(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")
It is easy for Unitarian Universalists to feel rootless. For so many centuries we have been out on the growing edge of religious, ethical, and philosophical thought. Folks hear that we are a non-creedal faith and say “UUs can believe anything they want” but for us it is not a creed that keeps us grounded, it is our principles and our roots. As one of my old professors at Seminary used to say about our movement “This wasn’t something that was born at an EST seminar in California in the 1970s.” No, we have deep roots, and as we learned in the story of the trees of Kenya, the deep roots of the trees protect the soil and the water, and keep it from blowing away in the wind and drying up in the sun. Without deep roots the land becomes a desert. This is the 3rd principle in our sermon series this year on the principles of permaculture, principles that will guide us toward a more sustainable and abundant culture for all beings on our planet. The principle is simply this: “Take Root” -- connect to our ancestors and to the local.
This principle is not only true for soil and trees and eco-systems, it is also true for our hearts and minds and spirits. For example when we proudly declare ourselves to be a welcoming congregation, welcoming to all people be they Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual or straight, that welcome has so much more strength when we realize it is rooted in our universalist theology- the idea that every single person has inherent worth and dignity, a 20th century idea rooted in our centuries old Universalist heritage which says that God is all loving, that god loves all people, that all people will be reunited with God and with one another at the end of days. All are chosen, all are saved. We draw not only on our contemporary principles and values when we protect the rights of our GLBT neighbors and friends, but I feel in me the fiery passion of our stump preaching ancestors, who called on the power of God’s all encompassing love and power to save. Like a tree drawing water and nutrients from its roots, I feel powerful and strong when I call on the wisdom of my ancestors.
The history of Unitarian Universalism is often told something like this: In the 1500s a Spanish physician named Michael Servetus, the same man who discovered respiration in the lungs, published a book called “On the Errors of the Trinity.” He believed that God was one, and that the bible did not say anything about a trinity. He was burned at the Stake by John Calvin in 1553 for refusing to retract this statement.
During this time, such ideas were traveling across Europe. Just a decade later in Transylvania [1568] a young king, John Sigismund was convinced to listen to great preachers of different sects of the Christian tradition before he name the state religion. A preacher named Frances David won the day with his ideas about how the trinity was not in the bible, and how “we need not think alike to love alike.” David advised King John that not only his Unitarian ideas but all Christian religious groups should be allowed to co-exist under an “edict of tolerance.” Now groups of Unitarians began to worship together for the first time under this name. Other strains of Unitarianism grew in Poland and in England.
But Unitarian ideas continued to be met with persecution. Joseph priestly, an English Scientist and Unitarian Minister fled to America after his laboratory was burned to the ground because of his ideas. [1791]
Many in America were responding to a powerful fundamentalist movement called “The Great Awakening.” This was revival movement that grew out of Calvinism. Opponents of this movement emphasized the importance of reason and logic, an approach to the bible that valued historical and critical thinking, and the importance of ethics. Unitarianism is one of the movements that grew out of this opposition.
But the Unitarian churches were still part of the state-sponsored church system. Universalism, which had its roots in similar ideas, believed in a separation of church and state, and were allied with radical fringe groups like the Quakers. Universalism grew up in opposition to Calvinism, which said that only a certain small group had been chosen by God at the beginning of time to go to heaven; The rest of us were going to hell.
Universalists thought that the damnation of most of humanity did not harmonize with the concept of an all powerful all loving God, and they centered their faith with the idea that all persons could be saved. It was in the second generation of American Universalists that this church was founded, that our lovely historic building was built in Sheshequin.
The Unitarian and Universalist movements grew alongside one another. Both were deeply impacted by the transcendentalist movement, which preferred the natural world over the biblical literalism on which even the old-school Unitarians built into their faith. Transcendentalists like Channing, Fuller and Emerson wanted to strip away the historic structures and teachings of the church and center their faith in the direct experience of God. The transcendentalists also introduced Eastern thought into our movement, widening the web of our roots beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This was also a great time for Social Justice as Unitarian and Universalist preachers and activists worked to end slavery, worked to give women the right to vote, and work in other areas which badly needed reform like the Prison and Mental Health systems. Pioneers like Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained into the ministry of an organized denomination in this country, paved the way for gender equality in our own Universalist Tradition.
In the 20th century, the humanist notion that one could be religious and ethical without God was a powerful one in our movement. 20th century Unitarians were atheists, agnostics and theists, humanists and Christians.
In 1961 the Unitarians and the Universalists merged into one association. Together we were allies and activists in the civil rights movement. The women’s movement lead us to re-consider how we thought about God, and searching for a concept of the divine that honored women, we encountered the ancient pagan ideas of God the mother, and were inspired by the ideas of the neo-pagan movement. We have been and still are leaders in the rights of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender persons. Today we provide a bridge between the secular and the sacred, among faiths and theologies.
But we have roots that go even deeper than that. I think of the church I used to serve in California. They had a beautiful Madrone branch as hung behind the pulpit for as long as anyone could remember. I thought about the symbolism of a branch without a trunk, without roots. I used to joke that maybe the place where that branch was cut from its tree is a symbol of the execution of Servetus -- Our break from the Catholic Church and our Protestant cousins. But it is shortsighted to consider a branch apart from the tree, and now I want to say something about the symbolic tree on which this branch grew.
Frances David and Michael Servetus were both raised Catholics, and were part of the protestant reformation that rocked the western world. The Church of England, the Calvinists, the Baptists and many other protestant movements blossomed and evolved within a generation of Martin Luther, the Augustinian Monk, nailing his 95 thesis to the church door in 1517. Luther had been upset about corruption in the Catholic Church, and had grown in his disputes with Catholic theology.
With the invention of the printing press in 1450, common people could now read and interpret the bible for themselves. The spread of the printed bible translated into the popular tongues created a grass-roots movement within the Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church had become the legal religion of Western Europe, tightly allied with political and financial power. Monastic movements, like those founded in the 12th century by St. Francis and in the 5th century by St. Benedict created an alternative to the wealth and corruption which infected the power structures of both church and kingdom. Men and Women religious took oaths of poverty and devoted their daily life to sharing work and to cultivating the spirit.
At the same time mystics like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen held at the center of their faith a direct experience of the divine (roots of the transcendentalists). Throughout Christian history there was a perennial tension between those keepers of the church traditions and institutions and those mystics and martyrs who held themselves accountable only to God, playing at the edges of heresy.
Arius, a parish priest at the turn of the 4th century, found himself on the heretical side of the Nicene Creed when in 325 the Council of Nicaea drew its theological line in the sand. Arius had taught that God created a Son who was the first creature, but who was not equal to God. According to Arius, Jesus was a supernatural creature not quite human and not quite divine. Some call Arius an early ancestor of Unitarianism.
Though there was as yet no council to declare him heretical, many controversies have followed the teachings of Origen of Alexandria, who lived a century before Arius. (185-232) He preached the eventual return of all souls to a perfection in proximity to God (an early ancestor, some say, of the Universalists).
Before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued The "Edict of Milan" (CE 313), which ended the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, the early followers of Jesus were enemies of Rome, tortured and punished by death. Paul, who is credited with forming the early church, was imprisoned and writes about his imprisonment in the New Testament. Early Christianity was a religious movement which identified strongly with its crucified teacher. It was an egalitarian movement, a reform movement both within the Jewish tradition and within the Roman Empire.
Within the Roman Empire, the Jewish people had lived as a conquered or occupied people. Many spent their lives as slaves, taken in battle. Roman procurators kept the peace and collected taxes, pocketing additional money for themselves. Roman leaders swung between tolerance of Jewish religious practices and persecution. Like the early Christians, Jews were tortured or put to death when they refused to worship pagan gods, or to worship the emperor as a God. In 70 CE the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem was the sad outcome of the Great Jewish Revolt against the Empire.
This time moving backwards to the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem under Babylonian rule was a time when the books we now think of as the Hebrew Bible were canonized and began to assume their present form. This was the time when classical Greek philosophy was thriving, and the Jews were known for the strong ethics of their legal code and tradition. The last books that made it into the canon were writings of the prophets like Ezekiel and Zacharia who spoke out against the injustices of the ruling class, and of their contemporary culture as a whole.
The chronicles of Jewish history that appear in the scriptures describe a struggle of kingdom against kingdom, of the rise and fall of powerful men. (This was a patriarchal time when women rarely had political power, and were not part of the Jewish Rabbinate.) The Indian Mahabharata tells similar story. The Hindu and Greek pantheons also reflect the role of war in Classical society. And so it was throughout the world, as the Chinese warred for dynastic control of China, and the Aztecs in this continent.
Writing was also a child of these civilizations, first in Sumer and later in Egypt peoples first wrote down their scared stories and texts. Classical religions such as Judaism brought sacred writing to the center of their religious identity.
But the earliest books of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures share oral roots with the stories of Islam. All 3 religions call themselves descendants of Abraham. The first five books of the bible, called the “Torah” collect stories of a very ancient oral tradition. 20th century feminist scholars have used the stories and descriptions of the life of women to help recreate a picture of what women’s lives might have been like. We notice the presence of deities like “the Queen of Heaven” in these biblical stories. Since women were not taught to read, and in many times and places worshiped separately from men, their stories and rituals would have been passed down orally and many were lost. Scholars like Marija Gimbutas have found evidence of a time before written history when women held power in politics and religion, when God was female.
Before the written record, before the lingering stories of ancient times, we have only the archeological record to help us understand what came before; the residual tools of a Neolithic village, the sediment of an evolving earth. Before people organized themselves and their farms around towns, were the Neolithic villages grown out of small settlements. Only about 1 million humans lived on earth. Archeological evidence of the first shrines and religious art shows us that religions focused on the cycle of life, the return of the sun after winter, harvest after planting. It was the role of early religions to pass on this cyclic wisdom, and to remind people of their place in the natural world. The Great mother deity gave birth to and cared for the universe.
These earliest peoples passed on to their offspring not only their genetic coding, but a cultural coding which preserved the learning of parent and grandparent for each evolving generation. Spoken language had made this possible in a new way.
As far back as our Neanderthal ancestors, ritual surrounded burial of the dead. Evidence of such a burial is found in an archeological site in Lebanon including a thoughtful arrangement of stones and a deer killed as food for the deceased. We identify with the drive of these early hominids to find meaning in the cycles of life and death, establishing traditions for integrating such experiences in their own lives and in the natural cycles of life.
Sometimes as a UU I feel like a newcomer in this valley, with all those new ideas our open minds have grasped. But we have roots here in this valley, going back over 200 years, before even the town of Sheshequin was incorporated in 1820. We have roots in this country going back to the American Revolution. We have roots back to the earliest leaders of the Christian Church – we were cutting edge thinkers (or heretics as Arius was called) back in the 3rd century. We have roots back to the ethical teachings of the Jewish traditions, and to the primal earth centered religions before history. We have roots that bind us to all beings who have ever wondered why we live and die.
Today, on Association Sunday, UUs from around the country gather to remember the web of roots that connects to one another. We honor our roots lest we become rootless and adrift, lest our UU tradition become cut off from the channels that bring us water and nutrients, lest our souls become deserts buffeted by the winds of change. When we take root we become strong, we become wise, and we remember that we are never alone.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Abundance Springs from Relationships (September 18, 2011)
(This sermon is part of an ongoing series on the Principles of Permaculture)
Every year since I was an intern I have adopted 3-5 goals about how I can serve my congregation and how I can grow as a minister. Well, the year my son was born I was just starting my second year as a full time minister, and I figured “Time management” was going to be an important growing edge for me. I signed myself up for one of those fancy workshops from the Franklin Covey people at a hotel in San Francisco. It was called “First Things First” and that was really the gist of what they had to say; Figure out what are the most important things, and put those into your schedule first, so no matter what happens that day you can say “well, at least I got the most important thing done.” Well, then we spent a good deal of time talking about what is important. And right at the heart of what is important is cultivating and tending relationships. Each week they suggest you make a list of 7 relationships in your life, and what you need to do to cultivate and tend those relationships. Can you imagine a time management seminar telling you that sometimes it is more important to meet with a co-worker or go to your daughter’s little league game than to finish a report?
I think we at UUCAS understand in a real way the importance of relationships. It’s one of the best qualities of this community; we make building and nurturing our relationships to one another a priority. For example, we take time at the beginning of most of our committee meetings, whether as part of the formal agenda or as just something that happens informally before we begin, to “check in” with folks whom we know have been going through something rough, maybe because they mentioned it during Joys and Concerns. When take part in a program like Evensong it is because we want to take the time to get to know one another in a deep way, and to speak from the heart about what is really important to us.
