by a novel mutation where Lycopods developed wood cells, becoming the first plants who could defy gravity and stand upright on land and vertebrates came ashore in response to.
The Permian-Triasic episode [245 million years ago] was the greatest of all extinctions. It erased 75-95% of all species living on earth, especially those in the tropics. Coral reefs were wiped out in their place there was only a void for millions of years. This time the earth was very slow to repopulate, in part because that vast treasure trove of memory, the DNA of all those extinct species was gone forever. The great continent Pangea had drifted over the south pole creating a colder drier climate. In a life affirming response, the egg came into being, a less vulnerable way of reproducing evolved first in reptiles, who could migrate further inland now that they didn’t have to reproduce in water. Land animals evolved a way to retain their body heat in a cold climate) – the warm blooded reptiles that we believe were ancestors of the mammals like us to follow. As the Dinosaurs appeared these were the first era of animals to care for their young- to stay with the young after they hatched, and mammals who could nourish young outside the womb.
Placental mammals emerged in the wake of another devastation 114 million years ago [Aptian extinction] Earth grew cold. The mammals who could carry their young inside them- who could experience pregnancy and birth as mammals to day experience it, theses animals had an edge because their young started life outside the womb more developmentally advanced than the young of reptiles and dinosaurs. Many of the animals who now keep us company on this earth came into being: horses, rabbits, bats, whales, primates, lions, flowering plants and songbirds.
But then Antarctica split of from Australia, opening up a passage for currents of cold air, and the first ice began to form in the sea around Antarctica, an the temperature of the whole planet became colder.
The primates and other mammals had began to flourish in a vacuum left by a devastating extinction 67 million years ago which eliminated the dinosaurs and 70% of life on earth. This mass extinction may be the most famous. It is called the Cretaceous-Tertiary event [or K/T boundary] because it created such a clear boundaries between the era of the dinosaurs, and the eras without them the followed. This mass extinction eliminated the diversity of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mollusks, fauna. There is some debate about what caused the extinction, but whether we believe it was caused by a great asteroid hitting the earth, a time of great volcanic activity, or the movement of tectonic plates, whether the extinction was dramatic and swift or happened over millions of years, we know that the climate changed drastically and could no longer support the old life forms, like the dinosaurs. Twice more the wealth of life and diversity of species swelled and died back, caused by environmental catastrophe caused by major shifts in the earth’s climate.
4 million years ago the first hominids were distinguishing themselves from other primates with a larger brain size and upright posture, though our ancestors still spent a lot of time in the trees. 3.3 million years ago the current ice ages began. 2.6 million years ago the Homo Habilis was the first hominid to make an abundance of stone tools. We can tell that Homo Habilis were hunters because the kind of tools they made -- developed for hunting and cutting apart their food. These were the first of our close relatives. 1 million years ago earth saw the peak of Mammals on our earth. Then during the following ice age many of the large many of the large animals such as the mammoths, the saber tooth tigers, and the mastodons as the glaciers advanced further and further south, shrinking the habitat and food supply for both animal and plant life. About 30,000 years ago the Neanderthals hit an evolutionary dead end. When the glaciers retreated, it was the smaller animals that took their place- the white tailed deer, wood mice and migrating birds; the abrupt climate changed began the most recent period of mass extinction. From that time, about 11,500 years ago, to this day we are part of the most recent mass extinction- including huge reduction in the other “mega fauna” that is- animals larger than ourselves such as elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceros. In fact hundreds and thousands of species have become extinct in our time; many scientists believe this to be from our own human actions- hunting and destroying habitat for perhaps hundreds of thousands of species, particularly in dramatically diverse communities like the rainforest.
As we once again alter the delicate balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere we risk another dramatic unbalancing of life on our planet- the 6th great extinction. As we look back over billions of years of our story, it may remind us with trepidation of the great extinction when our atmosphere was unbalanced so many billion years ago, or it may remind us of the triumph of Prospero, who turned toxic waste into the stuff of life. This story of extinction and adaptation is a sometimes tragic story, but it is also a story of hope. Hope for life on our planet and for life itself. Life finds a way.
It seems it may be up to we Homo Sapiens to make a change, a breakthrough on the level of respiring oxygen or turning light into energy to restore a new balance to our biosphere. Say Swimme and Berry “While the human cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be a blade of grass unless it is accepted, protected and fostered by the human.” (p. 247)
One thing that has been true of Unitarians since we called ourselves by that name is a value of science and reason. And Science has given us a new story of who we are and where we come from.
We live in the eon of geologic time in which all 5 kingdoms of life have blossomed on earth. We live in a time of war, of competition for resources, of technological achievement. We live in a time of massive species extinction and changes to our biosphere.
A story that helps us understand our place in the order of things must be a big story, a story that reminds us both that we are new- coming as we do after 13 billion years after the first flaring forth, and 4 billion years after the first life appeared on this earth. Our human history is just the latest chapter in a long, long story. The Universe Story also shows us that we are deeply intertwined with all that is. We were there in the very first moments and there in the dramatic end story of the supernova Tiamat, in the triumph of Arius, of Prospero. The story of their tragedies and successes is our story as well. Let us call on all those billions of years of wisdom and memory lest we miss whatever part of the story that will help us shape a bright future for our selves and our biosphere. The collected wisdom in our culture, in our bodies, in our DNA, in our ecosystem is a remarkable inheritance.
Who better than a faith that values science and reason to appreciate such wisdom? Who better than a faith which affirms we are all on the same path, to heed that wisdom in shaping a just and vibrant future. Who better than this very community to be students and teachers of this, our whole story? Who better than the Universalists and the Unitarians to remember that in the beginning all was one?
Now I come from a religious tradition that does not approach the scriptures as the literal word of God; I believe they are filled with poetry and symbol and metaphor. The stories found in the Judeo-Christian scriptures are ancient stories told person to person and occasionally edited and written down by different traditions of religious scholars. These stories have power because they are part of our shared meta-narrative. It doesn’t bother me that in the bible the whole of creation takes only seven days, when science currently estimates it took roughly 13.7 billion years. Here’s what does bother me -- that as a culture we have used this creation story as an excuse to fill the earth and subdue it. Creation stories have power. They tell us where we came from, and what role we have in this universe.
As a culture we have tended to separate the “science and how things work” part of our lives from the “religion and what does it all mean” part of our lives. So even someone who goes into a lab on Monday morning and works all week with hard data might still be living by a creation story that tells us that we are the pinnacle of creation, that it was all created just for us to fill and subdue. What if we didn’t leave science in the lab on Sunday, but brought it to church with us? Brought it right into the heart of the stories we tell one another to make meaning of our shared existence?
Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, and Tomas Berry a Catholic priest and cultural historian took on the daunting task of getting the story that science tells out of our laboratories and graduate level astrophysics classrooms, and into our hearts. They believe that we need a story that is compatible with the latest scientific truths that we can know by heart and tell our children when they ask at bedtime “where did we come from?” Says Swimme, “Every child should be told; you come out of the energy that gave birth to the universe. Its story is your story; its beginnings are your beginnings.” Swimme and Berry first attempted the daunting task of turning science into poetry and story in their ground breaking book the Universe Story and their work has spread. There is now a whole movement of storytellers who are telling stories about who we are and where we came from based on the science of evolution, the evolution of not only species but of the whole universe. Story tellers like Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd have dedicated their lives to telling and retelling the “great story” --the story of the universe. I propose that as UUs, as a people who believe in the power of science to shine a light on life, each of us needs to learn and tell this story. When I say “Adam and eve” a whole flood of stories and images come to our minds, everyone from the great painters of the Italian renaissance to the Simpsons. But when I say “the big bang” or “the Devonian extinction” my mind flashes back to some cramming I did late night before a science exam.
So today I want to tell you a few stories about who we are and where we came from that are rooted in science. This particular way of telling our story comes from Swimme and Berry in their “The Universe Story” and also from Starhawk in her book “The Earth Path.”
The first thing we were, was one. The beginning of our story, and indeed of all that is was the flaring forth from a singularity. As we heard in our children’s story this morning, all the energy that ever was and ever will be came into existence in an area smaller than the point of a pin, although that’s not really the right way of talking about it, since space and time were contained within that tiny singularity. The first thing that ever happened in this universe was emergence, birth, the unfolding and expanding of space. The foundational forces of our universe were a balance of expansion with the gravitational force which maintains a cohesion that allowed a balanced and sustainable unfolding.
The growing universe was in the beginning and to this day continues to be shaped by density waves which are amplifications of the subtle fundamental vibrations or aftershocks from the flaring forth. Within that first fraction of a second after that flaring forth photons were no longer able to leap into and out of being. The cooling universe entered a new level of stability as Neutrons and protons were able to bond and form lasting relationships. Clouds of all these newly formed particles and elements were shaped by the density waves and the first primal stars appear -- formed from cohesion of the first elements helium and hydrogen. When those primal stars died as supernovas releasing all those elements and energy, their death allowed second and third generation stars to come into being for the next 4 billion years. Even as the universe expanded and expanded, the gravitational force drew elements together to form galaxies and stars. Clouds of elements came together into billions of spiral galaxies, one of which what is now the Milky Way Galaxy. It was the death of the supernova Tiamat about 4.6 billion years ago that released nutrients that formed our own sun and planets, as she had, in turn, been born from the death of other stars.
4.45 billion years ago the planets of our solar system were formed from collections of granules and gasses drawn together into 10 bands around our sun. And these bands in turn were drawn together to form planets. Our own bodies are made up, just as our planet is from Carbon, Oxygen and other elements that were ejected around that dying star Tiamat as it collapsed.
As earth formed and cooled, Aries, our first living ancestor emerged in the lightning storms and turbulent chemical interactions of earth’s oceans about 4 billion years ago. Many of this first generation of living cells, prokaryotes, became extinct quite quickly, but others are the ancestors of, for example, the bacteria alive today, because they carried within them DNA, the capacity to remember and pass on the blueprint of life. A mutation in one could be passed on for generations into the future. As they mutated they helped ensure the survival of life on earth. Because as the earth became less turbulent, the heavy mineral compounds which littered our seas and atmosphere provided a feast for our first ancestors feasted were not produced as quickly as the abundant new life could consume them. But life adapted to meet this shortage. Those early single celled organisms mutated to be able to eat the waste of their cousins, and others to eat the compounds from the decaying bodies of other life forms when they died.
But even so, they were eating and reproducing at a rate faster than the earth could produce new compounds. This would have lead to a great extinction, if it were not for Promethio, an ancestor who evolved the ability to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, (100 million years after life appeared on earth) to capture photons from the sun and turn them into energy. Some call it the most amazing technological advance in the history of life itself and this advance was made, say Swimme and Berry “Without a brain, without eyes, without hands, without blueprints, without foresight, without reflective consciousness.” (P. 90) and they were, moreover, though their DNA, able to remember and share this technological breakthrough.
All through this time, as the earth was giving birth to the first life, those life forms were changing the earth by what they took in and what they gave off. These earliest ancestors lived in a world where the oceans were brown and the atmosphere “a brownish orange” made mostly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and methane (2.5 billion years ago).
For example, all those volcanoes threw off great amounts of Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and therefore beings who could transform that Carbon dioxide into their living bodies would flourish. And whereas an atmosphere rich with carbon dioxide helps the earth to maintain heat, with all those little single celled organisms turning Carbon Dioxide into life, the whole temperature of the earth declined, creating the first major ice age about 2.3 billion years ago.
The earliest cells consumed hydrogen, which had been plentiful and air, and which had sustained life for so long. Soon, however, hydrogen was over-consumed by a growing single-celled population. Some mutated into blue-green bacteria and were able to take hydrogen from the seas, sending flinging out a toxic gas into the land and sea and air, fundamentally altering the balance of our biosphere. That toxic gas was called Oxygen, which was like poison to these early beings, breaking down fragile membranes. As the oxygen content became higher and higher, at first those cells who lived in water could survive, but soon oxygen penetrated every part of our biosphere and there was a great catastrophic extinction.
But then life mutated. A Cyano-bacterium we can call Prospero drew prosperity out of catastrophe 2 billion years ago , inventing respiration; the ability to use oxygen for fuel, using it for a kind of controlled combustion, giving it many times more energy than its ancestors. Because there was so much oxygen it prospered. This helped stabilize the balance of oxygen on the planet, but even so the atmosphere approached 21% oxygen, the level at which spontaneous combustion happens.. Imagine -- the early earth had only half a percent of oxygen, and now had 21%! Like the balance between the forces of outward propulusion and gravity whose miraculous balance allows our universe to exist, a special balance of the gasses on our planet allows life as we know it to exist.
