Resilience

When my son was little, there was a coin operated machine at the front of grocery store that had bouncy balls in them. You could get a little ball for a quarter, and a bigger one for 2 quarters. We ended up with quite a collection over the years, which I dug out for this sermon. You never know which balls are going to be the best bouncers until you got one out of the machine and toss it at the ground. Some balls bounce so high, others would hit the ground with a thud and roll disappointingly away. Bouncy balls are all about resilience- that moment when your rubber ball hits the floor, or the wall, and kind of smushes down, deforms, and then snaps back to its regular round ball shape. Resilience makes bouncy balls bouncy.

Everything is more or less resilient. Youtube and TikTok are full of people throwing objects at the floor or wall and noticing what bounces, what splats and what shatters into a million bits.

When we are talking about humans, we use the word “resilience” in kind of a poetic way for what helps us “bounce back” body mind and spirit from the ordinary and major pressures of life. I know I’ve had moments where I feel kind of brittle and fragile, times when I land on the floor with a splat and just stay there and other times when I feel totally up to bouncing back from what life hands me. All mammals, like us, need to have a range of how “aroused” we are. For sitting in church, for example, we need to be pretty still, be able to sit quietly-ish. More quietly than, for example, playing a game of tennis. In the normal week or day we go up and down all day long.

But sometimes something happens in our lives that is so important that we have evolved the ability to shut down some of our basic maintenance functions like resting, digesting, healing, connecting with family and friends. This part of your brain notices the car that came out of nowhere and jams on the breaks before your thinking mind is even paying attention. Like in a Star Trek episode, when the captain commands “divert all power to shields”, or engines, or wherever it is needed for the current existential crisis. Sometimes it shuts us down and us be so still and quiet the danger passes us by- that’s the freeze response. Rev. Soto described that so evocatively in our reading: “when the world is heavy, like wet laundry, dragging from Your arms.”

Those are amazing adaptations that has helped us and other animals survive for millennia, but pretty quickly when the threat has passed we need to divert power back to life support. Most of the challenges we meet in our daily lives can be done without that, and in fact, we do most things better when our nervous system is in the Goldilocks zone, or what adults usually call it “the resilience zone.”

Resmaa Menakem says in My Grandmother’s Hands (which he wrote back in 2017) that one kind of event likely to cause trauma in most people is a pandemic – so we all know something about trauma in some way. If we’ve learned nothing else these past 3 years, it’s that sometimes things happen that make us feel like we “can’t even” what neuro science is helping us understand is that … you’re right. Your ability to “even” is just not available sometimes, this is because you are out of your “resilience zone”

There have been great advances in our understanding of what trauma does to the nervous system, particularly through the research at the VA about soldiers with PTSD, and the studies of adverse childhood experiences. (An important overview of this work can be found in The Body Keeps the Score.) People who have lived through many kinds of traumas get stuck in survival mode, and have a very narrow resilience zone, it doesn’t take much to make them feel like they are in danger.

The good news is that researchers are finding is that healing happens best when we can grow our resilience zone. That even folks like you and me who are not neuroscientists or clinicians, we can grow our resiliency zone for ourselves and we can help grow the resilience of our communities. The Trauma Resource Institute developed something called the “Community Resiliency Model” (CRM) based on the ideas that “People are resilient. Any person can learn self regulation skills based on science. The skills of well-being can reduce suffering.” And that each of us learn what works for us.

When in the Resilient Zone one is able to handle the stresses of life; You can be annoyed or even angry but do not feel like you will lose your head. You can feel sad without feeling like you can’t get out of bed. And because of neuroplasticity (the lifelong capacity of the brain to change and rewire itself in response to the stimulation of learning and experience) we can grow that resilience zone.

So today we focus on resilience, offering just a couple of the practices taught by the CRM and backed by science that help you get back to that ordinary middle- the resilience zone. A what I’m sharing with you today comes from Trauma Resource institute, which has gone all around the world training communities which have faced trauma. It’s a way normal people can support themselves and each others even when there is no expert around. Ordinary things you could do anywhere.

I’m not going to try to explain the science of WHY this works, but you might look at the work of Steven Porges and the Polyvagal theory if you are curious.  [Here's another helpful summary] We already did 3:

• Coming to our senses
• Comforting Gesture (The butterfly hug is a good one)
• Grounding

But the most important starting place is that everything is optional. This goes well with our UU belief that you have an inner wisdom that is the ultimate source of authority about how it is to be you, so if I or someone else suggests anything that doesn’t feel right, feel free to skip it, or do something else that does feel right. Everyone has a different nervous system, we’ve all faced different challenges.

So the first thing is just to check in with yourself, to notice how you feel right now. Content? Anxious? Sleepy? Just notice how it feels to be you right now.

Notice someplace in your body that feels good or neutral (I'm noticing the side of my leg feels pretty neutral) and remember you can always can bring attention to that place.

The final practice I want to offer you now is called “resourcing” [this practice comes from CRM] this just means “bringing to mind Something that makes you feel calm, joyful, or contented....or confident, strong, and alive It could be.... a person, a place, an activity you enjoy, an internal strength, an external support.

Take a moment and call to mind some things that are resources for you
Now pick one and think of 3 details about your resource.
You can write them down, or draw them, or share them with a friend.
As you listen to your companion, or read over what you've written, or look at your drawing, notice what happens on the inside.

If that doesn’t sound like the right practice for you right now, I invite you to go back to a different practice that seems right to you. 

This takes practice- when we trying to grow that resilience zone, it’s like exercising a muscle. And so especially at first it’s good to practice when you are doing okay – justice notice what’s happening on the inside, offer yourself a practice that feels right to you for the situation you are in. Call to mind a resource, notice what you can seen, hear, touch, just as a reminder to our nervous system about our resilience. When we practice widening our resilience zone, then we increase our capacity to stay present with one another and stay awake to the concerns that need our attention.

The resilience zone is where learning happens, growth happens, creativity, relationship building. Resting, digesting. That’s why we gather together for memorial services, for example, so that we can help each other grieve and “be sad but not feel like you will be washed away by the river of sorrows.” Actually, many aspects of the way we do church probably evolved to help us arrive in the resilience zone. Take a moment to look around you at the beautiful tapestry of people gathered together- in person, on zoom. Remember the sounds of the beautiful music we heard earlier in the service. Resourcing is something we do a lot in church - remembering together the things that give us strength and hope. That’s part of why we share our joys and sorrows. Even social hour- eating and drinking together helps grow that resilience zone, if you having an interesting conversation, you know you’re in the zone, and if you can’t even, that’s okay too. We support one another as we learn and grow in our resilience.