But sometimes we forget the value and power of relationship when we get down to the work itself. We often say things like “it would be easier and simpler if I just did this myself” Easier than making those phone calls to see who else might want to get involved, easier than training someone to do something we already know how to do. I was meeting with a planning team from the Labor and Religion Coalition up in Ithaca recently. We talked about how we needed to grow our core working group, and get different faith traditions involved in this interfaith effort. We talked about events, and press releases, and articles for the web page in order to spread the word. Then I remembered the story of how I came to be part of that group. I was new in Ithaca, and did not yet have a job or friends or a permanent place to live. After a morning of sending out résumés, I started to search the web for “community organizing Ithaca After some dead ends I found a number to call, and reached a lovely woman named Edie who, it turns out, also happened to be UU. We talked for maybe half an hour on the phone, she asked me all kinds of good questions about myself, and told me about what her group was working on. When she invited me to their next meeting, I jumped at the chance. Now it was July, so as often happens at July meetings, only the 2 staff people and I had come to the meeting. We didn’t have a quorum to do business, so they gave me advice on where to look for Job postings in Ithaca, and got me caught up on their work as a committee. After hearing me talk about my passion for the environment, Edie told me she had a project she was working on doing interfaith organizing around global warming, and I jumped at the chance. To this day I am involved in both of those groups, and all because Edie took the time to build a relationship with me. Her kindness grew in two ways; she made a newcomer feel welcome, and because she took the time to get to know me, she understood what I had to give, what I WANTED to give to my new community.
Permaculture is like that. Take Chickens, for example. In the factory farm model, a chicken contributes eggs or meat. But a chicken is more than an egg laying machine. Chickens also like to scratch and peck. If you let them run around in an area you are cultivating, they will with their scratching and pecking clear the ground of weeds and pests for you just because it is in the nature of a chicken to do that. They will also, how shall we say this, turn their food into nutrient material to build up the soil. But if they are in a cage, they are frustrated and irritable that they can’t walk around and scratch, and now you have to clean up their poop. Conversely, if you allow the full complexity of the relationship between a chicken and her environment, there are myriad benefits for the farmer and for the farm. What else does a chicken do naturally? They eat bugs! And kitchen scraps! They are like a walking fast acting compost bin these guys. It turns out that if you put your green house on the south wall of your chicken coop, the body heat of the chickens helps keep the green house warm over night, and in the early morning when the greenhouse is gathering sun, it helps warm the chicken coop. Moreover, the carbon dioxide exhaled by the chickens as a delight to the plants in the green house. It seems like it would be simpler, easier, to put the chickens off by themselves somewhere and just bring them food and take away their waste, but the chickens are actually more productive, more helpful with the health of our whole garden if we give them the opportunity to be in relationship with our garden, with our orchard, with our greenhouse.
And there is one more thing that is important about these chickens. They are living beings. Permaculture has at its heart a life ethic. According to which recognizes “the intrinsic worth of every living thing.” Does that sound familiar? Look at the back of our order of service- the inherent worth and dignity of every living person. Permaculture takes this one step further, and extends it to every living thing. So a chicken doesn’t have to be productive to be valuable. It has some inherent worth just because it is a living being Says Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture “A tree is something of value in itself, even if it has no commercial value for us. That it is alive and functioning is what is important. It is doing its part in nature; recycling biomass, providing oxygen and carbon dioxide for the region, sheltering small animals, building soils, and so on.” I know that’s a pretty radical thing to say, that even though on the open market a farmer can sell that chicken for $.89 per pound it actually has more intrinsic worth than an iPod, even tough the iPod can be sold for more on e-bay.
Now think about the value of relationships in times of trouble. Remember everything we heard this morning and last Sunday in Joys and Concerns. Last Saturday when I came down with that gas pump to pump out the basement, after JC and Joan had gotten the generator going and hooked up work lights so we could see in the basement, they had taken the gas pump to help a neighbor pump out their home. There was a while when it was just me and Alexa and Morgan in the basement. Let me tell you I’d take Alexa and Morgan for my team any day of the week, but it was clear after a while running up and down those steps that this job was too big for us. And in come Carol and John. Boy was I glad to see them. And we worked for a while, but still it felt like a big job. The pulling into the parking lot come Doug and Susan with a carload of cleaning supplies. Now there’s a team shop-vacing and mopping the basement floor, a team running stuff up the stairs, a team cleaning and sanitizing and sorting the stuff that comes out of the basement, and a team out helping the neighbors. And just when we were feeling overwhelmed again,here come Jack and Diane. Katie and Aurelio and Chris call, they are at the airport and on their way. And it feels like we can do this. Eventually folks did getting tired, and we started to close up shop for the night, because we know when we come back on Sunday, there is a web of relationships that will carry us through this. And then.
And then folks are talking on Sunday morning, wondering “what more can we do for our neighbors” and suddenly there church is providing lunch and a place of respite for the whole neighborhood all this week. Diane will be the first to tell you that every step of the way there have been folks bringing donations, helping get the word out, making sandwiches. In a moment of scarcity-- no power, no clean water, for a while there no vehicles allowed into the area at all -- we are overwhelmed by the abundance springing from relationships.
Think about this like a garden. For example, over at West Haven Farm where I work, their onion bed is filled with flowers. Why flowers? Because they attract beneficial insects which protect the onions from pests. Marigolds help control eelworms that eat our tomatoes, and the chemicals they release into the soil deter weeds like bindweed (Permaculture in a Nutshell p. 24). A plant called Comfrey has also long been used as an herbal medicine for bone fractures. But it serves not only the health of the people who plant it but the garden as a whole, because Comfrey draws nutrients form the soil like potassium and when Comfrey returns to the garden as compost, or is left there to rot as mulch, it brings potassium to the other plants that need it. Moreover, when we mix flowers into our vegetable gardens, they look lovely. Maybe fewer people would hide their vegetable gardens behind their house if they were full of vibrant flowers. Maybe if our gardens were right between us and our driveway, we’d be more likely to notice the ripe zucchini on the way to the car, instead of noticing too late a fruit that has gone past its prime because we only trudge back to our vegetable gardens on Saturday. A row of onions alone is vulnerable to pests, and requires a lot of human intervention. But Permaculture suggests that when plants grow in balanced community, they support one another in subtle and complicated ways.
Think about all we experienced this past week. If Diane had shown up here all by herself with a pot of soup, would the same magic have been possible? If Joan had shown up here with her generator and shop lights and faced that basement alone, how quickly would she have become discouraged?
Now I know that relationships are anything but easy and simple. Were you ever introduced to someone whom you were going to “just love” because you were so much alike? It doesn’t always work out the way you want it to does it. I have more than once planted a flower that was supposed to repel snails only to see it eaten down to the ground within days. Relationships take work and patience and commitment. But this moment, right here, right now, is the best example I have ever known of a time when there is real scarcity and profound abundance. We only have to walk down Main Street to see that loss is real, that people have gone without power, without their own home, without a kitchen to cook in. Last week we saw bulldozers scooping out of the mud so many of their material possessions we spend a lifetime of work accumulating. It is becoming clear that some of these homes and businesses are never going to be what they were. And yet there is a hope in the air unpredicted by the destruction we see around us. Real abundance, the abundance of a community reaching out hearts and hands to one another, caring connections old and new are a lasting abundance that persists even when the flood waters have receded. True abundance springs from relationships.
Every year since I was an intern I have adopted 3-5 goals about how I can serve my congregation and how I can grow as a minister. Well, the year my son was born I was just starting my second year as a full time minister, and I figured “Time management” was going to be an important growing edge for me. I signed myself up for one of those fancy workshops from the Franklin Covey people at a hotel in San Francisco. It was called “First Things First” and that was really the gist of what they had to say; Figure out what are the most important things, and put those into your schedule first, so no matter what happens that day you can say “well, at least I got the most important thing done.” Well, then we spent a good deal of time talking about what is important. And right at the heart of what is important is cultivating and tending relationships. Each week they suggest you make a list of 7 relationships in your life, and what you need to do to cultivate and tend those relationships. Can you imagine a time management seminar telling you that sometimes it is more important to meet with a co-worker or go to your daughter’s little league game than to finish a report?
I think we at UUCAS understand in a real way the importance of relationships. It’s one of the best qualities of this community; we make building and nurturing our relationships to one another a priority. For example, we take time at the beginning of most of our committee meetings, whether as part of the formal agenda or as just something that happens informally before we begin, to “check in” with folks whom we know have been going through something rough, maybe because they mentioned it during Joys and Concerns. When take part in a program like Evensong it is because we want to take the time to get to know one another in a deep way, and to speak from the heart about what is really important to us.
But sometimes we forget the value and power of relationship when we get down to the work itself. We often say things like “it would be easier and simpler if I just did this myself” Easier than making those phone calls to see who else might want to get involved, easier than training someone to do something we already know how to do. I was meeting with a planning team from the Labor and Religion Coalition up in Ithaca recently. We talked about how we needed to grow our core working group, and get different faith traditions involved in this interfaith effort. We talked about events, and press releases, and articles for the web page in order to spread the word. Then I remembered the story of how I came to be part of that group. I was new in Ithaca, and did not yet have a job or friends or a permanent place to live. After a morning of sending out résumés, I started to search the web for “community organizing Ithaca After some dead ends I found a number to call, and reached a lovely woman named Edie who, it turns out, also happened to be UU. We talked for maybe half an hour on the phone, she asked me all kinds of good questions about myself, and told me about what her group was working on. When she invited me to their next meeting, I jumped at the chance. Now it was July, so as often happens at July meetings, only the 2 staff people and I had come to the meeting. We didn’t have a quorum to do business, so they gave me advice on where to look for Job postings in Ithaca, and got me caught up on their work as a committee. After hearing me talk about my passion for the environment, Edie told me she had a project she was working on doing interfaith organizing around global warming, and I jumped at the chance. To this day I am involved in both of those groups, and all because Edie took the time to build a relationship with me. Her kindness grew in two ways; she made a newcomer feel welcome, and because she took the time to get to know me, she understood what I had to give, what I WANTED to give to my new community.
Permaculture is like that. Take Chickens, for example. In the factory farm model, a chicken contributes eggs or meat. But a chicken is more than an egg laying machine. Chickens also like to scratch and peck. If you let them run around in an area you are cultivating, they will with their scratching and pecking clear the ground of weeds and pests for you just because it is in the nature of a chicken to do that. They will also, how shall we say this, turn their food into nutrient material to build up the soil. But if they are in a cage, they are frustrated and irritable that they can’t walk around and scratch, and now you have to clean up their poop. Conversely, if you allow the full complexity of the relationship between a chicken and her environment, there are myriad benefits for the farmer and for the farm. What else does a chicken do naturally? They eat bugs! And kitchen scraps! They are like a walking fast acting compost bin these guys. It turns out that if you put your green house on the south wall of your chicken coop, the body heat of the chickens helps keep the green house warm over night, and in the early morning when the greenhouse is gathering sun, it helps warm the chicken coop. Moreover, the carbon dioxide exhaled by the chickens as a delight to the plants in the green house. It seems like it would be simpler, easier, to put the chickens off by themselves somewhere and just bring them food and take away their waste, but the chickens are actually more productive, more helpful with the health of our whole garden if we give them the opportunity to be in relationship with our garden, with our orchard, with our greenhouse.
And there is one more thing that is important about these chickens. They are living beings. Permaculture has at its heart a life ethic. According to which recognizes “the intrinsic worth of every living thing.” Does that sound familiar? Look at the back of our order of service- the inherent worth and dignity of every living person. Permaculture takes this one step further, and extends it to every living thing. So a chicken doesn’t have to be productive to be valuable. It has some inherent worth just because it is a living being Says Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture “A tree is something of value in itself, even if it has no commercial value for us. That it is alive and functioning is what is important. It is doing its part in nature; recycling biomass, providing oxygen and carbon dioxide for the region, sheltering small animals, building soils, and so on.” I know that’s a pretty radical thing to say, that even though on the open market a farmer can sell that chicken for $.89 per pound it actually has more intrinsic worth than an iPod, even tough the iPod can be sold for more on e-bay.
Now think about the value of relationships in times of trouble. Remember everything we heard this morning and last Sunday in Joys and Concerns. Last Saturday when I came down with that gas pump to pump out the basement, after JC and Joan had gotten the generator going and hooked up work lights so we could see in the basement, they had taken the gas pump to help a neighbor pump out their home. There was a while when it was just me and Alexa and Morgan in the basement. Let me tell you I’d take Alexa and Morgan for my team any day of the week, but it was clear after a while running up and down those steps that this job was too big for us. And in come Carol and John. Boy was I glad to see them. And we worked for a while, but still it felt like a big job. The pulling into the parking lot come Doug and Susan with a carload of cleaning supplies. Now there’s a team shop-vacing and mopping the basement floor, a team running stuff up the stairs, a team cleaning and sanitizing and sorting the stuff that comes out of the basement, and a team out helping the neighbors. And just when we were feeling overwhelmed again,here come Jack and Diane. Katie and Aurelio and Chris call, they are at the airport and on their way. And it feels like we can do this. Eventually folks did getting tired, and we started to close up shop for the night, because we know when we come back on Sunday, there is a web of relationships that will carry us through this. And then.
And then folks are talking on Sunday morning, wondering “what more can we do for our neighbors” and suddenly there church is providing lunch and a place of respite for the whole neighborhood all this week. Diane will be the first to tell you that every step of the way there have been folks bringing donations, helping get the word out, making sandwiches. In a moment of scarcity-- no power, no clean water, for a while there no vehicles allowed into the area at all -- we are overwhelmed by the abundance springing from relationships.