But this cycle of mass extinction and innovation continued. The Cambrian extinctions 570 million years ago saw the loss of 80-90 percent of species, yet in the aftermath of that extinction the Eukaryotic cell was born about 2 billion years ago, a cell with a nucleus, like the cells in our own bodies. Our earliest multi-celled ancestors - jelly fish, flat worms - filled the planet 2 billion years ago after the most vast glacial extinction earth has ever seen. Then life invented the shell, giving birth to life forms like trilobites, clams, and snails 550 million years ago, and vertebrates 510 million years ago. The cycle continued as 440 million years ago the Ordovician catastrophe was followed by the evolution of insects and fish with lungs. 370 million years ago the Devonian catastrophe was followed by a novel mutation where Lycopods developed wood cells, becoming the first plants who could defy gravity and stand upright on land and vertebrates came ashore in response to.
The Permian-Triasic episode [245 million years ago] was the greatest of all extinctions. It erased 75-95% of all species living on earth, especially those in the tropics. Coral reefs were wiped out in their place there was only a void for millions of years. This time the earth was very slow to repopulate, in part because that vast treasure trove of memory, the DNA of all those extinct species was gone forever. The great continent Pangea had drifted over the south pole creating a colder drier climate. In a life affirming response, the egg came into being, a less vulnerable way of reproducing evolved first in reptiles, who could migrate further inland now that they didn’t have to reproduce in water. Land animals evolved a way to retain their body heat in a cold climate) – the warm blooded reptiles that we believe were ancestors of the mammals like us to follow. As the Dinosaurs appeared these were the first era of animals to care for their young- to stay with the young after they hatched, and mammals who could nourish young outside the womb.
Placental mammals emerged in the wake of another devastation 114 million years ago [Aptian extinction] Earth grew cold. The mammals who could carry their young inside them- who could experience pregnancy and birth as mammals to day experience it, theses animals had an edge because their young started life outside the womb more developmentally advanced than the young of reptiles and dinosaurs. Many of the animals who now keep us company on this earth came into being: horses, rabbits, bats, whales, primates, lions, flowering plants and songbirds.
But then Antarctica split of from Australia, opening up a passage for currents of cold air, and the first ice began to form in the sea around Antarctica, an the temperature of the whole planet became colder.
The primates and other mammals had began to flourish in a vacuum left by a devastating extinction 67 million years ago which eliminated the dinosaurs and 70% of life on earth. This mass extinction may be the most famous. It is called the Cretaceous-Tertiary event [or K/T boundary] because it created such a clear boundaries between the era of the dinosaurs, and the eras without them the followed. This mass extinction eliminated the diversity of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mollusks, fauna. There is some debate about what caused the extinction, but whether we believe it was caused by a great asteroid hitting the earth, a time of great volcanic activity, or the movement of tectonic plates, whether the extinction was dramatic and swift or happened over millions of years, we know that the climate changed drastically and could no longer support the old life forms, like the dinosaurs. Twice more the wealth of life and diversity of species swelled and died back, caused by environmental catastrophe caused by major shifts in the earth’s climate.
4 million years ago the first hominids were distinguishing themselves from other primates with a larger brain size and upright posture, though our ancestors still spent a lot of time in the trees. 3.3 million years ago the current ice ages began. 2.6 million years ago the Homo Habilis was the first hominid to make an abundance of stone tools. We can tell that Homo Habilis were hunters because the kind of tools they made -- developed for hunting and cutting apart their food. These were the first of our close relatives. 1 million years ago earth saw the peak of Mammals on our earth. Then during the following ice age many of the large many of the large animals such as the mammoths, the saber tooth tigers, and the mastodons as the glaciers advanced further and further south, shrinking the habitat and food supply for both animal and plant life. About 30,000 years ago the Neanderthals hit an evolutionary dead end. When the glaciers retreated, it was the smaller animals that took their place- the white tailed deer, wood mice and migrating birds; the abrupt climate changed began the most recent period of mass extinction. From that time, about 11,500 years ago, to this day we are part of the most recent mass extinction- including huge reduction in the other “mega fauna” that is- animals larger than ourselves such as elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceros. In fact hundreds and thousands of species have become extinct in our time; many scientists believe this to be from our own human actions- hunting and destroying habitat for perhaps hundreds of thousands of species, particularly in dramatically diverse communities like the rainforest.
As we once again alter the delicate balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere we risk another dramatic unbalancing of life on our planet- the 6th great extinction. As we look back over billions of years of our story, it may remind us with trepidation of the great extinction when our atmosphere was unbalanced so many billion years ago, or it may remind us of the triumph of Prospero, who turned toxic waste into the stuff of life. This story of extinction and adaptation is a sometimes tragic story, but it is also a story of hope. Hope for life on our planet and for life itself. Life finds a way.
It seems it may be up to we Homo Sapiens to make a change, a breakthrough on the level of respiring oxygen or turning light into energy to restore a new balance to our biosphere. Say Swimme and Berry “While the human cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be a blade of grass unless it is accepted, protected and fostered by the human.” (p. 247)
One thing that has been true of Unitarians since we called ourselves by that name is a value of science and reason. And Science has given us a new story of who we are and where we come from.
We live in the eon of geologic time in which all 5 kingdoms of life have blossomed on earth. We live in a time of war, of competition for resources, of technological achievement. We live in a time of massive species extinction and changes to our biosphere.
A story that helps us understand our place in the order of things must be a big story, a story that reminds us both that we are new- coming as we do after 13 billion years after the first flaring forth, and 4 billion years after the first life appeared on this earth. Our human history is just the latest chapter in a long, long story. The Universe Story also shows us that we are deeply intertwined with all that is. We were there in the very first moments and there in the dramatic end story of the supernova Tiamat, in the triumph of Arius, of Prospero. The story of their tragedies and successes is our story as well. Let us call on all those billions of years of wisdom and memory lest we miss whatever part of the story that will help us shape a bright future for our selves and our biosphere. The collected wisdom in our culture, in our bodies, in our DNA, in our ecosystem is a remarkable inheritance.
Who better than a faith that values science and reason to appreciate such wisdom? Who better than a faith which affirms we are all on the same path, to heed that wisdom in shaping a just and vibrant future. Who better than this very community to be students and teachers of this, our whole story? Who better than the Universalists and the Unitarians to remember that in the beginning all was one?
Monday, February 6, 2012
Feed What you Want to Grow (February 5, 2012)
(This sermon is part of an ongoing series on the Principles of Permaculture. The 8 principles we are using come from Starhawk's "Principles of True Abundance")
Have you ever had aphids in your garden? Aphids are tiny little light green bugs eat the sap out of a rosebush or a tomato plant. I know when I see them in my garden I tend to panic. They reproduce like crazy- I heard that aphids can actually give birth to female offspring that are already pregnant! Conventional wisdom is to spray everything with insecticide -- to kill them all because if you let even a couple survive they will reproduce quickly and your garden will be covered with aphids again in no time. Moreover, each generation of aphids that survive are increasingly resistant to those insecticides.
Last year about this time I went to a workshop led by writer and Activist Starhawk about the “Principles of True Abundance” she called this the “nuke what annoys you” plan, and said that true abundance comes instead from “feeding what you want to grow.” Pests like aphids have natural enemies. In the case of aphids, one of their enemies is ladybugs. So in theory it is best to leave your aphid problem to the local ladybug population. Here’s the tricky part: predators of all kinds breed more slowly than their prey. They are slower to respond to changes to the ecosystem. This is a good thing, because it keeps predators from completely wiping out their own food sources. But when you spray insecticide all over your garden, you are killing not only most of the aphids, but most of the ladybugs. And because aphids reproduce so much more quickly than ladybugs, they will recover faster.
In this case, in our garden full of aphids, what we want to grow is ladybugs. So if we are thinking long-term, we can plant Marigolds, or dill, or fennel which are favorite foods of ladybugs. Ladybugs overwinter under rocks and in leaf litter, so we feed what we want to grow by letting a layer of fall leaves lay on the garden all winter, instead of “tidying up” as many of us have been taught to do.
Know who else likes to eat aphids? The Chickadee and the titmouse. Birds are some of the best insect eaters there are. If we want to make our garden bird friendly, we can add not only a birdfeeder to help get them through the lean times, but we would also make sure there are dense shrubs and trees to nest in as well as branches to perch on. To make our garden a home for birds we would also need a source of water. Now if you’ve ever been in an airplane, you remember flying over what looks like a quilt – but those quilt blocks are actually huge fields of neat rows of crops. If you drive by such fields they stretch on as far as the eye can see. You don’t see this as much on the roads I take to work, the fields on my commute are not so vast, and usually bordered by wild uncultivated patches of trees and shrubs. But in those big huge fields of mono-crops, there is no place for our bird friends to live and hide and nest. Most conventional fields are sprayed with expensive insecticide which kills all the natural insect predators in the process of killing the aphids and other bugs which would do harm to our crops. The thing is -- this method is not working. Apparently the USDA has been keeping track of the numbers and you can see from their figures that 50 years ago, before our newfangled high-tech farming methods, crop loss to pests and disease was a bout 7 percent per year. Now that we have all these patented insecticides and high tech farming methods, or crop loss has gone up to 14%. This is compelling proof to me that the “nuke what annoys you” approach to pests is not as effective as we might believe.
This idea of “feeding what you want to grow instead of nuking what annoys you” can be extrapolated into our personal lives as well. I believe the usual phrase is “you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.” When I was reading every parenting book I could get my hands on this strategy was called “positive discipline.” This school of thought suggests that instead of focusing on punishing mistakes, we focus on catching our kids doing it right, and making sure they know what “doing it right” looks like. So if you see your child at the sink wet from head to toe and surrounded by a puddle of water, we all know what our first gut instinct would be, but we could also reply “oh, you remembered to wash your hands! Looks like you are doing a very thorough job. Now let me show you how to clean up all that water on the floor.”
I have found over the years that often my son when does something “wrong” he actually was never taught how or doesn’t have the resources to do it “right”. Sometimes a few minutes together at the sink is all a parent and child would need to prevent a hand washing catastrophe.
When it comes to relationships, often the most effective thing we can give them to help them grow is our attention. For example, when we adopted our rescue puppy Trey, he had just about every behavior problem there is. He was so timid and afraid that he spent most of each day curled up in one spot on the sofa. But part of the reason I had chosen to adopt a high needs dog was that my job as your minister allows me to work from home during the day, so I knew I would be around a lot. After that first month Trey could be in the same room with humans, and if I let him go to his special safe spot and cower, he would let me pick him up. Because he was afraid of the stairs, every time I went upstairs to my study to work I would scoop him up from his safe spot and bring him with me so he could spend the time in his bed by my desk, or peaking out the window.
We were supposed to go out of town that first Memorial Day weekend, but because Trey was still very tenuous in his behavioral gains, we decided to stay home and just spend time together as a family. All 3 humans and 2 dogs puttered around the house. I played a little mandolin, mopped the kitchen, and taught my son a new card game. I started to remember that when we spend a day together just hanging out at home, good things happen. Our new dog even forgot himself and took a biscuit out of my hand instead of waiting for me to put it on the floor a safe distance away!
Finally it got to be bedtime, and Trey, who was really feeling like part of the pack, looked wistfully up the stairs after us as we ascended. I decided it was worth a try and carried him up. He went first to his bed by my desk but wasn't sure where to go when I headed to the bedroom. He paced and explored until I decided he was just too excited to sleep, so I carried him back downstairs to hang out with my partner.
Imagine my surprise when I woke some hours later and saw Trey curled up at the foot of our bed. He had climbed the stairs all by himself, and found himself a place to sleep. And that was that. He goes up and down the stairs now whenever he must and sleeps with the rest of the pack. Something huge changed for him that weekend, and I learned once again that good things happen when the family just spends time together. Our relationships grow when we feed them with time and attention.
We often give our attention to troubles and obstacles, to things that annoy us. Instead, feeding what we want to grow means that we give our attention to things that we want to have in our life. Many years back my partner and I were watching the now famous Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell in a series called “The power of Myth”.
A woman came to me long ago for pastoral counseling. She told me that a co-worker was driving her CRAZY. You know how sometimes in your job situation or family, or maybe even here at the fellowship sometimes there will be a person who just rubs you the wrong way? My parishioner came and met with me several times about her conflict with this other woman. I asked her each time “what is good in your life? What are you doing to take care of yourself?” By our 3rd meeting on the topic of her difficult work relationship my parishioner could think of nothing good at all. She fed so much of her energy to this difficult relationship that it had grown and grown until there was room for nothing else in her heart. By counseling this woman I was able to see this tendency more clearly in my own life. When I get obsessed with, for example, how someone else in my house does or doesn’t do the dishes, this is a sign to me that there is probably something in my own life that I am not feeding. Whatever you feed will most likely grow- so be very careful about what you feed.