Hope, Change and Evolution

Story: Learning to Eat

Did anyone eat breakfast this morning? 
How did you learn to do that? 

Have you ever seen a baby learning how to eat solid food?
Someone would offer maybe a finger or a spoon dipped in baby food, and you can see the look on the baby’s face- like WOW- WHAT IS THAT!
Then usually they spit it back out, until through a process of trial and error, they learn to swallow it.

It is a messy process. That is why babies wear bibs, because sometimes as much food ends up on the floor as gets into the baby’s mouth.

They learn how to get the applesauce off that rubber baby spoon, and eventually to hold the spoon or crust of bread in their own hand, and eventually by watching other people, with practice
and the helpful advice of parents and caregivers
they get to the point where they can eat their own breakfast and most of it gets into their mouths instead of their hair and table and clothing. It takes a long time.

Now, here’s a hard one- how did you learn how to turn breakfast into tissue- like eyes and skin and heart?
Everyone knows it, right? You don’t have to study that in school. You just… know

Not all living things eat what we eat for breakfast, but every living thing eats.

For billions of years animals and plants and bacteria have been eating,
that is to say, turning the proteins of their food into the proteins they need in their own bodies

When the first cells learned to do this, they couldn’t write it down, they didn’t have religious education classes to teach it to the young folks  

instead the special new thing one bacteria can do, is passed on to its children and to its children’s children through its DNA,
(that’s the code written in the cells of our bodies that makes us- us)

We are used to thinking of ancestors as our grandparents and our great great grandparents. We don’t often think about single celled organisms billions of years ago as our ancestors.

And these ancestors, they left us a gift, us and all their children. They left us the pattern for how to turn breakfast into, well… us.

They left it to us in our DNA, along with all the other patterns we need
to make lungs and to breathe into them,
to make blood and circulate it through our bodies,
to make brains that think and learn.

Our DNA is like the most amazing encyclopedia ever.
Everyone here in this room knows how to eat breakfast because
not only did our parents spend all those meals showing us
not only did we try and try again with applesauce on our face and spaghetti on the floor
But over millions of generations Life itself learns.

Reflection: Hope, Change and Evolution

Why do we celebrate Evolution Weekend? It’s partly because our UU sources encourage us to “heed the guidance of reason and the results of science,” and indeed our faith grew up alongside science when it was a brand new way of looking at the world. Darwin himself was raised by a Unitarian mother and went with her to her Unitarian chapel. Says the National Center of Science Education “One goal of [evolution weekend] is to … demonstrate that religious people from many different denominations and faith traditions understand that evolution is sound science, and that, properly understood as science, it poses no problem for their faith.”[i] I would go one step further and say that when we take a long loving look at the world around us, it can be a source of our faith. The body of the earth, and our bodies, and the history we all share can be a kind of scripture, to which we turn when we are troubled and need wisdom and hope.

We take part in Evolution weekend to practice that long loving look at the real, with science as our magnifying glass. We tell the story of the history of how our universe, how our ecosystems evolved through millennia because the story gives us hope, which is something we all need very much. When we look at the many real troubles of our world and feel powerless, as individual humans, and even as a people together - I know there are times when I wonder “are we up to this challenge?” In such moments we need a source of hope that is larger than our human selves. Because we are theologically diverse here, we are atheists, theists and agnostics, when we need a source of hope outside ourselves, when we feel like even all of humanity together is not enough, I am reassured to remember that life itself has been solving overwhelming problems since long before there were humans.

Because most of us are not scientists, and sometimes our eyes glaze over when we hear the word “Cytochrome-c” storytellers are trying to turn the raw facts of peer reviewed science into stories ordinary people can understand and remember and turn to for hope.

Our Universe story is full of moments when life solved overwhelming problems through the process of evolution; just one example of this is the problem of what we are going to eat. Those first living cells feasted on the chemical nutrients which were abundant until they ate them all up. This crisis was met with the stunning evolution of an ancestor who evolved to photosynthesize 3.9 million years ago, to capture photons and turn them into energy. When this new process of using the suns rays for energy, eating the light for food, produced a deadly gas --overpowering clouds of oxygen which was toxic to all life forms then on our earth. the first single celled organisms to use oxygen for fuel spontaneously adapted in response to this huge crisis.

In our story this morning, we talked about how we inherited the capacity to disassemble grains and transform them into the building blocks of our own lives. One of the tools we inherited that allows us to do this is Cytochrome-c-- an enzyme[ii] in our cells that is important in the breakdown of food molecules. It is found in large, complicated organisms like trees, alligators, and us, and also found in little one celled bacteria. It has existed for a very long time, but not always. The primal single-cell organisms first put together this very useful enzyme billions of years ago. And it was so useful that it has been handed down ever since.

But life can’t hand down a molecule the way my grandmother handed down a recipes; molecules don’t last forever. Instead the same pattern of nucleotides used by the first organisms to make Cytochrome-c was passed on to us and our bodies use that pattern today to make brand new Cytochrome-c proteins which help turn grains and bread into flesh and blood. For as long as there have been cells, even those very first primal Prokaryote cells, they have had this capacity to reproduce patterns. These patterns are tucked into our DNA[iii], and the very first pattern they had to learn was how to re-create life. Without those patterns life on earth would have been a momentary blip.

But how did our ancestors back over 2 billion years ago “learn” to turn food into useful stuff? The way scientists believe this works is that as DNA is passed on mother to child, sometimes by chance little changes happen (and what we are learning now is that not all of those changes happen by chance- some changes are sort of lying dormant in the DNA and are triggered by the environment). These slight differences in the patterns of the nucleotides lead to differences in the proteins within the cell. Huge numbers, possibly millions of such “slightly different” proteins are made this way before one of these slightly-changed patterns holds within it a unique gift that helps that cell to survive, and this genetic pattern for –say - cytochrome c, is passed on to its children and following generations until, if it is a very useful gene, it is spread throughout the population.