Think about this like a garden. For example, over at West Haven Farm where I work, their onion bed is filled with flowers. Why flowers? Because they attract beneficial insects which protect the onions from pests. Marigolds help control eelworms that eat our tomatoes, and the chemicals they release into the soil deter weeds like bindweed (Permaculture in a Nutshell p. 24). A plant called Comfrey has also long been used as an herbal medicine for bone fractures. But it serves not only the health of the people who plant it but the garden as a whole, because Comfrey draws nutrients form the soil like potassium and when Comfrey returns to the garden as compost, or is left there to rot as mulch, it brings potassium to the other plants that need it. Moreover, when we mix flowers into our vegetable gardens, they look lovely. Maybe fewer people would hide their vegetable gardens behind their house if they were full of vibrant flowers. Maybe if our gardens were right between us and our driveway, we’d be more likely to notice the ripe zucchini on the way to the car, instead of noticing too late a fruit that has gone past its prime because we only trudge back to our vegetable gardens on Saturday. A row of onions alone is vulnerable to pests, and requires a lot of human intervention. But Permaculture suggests that when plants grow in balanced community, they support one another in subtle and complicated ways.
Think about all we experienced this past week. If Diane had shown up here all by herself with a pot of soup, would the same magic have been possible? If Joan had shown up here with her generator and shop lights and faced that basement alone, how quickly would she have become discouraged?
Now I know that relationships are anything but easy and simple. Were you ever introduced to someone whom you were going to “just love” because you were so much alike? It doesn’t always work out the way you want it to does it. I have more than once planted a flower that was supposed to repel snails only to see it eaten down to the ground within days. Relationships take work and patience and commitment. But this moment, right here, right now, is the best example I have ever known of a time when there is real scarcity and profound abundance. We only have to walk down Main Street to see that loss is real, that people have gone without power, without their own home, without a kitchen to cook in. Last week we saw bulldozers scooping out of the mud so many of their material possessions we spend a lifetime of work accumulating. It is becoming clear that some of these homes and businesses are never going to be what they were. And yet there is a hope in the air unpredicted by the destruction we see around us. Real abundance, the abundance of a community reaching out hearts and hands to one another, caring connections old and new are a lasting abundance that persists even when the flood waters have receded. True abundance springs from relationships.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Back to the Garden (September 11, 2011)
When I was a teen-ager, my favorite thing in all the world was to hide out in my bedroom listening to albums on my turntable. Not so much of the rock and roll, but musical comedy and opera. One of my favorites was an opera by Leonard Bernstein called “Candide” based on the famous French novel by Voltaire. It’s the most cynical depiction of human nature that you can imagine in musical comedy form, yet at the end the ensemble unites in one of the most stirring moments from my massive record collection, singing
I hadn’t thought about that song in maybe 20 years, but this week the tune started to come back to me. I’ve always been a dreamer and an idealist, and by the time I went off to seminary and grappled with the big questions of life, I decided that the best single statement of truth was best found in the Beatles' song “All you need is love.” Being a dreamer and an idealist, so have often been disappointed in my life by the way things turn out. I experienced betrayal and loss as all people do, and the oppression of un-just systems. I realized that while this was Love is a good guiding principle in general, it must be grounded in the reality of our daily lives. When dreams are grounded in, well, solid ground, change happens.
This year the worship team has chosen to explore in a series of sermons the principles of permaculture. I’ll let the other members of the team speak for themselves about what this means to them, but to me this is the most hopeful vision I have to offer you- the fairest trees, the sweetest fruits are grown in solid ground. I think permaculture speaks to a deep and primal dream- the return to the fair garden where things grow in harmony.
The story of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures was written probably 5 or 600 years BC, but I was taught that these stories were from an oral tradition that had been passed on through story telling long before that. UUs tend to look at this story not as a historical fact, but as an archetypal story that has spoken to many peoples over thousands of years, and to me, today, it speaks of an ecological system in harmony, where all the beings in the system, including humans, have enough to eat, and can co-exist in peaceful cooperation with one another. Oh, and it’s not too much work, things just kind of grow and are fruitful and self regenerating.
In our Unitarian Universalist history we have often worked to create a more just and compassionate world. In our old statement of belief the (The Washington Declaration of 1935) “we avow our faith in … the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.” I’ve always had trouble with that phrase, but back in seminary a friend of mine said she preferred the “kin-dom of God” because it expressed a more egalitarian sense of our vision, of what we were working to accomplish with our lives as individuals as a church community, and as a movement. I think of the Kingdom of God in our Universalist statement of belief not as a heaven with pearly streets, nor as a time in the future when life will be perfect, but as a vision of what could be that guides us in the right direction, that gives us something to work toward. I think we still need that hopeful vision today. A guiding vision of what this world would look like if it were imbued with fairness and balance. Instead of a kingdom, I propose a garden.
To describe this garden I’m imagining, I need to talk first about systems. A System is a “set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole. ” Like the human body, or a society, or a garden. This is a way of looking at the world developed by a German Biologist in the mid-twentieth century who was trying to address the fragmented way science looks at things, dividing them neatly between specialties. He was trying to integrate all the scientific disciples, both natural (like biology and physics) and social (like psychology and sociology). It turns out that there are a number of things that all systems have in common, enough to really change how we look at the world. Because this disciple was seeking for the ways different systems are a like, it has raised some wonderful new questions like “how is a farm like a forest” and “how is a church community like a living being.”
This year as we look at principles of permaculture, we are not just looking at tips for gardeners, we are laying out a holistic map of principles or paths that will tend to get us closer to integrated healthy productive systems in balance, back to the garden. I propose that the Eden of our imaginations is actually a vision of a system in balance. As integral parts of many systems ourselves, we are hardwired to long for homeostasis, to long for a system in balance. Because by any account we are out of balance. And the culture we are living in is not sustainable- we all know this not only because we watch the news but because as living beings we know what balance looks like, we know what sustainability looks like, and this isn’t it.
In this very discouraging time, Permaculture offers a source of hope. The permaculture movement was begun in the early 1970s by two Australians: David Holmgren and Bill Mollison They were disturbed one the issues we have been talking about here in this congregation for the past few years; the way contemporary agriculture is practiced is not sustainable- it uses up top soil and fossil fuels with no thought for the future. Permaculture comes from the words “permanent” and “agriculture” Holmgren wrtires that “The idea which initiated permaculture was the forest as a model for agriculture”, since forests are self-sustaining systems teeming with life.
But Mollison and Holmgren they started to work with these ideas, they realized that the problem was bigger than agriculture, for example even the oil industry agrees that we are due to see an irreversible decline world oil production in the next couple of decades. So they enlarged the scope of their vision to be “Permanent Culture” Permaculture. Sustainable culture. A system where what is coming in is in balance with what is going out. This holistic way of looking at problems and solutions has at its core 3 values: Care for the Earth, (the soil, forests and water) Care for People (our selves, kin and community) , and Fair Share (setting limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistributing the surplus). Because we are part of something larger than ourselves, part of a living system, and therefore it is foolish to think that we ourselves could be self sustaining if we as a global economy are running out of topsoil and fossil fuel.
In this pursuit of a balanced sustainable system, the garden itself will be our teacher. Nature has tremendous wisdom about creating balanced sustainable systems or we ourselves would not be here on this planet. And nature generally tends towards that balance, but nature takes thousands or millions of years sometimes to achieve that balance, and while I have no doubt that my backyard garden will come into ecological harmony if left to its own devices for a decade or two, we are builders and creators. It says in the genesis story that we were put in the garden “to till and to keep it.” That’s who we are, it’s in our nature. This summer I spent as much time as possible in Lake Cayuga. And on the shore there was always a child or two moving around piles of earth and stones. Is there anyone else here who’s ever built something on the beach? It’s almost instinctual for us I think. And anyone who has ever built a sand castle remembers the first time that big wave comes and washes it all away. Oh the humanity! So the next time we build our sand castle maybe we build it further inland, or maybe we build channels for the water to flow so that our castle now has a moat for the tide to flow into instead of just knocking down our castle right away. Or maybe we build a bigger higher castle, with big rocks cause darn it that ocean is not going to stop me building my castle where I want to build it. Permaculture is a school of study that says “you know what? You are never going to stop the tide from coming in, build your sand castle accordingly.”
Our next step when we are building the sand castle is to look around the shoreline to see what nature has done over the past thousand years or so about this whole problem of building near a body of water. WE use nature’s wisdom as a model. This is called “bio-mimicry” It is the hopeful idea that solutions for many of our challenges are already out there in the world. We don’t have to invent a better pesticide- that’s what bats are for. We create solutions that work with nature like a partner, a teacher, a collaborator instead of as a foe to be vanquished and overcome. When we work against nature, we waste time and money. My favorite example, and one I fall into myself, is how every fall we rake up leaves, bagging them up and hauling them off to the dump, then purchasing fertilizer or compost or mulch to replenish our gardens. Permaculture notices that in a forest, no one hauls out the leaves, and no one has to haul in fertilizer. It proposes that if we look to the forest as a teacher we see that perhaps we are wasting not only our time and energy, but the fuel to power the trucks and the financial and environmental costs of hauling it away, the financial and environmental costs fertilizing. Nature has been working on this problem for millions of years- the answer is to use waste as food. The leaves don’t need to be outputs that leave our garden, they can be used right where they fall, or moved to a part of our garden that needs that can use those dead leafs for nourishment.
The most important aspect of permaculture is that we have to look at the garden, the system as a whole- as an interconnected web of life of which we are all a part. If we don’t take the time to time to think of the whole community, the whole ecosystem, the whole culture, then we are like a kid playing whack-a-mole, plug a hole here and the problem pops up someplace else.
Last spring I went to the Rowe Retreat center for the first time to attend a weekend long workshop by my favorite Witch and activist Starhawk. Her topic was “Principles of true abundance.” These can be scary times we are living in; when we lose a job or find our retirement savings plummeting in value with the stock market it is hard to see our world as abundant. It is easy for us to tie abundance to money, and feel insecure and powerless. But true abundance comes from a system in balance, when inputs balance outputs. Remember Ben Franklin said “a penny saved is a penny earned?” Well many are starting to realize that a penny saved is better than a penny earned, because you didn’t have to exert that energy earning it in the first place.
It turns out that her principles of abundance were also the principles of permaculture, counseling us to look in new places for abundance, like our relationships, like the web of life of which we are a part, like the trash heap, like our ancestors, or our diversity. In this time of imbalance and scarcity, we need to know where abundance truly lies. So this year our worship team will be exploring 8 principles of abundance, principles of a sustainable and balanced culture. What makes these permaculture principles relevant for us as a faith community is that they are rooted not only in the pagan tradition, of which Starhawk is a leader, but also in the humanist tradition which honors science, reason and the direct observation of truth in the world, and it also links to this ancient Judeo-Christian tradition of a garden where the fruit trees grow, where all live in balance and harmony.
As Unitarian Universalists, we already are committed to affirm and promote a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. I think we need to take that one step further- we need to be committed to bring the web back into balance, a sustainable balance for the natural and human worlds alike (knowing how intimately those worlds, those systems are interdependent), and as Universalists who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, I think we can commit to sharing fairly among all those with whom we share this earth. Way back in 1887 Unitarian minister William Channing Gannett declared: "We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all.”
This is a hopeful vision: a world in balance, a garden where the leaves that fall from a tree become food for new growth, where apples from the tree feed the gardeners and the canopy of the tree provides shelter from sun and wind for creatures and people alike. This vision will be our guiding star, and though we may never reach it except in part, it will lead us in a worthy direction. As our map to lead us there we will use these principles, and I challenge each of us to apply the principles not as a set of directions but as is uniquely appropriate in our own daily lives, in our own corner of the earth. I challenge each of us to think of ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of something larger than ourselves, part of countless interlocking systems. I challenge each of us to notice what works and what doesn’t work as we move through this year, and so to add to the wisdom of our tradition. Because a vision is only useful, in direct relationship to what grows from the springs from the ground to which we ourselves are connected. A vision is only powerful if it makes our garden grow.
Let dreamers dream
What worlds they please
Those Edens can't be found.
The sweetest flowers,
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
And make our garden grow.
I hadn’t thought about that song in maybe 20 years, but this week the tune started to come back to me. I’ve always been a dreamer and an idealist, and by the time I went off to seminary and grappled with the big questions of life, I decided that the best single statement of truth was best found in the Beatles' song “All you need is love.” Being a dreamer and an idealist, so have often been disappointed in my life by the way things turn out. I experienced betrayal and loss as all people do, and the oppression of un-just systems. I realized that while this was Love is a good guiding principle in general, it must be grounded in the reality of our daily lives. When dreams are grounded in, well, solid ground, change happens.
This year the worship team has chosen to explore in a series of sermons the principles of permaculture. I’ll let the other members of the team speak for themselves about what this means to them, but to me this is the most hopeful vision I have to offer you- the fairest trees, the sweetest fruits are grown in solid ground. I think permaculture speaks to a deep and primal dream- the return to the fair garden where things grow in harmony.