It’s not too hard to make the leap then to global politics. When Starhawk introduced this concept to us she asked “what if we had responded in this way to the events of 9-11 instead of responding with military might” in what she characterizes as the “nuke what annoys you” response. She asked- “what if instead of pouring resources into armed conflict, what if we had put that same amount of energy and support into our relationships with moderate Muslims and allies in those areas where terrorism had taken root?”
Going back to the garden she explained that in the Permaculture school of design you really want to avoid weeding. Usually the weeds serve some purpose, and if we plant the right plants and feed what we want to grow, the weeds won’t have an opportunity to take over. We asked her, thinking of movements like Occupy Wall street, and about the structures of power that are oppressive to many “don’t you sometimes have to weed?” Yes, she said, sometimes you do. But we must differential between people and structures. Sometimes structures need to be torn down, but there are people within them that we don’t have to demonize. When we weed we make room for new things to grow, and liberate energy and resources. When we tear down, she said, we must be careful of how we use the materials that made up the old structures, like when you tear down an old house.
She told us about the Gaza Freedom March she had attended in Egypt in the first days of 2010. They were supposed to enter Gaza through the Rafah border to meet with human rights groups to “bear witness to the continuing devastation” in Gaza. When they were not allowed to cross the border, they continued their protest in Egypt. There organizers were training grassroots communities in a school of organizing based on Gene Sharp’s work on non-violent struggle. Starhawk points out that when the people of Egypt rose up a year later everyone supposed it was just another protest, but in fact that organizing had been going on for years, starting in the poor neighborhoods and calling others to join them. Different news outlets calculate that somewhere between 500-800 folks died in the Egyptian uprising. But contrast those tragic deaths to these staggering numbers: over 4000 US service men and women and over 100,000 civilians who died in the Iraq war based on the Iraq war logs compiled by the US military.
The idea of “feeding what you want to grow” is that if we feed violence, what will grow is violence. If we feed nonviolent uprising and grassroots organizing, what will grow is non-violent uprising and grassroots uprising. You can see that this is a radical and subversive idea; it is not one adopted widely in our society. But the hope is that if you feed what you want to grow, what grows will be the very thing you wanted. Don’t take my word for it, try it in your life, and see what happens. Try it not just once, but consistently and patiently as you would care for a young child or a seedling in a garden. Notice what you are feeding and what is growing. May ladybugs and nonviolence, love, and harmony flourish in all our gardens.
Have you ever had aphids in your garden? Aphids are tiny little light green bugs eat the sap out of a rosebush or a tomato plant. I know when I see them in my garden I tend to panic. They reproduce like crazy- I heard that aphids can actually give birth to female offspring that are already pregnant! Conventional wisdom is to spray everything with insecticide -- to kill them all because if you let even a couple survive they will reproduce quickly and your garden will be covered with aphids again in no time. Moreover, each generation of aphids that survive are increasingly resistant to those insecticides.
Last year about this time I went to a workshop led by writer and Activist Starhawk about the “Principles of True Abundance” she called this the “nuke what annoys you” plan, and said that true abundance comes instead from “feeding what you want to grow.” Pests like aphids have natural enemies. In the case of aphids, one of their enemies is ladybugs. So in theory it is best to leave your aphid problem to the local ladybug population. Here’s the tricky part: predators of all kinds breed more slowly than their prey. They are slower to respond to changes to the ecosystem. This is a good thing, because it keeps predators from completely wiping out their own food sources. But when you spray insecticide all over your garden, you are killing not only most of the aphids, but most of the ladybugs. And because aphids reproduce so much more quickly than ladybugs, they will recover faster.
In this case, in our garden full of aphids, what we want to grow is ladybugs. So if we are thinking long-term, we can plant Marigolds, or dill, or fennel which are favorite foods of ladybugs. Ladybugs overwinter under rocks and in leaf litter, so we feed what we want to grow by letting a layer of fall leaves lay on the garden all winter, instead of “tidying up” as many of us have been taught to do.
Know who else likes to eat aphids? The Chickadee and the titmouse. Birds are some of the best insect eaters there are. If we want to make our garden bird friendly, we can add not only a birdfeeder to help get them through the lean times, but we would also make sure there are dense shrubs and trees to nest in as well as branches to perch on. To make our garden a home for birds we would also need a source of water. Now if you’ve ever been in an airplane, you remember flying over what looks like a quilt – but those quilt blocks are actually huge fields of neat rows of crops. If you drive by such fields they stretch on as far as the eye can see. You don’t see this as much on the roads I take to work, the fields on my commute are not so vast, and usually bordered by wild uncultivated patches of trees and shrubs. But in those big huge fields of mono-crops, there is no place for our bird friends to live and hide and nest. Most conventional fields are sprayed with expensive insecticide which kills all the natural insect predators in the process of killing the aphids and other bugs which would do harm to our crops. The thing is -- this method is not working. Apparently the USDA has been keeping track of the numbers and you can see from their figures that 50 years ago, before our newfangled high-tech farming methods, crop loss to pests and disease was a bout 7 percent per year. Now that we have all these patented insecticides and high tech farming methods, or crop loss has gone up to 14%. This is compelling proof to me that the “nuke what annoys you” approach to pests is not as effective as we might believe.
This idea of “feeding what you want to grow instead of nuking what annoys you” can be extrapolated into our personal lives as well. I believe the usual phrase is “you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.” When I was reading every parenting book I could get my hands on this strategy was called “positive discipline.” This school of thought suggests that instead of focusing on punishing mistakes, we focus on catching our kids doing it right, and making sure they know what “doing it right” looks like. So if you see your child at the sink wet from head to toe and surrounded by a puddle of water, we all know what our first gut instinct would be, but we could also reply “oh, you remembered to wash your hands! Looks like you are doing a very thorough job. Now let me show you how to clean up all that water on the floor.”
I have found over the years that often my son when does something “wrong” he actually was never taught how or doesn’t have the resources to do it “right”. Sometimes a few minutes together at the sink is all a parent and child would need to prevent a hand washing catastrophe.
When it comes to relationships, often the most effective thing we can give them to help them grow is our attention. For example, when we adopted our rescue puppy Trey, he had just about every behavior problem there is. He was so timid and afraid that he spent most of each day curled up in one spot on the sofa. But part of the reason I had chosen to adopt a high needs dog was that my job as your minister allows me to work from home during the day, so I knew I would be around a lot. After that first month Trey could be in the same room with humans, and if I let him go to his special safe spot and cower, he would let me pick him up. Because he was afraid of the stairs, every time I went upstairs to my study to work I would scoop him up from his safe spot and bring him with me so he could spend the time in his bed by my desk, or peaking out the window.
We were supposed to go out of town that first Memorial Day weekend, but because Trey was still very tenuous in his behavioral gains, we decided to stay home and just spend time together as a family. All 3 humans and 2 dogs puttered around the house. I played a little mandolin, mopped the kitchen, and taught my son a new card game. I started to remember that when we spend a day together just hanging out at home, good things happen. Our new dog even forgot himself and took a biscuit out of my hand instead of waiting for me to put it on the floor a safe distance away!
Finally it got to be bedtime, and Trey, who was really feeling like part of the pack, looked wistfully up the stairs after us as we ascended. I decided it was worth a try and carried him up. He went first to his bed by my desk but wasn't sure where to go when I headed to the bedroom. He paced and explored until I decided he was just too excited to sleep, so I carried him back downstairs to hang out with my partner.
Imagine my surprise when I woke some hours later and saw Trey curled up at the foot of our bed. He had climbed the stairs all by himself, and found himself a place to sleep. And that was that. He goes up and down the stairs now whenever he must and sleeps with the rest of the pack. Something huge changed for him that weekend, and I learned once again that good things happen when the family just spends time together. Our relationships grow when we feed them with time and attention.
We often give our attention to troubles and obstacles, to things that annoy us. Instead, feeding what we want to grow means that we give our attention to things that we want to have in our life. Many years back my partner and I were watching the now famous Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell in a series called “The power of Myth”.
Campbell says to Moyer: “I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.”I heard that remark at a powerful turning point in my life. I had just dropped out of grad school where I was studying to become an opera singer, and it seemed like the most important thing to do was to get a good job that would bring in a steady income and maybe even health insurance. I should get an office job like normal people, I thought. (whatever that means.) Can you imagine if I had done that? If what I had decided to feed was “being normal” and “getting a paycheck?” Instead I decided to feed that part of me that was curious about why things are the way they are, and what it all means. I fed it by carefully choosing the books I read, the adventures I had, and eventually with 4 years of seminary education. That part of myself that I fed eventually did grow, and became a minister. I am still feeding it, and it is still growing.
MOYERS asks: “What happens when you follow your bliss?”
CAMPBELL replies : “You come to bliss.”
A woman came to me long ago for pastoral counseling. She told me that a co-worker was driving her CRAZY. You know how sometimes in your job situation or family, or maybe even here at the fellowship sometimes there will be a person who just rubs you the wrong way? My parishioner came and met with me several times about her conflict with this other woman. I asked her each time “what is good in your life? What are you doing to take care of yourself?” By our 3rd meeting on the topic of her difficult work relationship my parishioner could think of nothing good at all. She fed so much of her energy to this difficult relationship that it had grown and grown until there was room for nothing else in her heart. By counseling this woman I was able to see this tendency more clearly in my own life. When I get obsessed with, for example, how someone else in my house does or doesn’t do the dishes, this is a sign to me that there is probably something in my own life that I am not feeding. Whatever you feed will most likely grow- so be very careful about what you feed.
It’s not too hard to make the leap then to global politics. When Starhawk introduced this concept to us she asked “what if we had responded in this way to the events of 9-11 instead of responding with military might” in what she characterizes as the “nuke what annoys you” response. She asked- “what if instead of pouring resources into armed conflict, what if we had put that same amount of energy and support into our relationships with moderate Muslims and allies in those areas where terrorism had taken root?”
Going back to the garden she explained that in the Permaculture school of design you really want to avoid weeding. Usually the weeds serve some purpose, and if we plant the right plants and feed what we want to grow, the weeds won’t have an opportunity to take over. We asked her, thinking of movements like Occupy Wall street, and about the structures of power that are oppressive to many “don’t you sometimes have to weed?” Yes, she said, sometimes you do. But we must differential between people and structures. Sometimes structures need to be torn down, but there are people within them that we don’t have to demonize. When we weed we make room for new things to grow, and liberate energy and resources. When we tear down, she said, we must be careful of how we use the materials that made up the old structures, like when you tear down an old house.
She told us about the Gaza Freedom March she had attended in Egypt in the first days of 2010. They were supposed to enter Gaza through the Rafah border to meet with human rights groups to “bear witness to the continuing devastation” in Gaza. When they were not allowed to cross the border, they continued their protest in Egypt. There organizers were training grassroots communities in a school of organizing based on Gene Sharp’s work on non-violent struggle. Starhawk points out that when the people of Egypt rose up a year later everyone supposed it was just another protest, but in fact that organizing had been going on for years, starting in the poor neighborhoods and calling others to join them. Different news outlets calculate that somewhere between 500-800 folks died in the Egyptian uprising. But contrast those tragic deaths to these staggering numbers: over 4000 US service men and women and over 100,000 civilians who died in the Iraq war based on the Iraq war logs compiled by the US military.
The idea of “feeding what you want to grow” is that if we feed violence, what will grow is violence. If we feed nonviolent uprising and grassroots organizing, what will grow is non-violent uprising and grassroots uprising. You can see that this is a radical and subversive idea; it is not one adopted widely in our society. But the hope is that if you feed what you want to grow, what grows will be the very thing you wanted. Don’t take my word for it, try it in your life, and see what happens. Try it not just once, but consistently and patiently as you would care for a young child or a seedling in a garden. Notice what you are feeding and what is growing. May ladybugs and nonviolence, love, and harmony flourish in all our gardens.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Who Do You Say That I Am? (January 15, 2012)
These reflections bookended a series of readings about the nature of the divine presented by participants in our Adult Religious Education Class.
Reflection part 1:
For as far back as anyone can remember, talking about God has been a problem. That one word is so powerful and so loaded. Richard Dawkins, a contemporary humanist and Atheist writes: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” [Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion ]
Many of us are here in this UU church today because at one point or another we have heard stories about God that we just could not believe in, like the god of Genesis who destroys all the beings of the world in a flood except those saved on an Ark because “the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth.” When I heard stories like this in Sunday school I knew that I could not believe in such a God.
The very first Universalists risked being ostracized by friends and family, losing their jobs, and facing persecution because they could not believe in a God who would damn to hell most of those people he had created and save only an elect few.
I arrived at seminary with just such images of God in my mind. Starr King is part of an interfaith Theological Union, and I didn’t really appreciate until my first semester the opportunities we would have to take classes at the other seminaries -- with Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Jews and Baptists and to engage in deep theological conversation with an incredible diversity of folks. I was repeatedly surprised to hear them struggle with and often reject those images of a vindictive, misogynistic, homophobic God and offer instead a variety of visions of the divine all of which were bigger and more inclusive than I had ever imagined.