Much as one baby learns to eat food through trial and error, thousands of generations of living beings “learn” through living out different patterns, some successful, some unsuccessful, which patterns allow life to flourish and thrive. But unlike the baby learning to eat solid food, it is not any one individual who learns, instead it is life’s long process of adapting through trial and error, and then remembering through these patterns and so passing on what is learned to future generations.

Brian Swimme is a professor and writer that has spent his career trying to take all that complex science information about our past and turn it into a story those of us who haven’t had a science class since high school can remember. As Swimme and Tucker say in their book The Journey of the Universe “It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.” In this way, Swimme and Tucker write:

“Though life’s creativity is a groping and sometimes chaotic process it is also a learning process. The connotation in modern English of the verb “to learn” is that of an individual acquiring a new skill, but with the discovery of biological evolution, we have a new insight into the way the ancient process of evolution can be understood as a higher-level form of “learning” we can begin with a simple question “Who has learned to transform food into flesh?” We humans certainly had nothing to do with the construction of the physiological processes involved. Nor can we think of the early bacteria that first generated the cytochrome c protein as having any idea of what their invention might one day be used for. No, it was not any individual who learned this. It was rather life’s whole process of adaption and memory that was responsible for this new ability. It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.  [Journey of the Universe p. 60-61]

It’s really quite amazing – the stunning intelligence of the forms life takes, from the nuclei of a single cell, to the amazing complexity of a leopard or a human body. For a long time creationists took the point of view that this beauty and complexity proved a divine entity was at work. Science took the mechanistic view that life was more like a machine, randomly creating mutations until we hit the lottery and through endless combination came up with something amazing, like photosynthesis. Today some scientists are starting to wonder- is it possible that life’s yearning, life’s striving, life’s urgent need could in some way guide our evolution? In the same way that I know I am existentially different from a toaster, could life itself have in its growing and learning and evolving something beyond the nihilism of meaningless chance?

But I digress. For things like breaking down grains into the more useful proteins that are the building blocks of our bodies, we rely on a legacy going back billions of years in our DNA. This happens entirely outside our consciousness. Not only does this story give me evidence for the hope that life can overcome great obstacles, but also that within each one of us, within our very cells is a great library of information from our ancestors. Now not every being gets a copy of every pattern. Flying, for example, is a piece of the pattern you and I did not get. Breathing air and photosynthesizing are both amazing skills critical to our balanced biosphere, but we got one and plants got the other. No one set of DNA has the learning of all our ancestors, so in a way life’s learning is a community activity. We need all this great diversity of genetic patterns present in all the living things to preserve the tremendous knowledge needed to sustain life on earth.

Humanity, life on earth, we in this congregation face challenges we’ve never faced before. So what do we do? In her book Earth Path Starhawk finds hope in how our non-human ancestors have faced the great challenges. “Those simple, one-celled beings were already experimenting with different forms. Some were long and skinny and wriggled and swam. Some were round and fat. Some adapted to hot and some to cold. And always they were trading genes, shifting forms, changing and transforming.” Like our earliest ancestors we experiment, we try stuff. All the great advances in life came from trying all kinds of things, being creative, experimenting.

Then, we learn from our experiments- we notice what worked, what didn’t work. Fortunately it’s not just our brains that do the learning, it’s our bodies too, it’s the bodies of every living thing on the planet trying to solve the problem of how life can thrive. And just as our families pass on to us the knowledge of how to bake bread, our genes pass on to our descendants how to digest it.

As much as I long to know the answers to life’s pressing problems, sometimes our job is just to experiment and try stuff, in community with all the incredibly diverse forms of life on our biosphere.

This story fills me up with gratitude and wonder for the legacy we carry in our very cells filled with the wisdom of 4 billion years of life on this earth. Our human lives are only a small chapter in this epic adventure, but life is evolving through us, and new chapters are still being written.

As people who honor the evolution of life on this planet, we know that massive change is possible, and that life strives, clings, fights for life. Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and activist once, remarked “Evolutionary pressures want us to survive.” Evolution is the transformation of species and eco-system to increase the odds that life in all its abundance and variety will survive. Sometimes this comes through radical change, change as radical as the first plants who photosynthesized light into food, as radical as learning to breathe air, as radical as holding the first tool. The survival of life counts on our capacity to change, to evolve as the world itself changes and evolves.Swimme and Tucker write:

 “When we today remember that the energy of our lives comes from the original flaring forth of the universe, and that the atoms of our bodies come from the explosion of ancient stars, and that the patterns of our lives come from many ancestors over billions of years, we begin to appreciate the intricate manner in which life remembers the past and brings it into fresh form today. Life adapts. Life remembers. Life Learns.” (p. 61)

We have not reached the end of our evolution as a biosphere, nor have we reached the end of our evolution as a species. I offer this as a very nerdy and concrete source of hope -- when hope is hard to find, remember that life itself wants us to succeed, to survive, to creatively overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as we have since the dawn of life.

Legacy Trees

The trees I see best from my front porch in downtown Ithaca are the Ginkos and honey locusts across the street on that strip of land planted by the City between sidewalk and street. They are taller by a story or 2 than the homes around them, and right now, with the branches bare of leaves, you can see large nests of several species. I know I’ve seen squirrels and Jays go in and out of those nests- and some of those nests have been there longer than I’ve lived in my house- so the nests themselves pass generation to generation. The squirrels use the canopy, a continuity of trees to travel safely out of the way of cats and cars to food and water. Last summer I watched the young squirrels first venture out of their nest in the honey locust climb out and learn travel across the street to my little Japanese Lilac, younger and smaller, where my bird feeder hangs. I watched, over the course of just a week or 2 as they grew bolder and braver and more skillful. Something about just sitting and watching the trees and all the activity of those who call them home is deeply and easily healing to my spirit.

For many of us paying attention to nature is an important spiritual practice. In her book Circle Round: Raising Children In The Goddess Traditions Diane Baker writes “One of my primary goals as a parent is to help my children revere earth, and discover the powerful correlation between loving nature and living the Goddess.” She shares her personal motto, “Studying nature is learning divinity.” … [392] So when you are staring out your window watching a squirrel scamper, we might not realize we are learning divinity. It’s a lovely spiritual practice, and one place to start paying attention to and knowing the trees around you- In that same book Starhawk writes “No Thealogy, no ritual can do as much to teach children to love nature as a friendship with a real tree. A fruit tree in your backyard, a favorite climbing tree, a host to a bird’s nest or a newly planted sapling can become a source of joy and connection for your child. I still remember the tree my friend Barry and I most loved to climb when I was nine years old. I still mourn the magnificent sycamore I could see from our kitchen window that our neighbors cut down years ago.” [p. 386]

I wonder, sometimes, as I sit there on the porch, what would happen to all those birds and squirrels, not to mention the moss and lichen and all the unseen critters and plants who depend on those trees, if that Honey Locust tree was cut down.