The story of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures was written probably 5 or 600 years BC, but I was taught that these stories were from an oral tradition that had been passed on through story telling long before that. UUs tend to look at this story not as a historical fact, but as an archetypal story that has spoken to many peoples over thousands of years, and to me, today, it speaks of an ecological system in harmony, where all the beings in the system, including humans, have enough to eat, and can co-exist in peaceful cooperation with one another. Oh, and it’s not too much work, things just kind of grow and are fruitful and self regenerating.
In our Unitarian Universalist history we have often worked to create a more just and compassionate world. In our old statement of belief the (The Washington Declaration of 1935) “we avow our faith in … the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.” I’ve always had trouble with that phrase, but back in seminary a friend of mine said she preferred the “kin-dom of God” because it expressed a more egalitarian sense of our vision, of what we were working to accomplish with our lives as individuals as a church community, and as a movement. I think of the Kingdom of God in our Universalist statement of belief not as a heaven with pearly streets, nor as a time in the future when life will be perfect, but as a vision of what could be that guides us in the right direction, that gives us something to work toward. I think we still need that hopeful vision today. A guiding vision of what this world would look like if it were imbued with fairness and balance. Instead of a kingdom, I propose a garden.
To describe this garden I’m imagining, I need to talk first about systems. A System is a “set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole. ” Like the human body, or a society, or a garden. This is a way of looking at the world developed by a German Biologist in the mid-twentieth century who was trying to address the fragmented way science looks at things, dividing them neatly between specialties. He was trying to integrate all the scientific disciples, both natural (like biology and physics) and social (like psychology and sociology). It turns out that there are a number of things that all systems have in common, enough to really change how we look at the world. Because this disciple was seeking for the ways different systems are a like, it has raised some wonderful new questions like “how is a farm like a forest” and “how is a church community like a living being.”
This year as we look at principles of permaculture, we are not just looking at tips for gardeners, we are laying out a holistic map of principles or paths that will tend to get us closer to integrated healthy productive systems in balance, back to the garden. I propose that the Eden of our imaginations is actually a vision of a system in balance. As integral parts of many systems ourselves, we are hardwired to long for homeostasis, to long for a system in balance. Because by any account we are out of balance. And the culture we are living in is not sustainable- we all know this not only because we watch the news but because as living beings we know what balance looks like, we know what sustainability looks like, and this isn’t it.
In this very discouraging time, Permaculture offers a source of hope. The permaculture movement was begun in the early 1970s by two Australians: David Holmgren and Bill Mollison They were disturbed one the issues we have been talking about here in this congregation for the past few years; the way contemporary agriculture is practiced is not sustainable- it uses up top soil and fossil fuels with no thought for the future. Permaculture comes from the words “permanent” and “agriculture” Holmgren wrtires that “The idea which initiated permaculture was the forest as a model for agriculture”, since forests are self-sustaining systems teeming with life.
But Mollison and Holmgren they started to work with these ideas, they realized that the problem was bigger than agriculture, for example even the oil industry agrees that we are due to see an irreversible decline world oil production in the next couple of decades. So they enlarged the scope of their vision to be “Permanent Culture” Permaculture. Sustainable culture. A system where what is coming in is in balance with what is going out. This holistic way of looking at problems and solutions has at its core 3 values: Care for the Earth, (the soil, forests and water) Care for People (our selves, kin and community) , and Fair Share (setting limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistributing the surplus). Because we are part of something larger than ourselves, part of a living system, and therefore it is foolish to think that we ourselves could be self sustaining if we as a global economy are running out of topsoil and fossil fuel.
In this pursuit of a balanced sustainable system, the garden itself will be our teacher. Nature has tremendous wisdom about creating balanced sustainable systems or we ourselves would not be here on this planet. And nature generally tends towards that balance, but nature takes thousands or millions of years sometimes to achieve that balance, and while I have no doubt that my backyard garden will come into ecological harmony if left to its own devices for a decade or two, we are builders and creators. It says in the genesis story that we were put in the garden “to till and to keep it.” That’s who we are, it’s in our nature. This summer I spent as much time as possible in Lake Cayuga. And on the shore there was always a child or two moving around piles of earth and stones. Is there anyone else here who’s ever built something on the beach? It’s almost instinctual for us I think. And anyone who has ever built a sand castle remembers the first time that big wave comes and washes it all away. Oh the humanity! So the next time we build our sand castle maybe we build it further inland, or maybe we build channels for the water to flow so that our castle now has a moat for the tide to flow into instead of just knocking down our castle right away. Or maybe we build a bigger higher castle, with big rocks cause darn it that ocean is not going to stop me building my castle where I want to build it. Permaculture is a school of study that says “you know what? You are never going to stop the tide from coming in, build your sand castle accordingly.”
Our next step when we are building the sand castle is to look around the shoreline to see what nature has done over the past thousand years or so about this whole problem of building near a body of water. WE use nature’s wisdom as a model. This is called “bio-mimicry” It is the hopeful idea that solutions for many of our challenges are already out there in the world. We don’t have to invent a better pesticide- that’s what bats are for. We create solutions that work with nature like a partner, a teacher, a collaborator instead of as a foe to be vanquished and overcome. When we work against nature, we waste time and money. My favorite example, and one I fall into myself, is how every fall we rake up leaves, bagging them up and hauling them off to the dump, then purchasing fertilizer or compost or mulch to replenish our gardens. Permaculture notices that in a forest, no one hauls out the leaves, and no one has to haul in fertilizer. It proposes that if we look to the forest as a teacher we see that perhaps we are wasting not only our time and energy, but the fuel to power the trucks and the financial and environmental costs of hauling it away, the financial and environmental costs fertilizing. Nature has been working on this problem for millions of years- the answer is to use waste as food. The leaves don’t need to be outputs that leave our garden, they can be used right where they fall, or moved to a part of our garden that needs that can use those dead leafs for nourishment.
The most important aspect of permaculture is that we have to look at the garden, the system as a whole- as an interconnected web of life of which we are all a part. If we don’t take the time to time to think of the whole community, the whole ecosystem, the whole culture, then we are like a kid playing whack-a-mole, plug a hole here and the problem pops up someplace else.
Last spring I went to the Rowe Retreat center for the first time to attend a weekend long workshop by my favorite Witch and activist Starhawk. Her topic was “Principles of true abundance.” These can be scary times we are living in; when we lose a job or find our retirement savings plummeting in value with the stock market it is hard to see our world as abundant. It is easy for us to tie abundance to money, and feel insecure and powerless. But true abundance comes from a system in balance, when inputs balance outputs. Remember Ben Franklin said “a penny saved is a penny earned?” Well many are starting to realize that a penny saved is better than a penny earned, because you didn’t have to exert that energy earning it in the first place.
It turns out that her principles of abundance were also the principles of permaculture, counseling us to look in new places for abundance, like our relationships, like the web of life of which we are a part, like the trash heap, like our ancestors, or our diversity. In this time of imbalance and scarcity, we need to know where abundance truly lies. So this year our worship team will be exploring 8 principles of abundance, principles of a sustainable and balanced culture. What makes these permaculture principles relevant for us as a faith community is that they are rooted not only in the pagan tradition, of which Starhawk is a leader, but also in the humanist tradition which honors science, reason and the direct observation of truth in the world, and it also links to this ancient Judeo-Christian tradition of a garden where the fruit trees grow, where all live in balance and harmony.
As Unitarian Universalists, we already are committed to affirm and promote a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. I think we need to take that one step further- we need to be committed to bring the web back into balance, a sustainable balance for the natural and human worlds alike (knowing how intimately those worlds, those systems are interdependent), and as Universalists who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, I think we can commit to sharing fairly among all those with whom we share this earth. Way back in 1887 Unitarian minister William Channing Gannett declared: "We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all.”
This is a hopeful vision: a world in balance, a garden where the leaves that fall from a tree become food for new growth, where apples from the tree feed the gardeners and the canopy of the tree provides shelter from sun and wind for creatures and people alike. This vision will be our guiding star, and though we may never reach it except in part, it will lead us in a worthy direction. As our map to lead us there we will use these principles, and I challenge each of us to apply the principles not as a set of directions but as is uniquely appropriate in our own daily lives, in our own corner of the earth. I challenge each of us to think of ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of something larger than ourselves, part of countless interlocking systems. I challenge each of us to notice what works and what doesn’t work as we move through this year, and so to add to the wisdom of our tradition. Because a vision is only useful, in direct relationship to what grows from the springs from the ground to which we ourselves are connected. A vision is only powerful if it makes our garden grow.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Finding our Place at the Table (August 21, 2011)
When this Universalist Church was built some 200 years ago, those men and women knew that they were Christian. The first Universalist articles of faith in 1790 said in part:
To our 21st century Unitarian Universalist ears that may sound pretty orthodox. But if you read carefully, you can see the Universalist heresy it contains- that Jesus gave his ransom for ALL, not just for an elect few, and that his Spirit will “Finally restore the whole human race to happiness” Even in this day and age that’s a very important idea- that no one will be “left behind” – that eventually we will all, every human person, be restored. This will happen, our Universalist forbearers believed, through the efficacy, the power of Jesus’ spirit. Jesus has the power to restore every last person to happiness. WE will be saved not through our own power, not through our good works and righteous living, but through the power of His spirit. Good works were important to those earliest Universalists, but it was not through our works we were saved, but through the power of Jesus’ Spirit, and God’s “infinite, adorable, incomprehensible and unchangeable Love”.
Even in the early 20th century, I am sure that the Universalists who sat and worshiped in these historic pews knew themselves to be Christians. You will find inside the front cover of many of the old blue hymnals here an affirmation of faith-
But notice that the role of Jesus changes in this 20th century avowal. Gone are the words “in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily who, by giving himself a ransom for all, hath redeemed them to God by his blood;” Gone from our avowal of faith is any discussion of the metaphysics of the nature of God and Jesus, and the miraculous nature of Jesus sacrifice on the cross. Now, here in the early 20th century Jesus is a spiritual leader, and what interested Universalists and Unitarians were his humanity and his teachings.
And so it is for many 21st century Unitarian Universalists- Jesus is an important teacher and spiritual leader. He taught us compassion for “the least of these” as he reached out to lepers and others at the margins of society. He taught us to respond to violence with nonviolence by “turning the other cheek” He taught us about community organizing, and speaking out against corruption, as he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the synagogue. He taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
About 20% Unitarian Universalists think of themselves as Christian today. The UU Christian Fellowship was founded in 1945 to continue Christian scholarship and to sustain this important tradition in our movement. But I want to challenge the other 80% of us to remember that Jesus is an important part of our religious heritage, and postulate that all of us can learn something from Jesus the teacher, the spiritual leader. This is particularly challenging for those who grew up in a Christian church and left that faith because in some way it was not a good fit. Perhaps some sadness or resentment lingers, and it is hard to look at the teachings of Jesus with fresh eyes. But this is also part of our UU tradition- to look at old traditions anew, with open hearts and minds. My own spiritual director once told me that sometimes when we come up against a religious story or teaching that is uncomfortable, this is when the most insight, the greatest transformation is available to us.
I think the same is true of the traditional communion ritual. For those of us who are Christian, as for those of us who have no history with the communion ritual, it is easy to open our hearts and minds. But if we have a difficult history or conflicted feelings, or if we don’t understand ourselves to be followers of Jesus, the ritual of Communion raises difficult questions. We may ask ourselves “given my doubts, given my history, given my beliefs, is there a place for me at the communion table?”
When I was a child growing up in a UU church, my 8th grade class studied Neighboring Faiths just as the UUCAS Teen class did last year. I remember how empowering it was to go into a completely foreign religious community, like the Greek Orthodox Church, prepared by our teachers and surround by other kids my age. We were greeted by a leader in the church who welcomed us, showed us to our special spot in the balcony, and could answer questions. “Can we take communion?” one classmate asked. His answer, “anyone who has been baptized can take communion here” left us with even more questions like “does a UU dedication count as a baptism for purposes of taking communion? We decided it probably didn’t.
I nervously asked the same question at a Catholic Mass I attended with my roommate in college. She replied "Oh, no. Even if you are Catholic you can't take communion unless you've been confessed,” and sure enough as I looked around I saw almost 30% of the congregation remain in their seats as others formed lines in the aisle to receive the host. But later that year, when I attend a Presbyterian service with a friend in her tiny old white steepled church, she looked amazed that I would even ask. "How could we turn anyone away from God's table" she responded, and so as the basket of rough cubed bread passed hand to hand, I took a piece and ate.
In her article “Food as Sacrament” UU Christian Rev. Wendy L Bell writes that “While early New England Protestants usually insisted that only members could take communion, and only so-called “worthy” ones at that, our Universalist forebears began insisting in the 1780s that the Lord’s Supper should be open to everyone who wished to take it.” (p. 87)
Ours is a Universalist communion. All are welcome at this table. Whether or not you are Christian. Whether or not you are Unitarian Universalist. For some folks it will be a reminder of that last supper when Jesus said to his followers “take this and eat it in remembrance of me” for others the essential symbol of the communion is that by sharing this loaf of bread, we remember that we are connected through this community. At its root, the word Communion just means a sharing- we share this bread and juice as we share our lives together in community.