John Buehrens, a former president of the UUA writes “to those who tell me, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ I often reply. ‘Tell me about the God that you don’t believe in,’ ‘The changes are that I don’t believe in Him either’” [“Experience” by John Buehrens in “Our Chosen Faith”] Whether we are atheists, theists or agnostics, when we hear the word “God” a set of images and stories and feelings come immediately to mind. What I have come to understand is that for each of us that set of images and feelings is unique. When someone uses the word “God” I assume that I have some idea what is meant, but more and more I have come to realize that we will never know for sure what is really meant unless we ask, and listen.
Reflection part 2:
Many who do believe in God say that God is ineffable, can never truly be described or understood. By definition the word “God” refers to something so different from us as to be outside our capacity to comprehend. As Forrest Church said in our opening reading “None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person’s window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth.” So a tremendous amount of humility must accompany any discussion of the divine.
What we can understand is how our beliefs cause us to act in the world. Early Universalist Hosea Ballou argued that those who believed in a judging vindictive god tended to become judging and vindictive themselves. Since, in our limited human view, can never know the true nature of the divine, we can ask ourselves, “do my beliefs cause me to be more compassionate, more ethical than if I did not believe them?” We can ask “Does the model I use for understanding my relationship to the divine and to the world around me lead me inexorably towards working for a more just and sustainable world for all the beings who share this world with me?”
It is this question that brings us together as Unitarian Universalists week after week despite sometimes significant theological differences. Atheists, Christians, Neo-Pagans and Jews can worship together, because we know that ultimately metaphysical questions are most important as they are lived out day to day. Whatever you believe about God, may your beliefs lead you to help build a world shaped by beauty, justice and compassion. May it be so.
Reflection part 1:
For as far back as anyone can remember, talking about God has been a problem. That one word is so powerful and so loaded. Richard Dawkins, a contemporary humanist and Atheist writes: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” [Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion ]
Many of us are here in this UU church today because at one point or another we have heard stories about God that we just could not believe in, like the god of Genesis who destroys all the beings of the world in a flood except those saved on an Ark because “the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth.” When I heard stories like this in Sunday school I knew that I could not believe in such a God.
The very first Universalists risked being ostracized by friends and family, losing their jobs, and facing persecution because they could not believe in a God who would damn to hell most of those people he had created and save only an elect few.
I arrived at seminary with just such images of God in my mind. Starr King is part of an interfaith Theological Union, and I didn’t really appreciate until my first semester the opportunities we would have to take classes at the other seminaries -- with Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Jews and Baptists and to engage in deep theological conversation with an incredible diversity of folks. I was repeatedly surprised to hear them struggle with and often reject those images of a vindictive, misogynistic, homophobic God and offer instead a variety of visions of the divine all of which were bigger and more inclusive than I had ever imagined.
John Buehrens, a former president of the UUA writes “to those who tell me, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ I often reply. ‘Tell me about the God that you don’t believe in,’ ‘The changes are that I don’t believe in Him either’” [“Experience” by John Buehrens in “Our Chosen Faith”] Whether we are atheists, theists or agnostics, when we hear the word “God” a set of images and stories and feelings come immediately to mind. What I have come to understand is that for each of us that set of images and feelings is unique. When someone uses the word “God” I assume that I have some idea what is meant, but more and more I have come to realize that we will never know for sure what is really meant unless we ask, and listen.
Reflection part 2:
Many who do believe in God say that God is ineffable, can never truly be described or understood. By definition the word “God” refers to something so different from us as to be outside our capacity to comprehend. As Forrest Church said in our opening reading “None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person’s window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth.” So a tremendous amount of humility must accompany any discussion of the divine.
What we can understand is how our beliefs cause us to act in the world. Early Universalist Hosea Ballou argued that those who believed in a judging vindictive god tended to become judging and vindictive themselves. Since, in our limited human view, can never know the true nature of the divine, we can ask ourselves, “do my beliefs cause me to be more compassionate, more ethical than if I did not believe them?” We can ask “Does the model I use for understanding my relationship to the divine and to the world around me lead me inexorably towards working for a more just and sustainable world for all the beings who share this world with me?”
It is this question that brings us together as Unitarian Universalists week after week despite sometimes significant theological differences. Atheists, Christians, Neo-Pagans and Jews can worship together, because we know that ultimately metaphysical questions are most important as they are lived out day to day. Whatever you believe about God, may your beliefs lead you to help build a world shaped by beauty, justice and compassion. May it be so.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Heeding the Call (December 11, 2011)
On the occasion of the installation of Rev. Doug Stearns at the Universalist Fellowship of Towanda
Readings:
Exodus 3:7-12
Exodus 4:10-14
"The Journey" by Mary Oliver
Sometimes when we hear folks talk about “calling” we imagine a scene much like the one in our reading today: an anthropomorphic God having a conversation with his chosen prophet. And so many of us who are humanist or atheist or agnostic, or who just don’t identify with an anthropomorphic deity discard this traditional idea. Today I would like for us to reclaim the idea of “calling” for Unitarian Universalists. And I’m going to get the help of one of those contemporary scriptures we Uus tend to rely on to help us connect to the holy- the poetry of Pulitzer prizing winning poet Mary Oliver, many of whose books of poetry are published by our own Beacon press. Her poem “the Journey” helps us imagine what “calling” might feel like to an ordinary modern person like us:
And I want to suggest to you that calling can be as simple as this. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began;” have you ever had that feeling, that you knew what you had to do? For the purposes of our service today, for purposes of our Uu lives, it doesn’t matter where that feeling comes from, because as Oliver goes on to write:
Ah, here is the voice. Here is the language of calling. Perhaps we are called when we learn to recognize our own voice. And though that is critically important, and can take a lifetime to do, that is not all that calling is. Having a calling is not just about listening, but also about turning what you hear into action “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,” There’s the rub. And that rub is where the story of Moses points us toward a universal human experience, because I believe just about every prophet in the scriptures, when they hear the call say exactly what Moses said ‘Who am I that I should go?” I bet every one of us who had heard a call has also asked such a question.
I want to give a much less lofty example from my own life, an example of calling found in the most mundane of all places – in the trash. I remember coming home from shopping one day, and I unpacked my purchases I noticed that every single thing came in a plastic container that at least matched the bulk of the product. For example, I had bought maybe an ounce of moisturizer, which came in a plastic bottle, that came in a plastic box, that came in a plastic bag. I had bought a plastic toy for my son, that came in a giant plastic hermetically sealed container, which came in its own plastic bag. When I finally finished unwrapping my purchases I had a pile of trash that would fill a kitchen trash can. And though I had making such shopping trips for years, on this day for the first time something bubbled up from deep inside me and said. “That can’t be right”
But then of course my second thought was a sense of powerlessness. “This problem is way too big for me,” I thought” there’s nothing I can do about this. Our whole society cooperates to create that giant bag of non-recyclable trash. What are you gonna do?” And this, I believe is the moment that famous bible story describes. ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ IN fact, and I love this kind of storytelling, Moses protests 3 different times. He says first in Exodus 3 “ Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring he Israelites out of Egypt?” Then in Exodus 4 he says ‘‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’’ and finally in Exodus 6 Moses asks ‘Since I am a poor speaker, why would Pharaoh listen to me?’
Well I sat carried that pile of trash around with me in my mind for a couple of weeks, like a pebble in my shoe. And then “one day I finally knew what I had to do, and began” I couldn’t worry about how small my actions would be, I couldn’t wait until everyone else had received the same calling,
It took a few weeks for that simple vision to unfold and even longer until I bought my first canvas bags, and even longer before I remembered EVERY time I went shopping to bring them with me. And let me tell you I NEVER feel like Moses when the lady at the Target makes me bag my own items because she can’t deal with my non-standard bags, or when I have to walk back to the car in the rain to get the bags I forgot AGAIN.
Except it says right there in the bible that the greatest prophet of the Jewish tradition felt insecure and not up to the task : “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” I also am encouraged by the fact that Moses says he is STILL not eloquent “now that you have spoken to your servant” When we are called, we are called just as we are, with all our human failings and weaknesses. We are not let off the hook just because we are “slow of speech and slow of tongue”
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, we don’t believe that the days of the prophets are past. We believe that a calling can and does come to anyone, not just the famous prophets of old, not just to our eloquent brother Aaron. We believe in the prophethood of all believers. One of the great 20th century Unitarian Theologians James Luther Adams coined this phrase. He writes:
Adams was converted to his world view after visiting Nazi Germany in 1935 and seeing the complacency of the churches there. While in Germany Adams used his home movie camera to film great leaders like Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer who worked with the church-related resistance groups, and also the pro-Nazi leaders of the Christian Church. By the time he came back to the US, he was more convinced than ever that any church any layperson or clergy was called to speak out, to act against such oppression. And any which could stand by and passively let such oppression happen, was irrelevant and impotent.
So if we are all prophets, what does it mean for us to be called? When I was at seminary we were often asked about our sense of call. Most of us had a story about a time when that still small voice in each of us, the voice we had “slowly begun to recognize as our own” had beckoned us to serve our UU congregations in one kind of ministry or another. But as the years of seminary and formation wore on, it became clear that this was not all there was to a call. There is not only this sense of inner rightness, of what “I am meant to do” but there must also be, our mentors assured us, a relationship between “What I am meant to do” and what the community needs. It is not simply enough for us to go into our places of silent meditation and emerge with this vision of our calling, our vocation. The passage from Exodus we read this morning begins with a witness of the realities of the local community
So we each of us have the capacity to be called by that inner voice that always tells us the truth, but that is only one part of the call, the other part of the call will come from the people around you, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. A vocation (a word which comes form the Latin root “Vocare” meaning to call) is what we do in response to what the voice we hear inside, but also the voices we hear in the community of beings.
I had the honor or conducting a memorial service last week for a woman called Dale Bryner, who was a great artist and environmental educator. Her message to her children and to her students over those years had been clear- be exactly who you are, because you are wonderful, and know that you are part of something larger than yourselves that is happening, and that is going to be amazing.
As I carried Dale’s words around inside me this past week. I thought of you – the Towanda Universalist Fellowship, and your new minister Doug. You are still a small tribe, but you’ve been around since maybe 1866. Back then you had about 100 members. Over these past 150 years your congregation has ebbed and flowed, changed and been changed. Recently, when there were no services being held here, we thought maybe the life of this congregation was over, but then you were reborn. At this time of rebirth, this is what you must ask yourselves: Who are you? And what are you called to do? I challenge you to remember that your true vocation will be not only an interior calling, about how you will be together as a congregation and what you will learn about together, but your calling is also about the intersection where that place of inner integrity meets your place in the in the community of beings, and you will understand how you are called to serve the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
You may say to yourselves “but we are not eloquent, the community will not listen to us” but remember you don’t have to do it alone. Remember when Moses beseeches God saying “‘O my Lord, please send someone else.” And God says, though at this point he is getting to the end of his rope “What of your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently; even now he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad.”
So when you are feeling “slow of speech” or otherwise not up to the task, remember the Rev. Stearns can speak fluently. Remember your friends are coming even now to meet you. Like Moses had his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam, you have not only my congregation, the UU Church of Athens and Sheshequin, which has been a partner of yours off and on for 150 years, but you have the Brooklyn Church, and all the churches of the Pennsylvania Universalist Convention, of the Joseph Priestly District, and of the UUA. You are not alone. You have allies in this community, in Towanda, and more who will emerge as you discover who you are, and how you are uniquely called to serve this your community.
I asked Doug, was there anything special he wanted to be sure you knew, as you set out on your covenant together. He said he wanted to give you courage for all that lays ahead for you as a congregation. I believe it is the sense of call that gives one courage. If you know what you have to do, if you begin to recognize that voice that is your own, then you will have the courage to stride deeper and deeper into the world. I wish for you the courage that comes from the strength of knowing who you really are, and the courage that comes from your desire to serve, knowing that you are part of something larger, and that it is going to be amazing.