It is part of the job of the Ithaca City Forester makes the hard decisions about which trees need to be removed. She has to weigh things like what branches could be a danger to passing pedestrians, cars and buildings. She also has to take a long view about the urban forest as a whole- for example if you replace all the trees at one time, then the new generation will be set up to die off around the same time. I watch as they choose a couple trees in each neighborhood to cut down each summer, and replace them with young trees. By young, we probably mean at least 10 years old, taller than me. On one property where they took down the biggest oldest tree on the block, an ancient maple it would have taken at least 2 people to get their arms around in a hug, which had been dropping branches and was starting to decay in places, they carefully replaced it with a young fruit tree. Obviously this is not an even swap. Not even the smallest bird or squirrel can live in the young tree. It’s certainly not providing the same carbon sink of a big tree, or helping clean the air like a big tree. And remember much of a tree extends below where the soil, where it is an important part of the community of underground life as well. On my daily walks during this transition I could see the huge hole left by the roots of this great tree, and the comparatively tiny root ball of the new one.

The new tree provides no shade, but on the up side I think my neighbor likes all the sunshine, and you can see the rapid influx of sun loving plants that are sprouting up under the tiny fruit tree that never could have lived under that old Maple.

As hard as it is to see one old tree go down in a neighborhood full of wonderful trees in all stages of life, I appreciate that commitment to sustaining a multi-generational urban forest. When the city of Ithaca did that major reconstruction on the commons, they thought long and hard about the trees there. Ultimately they had to take out many trees to do the renovations, since their root system was right where the plumbing needed to be, they left a couple of older trees in bank alley and designed the new walkway to flow around them, preserving some of the only natural shade and habitat on the commons. You can also see the new trees, older than saplings but still shorter than the buildings around them, that are part of this multigenerational plan.

As a culture we seem to cut down trees easily. My friend Aileen lives in a part of the world where with surprising regularity she sees whole wooded areas gone in a matter of days, replaced by server farms, big industrial buildings. Even in housing developments it is common to see old trees cut down for the ease of developers who then plant saplings in the fill dirt as if this was a replacement. The new buildings go up quickly in a matter of months, but the contractors who cut down the old trees will probably not live to see the replacements grow to maturity. I tell you it breaks my heart to see an old tree taken down without thought to what really is lost.

When I walk through my local grocery store I don’t feel assuaged by their promise of “one billion trees planted”- the young tree and the mature tree are not equivalent. Planting new trees is wonderful, but without a community of elders, most fail to survive. Not cutting down a tree- protecting it and preserving it -- is much less glamorous than planting a new one but is a powerful and important contribution.

The trees invite us to think of the value of things that grow slowly, and how that slow stable steady growth can ground a whole community. I think trees can be important teachers if we let them. We don’t have many truly ancient trees nearby, all those primeval forests were cut down by the early settlers, but even the city trees, the ones old enough to shelter squirrels and birds, are older than us. They are patient and slow, and so it’s easy to overlook the decades or centuries of growth it takes to build a structure that serves not only their own species, but the whole ecosystem where they live and grow.

Perhaps those heritage trees can be role models for our own lives, can provide a different perspectives for our traditions and institutions in our community. We are a culture that rewards novelty and startups. I’m told there are many more grants, for example for nonprofits who are kickstarting new initiatives than grants to support older programs with deep roots in the community. As someone with pretty radical progressive views I know I have often taken a “tear it all down” attitude towards the institutions that clearly do not serve all people.

Sometimes, as I approach the anniversary of 25 years in the ministry, as we as a congregation celebrate 215 and 186 years since our founding, and over 250 years of universalism, I often wonder, how would I know when it was time to step aside and let some younger minister, some newer organization take the sunshine, space and resources I use right now?

Susan V. Bosak of the Legacy Project writes:

“Where do you think it's best to plant a young tree: a clearing in an old-growth forest or an open field? Ecologists tell us that a young tree grows better when it's planted in an area with older trees. The reason, it seems, is that the roots of the young tree are able to follow the pathways created by former trees and implant themselves more deeply. Over time, the roots of many trees may actually graft themselves to one another, creating an intricate, interdependent foundation hidden under the ground. In this way, stronger trees share resources with weaker ones so that the whole forest becomes healthier. That's legacy: an interconnection across time, with a need for those who have come before us and a responsibility to those who come after us.”

Let’s consider that for a moment- how we as a congregation need those who came before us, and our responsibility to those who come after. Consider, for example, how challenging our commitment to multi-platform worship has been. We are building new pathways in real time, or as some say building the plane while flying it. It makes me more appreciative of the pathways we inherited, those built for us by all the volunteers who came before in our churches. I stand right now in the Athens sanctuary where the curve of the pulpit area was constructed to send sound out into the sanctuary, how the light of the southern stained glass window lights us on sunny days. Little things like the fact that there is already an outlet under the pulpit, a door that closes between the pulpit and the back door, which even has a coatrack for the worship team’s coats, and a mirror in case you panic at the last moment about whether your hair is sticking up funny. If you wanted to go in the social hall right now and make coffee for yourself, for 10 people, for 100 people, everything you need is right there including written instructions. Hundreds of ways big and small that members of our congregations smoothed the way for us now. And we too building pathways now that we hope will serve in time to come – like the addition we are building to our sanctuary in Zoom space for all those who want to be with us but can’t join us in person.

Just as our city Forester must decide which trees are steady and strong, which trees need to be pruned, and when it is time for an old tree to come down and make space for the next generation, so we are called to discern. It’s easy, when you are young, to see all that needs to be changed, matched by all the fresh energy and inspiration ready to manifest. It can take the long view of older folks to see the role these older sometimes unseen institutions and traditions play in undergirding and supporting anything that will be built today. It’s not just age, of course, but perspective- if an old tree or old institution has been blocking the sun from shining on you, you can easily see the importance of taking it down. If you were supported in some nurturing way by, say a UU church, it’s easier to imagine how that church could serve those who come after.