Today we celebrate this historic ritual, in our historic church building. We use the same chalice and cups that Universalists have used in this space for decades. The words of the service are ours too. The liturgy we will follow (it’s that insert in your order of service) is based on a worship held by the UU Christian Fellowship at the 2010 General Assembly. These words come from our new hymnal- “Singing the Living Tradition” and from a very old hymnal- the “red hymnal” called “Hymns of the Spirit.” Whether you think of yourself as Christian or Jewish, or Pagan or Humanist, our Universalist faith is big enough to hold us all. And so I invite everyone to find a place at this communion table today.
We believe that there is One Mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; who, by giving himself a ransom for all, hath redeemed them to God by his blood; and who, by the merit of his death, and the efficacy of his Spirit, will finally restore the whole human race to happiness.
To our 21st century Unitarian Universalist ears that may sound pretty orthodox. But if you read carefully, you can see the Universalist heresy it contains- that Jesus gave his ransom for ALL, not just for an elect few, and that his Spirit will “Finally restore the whole human race to happiness” Even in this day and age that’s a very important idea- that no one will be “left behind” – that eventually we will all, every human person, be restored. This will happen, our Universalist forbearers believed, through the efficacy, the power of Jesus’ spirit. Jesus has the power to restore every last person to happiness. WE will be saved not through our own power, not through our good works and righteous living, but through the power of His spirit. Good works were important to those earliest Universalists, but it was not through our works we were saved, but through the power of Jesus’ Spirit, and God’s “infinite, adorable, incomprehensible and unchangeable Love”.
Even in the early 20th century, I am sure that the Universalists who sat and worshiped in these historic pews knew themselves to be Christians. You will find inside the front cover of many of the old blue hymnals here an affirmation of faith-
Avowal of Faith:
We avow our faith
in God as eternal and all-conquering love;
In the spiritual leadership of Jesus;
In the supreme worth of every human personality;
In the authority of truth known or to be known:
And in the power of men of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the kingdom of God.
But notice that the role of Jesus changes in this 20th century avowal. Gone are the words “in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily who, by giving himself a ransom for all, hath redeemed them to God by his blood;” Gone from our avowal of faith is any discussion of the metaphysics of the nature of God and Jesus, and the miraculous nature of Jesus sacrifice on the cross. Now, here in the early 20th century Jesus is a spiritual leader, and what interested Universalists and Unitarians were his humanity and his teachings.
And so it is for many 21st century Unitarian Universalists- Jesus is an important teacher and spiritual leader. He taught us compassion for “the least of these” as he reached out to lepers and others at the margins of society. He taught us to respond to violence with nonviolence by “turning the other cheek” He taught us about community organizing, and speaking out against corruption, as he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the synagogue. He taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
About 20% Unitarian Universalists think of themselves as Christian today. The UU Christian Fellowship was founded in 1945 to continue Christian scholarship and to sustain this important tradition in our movement. But I want to challenge the other 80% of us to remember that Jesus is an important part of our religious heritage, and postulate that all of us can learn something from Jesus the teacher, the spiritual leader. This is particularly challenging for those who grew up in a Christian church and left that faith because in some way it was not a good fit. Perhaps some sadness or resentment lingers, and it is hard to look at the teachings of Jesus with fresh eyes. But this is also part of our UU tradition- to look at old traditions anew, with open hearts and minds. My own spiritual director once told me that sometimes when we come up against a religious story or teaching that is uncomfortable, this is when the most insight, the greatest transformation is available to us.
I think the same is true of the traditional communion ritual. For those of us who are Christian, as for those of us who have no history with the communion ritual, it is easy to open our hearts and minds. But if we have a difficult history or conflicted feelings, or if we don’t understand ourselves to be followers of Jesus, the ritual of Communion raises difficult questions. We may ask ourselves “given my doubts, given my history, given my beliefs, is there a place for me at the communion table?”
When I was a child growing up in a UU church, my 8th grade class studied Neighboring Faiths just as the UUCAS Teen class did last year. I remember how empowering it was to go into a completely foreign religious community, like the Greek Orthodox Church, prepared by our teachers and surround by other kids my age. We were greeted by a leader in the church who welcomed us, showed us to our special spot in the balcony, and could answer questions. “Can we take communion?” one classmate asked. His answer, “anyone who has been baptized can take communion here” left us with even more questions like “does a UU dedication count as a baptism for purposes of taking communion? We decided it probably didn’t.
I nervously asked the same question at a Catholic Mass I attended with my roommate in college. She replied "Oh, no. Even if you are Catholic you can't take communion unless you've been confessed,” and sure enough as I looked around I saw almost 30% of the congregation remain in their seats as others formed lines in the aisle to receive the host. But later that year, when I attend a Presbyterian service with a friend in her tiny old white steepled church, she looked amazed that I would even ask. "How could we turn anyone away from God's table" she responded, and so as the basket of rough cubed bread passed hand to hand, I took a piece and ate.
In her article “Food as Sacrament” UU Christian Rev. Wendy L Bell writes that “While early New England Protestants usually insisted that only members could take communion, and only so-called “worthy” ones at that, our Universalist forebears began insisting in the 1780s that the Lord’s Supper should be open to everyone who wished to take it.” (p. 87)
Ours is a Universalist communion. All are welcome at this table. Whether or not you are Christian. Whether or not you are Unitarian Universalist. For some folks it will be a reminder of that last supper when Jesus said to his followers “take this and eat it in remembrance of me” for others the essential symbol of the communion is that by sharing this loaf of bread, we remember that we are connected through this community. At its root, the word Communion just means a sharing- we share this bread and juice as we share our lives together in community.
Today we celebrate this historic ritual, in our historic church building. We use the same chalice and cups that Universalists have used in this space for decades. The words of the service are ours too. The liturgy we will follow (it’s that insert in your order of service) is based on a worship held by the UU Christian Fellowship at the 2010 General Assembly. These words come from our new hymnal- “Singing the Living Tradition” and from a very old hymnal- the “red hymnal” called “Hymns of the Spirit.” Whether you think of yourself as Christian or Jewish, or Pagan or Humanist, our Universalist faith is big enough to hold us all. And so I invite everyone to find a place at this communion table today.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Washing the Dishes (June 5, 2011)
One summer at the UU church I served in Palo Alto, our RE team decided that over the summer we would offer a pilot session of SpiritPlay- the UU adaptation of the Montessori-based “Godly Play” developed by one of my heroes Jerome Berryman. My co-teachers and I were all a little daunted by the amount of prep and set-up required; the idea is that there is a “prepared room” so that the children are empowered to find what they need to do their work. This means there’s a huge amount of preparation need for the first class, but then little changes from week to week except the story. The teacher also has to be “prepared”. There are certain phrases that are used, places to be, hand gestures and ways of handling conflict that are particular to this method. There’s a way everything is to be done, to help give the children a sense of mastery. Because really the lesson plan, like most CRE classes, is just story, discussion, craft and snack. What makes SpiritPlay different is that we were trying to create a scared space where children could engage directly with religious language. It is based on the radical assumption that all humans are engaging their existential reality no mater what their age. And so after the story each week the students choose the work they will do. It might be painting, or drawing, or shaping clay, or re-telling the story for themselves.
One of the core concepts behind Montessori is that if children have equipment matched to their size and capabilities, they will really develop a sense of their own capacity. I had thought the long descriptions of clean-up supplies present in the Montessori classroom to help children take care of their own spills seemed really tedious and complex, and I was willing to let it go. But at the last minute of that first morning we made a quick run to the kitchen for buckets and sponges and were back in time for the children to enter. And so that first morning the children did more-or-less engage with me in a quiet wondering space. I was touched and delighted each time they were willing to play along. After the story each child went to find their work for the first time, and the two youngest children chose paint. They got out their special paint tray and paints and paper, and in about 2 minutes they were done painting. Oh my, I thought, I hope they will be able to “find their work” today. But before they moved on to their next choice, they needed to clean up after their painting. I showed them where we kept the bins of water and the sponges cut small for individual use. Twenty minutes later when I called everyone back to the circle those two were still cleaning their trays. For those young children, this was clearly the best fun of the whole morning. How fun to have your own sponge in a bucket marked “trays” to clean off your tray. How fun to have a special bucket marked “hands” to wash your hands in.
Think about it pedagogically- Berryman’s idea is that each of us knows somewhere deep inside what our spiritual work is on any given morning. This theory places a radical trust in the spirit’s capacity to be heard, and in our capacity to hear it. And this capacity is not dependant on physical or mental maturity; Berryman is making the radical leap that we are all engaged in our spiritual work our whole lives, not once we get some degree, or go on a meditation retreat with some guru. We don’t always know what our work is, so we set aside time to see what emerges, trusting that this will be our work. And these youngest children figured out that the work of their spirit that day was to wash those paint trays in bins of soapy water with their very own sponge.
I told this story a number of times when folks asked how SpiritPlay was going. I found myself saying “maybe the Buddhists were right- maybe it is all about washing the dishes.” It came out in a kind of glib way, but the idea sank deeper and deeper in me over the following weeks and years. Maybe the spiritual work of washing the dishes is really important and powerful and even compelling. Maybe it really is all about washing the dishes.
Let me back up and say that I had first been exposed to Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing about mindfulness maybe a decade before that fateful morning with the paint trays. I was in seminary at the time and I had the frame of mind that I was really living only when I was doing something interesting or fun or exciting- and that the chores I had to do were the cost I had to pay to have my real life. Dishes and other chores were something you should put off doing as long as possible, then rush through as quickly as possible to get back to really living. But in my Intro to Buddhist meditation class, we were learning that we should always put our attention in to the present moment, no matter what that might involve. Whether we were sitting quietly on a meditation mat, or stuck in traffic, we could practice equanimity, and being fully present in the moment.
Well, I tried- honestly I did. And when you live in the bay area, there are plenty of moments to sit patiently in traffic practicing your equanimity. But somewhere inside I was still doing this because I was preparing or getting ready for some later outcome. I was motivated by the idea that if you really practice being present as often as possible, then when some great moment of spiritual revelation comes, you could be as fully present to that as to the bumper of the car in front of you on the interstate. I would struggle with doing the dishes to do the dishes so that later I could drink tea to drink tea, as it were. And maybe that was my work. I was a student after all, and after many very studious and introverted years at music school, I am so grateful that I had adventures and did interesting things in my twenties- I’m glad I had passionate ideas about changing the world, and a deep hunger for spiritual awakening and growth.
Then, about the time I was settled in my first full time ministry, I had my son. I remember one Sunday afternoon standing in the living room after a full day at church, and my family was all watching a football game and relaxing. “Why don’t you sit down and relax?” someone said. I wondered, “why don’t I?” And then I heard the sound of my infant son waking from an all-too-short nap in his room. Now parenting an infant is a very rigorous time of life. You are never really in control of your own schedule. There is no putting off your work for later. And when you are the parent of a toddler, there is no rushing through things as quickly as possible. Toddlers do everything in their own time and are rushed at your peril. It’s not unusual to spent half an hour getting a child into his or her shoes. So if you are really living only when you are on some grand adventure, or having fun with your friends, or pursuing some scholarly or spiritual insight, this is a time of life when you are not really living.
But the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition challenges us to set aside those assumptions. The time you are stuck in traffic or stuck at the sink with a pile of dishes, this is still your time. This is still living. In fact, for most of us this is the very fabric of our days. What a waste it would be if all our long day of chores and work and helping others were all in preparation for that hour after dinner when all the dishes are done and we relax with family or with a good book, or have a quiet walk alone.
Moreover, there is something really satisfying about work done well. There is something almost restful about washing dishes, or sweeping, or pulling weeds because the mind can let go of all its cares and worries, can put aside planning for the future and just sink down deeply into the task at hand. When I sit in front of the computer answering e-mail I usually feel kind of scattered by the time I finish, and finish is such an arbitrary word for it since there is always more to do. But when I set out to wash a load of dishes it has a definite beginning, middle and end, and when I am done I have something aesthetically pleasing to show for my work- a clean kitchen that I can enjoy and use. I may feel tired after doing the dishes or weeding the garden, but my mind is almost always more clear and calm when I am done if I am doing the dishes to do the dishes, than if I am rushing through to get to the next thing on my list.
As pretty much every healing discipline agrees, doing things with our body is good. Being a little tired from activity is a good thing. I used to lace on my running shoes and go for a run first thing out of bed in the morning, but now that I have to get my son to elementary school, after I make my son’s breakfast and lunch and feed the dogs and let them out and set the coffee to perking, I like to do a load of dishes or a load of laundry. It has a very similar effect to going for a run -- I’m awake, I’ve used my body to start the day and I feel ready to go. I think this is how you know you are in mid-life; when doing a few chores before breakfast seems like a nice way to start the day.