Readings:
Exodus 3:7-12
Exodus 4:10-14
"The Journey" by Mary Oliver
Sometimes when we hear folks talk about “calling” we imagine a scene much like the one in our reading today: an anthropomorphic God having a conversation with his chosen prophet. And so many of us who are humanist or atheist or agnostic, or who just don’t identify with an anthropomorphic deity discard this traditional idea. Today I would like for us to reclaim the idea of “calling” for Unitarian Universalists. And I’m going to get the help of one of those contemporary scriptures we Uus tend to rely on to help us connect to the holy- the poetry of Pulitzer prizing winning poet Mary Oliver, many of whose books of poetry are published by our own Beacon press. Her poem “the Journey” helps us imagine what “calling” might feel like to an ordinary modern person like us:
“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,”
And I want to suggest to you that calling can be as simple as this. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began;” have you ever had that feeling, that you knew what you had to do? For the purposes of our service today, for purposes of our Uu lives, it doesn’t matter where that feeling comes from, because as Oliver goes on to write:
“there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
Ah, here is the voice. Here is the language of calling. Perhaps we are called when we learn to recognize our own voice. And though that is critically important, and can take a lifetime to do, that is not all that calling is. Having a calling is not just about listening, but also about turning what you hear into action “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,” There’s the rub. And that rub is where the story of Moses points us toward a universal human experience, because I believe just about every prophet in the scriptures, when they hear the call say exactly what Moses said ‘Who am I that I should go?” I bet every one of us who had heard a call has also asked such a question.
I want to give a much less lofty example from my own life, an example of calling found in the most mundane of all places – in the trash. I remember coming home from shopping one day, and I unpacked my purchases I noticed that every single thing came in a plastic container that at least matched the bulk of the product. For example, I had bought maybe an ounce of moisturizer, which came in a plastic bottle, that came in a plastic box, that came in a plastic bag. I had bought a plastic toy for my son, that came in a giant plastic hermetically sealed container, which came in its own plastic bag. When I finally finished unwrapping my purchases I had a pile of trash that would fill a kitchen trash can. And though I had making such shopping trips for years, on this day for the first time something bubbled up from deep inside me and said. “That can’t be right”
But then of course my second thought was a sense of powerlessness. “This problem is way too big for me,” I thought” there’s nothing I can do about this. Our whole society cooperates to create that giant bag of non-recyclable trash. What are you gonna do?” And this, I believe is the moment that famous bible story describes. ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ IN fact, and I love this kind of storytelling, Moses protests 3 different times. He says first in Exodus 3 “ Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring he Israelites out of Egypt?” Then in Exodus 4 he says ‘‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’’ and finally in Exodus 6 Moses asks ‘Since I am a poor speaker, why would Pharaoh listen to me?’
Well I sat carried that pile of trash around with me in my mind for a couple of weeks, like a pebble in my shoe. And then “one day I finally knew what I had to do, and began” I couldn’t worry about how small my actions would be, I couldn’t wait until everyone else had received the same calling,
“determined to doI had to stop allowing that kind of waste into my life. I had to start carrying my own shopping bags, I had to stop buying products that were so packaging intensive, and I had to start learning something about the impact of all our plastic packaging waste on the planet. I had to reorganize my theology to include care for the earth in a more holistic way.
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
It took a few weeks for that simple vision to unfold and even longer until I bought my first canvas bags, and even longer before I remembered EVERY time I went shopping to bring them with me. And let me tell you I NEVER feel like Moses when the lady at the Target makes me bag my own items because she can’t deal with my non-standard bags, or when I have to walk back to the car in the rain to get the bags I forgot AGAIN.
Except it says right there in the bible that the greatest prophet of the Jewish tradition felt insecure and not up to the task : “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” I also am encouraged by the fact that Moses says he is STILL not eloquent “now that you have spoken to your servant” When we are called, we are called just as we are, with all our human failings and weaknesses. We are not let off the hook just because we are “slow of speech and slow of tongue”
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, we don’t believe that the days of the prophets are past. We believe that a calling can and does come to anyone, not just the famous prophets of old, not just to our eloquent brother Aaron. We believe in the prophethood of all believers. One of the great 20th century Unitarian Theologians James Luther Adams coined this phrase. He writes:
"The churches of the left wing of the Reformation …demanded a church in which every member, under the power of the Spirit, would have the privilege and the responsibility of interpreting the Gospel and also of assisting to determine the policy of the church. The new church was to make way for a radical laicism -- that is, for the priesthood and the prophethood of all believers."
Adams was converted to his world view after visiting Nazi Germany in 1935 and seeing the complacency of the churches there. While in Germany Adams used his home movie camera to film great leaders like Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer who worked with the church-related resistance groups, and also the pro-Nazi leaders of the Christian Church. By the time he came back to the US, he was more convinced than ever that any church any layperson or clergy was called to speak out, to act against such oppression. And any which could stand by and passively let such oppression happen, was irrelevant and impotent.
So if we are all prophets, what does it mean for us to be called? When I was at seminary we were often asked about our sense of call. Most of us had a story about a time when that still small voice in each of us, the voice we had “slowly begun to recognize as our own” had beckoned us to serve our UU congregations in one kind of ministry or another. But as the years of seminary and formation wore on, it became clear that this was not all there was to a call. There is not only this sense of inner rightness, of what “I am meant to do” but there must also be, our mentors assured us, a relationship between “What I am meant to do” and what the community needs. It is not simply enough for us to go into our places of silent meditation and emerge with this vision of our calling, our vocation. The passage from Exodus we read this morning begins with a witness of the realities of the local community
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,”.
So we each of us have the capacity to be called by that inner voice that always tells us the truth, but that is only one part of the call, the other part of the call will come from the people around you, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. A vocation (a word which comes form the Latin root “Vocare” meaning to call) is what we do in response to what the voice we hear inside, but also the voices we hear in the community of beings.
I had the honor or conducting a memorial service last week for a woman called Dale Bryner, who was a great artist and environmental educator. Her message to her children and to her students over those years had been clear- be exactly who you are, because you are wonderful, and know that you are part of something larger than yourselves that is happening, and that is going to be amazing.
As I carried Dale’s words around inside me this past week. I thought of you – the Towanda Universalist Fellowship, and your new minister Doug. You are still a small tribe, but you’ve been around since maybe 1866. Back then you had about 100 members. Over these past 150 years your congregation has ebbed and flowed, changed and been changed. Recently, when there were no services being held here, we thought maybe the life of this congregation was over, but then you were reborn. At this time of rebirth, this is what you must ask yourselves: Who are you? And what are you called to do? I challenge you to remember that your true vocation will be not only an interior calling, about how you will be together as a congregation and what you will learn about together, but your calling is also about the intersection where that place of inner integrity meets your place in the in the community of beings, and you will understand how you are called to serve the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
You may say to yourselves “but we are not eloquent, the community will not listen to us” but remember you don’t have to do it alone. Remember when Moses beseeches God saying “‘O my Lord, please send someone else.” And God says, though at this point he is getting to the end of his rope “What of your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently; even now he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad.”
So when you are feeling “slow of speech” or otherwise not up to the task, remember the Rev. Stearns can speak fluently. Remember your friends are coming even now to meet you. Like Moses had his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam, you have not only my congregation, the UU Church of Athens and Sheshequin, which has been a partner of yours off and on for 150 years, but you have the Brooklyn Church, and all the churches of the Pennsylvania Universalist Convention, of the Joseph Priestly District, and of the UUA. You are not alone. You have allies in this community, in Towanda, and more who will emerge as you discover who you are, and how you are uniquely called to serve this your community.
I asked Doug, was there anything special he wanted to be sure you knew, as you set out on your covenant together. He said he wanted to give you courage for all that lays ahead for you as a congregation. I believe it is the sense of call that gives one courage. If you know what you have to do, if you begin to recognize that voice that is your own, then you will have the courage to stride deeper and deeper into the world. I wish for you the courage that comes from the strength of knowing who you really are, and the courage that comes from your desire to serve, knowing that you are part of something larger, and that it is going to be amazing.
Habit, Ritual and Addiction: Building a Day (January 8, 2011)
Last summer my son Nick and I took advantage of a clergy scholarship to visit Star Island for the first time. This is a UU conference and retreat center on the Isle of Shoales off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. It can be reached only by ferry. We stayed at the historic and now somewhat dilapidated Grand Oceanic hotel built in the 1800s when time when that sort of thing was all the rage. It was bought by a non-profit and started offering conferences in 1916. Many of the folks we met as we nervously boarded the ferry had been making the annual pilgrimage for years. There is a history center on the island where you can see old timey black and white photos showing people engaged in many of the same traditions that still live on there today. One of those traditions is polar bearing at 7:00 am. Now remember this island is pretty far north, and out a few miles into the Atlantic. The ocean water is not warm even on a sunny summer afternoon, but these folks start their day every morning with a walk out to the end of the dock and a dive into the chilly early morning water.
When I first heard of this tradition, I knew it was one that was not for me. Just taking a ferry out to this strange island to spend a week single morning it with my son and 200 some total strangers was challenge enough. But one day as I sat at lunch getting to know yet another new person, she told me that she was 80 and had been coming to the island for decades. I noticed around her neck the plastic beads that reward those brave enough to take the plunge. I was amazed. I had imagined a gang of burly 2-something men lining up on the dock in the early morning, but my dining companion said she never missed a morning. It was all the more remarkable since weather was just horrible for almost the whole week. There was drenching rain every day; Nick and I quickly ran out of dry clothes. The winds were so sever that the ferries to and from the island were canceled, and staying warm was a challenge even in the middle of the afternoon.
What got me through those rainy days so far from home, what I had to be sure of even before I registered for the program, was yoga. Every afternoon there were several programs to choose from, and I always chose yoga. I had discovered the first day that this was to be a gentle yoga class- the teacher was very specific about that. Some of the women who enjoy the same kind of vigorous yoga that I enjoy left the class to do their own practice, but in an island full of strangers, I needed a yoga community. Even though this was not the same kind of yoga I was used to, what was important to me was to have that yoga discipline to anchor my day. Even on the days when the storm was so intense that rain dripped through the roof onto the yoga mats of the folks in the back row, even on the days when a cold wind whipped through the swinging doors. Even, and this was the hard one, on the beautiful sunny day when sensible people played hooky from their workshops and basked in the sun after days of being locked up inside in the rain, there I was on my yoga mat.
That last weekend of our stay, the sun finally broke. Nick insisted we join the group of singers who gather each morning to walk the whole of the residential part of the island singing a wake-up song at every dorm and cabin. As we gathered, another group of folks sat in the white wooden rocking chairs on the deck enjoying a pre-breakfast cup of coffee and watching the island wake up. The polar bears were also gathering there at the edge of the dock in the glittering early morning sunlight. There were people of all shapes and sizes from elementary aged children to the octogenarian friend I had met at lunch earlier in the week. While I could see the appeal of taking an early morning walk around the island singing, I had this sudden knowing that I MUST polar bear before I left the island, or I would always regret it. So the next morning I got up even earlier, left my son abed, wrapped a towel around me and headed out to the dock. It was just as scary and cold and exciting as I’d thought it would be. There was a lovely sense of camaraderie, and after I proudly emerged from the water I reported to the guy in change for my very own plastic beads on a string to show I had been a polar bear at Star Island. I could see why those folks did it even in the cold and the rain. Because you felt like you had already DONE something, even before breakfast. No matter what else the day held, you had had your moment of excitement and camaraderie and you were awake and ready to face the day.
I thought about all the little traditions that made up the Star Island Experience, and how different people needed different things to make up their day- the folks who went door to door singing, the folks who gathered quietly on the deck with their coffee, the kids who massed in the snack bar in the evening, the night owls who walked out to the stone village for coffee house after the rest of us were tucking in for the night. I thought fondly of the morning worship after breakfast, and the procession of the lanterns in the darkness for worship at the close of day.
Here on this island where everything was new and strange to me, where the weather was so extreme that even the staff wasn’t quite sure what to do sometimes, there was something so grounding, so comforting and also strengthening about building those anchors into my day, that kept me from feeling adrift even in the tempestuous storms. Now I don’t know if yoga would have had that same grounding feeling if I had not had my yoga practice as part of my ordinary every day life for so many years. Day in and day out, when I am full of the energy of a spring day, or the excitement of learning a new challenging pose, or when I am grumpy, sleep deprived and even injured, yoga is there like an anchor.
Our everyday life is full of habits and rituals, whether or not we have been intentional about creating them. Being stuck on the 220 behind a water truck is probably not something you intentionally chose to be part of your day, but there it is, regular as clock work. Waiting for my son to get off the school bus is not something I have any control over, but there it is, a critical pillar of my day. Even the dogs know it is coming and start to run in little circles and pat me on the knee as that magical time approaches. Committing to dive into icy water every morning is an intentional choice, but many of the rituals and habits that make up our days we stumble onto accidentally. Because I work at home most mornings, I brew a pot of coffee and boil water for oatmeal while I get my son off to school. Then my work day starts with a quiet moment alone in the house, and whether I’m reading up on theology or writing the first sentences of a sermon, that cup of coffee is warm and lovely and helps ease the transition into the day. Recently when the morning was so cold and dark, and I had slept only restlessly the night before, I heard the sound of my alarm clock with despair and disbelief. Then I remembered- there would be that moment of warm coffee and warm oatmeal and quiet, and that gave me the will to get out of bed and begin the day. I didn’t mean to create that ritual, but there it is- a pillar of my day.