Right now the Athens congregation is working through the sale of our Sheshequin meeting house. A beautiful old tree if ever there was one- on the national registry of historic places as a great example of federalist architecture, and a place of great meaning for many in our church and larger community. Fortunately, the fellow who is buying the place is one of those for whom the building has meaning. A new squirrel in an old nest perhaps.

Just as we might take for granted the gifts of the great old legacy trees, it’s easy to take for granted these great old traditions, like Universalism, like democracy. In honor of the new year of the tress, I invite you to bring to mind with gratitude great old heritage trees (literal and metaphoric) in your community. These old trees, old traditions, yes even us older people have something important to offer to the generations who are new, and those yet to come. It’s not always clear what that is, since the future is so uncertain, but maybe it would be fun as we are noticing our trees to ask “in what way am I like that old maple? Or like that little fruit tree? How does my being and growing and living support others in the web of life, and what big old trees that I did not plant support and shelter and make way for me?

In honor of the new year for trees, we pay attention to the trees which support and shade and provide oxygen for our own lives, with respect and gratitude. This time of year right now is a great time to see the branching frame of the tree, each one different, it’s also a great time to see nests and the critters who live in trees. Soon the buds will set and leaves will start to grow almost overnight; we’re heading into a very rewarding time to pay attention to a tree in your neighborhood. In honor of the New Year for Trees, we also keep planting seeds and sheltering the young ones. This is one of the blessings of inter-generational community- the community of trees, of beings, and our little gathered community planted long before any of us were born, and growing still.

Caring for One Another

Grampa leads the youngest cooks in making Cranberry Sauce

I have this clear memory from when I was maybe 11 years old, of being at my friend’s house just before mealtime and everyone was pitching in- setting the table and all those things you do as mealtime draws near. I knew I should be helping -- my parents often rolled their eyes at me over the years saying “why are you just standing there and not helping” -- but I just had no clear idea what needed to be done and how I could help, or even where the plates were kept in this strange kitchen. I carried that feeling with me for many years, that “helping” was something everyone had figured out except me.

As I watched my son growing up, I’ve seen him get better and better at helping – how to hold a door open, how to set the table. This year at Thanksgiving he knew without anyone telling him that you have to make the cranberry sauce early in the day before the kitchen gets too busy and he asked when we were aiming to serve dinner so the Mashed potatoes would be warm. It was such a gift to know those parts of the meal were taken care of, and I cherish the sweet memories of 15 Thanksgivings of mentoring with the cooking team it took to get there.

I understand as a middle-aged person what my 11 year old self didn’t, that learning how to lend a hand takes time and experience. As last month’s potluck seemed to magically assemble itself, folks having arrived early to set up tables and gather food, we chatted about how the skills of potlucking transfer from one congregation to another. How even if you’ve never potlucked with a particular community before, and don’t know where they keep their fold up tables or how to run the dishwasher, you know everything needs to go back to the kitchen at the end, and someone’s going to have to get the crumbs off the floor.

Likewise, once you have been a parent, or cared for a baby, you glance at a fussy baby and exhausted parent and realize it might be helpful to offer “would you like me to take the baby for a bit?” And then feel confident parent hands the child to you. I was a religious educator for 3 years before I had my son nick, but after attending church with a little one in tow I suddenly saw with new eyes how we could be more supportive to parents of young children, noticing obvious oversites like the total lack of highchairs, or failing to consider bedtimes when scheduling meetings to name a couple.

Helping is a skill that evolves and gets better with time and experience. One of the silver linings of our own struggles is that we know what helped us when we needed help. I was able to help a friend jump start his car because my friend’s dad had taught me back when I was a teenager driving an ancient car with a tired old battery. There are things you know, each of you, because of what you’ve been through. You know what helped you, or the help you needed but didn’t get, or the supposedly helpful things people tried that were no help at all.

Even if you don’t have any idea how to set up for a potluck, or visit a friend in the hospital, I would like this congregation to a place where we learn from one another about what helps. I chose today’s story because it says something important about what we, as a church community, can offer one another. It’s hard when we can’t fix what’s broken -- it hurts us so much to see a friend in need, but as the little girl in the story told her friends, what she most wanted from them was help with her loneliness. We should try not to let our inexperience and fear of getting it wrong keep us from doing the most important thing we can do- which is extending our care to one another.

Even in the everyday work of the church, I am always touched when someone asks “can I give you a hand with that?” there is something so reassuring, even if you say “no thanks, I’ve got it” to know that you are part of a web of support. In his book The Body Keeps The Score Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explains that social support makes a surprising difference in how we recover from the hard moments of our lives. “Whenever we feel threatened, we instinctively turn to …, social engagement. We call out for help, support and comfort from the people around us. But if no one comes to our aid, or we’re in immediate danger, the organism reverts to a more primitive way to survive, fight or flight.” [p. 82] ”When something distressing happens, we automatically signal our upset in our facial expressions and tone of voice, changes meant to beckon others to come to our assistance. However, if no one responds to our call for help, the threat increases, and the older limbic brain jumps in… mobilizing muscles, heart and lungs for fight or flight.” [p. 84]”

This is wired deep within us- when we feel connected to social support, our nervous systems can relax and go about the work or the healing that needs to be done. If we feel disconnected from social support, our nervous system cranks it up a notch, we end up in a fight or flight response.

As a congregation that serves lovingly, we try to strengthen that interconnected web of social support that connects us all. Like in today’s story, certain suffering is beyond our capacity to fix or resolve, but we do the things we can do to help one another feel supported, feel connected. My friends were in marriage counseling a few years back and when one would do something for the other their therapist would ask “and did you receive that as love?” When someone offers to feed your cats while you are in the hospital or on vacation, it’s not just a practical help, it is a reminder of the love that holds us all.

A couple of concrete tips for showing our care for one another. It is always lovely to ask “can I give you a hand with that?” By asking, the other person can consent, can receive it or decline. Sometimes when we are not doing well, we just don’t even know what we need, so it’s often good practice to offer specific things- Can I give you a ride to the doctor? Do you need me to pick up some groceries for you? The other nice thing about making a concrete offer is that then we can be clear about what we are able to give. Because of course there is no limit to the help the world needs, so we must discern inside ourselves what we are able to give, what we specifically feel called to give.