I want to beyond a strictly Buddhist concept of mindfulness for a moment and think about work itself. Especially the kind of every day tasks we do with our hands, with our bodies. The last half century or so has been filled with “labor saving” devices, tools and machines. And yet are folks less busy than they were half a century ago? Do we have more time to go on walks and sit quietly and read a book? I don’t think we do. Our whole society is guided by the idea of doing the dishes to get done as quickly as possible so that we can go watch TV or something. James Bostic, former deputy assistant secretary of agriculture for rural development once said “But just stop for a minute and think about what it means to live in a land where 95 percent of the people can be freed form the drudgery of preparing their own food.” To this Wendell Berry replied in his book The unsettling of America:
“In gardening, … one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, and a source of delight. …
The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all… It is – in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need – a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies…”
“The former deputy assistant secretary cannot see work as a vital connection; he can see it only as a trade of time for money, and so of course he believes in doing as little of it as possible, especially if it involves the use of the body.” [Berry p. 138-9]
I agree with Berry that eating becomes more meaningful when we have prepared the food ourselves. The only time my son has ever eaten certain vegetables is when he harvested them off the vine, or helped cook them up in a stir fry. And so it is with washing the dishes. To really feel the dish under your hands, the temperature of the water, the smell of the soap. How different each kind of food is to clean off a dish. How different it is to clean a fork than to clean a mug. I tell you I am much more careful when I cook certain foods knowing how hard it is to clean the pan if I scorch it. When we feel the full cycle of food, or of a dish from cupboard, to table, to sink, to cupboard again, we know something real about what it means to live in this world. If we only ever experience the cupboard full of clean cups, our knowing is superficial.
A few weeks ago I mentioned one of my most deeply held beliefs -- that if anything is sacred, then everything is sacred. If any work is sacred, then washing the dishes is surely sacred. Whatever your work is this week, whether you are called to it by the spirit, or called by the pragmatic needs of living in the world, I challenge you not to rush through it to get back your real life, but to Cherish your time washing the dishes, to claim it as your life. Any time you find yourself facing the day’s chores: washing dishes, mowing the lawn, getting a cup of juice for a child, walking to the mailbox. I encourage you to sink down into it, to experience it fully. It is the very fabric of our lives.
One of the core concepts behind Montessori is that if children have equipment matched to their size and capabilities, they will really develop a sense of their own capacity. I had thought the long descriptions of clean-up supplies present in the Montessori classroom to help children take care of their own spills seemed really tedious and complex, and I was willing to let it go. But at the last minute of that first morning we made a quick run to the kitchen for buckets and sponges and were back in time for the children to enter. And so that first morning the children did more-or-less engage with me in a quiet wondering space. I was touched and delighted each time they were willing to play along. After the story each child went to find their work for the first time, and the two youngest children chose paint. They got out their special paint tray and paints and paper, and in about 2 minutes they were done painting. Oh my, I thought, I hope they will be able to “find their work” today. But before they moved on to their next choice, they needed to clean up after their painting. I showed them where we kept the bins of water and the sponges cut small for individual use. Twenty minutes later when I called everyone back to the circle those two were still cleaning their trays. For those young children, this was clearly the best fun of the whole morning. How fun to have your own sponge in a bucket marked “trays” to clean off your tray. How fun to have a special bucket marked “hands” to wash your hands in.
Think about it pedagogically- Berryman’s idea is that each of us knows somewhere deep inside what our spiritual work is on any given morning. This theory places a radical trust in the spirit’s capacity to be heard, and in our capacity to hear it. And this capacity is not dependant on physical or mental maturity; Berryman is making the radical leap that we are all engaged in our spiritual work our whole lives, not once we get some degree, or go on a meditation retreat with some guru. We don’t always know what our work is, so we set aside time to see what emerges, trusting that this will be our work. And these youngest children figured out that the work of their spirit that day was to wash those paint trays in bins of soapy water with their very own sponge.
I told this story a number of times when folks asked how SpiritPlay was going. I found myself saying “maybe the Buddhists were right- maybe it is all about washing the dishes.” It came out in a kind of glib way, but the idea sank deeper and deeper in me over the following weeks and years. Maybe the spiritual work of washing the dishes is really important and powerful and even compelling. Maybe it really is all about washing the dishes.
Let me back up and say that I had first been exposed to Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing about mindfulness maybe a decade before that fateful morning with the paint trays. I was in seminary at the time and I had the frame of mind that I was really living only when I was doing something interesting or fun or exciting- and that the chores I had to do were the cost I had to pay to have my real life. Dishes and other chores were something you should put off doing as long as possible, then rush through as quickly as possible to get back to really living. But in my Intro to Buddhist meditation class, we were learning that we should always put our attention in to the present moment, no matter what that might involve. Whether we were sitting quietly on a meditation mat, or stuck in traffic, we could practice equanimity, and being fully present in the moment.
Well, I tried- honestly I did. And when you live in the bay area, there are plenty of moments to sit patiently in traffic practicing your equanimity. But somewhere inside I was still doing this because I was preparing or getting ready for some later outcome. I was motivated by the idea that if you really practice being present as often as possible, then when some great moment of spiritual revelation comes, you could be as fully present to that as to the bumper of the car in front of you on the interstate. I would struggle with doing the dishes to do the dishes so that later I could drink tea to drink tea, as it were. And maybe that was my work. I was a student after all, and after many very studious and introverted years at music school, I am so grateful that I had adventures and did interesting things in my twenties- I’m glad I had passionate ideas about changing the world, and a deep hunger for spiritual awakening and growth.
Then, about the time I was settled in my first full time ministry, I had my son. I remember one Sunday afternoon standing in the living room after a full day at church, and my family was all watching a football game and relaxing. “Why don’t you sit down and relax?” someone said. I wondered, “why don’t I?” And then I heard the sound of my infant son waking from an all-too-short nap in his room. Now parenting an infant is a very rigorous time of life. You are never really in control of your own schedule. There is no putting off your work for later. And when you are the parent of a toddler, there is no rushing through things as quickly as possible. Toddlers do everything in their own time and are rushed at your peril. It’s not unusual to spent half an hour getting a child into his or her shoes. So if you are really living only when you are on some grand adventure, or having fun with your friends, or pursuing some scholarly or spiritual insight, this is a time of life when you are not really living.
But the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition challenges us to set aside those assumptions. The time you are stuck in traffic or stuck at the sink with a pile of dishes, this is still your time. This is still living. In fact, for most of us this is the very fabric of our days. What a waste it would be if all our long day of chores and work and helping others were all in preparation for that hour after dinner when all the dishes are done and we relax with family or with a good book, or have a quiet walk alone.
Moreover, there is something really satisfying about work done well. There is something almost restful about washing dishes, or sweeping, or pulling weeds because the mind can let go of all its cares and worries, can put aside planning for the future and just sink down deeply into the task at hand. When I sit in front of the computer answering e-mail I usually feel kind of scattered by the time I finish, and finish is such an arbitrary word for it since there is always more to do. But when I set out to wash a load of dishes it has a definite beginning, middle and end, and when I am done I have something aesthetically pleasing to show for my work- a clean kitchen that I can enjoy and use. I may feel tired after doing the dishes or weeding the garden, but my mind is almost always more clear and calm when I am done if I am doing the dishes to do the dishes, than if I am rushing through to get to the next thing on my list.
As pretty much every healing discipline agrees, doing things with our body is good. Being a little tired from activity is a good thing. I used to lace on my running shoes and go for a run first thing out of bed in the morning, but now that I have to get my son to elementary school, after I make my son’s breakfast and lunch and feed the dogs and let them out and set the coffee to perking, I like to do a load of dishes or a load of laundry. It has a very similar effect to going for a run -- I’m awake, I’ve used my body to start the day and I feel ready to go. I think this is how you know you are in mid-life; when doing a few chores before breakfast seems like a nice way to start the day.
I want to beyond a strictly Buddhist concept of mindfulness for a moment and think about work itself. Especially the kind of every day tasks we do with our hands, with our bodies. The last half century or so has been filled with “labor saving” devices, tools and machines. And yet are folks less busy than they were half a century ago? Do we have more time to go on walks and sit quietly and read a book? I don’t think we do. Our whole society is guided by the idea of doing the dishes to get done as quickly as possible so that we can go watch TV or something. James Bostic, former deputy assistant secretary of agriculture for rural development once said “But just stop for a minute and think about what it means to live in a land where 95 percent of the people can be freed form the drudgery of preparing their own food.” To this Wendell Berry replied in his book The unsettling of America:
“In gardening, … one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, and a source of delight. …
The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all… It is – in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need – a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies…”
“The former deputy assistant secretary cannot see work as a vital connection; he can see it only as a trade of time for money, and so of course he believes in doing as little of it as possible, especially if it involves the use of the body.” [Berry p. 138-9]
I agree with Berry that eating becomes more meaningful when we have prepared the food ourselves. The only time my son has ever eaten certain vegetables is when he harvested them off the vine, or helped cook them up in a stir fry. And so it is with washing the dishes. To really feel the dish under your hands, the temperature of the water, the smell of the soap. How different each kind of food is to clean off a dish. How different it is to clean a fork than to clean a mug. I tell you I am much more careful when I cook certain foods knowing how hard it is to clean the pan if I scorch it. When we feel the full cycle of food, or of a dish from cupboard, to table, to sink, to cupboard again, we know something real about what it means to live in this world. If we only ever experience the cupboard full of clean cups, our knowing is superficial.
A few weeks ago I mentioned one of my most deeply held beliefs -- that if anything is sacred, then everything is sacred. If any work is sacred, then washing the dishes is surely sacred. Whatever your work is this week, whether you are called to it by the spirit, or called by the pragmatic needs of living in the world, I challenge you not to rush through it to get back your real life, but to Cherish your time washing the dishes, to claim it as your life. Any time you find yourself facing the day’s chores: washing dishes, mowing the lawn, getting a cup of juice for a child, walking to the mailbox. I encourage you to sink down into it, to experience it fully. It is the very fabric of our lives.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Our Golden Anniversary or “Transient and permanent in Untarian Universalism” (May 15, 2011)
In 1841 Unitarian Minister Rev. Theodore Parker gave a famous sermon called “A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” that made him very popular with the young upstarts, and reviled by the old establishment. But it is such an important sermon that UU seminary students are still required to read it today. Parker believed that there were some parts of Christianity, like “forms and doctrines” that were transient, that would change over the life of the church. But there were other parts of Christianity like “the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man” that would persist through the changes of time and culture.
“Already men of the same sect eye one another with suspicion, and lowering brows that indicate a storm, and, like children who have fallen out in their play, call hard names. Now, as always, there is a collision between these two elements. The question puts itself to each man, “Will you cling to what is perishing, or embrace what is eternal? This question each must answer for himself. (pp. 146-147)”
Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unitarian Universalism, of the merger of 2 historic traditions. And as we do so I invite us to consider where we have been and where we are going; What is transient and what is permanent in our faith, now called Unitarian Universalism?
When the Unitarian association and the Universalist Associate merged in 1961, no one knew for sure what would happen. It’s true that if you made a theological continuum of all the protestant churches U and U often found themselves standing next to one another. But the two churches were different in important ways. There had been talk of union since 1865 but these differences had always held us apart in the past.
One of the most acute differences over the years is our relationship to Christianity. The founders of both movements understood themselves to be Christians, though many in the more mainstream traditions found there ideas so heretical that they were often accused of not being true Christians. Remember the Universalists were, at the time of their emergence, Trinitarians. They had no problem with the orthodox understandings of God, only an irreconcilable difficulty with the belief that an loving, all-powerful God would predestine eternal punishment for most of humanity. It was a different orthodoxy that distinguished the Unitarians. You may remember form earlier this year we talked about Joseph priestly who, way back in the 1700s, argued for the idea that Jesus was fully human, and that Jesus’ divinity had only been thought up in the 3rd century- long after Jesus lived and taught. The Unitarians had long believed that the humanity of Jesus was important, and that his divinity was less important than his teachings. Unitarians like Parker were already suggesting over 100 years ago that you could be a Christian without believing in miracles.
By the 1930s, humanism was an important part of both traditions, but was much more widespread among the Unitarians. (When the Humanist manifesto was signed in 15 of 34 signers were Unitarian). We oversimplify history when we portray Universalist Christians in conflict with Unitarian Humanists, because there were Christians and Humanists in both movements. The tension between more orthodox Christians and the swelling ranks of humanists begged the question -could the new merged association make room for both? Moreover, some folks felt that to be truly “Universalist” we needed to go beyond just the wisdom of the Christian tradition, to “the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition” -- to a truly universal religion.
In 1959, the General Assembly of the two associations met in Syracuse New York. 1000 delegates were there. The Joint Merger Commission had spent 5 years seeking out the perspectives of UU congregations around the country. The Secretary of the Merger Commission said “it is safe to say that our societies have never responded in such numbers and with such seriousness as they did to the subject of merger.” In fact the merger was ultimately approved by a plebiscite representing 94 percent of Unitarian societies and 95 percent of Universalist societies. The Merger Commission worked for 5 years to prepare hundreds of pages of reports and study guides, and a 44 page "The Plan to Consolidate the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America" also called “the blue book” by the delegates who carried it throughout the Assembly.