Now a couple of years back I was at a professional conference at this super fancy hotel- I had NEVER even been inside a hotel so fancy. It was so fancy that the planning committee hadn’t been able to afford the cost of the morning coffee break, so when we came out of our first event of the morning at 10:00 all the coffee had been cleared away. I just stood there incredulous and pouting in front of the empty space where just an hour before the coffee tureens had been. My anchor was gone! Here I was hundreds of miles from home and without my anchor! I ended up riding the elevator back up to the 10th floor to brew a pot of coffee in my hotel room. I think that was when I knew that my morning coffee wasn’t just a ritual, it was an addiction.
Sometimes the anchor that gets us through a stormy transition, or gets us out of bed in the morning becomes an albatross around our neck. We get in the habit of drinking a glass of wine with dinner, or a nightcap before bed, and we don’t realize until we try to go without how attached we are. Even something as vital and nourishing as food can become an unhealthy crutch. We turn to a favorite comfort food in difficult times, and soon our cardiologist explains that it is endangering our health. A teenager experiments with smoking and spends the rest of her life trying to break the habit. It is more than the power of habit and the comfort of daily ritual keeping us in an unhealthy rut. The same chemical process by which alcohol, illegal drugs or even certain prescription medications make us feel good traps us. We used to think that recovering from an addiction was merely a matter of will power but now we know that the chemicals in our body and brain are changed by such addictions and, the normal survival mechanisms in the limbic brain are overridden. Our brain tells us that only the drug we are addicted to will provide safety, satiety, security.
Once the very functioning of our brain has been altered, addiction becomes a disease, and requires a medical support. For example I had a roommate who was determined to stop smoking cold turkey. After about 24 hours of misery, he ran for the door like a man possessed- headed to the pharmacy for a patch to help him through the transition. But overcoming the chemical, biological part of addiction is only part of the solution. Because the warm cup of coffee that starts the day, the cigarette break, the drink after work, the snack before bed, these calm and comfort us because they have become anchors in our day. We cannot simply leave an empty hole where those anchors were dropped, we have to fill those transitions in our day with something new. We must practice those new anchors daily so that they are strong and comforting when we need them.
A few years back I was going through a very stressful time. I had built a life that was all work and no play, and felt out of balance. Moreover, I had recently lost about 60 pounds and was determined not to use food as a crutch to get me out of this latest difficult time. A friend asked what I enjoyed as a little girl. I thought back to my Elementary school years and remembered that I spent almost all of my free time doing 2 things, reading fiction and dancing around my room. It was at that moment that I developed a substantive Sci-Fi Fantasy habit. It was only a few days ago, however, when I realized as I stretched out on my mat that the reason I am so devoted to yoga is not only because it is good exercise and a form of meditation, but because as an adult I hardly ever get to dance around in a big open space like I did when I was little; I have built what I enjoy most about being alive right into my day.
As we enter the season of New Year Resolutions, a resolution like “stop smoking” or “start exercising” or “stop over eating” are noble and good. But the mere fact of decision must be linked with intentionally building a day. We increase the odds of success by taking time to reflect “when is it that I most need a cigarette” or “when am I most likely to grab an unhealthy stack” and figure out what you are really needing during that moment. And to ask yourself “what could I give myself in those moments that will someday provide the anchor that a cigarette or a handful of potato chips once provided.”
The ease with which we move within our habits and routines is the same inertial pull that makes changing those habits and routines so challenging. Instead of grooving along the comfortable familiar path we can follow without thinking, we are asking ourselves to stay awake in order to remember to turn left instead of right. Moving across the country is a difficult change, but skipping the nightcap, or ice cream or cigarette before bed is even more difficult, because it comes so easily. So be patient with yourself, encourage yourself. And most importantly give the day you are building your attention and love. When you create a beautiful day that you enjoy you are rewarding yourself and asking the part of your brain that releases dopamine to anticipate those new rewards. Is there something lovely you have always coveted for your life? Something healing and life affirming? Then give that to yourself every day as a gift.
At a continuing education training about addiction our presenter was explaining that part of the reason that Alcoholics Anonymous is so successful is that it offers new coping skills for times of stress to replace the crutches the old addictions provided. Healing the spirit is a critical part of recovery he said, and reminded us that the Lord’s prayer beseeches “give us this day our daily bread.” To him that prayerful request is not just about food, but about whatever gives the spirit sustenance. We need to feed our souls every day, and if we don’t have healthy life affirming ways of doing it, we run the risk of stumbling into unhealthy, addictive ways of making it through the big and little stresses of daily life.
How you build your day involves about 1000 different choices that usually we don’t think about, in the words of Nancy Schaeffer:
As UUs we aren’t bound to pray 5 times a day like our Muslim neighbors. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need those anchors for our spirit every single day. What Anchors your day? What comforts you when times are stressful? What makes getting up in the morning possible? Whether it’s a plunge into icy cold water, a hot cup of coffee, a quiet hour with your partner, a walk alone in the evening, offer that anchor to yourself as a promise you can rely on. When we are building our day, we must be intentional about including our daily bread, about shaping a day to feed our soul in good times and in bad.
When I first heard of this tradition, I knew it was one that was not for me. Just taking a ferry out to this strange island to spend a week single morning it with my son and 200 some total strangers was challenge enough. But one day as I sat at lunch getting to know yet another new person, she told me that she was 80 and had been coming to the island for decades. I noticed around her neck the plastic beads that reward those brave enough to take the plunge. I was amazed. I had imagined a gang of burly 2-something men lining up on the dock in the early morning, but my dining companion said she never missed a morning. It was all the more remarkable since weather was just horrible for almost the whole week. There was drenching rain every day; Nick and I quickly ran out of dry clothes. The winds were so sever that the ferries to and from the island were canceled, and staying warm was a challenge even in the middle of the afternoon.
What got me through those rainy days so far from home, what I had to be sure of even before I registered for the program, was yoga. Every afternoon there were several programs to choose from, and I always chose yoga. I had discovered the first day that this was to be a gentle yoga class- the teacher was very specific about that. Some of the women who enjoy the same kind of vigorous yoga that I enjoy left the class to do their own practice, but in an island full of strangers, I needed a yoga community. Even though this was not the same kind of yoga I was used to, what was important to me was to have that yoga discipline to anchor my day. Even on the days when the storm was so intense that rain dripped through the roof onto the yoga mats of the folks in the back row, even on the days when a cold wind whipped through the swinging doors. Even, and this was the hard one, on the beautiful sunny day when sensible people played hooky from their workshops and basked in the sun after days of being locked up inside in the rain, there I was on my yoga mat.
That last weekend of our stay, the sun finally broke. Nick insisted we join the group of singers who gather each morning to walk the whole of the residential part of the island singing a wake-up song at every dorm and cabin. As we gathered, another group of folks sat in the white wooden rocking chairs on the deck enjoying a pre-breakfast cup of coffee and watching the island wake up. The polar bears were also gathering there at the edge of the dock in the glittering early morning sunlight. There were people of all shapes and sizes from elementary aged children to the octogenarian friend I had met at lunch earlier in the week. While I could see the appeal of taking an early morning walk around the island singing, I had this sudden knowing that I MUST polar bear before I left the island, or I would always regret it. So the next morning I got up even earlier, left my son abed, wrapped a towel around me and headed out to the dock. It was just as scary and cold and exciting as I’d thought it would be. There was a lovely sense of camaraderie, and after I proudly emerged from the water I reported to the guy in change for my very own plastic beads on a string to show I had been a polar bear at Star Island. I could see why those folks did it even in the cold and the rain. Because you felt like you had already DONE something, even before breakfast. No matter what else the day held, you had had your moment of excitement and camaraderie and you were awake and ready to face the day.
I thought about all the little traditions that made up the Star Island Experience, and how different people needed different things to make up their day- the folks who went door to door singing, the folks who gathered quietly on the deck with their coffee, the kids who massed in the snack bar in the evening, the night owls who walked out to the stone village for coffee house after the rest of us were tucking in for the night. I thought fondly of the morning worship after breakfast, and the procession of the lanterns in the darkness for worship at the close of day.
Here on this island where everything was new and strange to me, where the weather was so extreme that even the staff wasn’t quite sure what to do sometimes, there was something so grounding, so comforting and also strengthening about building those anchors into my day, that kept me from feeling adrift even in the tempestuous storms. Now I don’t know if yoga would have had that same grounding feeling if I had not had my yoga practice as part of my ordinary every day life for so many years. Day in and day out, when I am full of the energy of a spring day, or the excitement of learning a new challenging pose, or when I am grumpy, sleep deprived and even injured, yoga is there like an anchor.
Our everyday life is full of habits and rituals, whether or not we have been intentional about creating them. Being stuck on the 220 behind a water truck is probably not something you intentionally chose to be part of your day, but there it is, regular as clock work. Waiting for my son to get off the school bus is not something I have any control over, but there it is, a critical pillar of my day. Even the dogs know it is coming and start to run in little circles and pat me on the knee as that magical time approaches. Committing to dive into icy water every morning is an intentional choice, but many of the rituals and habits that make up our days we stumble onto accidentally. Because I work at home most mornings, I brew a pot of coffee and boil water for oatmeal while I get my son off to school. Then my work day starts with a quiet moment alone in the house, and whether I’m reading up on theology or writing the first sentences of a sermon, that cup of coffee is warm and lovely and helps ease the transition into the day. Recently when the morning was so cold and dark, and I had slept only restlessly the night before, I heard the sound of my alarm clock with despair and disbelief. Then I remembered- there would be that moment of warm coffee and warm oatmeal and quiet, and that gave me the will to get out of bed and begin the day. I didn’t mean to create that ritual, but there it is- a pillar of my day.
Now a couple of years back I was at a professional conference at this super fancy hotel- I had NEVER even been inside a hotel so fancy. It was so fancy that the planning committee hadn’t been able to afford the cost of the morning coffee break, so when we came out of our first event of the morning at 10:00 all the coffee had been cleared away. I just stood there incredulous and pouting in front of the empty space where just an hour before the coffee tureens had been. My anchor was gone! Here I was hundreds of miles from home and without my anchor! I ended up riding the elevator back up to the 10th floor to brew a pot of coffee in my hotel room. I think that was when I knew that my morning coffee wasn’t just a ritual, it was an addiction.
Sometimes the anchor that gets us through a stormy transition, or gets us out of bed in the morning becomes an albatross around our neck. We get in the habit of drinking a glass of wine with dinner, or a nightcap before bed, and we don’t realize until we try to go without how attached we are. Even something as vital and nourishing as food can become an unhealthy crutch. We turn to a favorite comfort food in difficult times, and soon our cardiologist explains that it is endangering our health. A teenager experiments with smoking and spends the rest of her life trying to break the habit. It is more than the power of habit and the comfort of daily ritual keeping us in an unhealthy rut. The same chemical process by which alcohol, illegal drugs or even certain prescription medications make us feel good traps us. We used to think that recovering from an addiction was merely a matter of will power but now we know that the chemicals in our body and brain are changed by such addictions and, the normal survival mechanisms in the limbic brain are overridden. Our brain tells us that only the drug we are addicted to will provide safety, satiety, security.
Once the very functioning of our brain has been altered, addiction becomes a disease, and requires a medical support. For example I had a roommate who was determined to stop smoking cold turkey. After about 24 hours of misery, he ran for the door like a man possessed- headed to the pharmacy for a patch to help him through the transition. But overcoming the chemical, biological part of addiction is only part of the solution. Because the warm cup of coffee that starts the day, the cigarette break, the drink after work, the snack before bed, these calm and comfort us because they have become anchors in our day. We cannot simply leave an empty hole where those anchors were dropped, we have to fill those transitions in our day with something new. We must practice those new anchors daily so that they are strong and comforting when we need them.
A few years back I was going through a very stressful time. I had built a life that was all work and no play, and felt out of balance. Moreover, I had recently lost about 60 pounds and was determined not to use food as a crutch to get me out of this latest difficult time. A friend asked what I enjoyed as a little girl. I thought back to my Elementary school years and remembered that I spent almost all of my free time doing 2 things, reading fiction and dancing around my room. It was at that moment that I developed a substantive Sci-Fi Fantasy habit. It was only a few days ago, however, when I realized as I stretched out on my mat that the reason I am so devoted to yoga is not only because it is good exercise and a form of meditation, but because as an adult I hardly ever get to dance around in a big open space like I did when I was little; I have built what I enjoy most about being alive right into my day.
As we enter the season of New Year Resolutions, a resolution like “stop smoking” or “start exercising” or “stop over eating” are noble and good. But the mere fact of decision must be linked with intentionally building a day. We increase the odds of success by taking time to reflect “when is it that I most need a cigarette” or “when am I most likely to grab an unhealthy stack” and figure out what you are really needing during that moment. And to ask yourself “what could I give myself in those moments that will someday provide the anchor that a cigarette or a handful of potato chips once provided.”