In the Athens congregation at least 10 years ago we started something called the “caring circle”- it’s really just an email list of folks who want to know when other members are going through something hard or might need some help. When a beloved member had a stroke years ago, it was through this caring circle that we were able to let each other know she was in the hospital, and concrete things like room number, how she was doing, when visitors were allowed, and who had visited when (we were noticing that many of our hospitalized members got a slew of visitors after church Sunday, more visitors than a sick person should really have, and then no visitors during the week). Those who had more experience with hospital visits and strokes were able to offer concrete suggestions to those of us who weren’t quite sure what we could do. Being part of the caring circle doesn’t obligate anyone to do anything, we invite each person to discern for themselves what they are willing and able to give, as part of the wider web of community.

We came up with a little handout, a little script for when you reach out to someone for the first time:

• How are you, what’s going on?
• Is it okay if I tell the minister?
• Is it okay if I tell the caring circle?
• Can I share it at Joys and concerns?
• Would you like: 
• Calls?
• Visits?
• Meals?
• Rides?
• Any other way we could help?
• Does your partner or family need any support? If so what is their name and contact information?

A few years back, we had a conversation after church “how can I help” and we talked about what was helpful and not helpful. One member offered that what she most liked when she was in the hospital was to receive a nice plant to cheer her room. We went around the circle, and soon one person shared “If I am in the hospital, please don’t bring me a plant.” We had a good laugh. Some folks feel better knowing their congregation is aware they have a big surgery coming up, other folks are very private, and prefer not to share until the worst is past. One person shared that she liked to hear people’s messages on her voice mail, but also appreciated one who said “you don’t have to call me back” because she was feeling the weight of having to keep up with all the people reaching out.

What has been helpful to you? What do you wish your helpers had known?

One of the things I have always loved about both our churches is the way people pitch in and help. When our beloved Jason died this summer, the Cortland congregation jumped into action and put on memorials and a lunch without even being asked. We knew people would need a place to gather and support one another, we knew the healing properties of both worship and food. Consider the Goodie Bags we delivered during the times of Covid Isolation- these clearly provide no concrete help but folks tell us when they received our goodie bags, that gesture of connection helped them feel loved and connected.

There are many times in our lives when we could use a hand- When you are sick at home, or in the hospital. When a loved one has died. When you are moving. When your car breaks down. When you are between jobs. When you just have too many things in your hands and need help opening a door. As a congregation committed to “serving lovingly” we keep an eye out for these moments when folks could use a hand. Our goal is not to meet every need- it’s humanly impossible. We help one another so that we remember we are not alone, that we are supported by a web of community and of life. Giving or receiving a helping hand reminds us we are part of something larger than ourselves, a love that holds us all.

The Wisdom of Howard Thurman

Source: Boston University Archives

 The Wisdom of Grandmother Nancy

Howard Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, was a very important person in his life. She had been born into slavery on a large plantation in South Carolina. She was a midwife in Daytona Florida, and people called her “Lady Nancy[i]”

As Thurman was growing up just at the start of the 20th century, he lived with her and his mom, (his dad died when he was 7) and called her the “anchor person in our family.”

One of Thurman’s responsibilities growing up was to read to his grandmother from the bible each day. She told him that “Whenever her owner’s wife saw her little daughter trying to teach … grandmother the alphabet or one, two, three, she would chastise the child and send her to bed without supper.” grandmother said: “I saw there must be some magic in knowing how to read and write."

Remembering her, Thurman recalled the stories she would tell occasionally about her time as an enslaved person, about how “sometimes the plantation owner’s minister would be permitted to hold a religious service for the slaves, and he always preached from the same text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to your masters, for this is right in the Lord.’ … grandmother said that she made up her mind then and there that if she ever learned to read or if freedom ever came she would never read that part of the Bible.” …”. So all the years that I was growing and had the job of reading to her every day, I could never read any of the Pauline letters, except now and then the 13th chapter of I Corinthians.[ii]

Thurman told a reporter many year’s later, in his own words:“My grandmother’s second story is even more important to me, but in a different way. She would talk about the times when a slaver preacher was permitted to hold services for the slaves of her master’s and all the neighboring plantations.

I don’t remember how often this happened, but that that it happened at all was tremendously important. And then my sister and I would be every still, because we knew what she was going to tell us – this: “It didn’t matter what the text was, the minister always ended up at the same place.”... Then she would say: “he would stand up, start very quietly and then look around to all of us in the room and then he would say, ‘You are not slaves, you are not n____ – you are God’s children’. . .” And you know, when my grandmother said that she would unconsciously straighten up, head high and chest out, and a faraway look would come on her face.” [iii]

That phrase “you are God’s children” and that strength he saw in his grandmother inspired much of his writing and work. The same writing which inspired Martin Luther King and many others who made a huge difference in our country.

Image Source: Journey Films

The Wisdom of Howard Thurman

Rev. Howard Thurman was a minister, a professor, a writer. He was raised Baptist, and preached and taught in the Baptist tradition, but also helped found the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco -- the first, interracial, intercultural chapel in the united states. This is how I was introduced to Thurman’s work during seminary, as their current minister Dorsey Blake was a professor at my school. Blake told us that many white seminary students were drawn to Thurman for his mysticism, but he wanted us to understand the racial context our of which they grew. For Thurman mysticism and the work for social change flowed naturally from one another.

Thurman had visited Mahatma Ghandi with a delegation to India in 1935, which was formative in his life and thought, and was part of the connection between the American civil rights movement and the philosophy of non-violent resistance.

It is said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King kept a “well thumbed copy” of “Jesus and the disinherited” in his pocket during the days of the Montgomery bus boycotts. [i] which Thurman wrote in 1949, so today I’d like to share some readings from that important work with you. To share the beauty and care of his words with you today. Thurman begins:

“Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.”

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The Conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples… "

"It is not a singular thing to hear a sermon that defines what should be the attitude of the Christian toward people who are less fortunate than himself. Again and again our missionary appeal is on the basis of the Christian responsibility to the needy, the ignorant, and the so-called backward peoples of the earth. There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another’s need out of one’s fullness and plenty. . . . It is certainly to the glory of Christianity that it has been most insistent on the point of responsibility to others whose only claim upon one is the height and depth of their need. This impulse at the heart of Christianity is the human will to share with others what one has found meaningful to oneself elevated to the height of a moral imperative. But there is a lurking danger in this very emphasis. It is exceedingly difficult to hold oneself free from a certain contempt for those whose predicament makes moral appeal for defense and succor. It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other.”