One part of the plan proved to be most contentions. The new organization would need a statement of the “purposes and objectives” that could guide their new consolidated association. The commission had proposed this statement: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in their essence as love to God and love to man.” The Universalists passed it in their first vote, but the Unitarian assembly had intense debate. Some folks thought it was too creed-like, but others wondered why it didn’t mention Jesus or our Judeo-Christian Heritage. The Unitarians countered with this: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by Jesus and the other great teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, and prophetically expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition as love to God and love to man.” But this also couldn’t pass a vote on the Unitarian side, who felt like it stated too strongly our relationship to Christianity. Debate over wording of this statement created so much tension among the ranks, that it almost derailed the whole merger. Delegates debated late into the night, not wanting to give up, but not able to find something they could agree on, until finally they changed one word; our Judeo-Christian heritage” was changed to “the Judeo-Christian heritage.” Finally this statement could be approved by a majority of delegates.
A second area of concern was whether the smaller Universalist Church of America would loose itself in the larger American Unitarian Association. Would folks get lazy and say “Unitarian” instead of “Unitarian Universalist”? Would the Universalists lose their own unique history and identity? As a Unitarian Universalist congregation that was a Universalist congregation for its first 150 years, this is an important question for us. As we move into the future it is important that we, as a historic Universalist congregation, take a leadership role in preserving and uplifting our history. One way the Universalists hung onto their identity was by preserving our state conventions. If I understand correctly, before merger the Universalists also had one general association, but most of the decisions and power were in their state conventions, while the Unitarians had a more congregational polity. My favorite illustration of this is one Ginna gave me. In 1891 Rev. R. Neale was contracted by PUC to preach at Athens Church for 3 months, but the rule was that you must be in fellowship in Universalist tradition to serve a Universalist church. The PUC gave Rev. Neale 3 months to get into fellowship. So Rev. Neale applies for fellowship, but when the PUC convenes in Athens, perhaps in this very building, he does not attend but sends his lawyer to the hearing. As you might expect, his application for fellowship is rejected, and because there is NOT congregational polity-- that is the right of congregations to chose their own ministers-- the PUC closes the church, doors barricaded. A new board of the Athens church is elected, reengaging Mr. Neale who broke in through window, and started conducting services again. It is because he was “Enjoined in court of law” that we know this story at all- since it was reported in the news in the “Term of Court” blotter, wherein it quips that no word was give on the “spiritual fitness” of the lawyer. Now, post merger, the PUC does not have the power to give fellowship to ministers, but it does us stay connected to our Universalist roots, and the endowment of the PUC helps keep some of these historic Universalist churches alive.
Both denominations were active in social justice, and believed this to be an important part of their faith. Perhaps you remember that the first Universalist Minister, Olympia Brown, was also a tireless voice of women’s suffrage. Or Unitarian Dorothea Dix whose reporting on our treatment of the mentally ill lead to important reforms in the mid 1800s. Each denomination had their own service committee formed in the 1930s to witness against the Nazi invasions in Europe and to help refugees. And in fact the two worked closely together throughout their history and seemed to easily merge in 1963.. IN fact, it was in part their history of working together and being of similar mind about Social Justice work that was one of the cornerstones that made consolidation seem possible. But while Unitarians and Universalists were marching in Selma and Washington in the 1950s and 19602, the 1963 GA in Chicago failed to pass a non-discrimination clause. In 1969, just 8 years after merger, the Black Empowerment controversy erupted, marked at one dramatic moment by a walkout of our General Assembly. We came to realize that we had not even begun to address systemic racism and oppression in our own institutions. And so over the past few decades we have begun to take a hard look at our own institutions and to do the work of countering oppressions, but if this is work we really hope to do in a serious way, it is work that we must commit to into the future.
As in the larger culture, the black power movement empowered not only people of color but also women and GLBT persons to claim their power in this democratic country and within our movement. Senior ministers can still recall a time when there was not a single woman in our St. Lawrence District chapter of the Minister’s association, but now more than half of all ministers in our denomination today are women. Before merger all our GLBT clergy were closeted, and now our queer clergy and layfolks are at the heart of our movement- and at the heart of our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign. We are chagrined to hear about the difficulty ministers from traditionally marginalized groups faced when looking for a congregation (and we have to assume that lay folks looking for welcoming congregations experienced the same barriers). But we have tried to look honestly at the structures of power and oppression, and we have committed ourselves to a path of change. We now require, for example, all congregations to participate in “Beyond Categorical Thinking” when they are in search. Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our 2 UU seminaries, includes as part of its core curriculum “Educating to Counter Oppressions.” As a movement we have begun to wake up to the realities of racism and overlapping oppressions, and have faith that we can change- that these institutional oppressions will be part of the “transient” in our movement.
IN the Commission on Appraisals report I mentioned before, they noticed a trend that folks want more heart than head from their churches in the last half of the 20th centuries. The Culture of the 1960s and 1970s changed our movement deeply. A new generation put aside study groups for encounter groups, and something stuck. On some fundamental way, what we wanted from our congregations changed from what our grandparents wanted. We want to feel connected to one another, we want chances to relate deeply in a way that, according to that report, is a change for who we are as a movement. That old old idea of an all-loving god may be better expressed in this time not as an important idea that can be argued by quick tongues and minds, but as a way for us to be in the world.
Universalists were at one time the 6th largest denomination in the country. We can see that here in the valley where there were at one time 7 Universalist congregations in the North Branch. Both the Unitarian and Universalist movements had shrunk over the years, as had many main line denominations. In the Commission on Appraisals report: “The Unitarian Universalist Merger 1961-1975” in 1975, there was already a perception that the great hopes of growth after merger were slowed by outside forces including this decentralization of church in our culture, and also that our cutting edge liberal ideas were no longer so cutting edge –that is to say that when our ideas became mainstream, one no longer had to take sanctuary in our congregations to hear our good news. Whereas at many points in our history we have had great clarity about who we were as a faith tradition, the changes to our movement and to the world over this past century have forced us to ask ourselves “What is transient and what is permanent in Unitarian Universalism.” The question we have been asking ourselves for over 50 years is “who are we?” and “what next?” what is the special calling of this faith tradition.
This fall you all sent me to the CENTER for Excellence in Ministry, and one of our presenters, Beth Zemsky, said during a panel discussion, that what she saw next not only for our movement, but for our culture as a whole, emerging in response to the rhetoric of individualism and security which has dominated our public discourse for the past decades, is a focus on interconnection and interdependence. As she spoke those words, I realized that actually, we’ve been talking around this for a while, about our interconnection and interdependence. I’ve heard us described over the past few decades as a “queer theology” that is to say not a theology for folks who are queer, but a theology which “goes both ways” as it were. I’ve heard us described as a cross-roads religion. And we covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web, added to our principles only 25 years ago. We have known for a long time that our culture is out of balance in its pursuit of individual liberty. And I think of that night 50-some years ago when in the middle of what was probably unprecedented theological diversity, those 1000 delegates staid up deep into the night because they had faith that there was a way to stay connected while being authentic to individual difference and to our multiplicity. Think about the hateful horrible things we hear folks say in the media about other folks, folks who are different from them. This world needs us, Unitarian Universalists, to hang fast to our interdependence web, and to help others see it too. We must share the good news of our interconnection with those who don’t recognize how inextricably wound up in it we all are.
So when I ask myself what will remain at the core of Unitarian Universalism, what is transient and what is permanent, I think of our radical respect for our interdependence. I also think about our roots --hose roots going back hundreds of years, and our heroes who held for their contemporaries and for the future the light of reason, who were not afraid to speak their truth even when it meant personal sacrifice. And I think of our love of justice, and our deep roots in working for justice for more than a century. And now we bind our love of justice into that web- a web of intersecting identities, or staggering diversity -- knowing that this will not be a truly just world until there is justice for everyone in that web. We start with ourselves, our own association, our own congregation, our own hearts. And we express that web each Sunday when we gather in community. It is no longer enough for us to speak the truth to one another, we crave that interconnection. We practice love here in this place, not only because we have an innate longing for connection, but also because we believe that by practicing love, we help to create the world we dream of. When forms and doctrines fade away, I have faith that the good news we have to share about the love to the transcendent, love to one another, and love to this great web of life of which we are a part, these will never fade.
“Already men of the same sect eye one another with suspicion, and lowering brows that indicate a storm, and, like children who have fallen out in their play, call hard names. Now, as always, there is a collision between these two elements. The question puts itself to each man, “Will you cling to what is perishing, or embrace what is eternal? This question each must answer for himself. (pp. 146-147)”
Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unitarian Universalism, of the merger of 2 historic traditions. And as we do so I invite us to consider where we have been and where we are going; What is transient and what is permanent in our faith, now called Unitarian Universalism?
When the Unitarian association and the Universalist Associate merged in 1961, no one knew for sure what would happen. It’s true that if you made a theological continuum of all the protestant churches U and U often found themselves standing next to one another. But the two churches were different in important ways. There had been talk of union since 1865 but these differences had always held us apart in the past.
One of the most acute differences over the years is our relationship to Christianity. The founders of both movements understood themselves to be Christians, though many in the more mainstream traditions found there ideas so heretical that they were often accused of not being true Christians. Remember the Universalists were, at the time of their emergence, Trinitarians. They had no problem with the orthodox understandings of God, only an irreconcilable difficulty with the belief that an loving, all-powerful God would predestine eternal punishment for most of humanity. It was a different orthodoxy that distinguished the Unitarians. You may remember form earlier this year we talked about Joseph priestly who, way back in the 1700s, argued for the idea that Jesus was fully human, and that Jesus’ divinity had only been thought up in the 3rd century- long after Jesus lived and taught. The Unitarians had long believed that the humanity of Jesus was important, and that his divinity was less important than his teachings. Unitarians like Parker were already suggesting over 100 years ago that you could be a Christian without believing in miracles.
By the 1930s, humanism was an important part of both traditions, but was much more widespread among the Unitarians. (When the Humanist manifesto was signed in 15 of 34 signers were Unitarian). We oversimplify history when we portray Universalist Christians in conflict with Unitarian Humanists, because there were Christians and Humanists in both movements. The tension between more orthodox Christians and the swelling ranks of humanists begged the question -could the new merged association make room for both? Moreover, some folks felt that to be truly “Universalist” we needed to go beyond just the wisdom of the Christian tradition, to “the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition” -- to a truly universal religion.
In 1959, the General Assembly of the two associations met in Syracuse New York. 1000 delegates were there. The Joint Merger Commission had spent 5 years seeking out the perspectives of UU congregations around the country. The Secretary of the Merger Commission said “it is safe to say that our societies have never responded in such numbers and with such seriousness as they did to the subject of merger.” In fact the merger was ultimately approved by a plebiscite representing 94 percent of Unitarian societies and 95 percent of Universalist societies. The Merger Commission worked for 5 years to prepare hundreds of pages of reports and study guides, and a 44 page "The Plan to Consolidate the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America" also called “the blue book” by the delegates who carried it throughout the Assembly.
One part of the plan proved to be most contentions. The new organization would need a statement of the “purposes and objectives” that could guide their new consolidated association. The commission had proposed this statement: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in their essence as love to God and love to man.” The Universalists passed it in their first vote, but the Unitarian assembly had intense debate. Some folks thought it was too creed-like, but others wondered why it didn’t mention Jesus or our Judeo-Christian Heritage. The Unitarians countered with this: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by Jesus and the other great teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, and prophetically expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition as love to God and love to man.” But this also couldn’t pass a vote on the Unitarian side, who felt like it stated too strongly our relationship to Christianity. Debate over wording of this statement created so much tension among the ranks, that it almost derailed the whole merger. Delegates debated late into the night, not wanting to give up, but not able to find something they could agree on, until finally they changed one word; our Judeo-Christian heritage” was changed to “the Judeo-Christian heritage.” Finally this statement could be approved by a majority of delegates.
A second area of concern was whether the smaller Universalist Church of America would loose itself in the larger American Unitarian Association. Would folks get lazy and say “Unitarian” instead of “Unitarian Universalist”? Would the Universalists lose their own unique history and identity? As a Unitarian Universalist congregation that was a Universalist congregation for its first 150 years, this is an important question for us. As we move into the future it is important that we, as a historic Universalist congregation, take a leadership role in preserving and uplifting our history. One way the Universalists hung onto their identity was by preserving our state conventions. If I understand correctly, before merger the Universalists also had one general association, but most of the decisions and power were in their state conventions, while the Unitarians had a more congregational polity. My favorite illustration of this is one Ginna gave me. In 1891 Rev. R. Neale was contracted by PUC to preach at Athens Church for 3 months, but the rule was that you must be in fellowship in Universalist tradition to serve a Universalist church. The PUC gave Rev. Neale 3 months to get into fellowship. So Rev. Neale applies for fellowship, but when the PUC convenes in Athens, perhaps in this very building, he does not attend but sends his lawyer to the hearing. As you might expect, his application for fellowship is rejected, and because there is NOT congregational polity-- that is the right of congregations to chose their own ministers-- the PUC closes the church, doors barricaded. A new board of the Athens church is elected, reengaging Mr. Neale who broke in through window, and started conducting services again. It is because he was “Enjoined in court of law” that we know this story at all- since it was reported in the news in the “Term of Court” blotter, wherein it quips that no word was give on the “spiritual fitness” of the lawyer. Now, post merger, the PUC does not have the power to give fellowship to ministers, but it does us stay connected to our Universalist roots, and the endowment of the PUC helps keep some of these historic Universalist churches alive.