The ease with which we move within our habits and routines is the same inertial pull that makes changing those habits and routines so challenging. Instead of grooving along the comfortable familiar path we can follow without thinking, we are asking ourselves to stay awake in order to remember to turn left instead of right. Moving across the country is a difficult change, but skipping the nightcap, or ice cream or cigarette before bed is even more difficult, because it comes so easily. So be patient with yourself, encourage yourself. And most importantly give the day you are building your attention and love. When you create a beautiful day that you enjoy you are rewarding yourself and asking the part of your brain that releases dopamine to anticipate those new rewards. Is there something lovely you have always coveted for your life? Something healing and life affirming? Then give that to yourself every day as a gift.
At a continuing education training about addiction our presenter was explaining that part of the reason that Alcoholics Anonymous is so successful is that it offers new coping skills for times of stress to replace the crutches the old addictions provided. Healing the spirit is a critical part of recovery he said, and reminded us that the Lord’s prayer beseeches “give us this day our daily bread.” To him that prayerful request is not just about food, but about whatever gives the spirit sustenance. We need to feed our souls every day, and if we don’t have healthy life affirming ways of doing it, we run the risk of stumbling into unhealthy, addictive ways of making it through the big and little stresses of daily life.
How you build your day involves about 1000 different choices that usually we don’t think about, in the words of Nancy Schaeffer:
“The self is not one thing, once made,
Unaltered. Not midnight task alone, not
After other work. It’s everything we come
Upon, make ours: all this fitting of
What-once-was and has-become.”
As UUs we aren’t bound to pray 5 times a day like our Muslim neighbors. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need those anchors for our spirit every single day. What Anchors your day? What comforts you when times are stressful? What makes getting up in the morning possible? Whether it’s a plunge into icy cold water, a hot cup of coffee, a quiet hour with your partner, a walk alone in the evening, offer that anchor to yourself as a promise you can rely on. When we are building our day, we must be intentional about including our daily bread, about shaping a day to feed our soul in good times and in bad.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Hospitality (December 4, 2011)
“So glad you’re here”
“So glad you’re here”
Like a mantra
They repeat with warm smiles
“you must be tired”
“you must be hungry”
“you must be cold”
“It means so much
that you would come
all this way to be with us”
“Do still drink decaf?”
“I made those walnut cookies you like
when I heard you were coming”
“honey take her bags”
“tell us about your trip”
“No, take my chair,
I’ll get another from the den”
“take your time”
“rest a while”
“stay as long as you like”
“so glad you’re here”
“so glad you’re here”
Hopefully each of us has at some point in our lives experienced really skillful hospitality; we have met the host or hostess who knows how to make us feel truly at home, easing our awkward transition to a new situation. Hospitality is a Mitzvah, that is to say a religious commandment not only in Judaism from which tradition we get the word “Mitzvah” but in many of the world’s religions. We offer hospitality because it is the right thing to do, the caring though to do. But I would like to suggest that it is also a spiritual practice, one that works on those who practice it. Today we want to consider the question, “if one took on hospitality as a spiritual practice, how might it change the one who practices, and how might it change the world?”
I begin with the easier question, how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world. For example, about 6 years ago this congregation took upon itself the task of becoming a “Welcoming Congregation.” This is the phrase used by the Unitarian Universalist Association to refer to a congregation who has intentionally opened their doors to Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgendered persons. I’m sure it seemed unnecessary to many members of this congregation- Unitarian Universalists were one of the first denominations to ordain openly Gay and Lesbian clergy, and have long been at the forefront of the movement to widen this circle of inclusivity. But I know that in the first welcoming congregation I ever served things were not so simple. Many of those who joined in discussion groups and classes, and scanned the church for heterosexism, found that the issues were more complex than they had imagined. For example, we begin to notice hetero-presumptive language in talking about relationships. We realize that unless we publicly speak our intention to be inclusive, say by hanging a rainbow flag out front, folks would have no reason to assume that our church was any safer than those who publicly condemn same sex relationships. We realized that we each had to root out our own internalized homophobia, so that it would truly be a safe place for our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered members to speak their stories. Queer clergy, like myself, had to be willing to say our truth as a gesture of hospitality, as it were, to others. Being a “Welcoming Congregation” takes commitment and self awareness and hospitality.
How could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world? I remember the first time I attended the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco. As I watched the Dykes on Bikes roll by, leading off the festivities, my eyes welled with tears, grateful that San Francisco had become home to a community so long marginalized. To get a closer look at the parade, I found a line of sight from behind a fenced off seating area. It turned out I was standing behind a section set aside for folks in wheelchairs. It seems like just good common sense that persons in wheelchairs will need a large flat space in which to maneuver, and a lower line of site, but in so much of our history, no one bothered to make such a space. It occurred to me that the City of San Francisco was behaving like a loving family who always remembers to pull out a chair for Uncle Bob when he comes to Thanksgiving Dinner.
In the same way that my mother in law carefully makes a huge and luscious fruit salad whenever I come to visit so that I will feel at home each time we break bread together. In the same way that the Athens UU Church recently converted their mail room into a bathroom wide enough for a wheelchair. In the same way that even when we have no young children in our church we keep our nursery full of toys and supplies ready to make new children feel welcome. In the same way that Miss Manners advises us to occasionally spend one night in our guest bed to feel for ourselves the kind of sleep our friends might experience in our homes, we look around our world community with the eyes of a good host, wondering what we could do to make others feel at ease.
What makes this challenging, is that in assuming the role of host, we must view the world through the eyes of others; we must anticipate needs that are not necessarily our own. How do we create a welcoming space for all? This becomes most difficult when we realize that there are many subtle cultural factors which can make a community seem hospitable or hostile. Can we use language, for example, in a way that is understandable to people outside our field, to folks with different kinds of education, to persons who are unfamiliar with our idioms and colloquialisms? Our art, music, theology, all mark us as belonging to one demographic or another, and all have the power to include or exclude. It is one thing to renovate the bathroom or to hang a rainbow flag, but if radical hospitality is not a central value of our culture, our community, then these are merely superficial gestures. We may find ourselves in communities which are both figuratively and literally gated.
How could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world? Imagine how this radical hospitality would impact our social and political policies if, for example, we considered immigrants to our country to be visitors, and ourselves to be their hosts. Imagine if we challenged ourselves to broadly apply our call to “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free.” Imagine the impact on the doors of “race” or “class” if we approached them with radical hospitality.
Now we move on to a more difficult question: how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change our congregations? Let’s be clear. When we practiced a truly radical hospitality, it does change us. Members of this church still remember their struggle as they welcomed their first transgender members long before I came to be your minister. As a community and as individuals they had to reexamine their way of looking at gender and see if those old prejudices and taboos could be relinquished so that they might become truly welcoming. It was a time of soul searching for individuals and for the community as a whole. It lead this congregation into the Welcoming Congregation process for the first time. And change we did. Our new members stayed through what must have been a less than open-armed welcome, and continued to bless us with their gifts. A few folks who just could not open their arms to the new members left the congregation, but for all who stayed, being welcoming is now part of their identity, calling them to wonder “what other prejudices or oppressive structures might need to be opened up to make us more welcoming still?”
I can’t help but remember my first days in California when my husband and I were subletting student housing at the Franciscan School. Not knowing a soul in 3000 miles, we were taken completely aback when we opened our apartment door one day at the same moment our neighbor was opening his. He greeted us immediately with a smile and the words “Hello Protestant Neighbor!” He was very friendly, introduced himself, asked how we were settling in, and invited us to coffee “any time.” Eric and I, being from a less outgoing community, couldn’t figure out what his motivation might be. There was something a little weird about someone so friendly. But we eventually became great friends with our Catholic neighbor, and learned that he is indeed a wonderful host.
That summer afternoon in Berkeley our friend took the risk that he might frighten us off with his overture, that we might be more attracted to someone aloof and cool. This is the risk each of us takes when we extend ourselves, when we invite someone into our lives. They might judge us, they might use us, they might ignore us. More likely they will be grateful for the introduction, the generosity of spirit, the attempt to make them feel at ease. This boundary between “me” and “you” is one that must be confronted on both the spiritual and ethical journey. The edge between my ego and the other can be a scary, powerful place where we learn both about the world and ourselves. When we open ourselves to the stranger, the other, the unknown we open ourselves to learning and transformation. By approaching the limits of what is known and comfortable, our universe expands and perhaps our spirits expand as well.
But hospitality in congregations is not just about welcoming strangers and visitors. It is also about welcoming newcomers into the heart of our community, inviting them to “take off your coats and stay a while” as my Grandmother used to stay. Think about the things a good host offers you in their home to make you feel comfortable. For a short stay you need to know where the bathroom is, where to hang your coat. But when you are staying for a few days, you need to know how to get yourself a glass of water, where the towels are kept, how the shower works. You need not just to have someone fussing over you all the time (which works fine for a 3 hour visit). You need the information to really “make yourself to home.” Now what if you were going to stay… well, forever? You would need your own niche. Like when you introduce a new plant to your garden, if it can’t find a niche it will not flourish.
Next Sunday we are welcoming three new members into our community. Our challenge is to offer them not only a friendly smile, and a warm cup of coffee, but a meaningful way to engage in our community. They need a niche. Part of a deep practice of hospitality will be evoking from one another our gifts, Just as an apple tree provides fruit for humans and other critters, and shade for the soil and shade loving plants, some of our members give us the gift of music, others their thoughtful insights, or practical common sense, or warm hearts. We have to be open to the idea that newcomers will bring new gifts we have never experienced before. Just because there has not previously been a knitting group, doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Newcomers bring us gifts that will change us. The other part of our practice of hospitality is to discover and respond to one another’s needs for nourishment. Much as some garden plants need sun and others need shade, some members of our community need quiet private conversations, and others thrive in large, lively groups. Some folks need a way to be in community that involves their children. Others need a way that works around their strenuous works schedule. By being aware of and responsive to newly emerging needs for nourishment, our “Support our aging parents” group was created, and “coming of age” was offered to our youth for the first time.
If we offer truly radical hospitality, we will be changed, we will be transformed as a congregation and as individuals. Let’s try this. Please stand up if you came to this church for the first time in 2011. Now stand up if you came for the first time in 2010. Now stand if you came for the first time since 2000. Imagine how different our congregation would be without these folks. (You can all sit) Now anyone who has been a member for more than 3 years please stand. These folks all stayed because they found a niche, a special unique place in our community where they could share their gifts and also be nourished. In gratitude for the place each of us has found here, we offer the gift of hospitality to all, because and even though it will change our beloved community.
Finally the most difficult question of all: how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the individual who practices it? In his book “The World’s Religions” Huston Smith describes a noble quality of chun tzu. He writes
“Fully adequate, poised, the chun tzu has toward life as a whole the approach of an ideal hostess who is so at home in her surroundings that she is completely realized, and, being so, can turn full attention to putting others at ease…the chun tzu carries these qualities of the ideal host with him through life generally. Armed with a self-respect that generates respect for others, he approaches them wondering not, “What can I get from them” but “What can I do to accommodate them?”
If we engage the world with the quality of Chun tzu, a feeling of always being at home, where might that practice lead? In order to risk extending ourselves, we must first know that we are at home in this world. I believe this logic is reversible as well; if we can act as a host wherever we go, perhaps it will remind us that this world is in fact our home.
This practice of hospitality can be a spiritual one not only in the way it brings us in contact with our own boundaries and limits, but extending the notion one step further, in the way we invite that transcending mystery and wonder into our lives. My seminary professor Yielbanzie used to remind us: “If you want to have spirit in your life, you have to invite spirit into your life.” We treat the ineffable with the same respect and care that we would a neighbor, a guest, a stranger or a friend. Perhaps if we adopt the role of host, it will give us the courage to come closer to God, or if we are an atheist, to whatever is of ultimate concern in our lives.
When I was starting my internship at the Mount Diablo UU Church, I nervous about the many things I would be doing for the first time, but I was most terrified of the coffee hour. Oh the agony of standing on the patio trying not to look uncomfortable, hoping someone would talk with me. I decided, nonetheless, that this was my job now. People expected their minister to make them feel welcome, to play the host. I realized that it was important that I take the risk that visitors might leave saying “boy they would not leave us alone!” rather than wondering why no one had approached them, why they felt more lonely after coming to church than before. And so that first day on the patio I screwed up my courage, deputized myself with the nametag reading “Darcey Laine, Intern Minister” and challenged myself to engage as many strangers as I could. I tried to imagine who might welcome that extra effort. Certainly newcomers deserved a warm welcome. Obviously those who had shared some pain or joy during “caring and sharing” might want a chance to talk further. The children and youth of the congregation needed to feel that the ministers of the congregation are their ministers too. And the list went on. Before long there were so many people I wanted to connect with, that I had hardly gotten started each week before the patio cleared out and I was left to turn out the lights and lock the doors. I understood that hospitality is one of the primary gifts of a church community, one member to another.