Thurman is noticing that much of what the church offered folks “with their back against the wall” is a call for the more fortunate to help them in their need. Unfortunately, Thurman notices, this can give the folks helping a sense of pride and superiority to those one his helping.

“…It has long been a matter of serious moment that for decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings. I say this without rancor, because it is not an issue in which vicious human beings are involved. But it is one of the subtle perils of a religion which calls attention—to the point of overemphasis, sometimes—to one’s obligation to administer to human need.

“I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent that my meaning be crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?”[in For the Inward Journey p. 121-123]

This message that is over 70 years old dovetails exactly with our own growing edge as a movement. For so long UU has focused on how we could support those less fortunate than ourselves, but the COIC has asked us instead to take up Howard Thurman’s question- what good is our faith to those who live with their backs against the wall? We are asked now, at this moment in history, to devote ourselves to deepening a theology of liberation, to speak to those of us who are disinherited, the dispossessed. If we are going to live our dream of becoming an anti oppressive faith, this is at the core of our work.

In Jesus and the disinherited Thurman suggests that :

“Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited” [p. 138]. “Always back of the threat is the rumor or the fact that somewhere, under some similar circumstances, violence was used. That is all that is necessary. The threat becomes the effective instrument” [p. 140] “Through bitter experience they have learned how to exercise extreme care, how to behave so as to reduce the threat of immediate danger from their environment.” …” The threat of violence within a framework of well-nigh limitless power is a weapon by which the weak are held in check. Artificial limitations are placed upon them, restricting freedom of movement, of employment, and of participation in the common life. These limitations are given formal or informal expression in general or specific policies of separateness or segregation. These policies tend to freeze the social status of the insecure.

The threat of violence may be implemented not only by constituted authority but also by anyone acting oin behalf of the established order. Every member of the controllers’ group is in a sense a special deputy, authorized by the mores to enforce the pattern. This fact tends to create fear, which works on behalf of the proscriptions and guarantees them. The anticipation of possible violence makes it very difficult for any escape from the pattern to be effective. [p. 141-142]

 “Even recourse to the arbitration of the law tends to be avoided because of the fear that the interpretation of law will be biased on the side of the dominant group.” [p. 144]

How familiar does this sound in 2023 - the threat of violence from police, from social systems, that crushes the soul, and circumscribes the lives of many in our time as it did in Thurman’s and in King’s time.

Again Thurman asks: “The crucial question, then, is this: Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here? It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited…No man wants to be the object of his fellow’s pity. Obviously, if the strong put forth a great redemptive effort to change the social, political, and economic arrangements in which they seem to find their basic security, the whole picture would be altered. But his is apart from my thesis. Again the crucial question: Is there any help to be found for the disinherited in the religion of Jesus?” [p. 145]

Though Thurman speaks with more explicitly Christian language than we generally used in our churches today, the good news he offers is our good news too. Thurman was a universalist (small u) which he learned from his grandmother. Who learned it from that preacher on the plantations of her childhood- that each of us is a “child of God”

Thurman’s proposes: 

“The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life-process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man’s head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease. In this world the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: “Who am I? What am I?”

The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting If a man feels that he does not belong in the way in which it is perfectly normal for other people to belong, then he develops a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls an inferiority complex. It is quite possible for a man to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”

(I hear in Thurman’s wisdom, the stirring words of the preacher who assured them “you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” )

Thurman continues “This established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value.

The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of the churning fear. The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. He senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.”

When we UUs speak today about a love which holds us all, our love must be big enough to hold this. When Thurman encouraged us to “keep open the doors of our hearts” in today’s reading, it is not about a charity to the less fortunate, but the power of the individual and our relationship to the divine, to choose love instead of hate. We must know so deeply that we count, that we belong, that it confirms us like a tree rooted in a place of belonging, even in the midst of oppression and fear. When our backs are to the wall, our work for justice begins in our own soul – our integrity, our authentic voice. These allow one to be strong and live a life of meaning, and intimacy with the sacred that return power and agency to those of us who have been disinherited.

When we look at God’s universal love, or as the principles say “the inherent worth and dignity” with this in mind, we see how deep and important this theological anchor is to the work of justice and the meaning of our lives. “No easy sentimentality” as Thurman writes, but a blueprint for the future of our faith.

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Notes:

 The Story of Nancy AMbrose:

[i] https://sojo.net/magazine/november-2020/story-howard-thurman-kept-telling-about-race

[ii] For a quick perspective on the impact of this story, and alternate views on Paul https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhPXBSESGVQ

[iii] https://genius.com/Mary-e-goodwin-racial-roots-and-religion-an-interview-with-howard-thurman-annotated

 The Wisdom of Howard Thurman:

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-theologian-helped-mlk-see-value-nonviolence-180967821/

 I am using the edition included in For the Inward Journey: The Writing s fo Howard Hutmrn, but a PDF of hte whole book can be found here.

Finding Center

This time of year, after the winter holidays, when days are short, and even the squirrels spend much of the day hunkering down in their shelter, there is a possibility of drawing inward, of being moved by the stillness and relative quiet of midwinter. For some of us this is a welcome opportunity for contemplation, for others it is just bleak.

Today I want to offer some concrete guidance for this contemplative time, specifically focused on “finding center”. Many contemplative and psychological traditions speak of the value of centering, which is actually something pretty ordinary we all can do. To me finding my center feels like disentangling all the loose threads of my life, the projects, the relationships, the drama, even the input of sound and sight, like pulling all the tendrils of my attention back in toward myself. “here I am!” It might feel simple, or peaceful, or solid, or balanced. I like the metaphor of “coming home” to oneself.

And like when we come home after a day of work, or our travels, what we find when we arrive there is highly personal and individual. Perhaps some of us this morning feel rested and full after the holiday time. I confess to you, however, that after a couple of weeks of preparation, and services, and visitors and traveling, I am a bit wiped out, and somewhat off my game. When we arrived home on Monday, after visiting my sister in Boston, we were so ready to be home, but we were also exhausted and spent, and while grateful to be back, all of us noticed this week that reentry was a challenge. Just so, when we return to our metaphorical center, we might feel the relief or arriving back where we belong, the peace of letting go of all those threads, or a post-holiday jumble needing our attention.