Hospitality is not identical to love, because it pays attention to the boundaries between individuals, between peoples. We treat the other with dignity, humble in the awareness that there is much we do not know about one another, yet when we extend ourselves to put another at ease, we act from a position of personal power. We welcome courageously and with skill those who knock at our door.
Today when coffee hour beings, I have my nametag labeling me as “Reverend Laine”, deputizing me officially to act as host for this community. But it is not because I’m a minister of this Church that I have the right and the responsibility to be a host, but because I’m a member of this community. I hereby deputize all of you to be a host at our social hour, and out in the world. Think of your nametag be your deputy’s badge - a symbol of your job as greeter, host, vice-president for east coast introductions and friendliness to strangers. Let this deputy’s badge remind us of one of the oldest and most important religious practices- remembering this world is your home, and so making one another feel welcome in this world.
“So glad you’re here”
Like a mantra
They repeat with warm smiles
“you must be tired”
“you must be hungry”
“you must be cold”
“It means so much
that you would come
all this way to be with us”
“Do still drink decaf?”
“I made those walnut cookies you like
when I heard you were coming”
“honey take her bags”
“tell us about your trip”
“No, take my chair,
I’ll get another from the den”
“take your time”
“rest a while”
“stay as long as you like”
“so glad you’re here”
“so glad you’re here”
Hopefully each of us has at some point in our lives experienced really skillful hospitality; we have met the host or hostess who knows how to make us feel truly at home, easing our awkward transition to a new situation. Hospitality is a Mitzvah, that is to say a religious commandment not only in Judaism from which tradition we get the word “Mitzvah” but in many of the world’s religions. We offer hospitality because it is the right thing to do, the caring though to do. But I would like to suggest that it is also a spiritual practice, one that works on those who practice it. Today we want to consider the question, “if one took on hospitality as a spiritual practice, how might it change the one who practices, and how might it change the world?”
I begin with the easier question, how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world. For example, about 6 years ago this congregation took upon itself the task of becoming a “Welcoming Congregation.” This is the phrase used by the Unitarian Universalist Association to refer to a congregation who has intentionally opened their doors to Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgendered persons. I’m sure it seemed unnecessary to many members of this congregation- Unitarian Universalists were one of the first denominations to ordain openly Gay and Lesbian clergy, and have long been at the forefront of the movement to widen this circle of inclusivity. But I know that in the first welcoming congregation I ever served things were not so simple. Many of those who joined in discussion groups and classes, and scanned the church for heterosexism, found that the issues were more complex than they had imagined. For example, we begin to notice hetero-presumptive language in talking about relationships. We realize that unless we publicly speak our intention to be inclusive, say by hanging a rainbow flag out front, folks would have no reason to assume that our church was any safer than those who publicly condemn same sex relationships. We realized that we each had to root out our own internalized homophobia, so that it would truly be a safe place for our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered members to speak their stories. Queer clergy, like myself, had to be willing to say our truth as a gesture of hospitality, as it were, to others. Being a “Welcoming Congregation” takes commitment and self awareness and hospitality.
How could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world? I remember the first time I attended the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco. As I watched the Dykes on Bikes roll by, leading off the festivities, my eyes welled with tears, grateful that San Francisco had become home to a community so long marginalized. To get a closer look at the parade, I found a line of sight from behind a fenced off seating area. It turned out I was standing behind a section set aside for folks in wheelchairs. It seems like just good common sense that persons in wheelchairs will need a large flat space in which to maneuver, and a lower line of site, but in so much of our history, no one bothered to make such a space. It occurred to me that the City of San Francisco was behaving like a loving family who always remembers to pull out a chair for Uncle Bob when he comes to Thanksgiving Dinner.
In the same way that my mother in law carefully makes a huge and luscious fruit salad whenever I come to visit so that I will feel at home each time we break bread together. In the same way that the Athens UU Church recently converted their mail room into a bathroom wide enough for a wheelchair. In the same way that even when we have no young children in our church we keep our nursery full of toys and supplies ready to make new children feel welcome. In the same way that Miss Manners advises us to occasionally spend one night in our guest bed to feel for ourselves the kind of sleep our friends might experience in our homes, we look around our world community with the eyes of a good host, wondering what we could do to make others feel at ease.
What makes this challenging, is that in assuming the role of host, we must view the world through the eyes of others; we must anticipate needs that are not necessarily our own. How do we create a welcoming space for all? This becomes most difficult when we realize that there are many subtle cultural factors which can make a community seem hospitable or hostile. Can we use language, for example, in a way that is understandable to people outside our field, to folks with different kinds of education, to persons who are unfamiliar with our idioms and colloquialisms? Our art, music, theology, all mark us as belonging to one demographic or another, and all have the power to include or exclude. It is one thing to renovate the bathroom or to hang a rainbow flag, but if radical hospitality is not a central value of our culture, our community, then these are merely superficial gestures. We may find ourselves in communities which are both figuratively and literally gated.
How could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the world? Imagine how this radical hospitality would impact our social and political policies if, for example, we considered immigrants to our country to be visitors, and ourselves to be their hosts. Imagine if we challenged ourselves to broadly apply our call to “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free.” Imagine the impact on the doors of “race” or “class” if we approached them with radical hospitality.
Now we move on to a more difficult question: how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change our congregations? Let’s be clear. When we practiced a truly radical hospitality, it does change us. Members of this church still remember their struggle as they welcomed their first transgender members long before I came to be your minister. As a community and as individuals they had to reexamine their way of looking at gender and see if those old prejudices and taboos could be relinquished so that they might become truly welcoming. It was a time of soul searching for individuals and for the community as a whole. It lead this congregation into the Welcoming Congregation process for the first time. And change we did. Our new members stayed through what must have been a less than open-armed welcome, and continued to bless us with their gifts. A few folks who just could not open their arms to the new members left the congregation, but for all who stayed, being welcoming is now part of their identity, calling them to wonder “what other prejudices or oppressive structures might need to be opened up to make us more welcoming still?”
I can’t help but remember my first days in California when my husband and I were subletting student housing at the Franciscan School. Not knowing a soul in 3000 miles, we were taken completely aback when we opened our apartment door one day at the same moment our neighbor was opening his. He greeted us immediately with a smile and the words “Hello Protestant Neighbor!” He was very friendly, introduced himself, asked how we were settling in, and invited us to coffee “any time.” Eric and I, being from a less outgoing community, couldn’t figure out what his motivation might be. There was something a little weird about someone so friendly. But we eventually became great friends with our Catholic neighbor, and learned that he is indeed a wonderful host.
That summer afternoon in Berkeley our friend took the risk that he might frighten us off with his overture, that we might be more attracted to someone aloof and cool. This is the risk each of us takes when we extend ourselves, when we invite someone into our lives. They might judge us, they might use us, they might ignore us. More likely they will be grateful for the introduction, the generosity of spirit, the attempt to make them feel at ease. This boundary between “me” and “you” is one that must be confronted on both the spiritual and ethical journey. The edge between my ego and the other can be a scary, powerful place where we learn both about the world and ourselves. When we open ourselves to the stranger, the other, the unknown we open ourselves to learning and transformation. By approaching the limits of what is known and comfortable, our universe expands and perhaps our spirits expand as well.
But hospitality in congregations is not just about welcoming strangers and visitors. It is also about welcoming newcomers into the heart of our community, inviting them to “take off your coats and stay a while” as my Grandmother used to stay. Think about the things a good host offers you in their home to make you feel comfortable. For a short stay you need to know where the bathroom is, where to hang your coat. But when you are staying for a few days, you need to know how to get yourself a glass of water, where the towels are kept, how the shower works. You need not just to have someone fussing over you all the time (which works fine for a 3 hour visit). You need the information to really “make yourself to home.” Now what if you were going to stay… well, forever? You would need your own niche. Like when you introduce a new plant to your garden, if it can’t find a niche it will not flourish.
Next Sunday we are welcoming three new members into our community. Our challenge is to offer them not only a friendly smile, and a warm cup of coffee, but a meaningful way to engage in our community. They need a niche. Part of a deep practice of hospitality will be evoking from one another our gifts, Just as an apple tree provides fruit for humans and other critters, and shade for the soil and shade loving plants, some of our members give us the gift of music, others their thoughtful insights, or practical common sense, or warm hearts. We have to be open to the idea that newcomers will bring new gifts we have never experienced before. Just because there has not previously been a knitting group, doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Newcomers bring us gifts that will change us. The other part of our practice of hospitality is to discover and respond to one another’s needs for nourishment. Much as some garden plants need sun and others need shade, some members of our community need quiet private conversations, and others thrive in large, lively groups. Some folks need a way to be in community that involves their children. Others need a way that works around their strenuous works schedule. By being aware of and responsive to newly emerging needs for nourishment, our “Support our aging parents” group was created, and “coming of age” was offered to our youth for the first time.
If we offer truly radical hospitality, we will be changed, we will be transformed as a congregation and as individuals. Let’s try this. Please stand up if you came to this church for the first time in 2011. Now stand up if you came for the first time in 2010. Now stand if you came for the first time since 2000. Imagine how different our congregation would be without these folks. (You can all sit) Now anyone who has been a member for more than 3 years please stand. These folks all stayed because they found a niche, a special unique place in our community where they could share their gifts and also be nourished. In gratitude for the place each of us has found here, we offer the gift of hospitality to all, because and even though it will change our beloved community.
Finally the most difficult question of all: how could a deep and skillful practice of hospitality change the individual who practices it? In his book “The World’s Religions” Huston Smith describes a noble quality of chun tzu. He writes
“Fully adequate, poised, the chun tzu has toward life as a whole the approach of an ideal hostess who is so at home in her surroundings that she is completely realized, and, being so, can turn full attention to putting others at ease…the chun tzu carries these qualities of the ideal host with him through life generally. Armed with a self-respect that generates respect for others, he approaches them wondering not, “What can I get from them” but “What can I do to accommodate them?”
If we engage the world with the quality of Chun tzu, a feeling of always being at home, where might that practice lead? In order to risk extending ourselves, we must first know that we are at home in this world. I believe this logic is reversible as well; if we can act as a host wherever we go, perhaps it will remind us that this world is in fact our home.
This practice of hospitality can be a spiritual one not only in the way it brings us in contact with our own boundaries and limits, but extending the notion one step further, in the way we invite that transcending mystery and wonder into our lives. My seminary professor Yielbanzie used to remind us: “If you want to have spirit in your life, you have to invite spirit into your life.” We treat the ineffable with the same respect and care that we would a neighbor, a guest, a stranger or a friend. Perhaps if we adopt the role of host, it will give us the courage to come closer to God, or if we are an atheist, to whatever is of ultimate concern in our lives.
When I was starting my internship at the Mount Diablo UU Church, I nervous about the many things I would be doing for the first time, but I was most terrified of the coffee hour. Oh the agony of standing on the patio trying not to look uncomfortable, hoping someone would talk with me. I decided, nonetheless, that this was my job now. People expected their minister to make them feel welcome, to play the host. I realized that it was important that I take the risk that visitors might leave saying “boy they would not leave us alone!” rather than wondering why no one had approached them, why they felt more lonely after coming to church than before. And so that first day on the patio I screwed up my courage, deputized myself with the nametag reading “Darcey Laine, Intern Minister” and challenged myself to engage as many strangers as I could. I tried to imagine who might welcome that extra effort. Certainly newcomers deserved a warm welcome. Obviously those who had shared some pain or joy during “caring and sharing” might want a chance to talk further. The children and youth of the congregation needed to feel that the ministers of the congregation are their ministers too. And the list went on. Before long there were so many people I wanted to connect with, that I had hardly gotten started each week before the patio cleared out and I was left to turn out the lights and lock the doors. I understood that hospitality is one of the primary gifts of a church community, one member to another.
Hospitality is not identical to love, because it pays attention to the boundaries between individuals, between peoples. We treat the other with dignity, humble in the awareness that there is much we do not know about one another, yet when we extend ourselves to put another at ease, we act from a position of personal power. We welcome courageously and with skill those who knock at our door.
Today when coffee hour beings, I have my nametag labeling me as “Reverend Laine”, deputizing me officially to act as host for this community. But it is not because I’m a minister of this Church that I have the right and the responsibility to be a host, but because I’m a member of this community. I hereby deputize all of you to be a host at our social hour, and out in the world. Think of your nametag be your deputy’s badge - a symbol of your job as greeter, host, vice-president for east coast introductions and friendliness to strangers. Let this deputy’s badge remind us of one of the oldest and most important religious practices- remembering this world is your home, and so making one another feel welcome in this world.
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