If there are no guarantees of peace or bliss when we find our center, why bother? The world is big and complex. We can’t even experience it all, let alone fix it all. When we find our own center, we can tell what is ours, and what is ours to do. Our center is a good place to be for discernment -- there is a truth and a clarity available when we center ourselves. When we are off adventuring in mind or body, it’s easy to say to our concerns “not now” but when I come home to myself I often feel grumpy- that doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong, because I don’t feel peace, it means that this is the truth of what is real for me in the moment- I ate too many cookies, didn’t get enough sleep, and I still have all the holiday decorations and supplies to put away before I can get back to normal. When I centered myself this week, it was clear to me that I’m depleted and out of sorts, and grounded in that truth I could make choices. The center s the place where I know myself, this is where I must return to know the truth that only I can know.

Our center is also where we are the strongest. When we center, we bring all our energy, our attention to where we are located in this time and place. Think of a squirrel skittering around a big old tree – that trunk can hold so much weight, it doesn’t even notice the squirrel. But as the squirrel gets closer and closer to the end of the branch, it sways and buckles and sometimes breaks. This week I had the delight of watching a juvenile squirrel learning how far out a branch he could safely travel, and how much branch he needed to support him. The squirrels know, when the branches sway, to scramble back to the center. The center is where they build their nests.

This is why it can be useful to find your center in tumultuous times. To bring your sense of self, your attention, your energy to the core of who you are, as you understand it. In the same way that during a hurricane, people are encouraged to go to the center of their home -- a small downstairs room in the interior. Imagine a part of yourself like that- a small interior space where you are ready for whatever storms may come. Perhaps you have experienced this, a time of trouble when you felt centered and ready, you were able to set aside all the distractions, and just focus on the important thing in the moment.

Finding center is not a place we reach once and for all, but a place from which we come and go. As we return again and again to our center, we can cultivate our capacity to center ourselves. For me, rolling out the yoga mat and practicing asana is quite reliable in helping me center myself. My yoga matt becomes like a tiny home base no matter where I travel on my outward or inward journeys. More ordinary things are useful too- like taking a walk, or sitting and having a cup of coffee. Boy there is something about just holding my favorite coffee cup in my hands warm with coffee that helps me settle into myself, into my day. I wonder what it is for you? [pause] Because each of us is absolutely unique, so is what we experience, and so there are many tools and practices that we can use to find center.

I’d like to try a couple of experiments with you now. Please listen to your inner wisdom about these practices, and notice what feels interesting, and especially if you hear feedback “this is not for me right now.” Everything is optional.

First let’s start by finding any place in your body that feels good or neutral-- boring, ordinary even... If any of these experiments don’t work for you, just return to that spot. How nice to have someplace ordinary and neutral to return to.

Next, let’s try another one, notice your breath just however it is naturally, and bring your attention to the tip of your nose, just where the air comes in and out, just notice that for a few breaths. ..

If your attention wanders, just gently invite it back, each time like a fresh homecoming...

When you’re ready you can let that go, or stick with it if you are enjoying that.

Now try bringing your attention and sense of self into your feet, or whatever your weight is resting on. Let your attention pool and settle there...

Last, I invite you to bring your attention into the center of your chest, the place we associate with the heart. Allow your attention to fill up the whole volume of your chest and just notice the way the chest rises and falls with the breath...

Now expand your attention to your whole self. What do you notice? How do you feel? There are no wrong answers...

There is a truism in astrophysics that “Any spot in the Universe can be considered the center, with equal validity.”[i] In a way we are like that, we can chose where to center our attention as we just did. For me when I focus on my nose, it has a clear precise quality when I settle into it. When I focus on my feet or legs or wherever my weight is resting, I feel very grounded, strong like a mountain. Usually when I meditate, I choose the center of my chest, which helps me get in touch with my own feelings, and with my compassion and connection for others. But if I am sad or worried, I prefer to settle into my feet, or some other strong, stable place.

Many traditions teach a variety of paths to finding center, but it is not the only state of mind taught by the spiritual traditions. Sometimes when people talk about a religious experience, they talk about transcending the ordinary and the everyday, or losing their sense of self, about dissolving into the hugeness of something larger. Sometimes we cultivate a diffuse sense of awareness, where we are listening to everything around us, or just trying to fall asleep. Often when I sit on my porch in the spring I bring this kind of diffuse receptive awareness, which I find to be the best mindset to learn things about what’s happening in my ecosystem.

The point of being alive is not just to be perfectly centered at all times. One very important part of our work as UUs is learning how to de-center ourselves. If we always think of ourselves as the center of the universe, we can’t grow in compassion and our viewpoint will be limited. That’s part of what’s challenging and wonderful about building community- learning to be open to one another’s point of view, to do things in the service of others. When we visit a loved one in the hospital, for example, it’s good to leave our own concerns at the door, and be attentive to what they need in the moment. At the same time, folks who are used to being other-centered, will find it a real challenge to find and speak from their own center. I have a friend who always answers the question “how are you” by telling me how her family is. And so we practice finding our own center, and we also practice centering others. Whenever I hear myself saying “so and so is making me feel a certain way” this is a clue I’m off center. I can’t change so and so, but from the point of view of my own center, I can determine what is mine to do, and how I want to respond. If we practice returning to the center, asking ourselves “what do you need in this situation, what do you want, what do you feel?” eventually it helps disentangle from the situation just enough so that we can discern a path forward with integrity to themselves and autonomy of the other.

This is especially true when it comes to anti-oppressive work; folks who have the privilege of having their point of view centered and normalized, can practice stepping out of the center and inviting in the voices of those who have traditionally been on the margins. At the same time, folks who are used to being decentered, we invite to courageously speak from their own center.

My invitation to you this week is a playful one. Just notice, from time to time, whether you feel centered, and when you feel something else- decentered, expansive, diffuse, scattered. All of these ways of being have a use, and it’s nice to be able to choose to return to center when that would be helpful. I invite you to experiment- how do you know when you have found center? what helps you find your center? What takes you out of our center? Are there things you can do to help yourself return to center? Just notice and explore, experiment and play. Let us offer one another support and blessings for our return journey home, again and again and again.

 

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[i] https://bigthink.com/hard-science/center-of-the-universe/