Both denominations were active in social justice, and believed this to be an important part of their faith. Perhaps you remember that the first Universalist Minister, Olympia Brown, was also a tireless voice of women’s suffrage. Or Unitarian Dorothea Dix whose reporting on our treatment of the mentally ill lead to important reforms in the mid 1800s. Each denomination had their own service committee formed in the 1930s to witness against the Nazi invasions in Europe and to help refugees. And in fact the two worked closely together throughout their history and seemed to easily merge in 1963.. IN fact, it was in part their history of working together and being of similar mind about Social Justice work that was one of the cornerstones that made consolidation seem possible. But while Unitarians and Universalists were marching in Selma and Washington in the 1950s and 19602, the 1963 GA in Chicago failed to pass a non-discrimination clause. In 1969, just 8 years after merger, the Black Empowerment controversy erupted, marked at one dramatic moment by a walkout of our General Assembly. We came to realize that we had not even begun to address systemic racism and oppression in our own institutions. And so over the past few decades we have begun to take a hard look at our own institutions and to do the work of countering oppressions, but if this is work we really hope to do in a serious way, it is work that we must commit to into the future.
As in the larger culture, the black power movement empowered not only people of color but also women and GLBT persons to claim their power in this democratic country and within our movement. Senior ministers can still recall a time when there was not a single woman in our St. Lawrence District chapter of the Minister’s association, but now more than half of all ministers in our denomination today are women. Before merger all our GLBT clergy were closeted, and now our queer clergy and layfolks are at the heart of our movement- and at the heart of our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign. We are chagrined to hear about the difficulty ministers from traditionally marginalized groups faced when looking for a congregation (and we have to assume that lay folks looking for welcoming congregations experienced the same barriers). But we have tried to look honestly at the structures of power and oppression, and we have committed ourselves to a path of change. We now require, for example, all congregations to participate in “Beyond Categorical Thinking” when they are in search. Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our 2 UU seminaries, includes as part of its core curriculum “Educating to Counter Oppressions.” As a movement we have begun to wake up to the realities of racism and overlapping oppressions, and have faith that we can change- that these institutional oppressions will be part of the “transient” in our movement.
IN the Commission on Appraisals report I mentioned before, they noticed a trend that folks want more heart than head from their churches in the last half of the 20th centuries. The Culture of the 1960s and 1970s changed our movement deeply. A new generation put aside study groups for encounter groups, and something stuck. On some fundamental way, what we wanted from our congregations changed from what our grandparents wanted. We want to feel connected to one another, we want chances to relate deeply in a way that, according to that report, is a change for who we are as a movement. That old old idea of an all-loving god may be better expressed in this time not as an important idea that can be argued by quick tongues and minds, but as a way for us to be in the world.
Universalists were at one time the 6th largest denomination in the country. We can see that here in the valley where there were at one time 7 Universalist congregations in the North Branch. Both the Unitarian and Universalist movements had shrunk over the years, as had many main line denominations. In the Commission on Appraisals report: “The Unitarian Universalist Merger 1961-1975” in 1975, there was already a perception that the great hopes of growth after merger were slowed by outside forces including this decentralization of church in our culture, and also that our cutting edge liberal ideas were no longer so cutting edge –that is to say that when our ideas became mainstream, one no longer had to take sanctuary in our congregations to hear our good news. Whereas at many points in our history we have had great clarity about who we were as a faith tradition, the changes to our movement and to the world over this past century have forced us to ask ourselves “What is transient and what is permanent in Unitarian Universalism.” The question we have been asking ourselves for over 50 years is “who are we?” and “what next?” what is the special calling of this faith tradition.
This fall you all sent me to the CENTER for Excellence in Ministry, and one of our presenters, Beth Zemsky, said during a panel discussion, that what she saw next not only for our movement, but for our culture as a whole, emerging in response to the rhetoric of individualism and security which has dominated our public discourse for the past decades, is a focus on interconnection and interdependence. As she spoke those words, I realized that actually, we’ve been talking around this for a while, about our interconnection and interdependence. I’ve heard us described over the past few decades as a “queer theology” that is to say not a theology for folks who are queer, but a theology which “goes both ways” as it were. I’ve heard us described as a cross-roads religion. And we covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web, added to our principles only 25 years ago. We have known for a long time that our culture is out of balance in its pursuit of individual liberty. And I think of that night 50-some years ago when in the middle of what was probably unprecedented theological diversity, those 1000 delegates staid up deep into the night because they had faith that there was a way to stay connected while being authentic to individual difference and to our multiplicity. Think about the hateful horrible things we hear folks say in the media about other folks, folks who are different from them. This world needs us, Unitarian Universalists, to hang fast to our interdependence web, and to help others see it too. We must share the good news of our interconnection with those who don’t recognize how inextricably wound up in it we all are.
So when I ask myself what will remain at the core of Unitarian Universalism, what is transient and what is permanent, I think of our radical respect for our interdependence. I also think about our roots --hose roots going back hundreds of years, and our heroes who held for their contemporaries and for the future the light of reason, who were not afraid to speak their truth even when it meant personal sacrifice. And I think of our love of justice, and our deep roots in working for justice for more than a century. And now we bind our love of justice into that web- a web of intersecting identities, or staggering diversity -- knowing that this will not be a truly just world until there is justice for everyone in that web. We start with ourselves, our own association, our own congregation, our own hearts. And we express that web each Sunday when we gather in community. It is no longer enough for us to speak the truth to one another, we crave that interconnection. We practice love here in this place, not only because we have an innate longing for connection, but also because we believe that by practicing love, we help to create the world we dream of. When forms and doctrines fade away, I have faith that the good news we have to share about the love to the transcendent, love to one another, and love to this great web of life of which we are a part, these will never fade.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Dirt Beneath Our Feet (May 1, 2011)
I guess you could say that I’m an agnostic –there’s nothing that I know for sure about God. But at some point I made a theological leap that if I was going to believe in God, the God I could believe in was not separate from the world, but was deeply immanent in the world. If there was anything that was sacred, then everything was sacred. It is not enough simply to make that theological pronouncement, however, because such an audacious statement calls me to look deeply at all these manifold sacred things. Each living thing is a sacred text, and like the great sacred texts, new wisdom emerges as you live with those texts. What has surprised me in the years since I made that leap is that Once you put on your “everything is sacred glasses,” that is once you look at things as if you believe and trust that they are miraculous and sacred if you have the eyes to see, even the most ordinary of things begin to blow your mind
For years I have been singing the song “The Earth is our mother” and in my mind I pictured the globe- Gaia – our blue boat home. Recently, however, I heard Vandana Shiva, Physicist, Environmental Activist, talking about the role of earth in her culture in India. "For us,” she says “mud is not just the matrix of life in which we grow our plants, it's our building structure - it's our very sense of who we are." [quoted in a movie I recommend highly- Dirt! The Movie]
I realized she was talking about earth- the soil out of which we are all born. The soil which carries the building blocks of life, all those minerals and elements that make up our bodies, and the bodies of the plants and animals we eat. Says Physicist Fritjof Capra "The living organisms on earth have used the very same molecules of air, water and soil over and over again. Not just the same types of molecules but the very same molecules.", [Dirt! The Movie] Image singing that chant again- the earth is our mother, and picturing not the shining blue sphere, but a handful of dirt from your garden: the soil that feeds you and your children, the soil that turns fallen leaves and apple cores from garbage into life. As it says in the book of Genesis: [3: 19] “for out of [the ground] you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” The earth is our mother. It literally gives us life.
When I first read the passage by Wendell Berry we heard this morning, it awakened some deeper knowing in me- knowing in a deeper way what I had known since I was a child-- that everyone, everything I love as they die becoming part of the soil, and (I’ve been very clear with my family- when I die I want to be buried in a plain pine box) my own body will be part of that soil. I want to rejoin that millennia old chain of life, and when I die I want to rejoin it as soon as possible. When I thought of the soil that way, suddenly I was filled with an awe-filled reverence. That soil IS my ancestors, all our ancestors, all our loved ones, it is us.
As we saw in our opening meditation, dirt is not some inert material, soil is incredibly alive. I recently saw a movie called “Dirt! The Movie” and in it wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk said "With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt, I think it's very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are."
Because we live in a very fertile area, we take for granted that something will grow out of the ground, bidden or unbidden. We have to mow and cut back and sometimes even use poisons to keep thing from growing out of every bit of dirt. If we lived someplace like Africa we would know better. There about a third of the continent is dessert. Most of the continent is savannah, some naturally occurring, and much of it created when forests were cut down or burned to create farmland Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai has devoted her life to planting trees to try to reclaim that desert, the desert that was created when we humans cut down or burned the trees and plants that held water and nutrients in the soil. Pierre Rabhi: Philosopher, Agro-ecologist Farmer turned philosopher has spent his life helping farmers in such arid landscapes to rebuild soil damaged through cultivation. He is quoted as saying "Africa is not poor. Ethiopia alone, if properly cultivated, could feed the entire African continent." [Dirt! The Movie.]
It is scary to realize that we in North America are not immune to this desertification. Our Top soil is not inert- not something that will always be there no matter what we do. We take it for granted, perhaps the same way we took our mothers for granted when we were children. The way we practice farming in modern times we lose six tons of topsoil for every ton of food produced "The Dust Bowl was an event, not quite on the same scale, but comparable to what happened after the last Ice Age. We made a really big change in the landscape just by bad farming practices” -- to quote urban arborist Bill Logan. [Dirt! The Movie ]
But this is not a sermon about science, this is a service about renewal. I am proposing that the earth itself- the soil is a kind of sacred text that can help us understand how to prevent the burn out, the desertification of our own hearts and minds, and can help us renew ourselves when we need it most.
I think we should start with roots. Roots hold the soil together. Roots draw water and nutrients down into the soil and up into plants. Without an interconnected of roots the soil washes away, or is blown away as in the days of the dust bowl. This is what causes desertification. This is why it is so important for farmers to plant cover crops in the off season- it keeps the soil healthy and whole when it is not producing crops. When we go through a storm, if we have laid down a web of connections, to one another, to our community, to the earth, it helps us stay whole during times of change or times of loss. Moreover, the deep roots help us through droughts, through times of scarcity. In times of drought the deep roots reach sources of water the more shallow roots cannot reach, they can also reach elements, nutrients from deep down. If the soil is low on phosphorous, say, but there is a layer several feet down the plants with deep roots can reach those nutrients that those annual plants with shallow roots cannot. Deep roots are the ones that take time to lay down, the roots that last from year to year, decade to decade. The earth teaches us that it is worth laying down roots slowly over many years, of keeping connected to the sources of nourishment and connection from long ago, because while we grow new roots every year, the plants that have deep roots have special sources of nourishment and strength to draw from. My grandfather told me once about how hard they worked to encourage their neighbors to plant a row of trees at the edge of their fields to help preserve the soil and slow the wind. Even in a life which depends on the annual crops, there must be trees, there must be deep roots for the health of the soil and of ourselves.
We also learn from the soil that we need change, and we need rest. A piece of land that has grown corn for too many years will bear less and less produce as the nutrients that corn needs are used up. Sometimes we need to just let the land rest- to lay fallow. By lay fallow we don’t mean that the bare dirt is just exposed to the sky for a year, we mean that it is uncultivated. In the same way rest for our soul is probably not sitting on the couch watching tv, but when soil is lay fallow it is “left to its own natural growth.” I guess for me this means to leave some time unscheduled sometimes- to be spontaneous and see what grows. Good farmers also rotate crops to keep the land fruitful. We all need change in those things we cultivate in our lives.
A natural ecosystem will find its own balance over the years if “left to its natural growth.” But when we cultivate land, when we cultivate ourselves, we have to very carefully keep track of the balance, to build a relationship of plants that are mutually supporting- elements that work in harmony with one another. It is widely known that it was the custom among the first nations people in this land to plant corn, squash and beans together- this is referred to as “the three sisters. Squash protects her sisters from weeds and shades the soil from the sun with her leaves, keeping it cool and moist. Beans help keep the soil fertile by converting the sun's energy into nitrogen filled nodules that grow on its roots. And the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb. Or think of the compost pile. Most folks use a layering of dry and wet compost materials (lasagna is the common metaphor) Too much wet stuff and it will not get hot enough to transform. If there’s not enough oxygen it doesn’t transform (this is part of the problem with our current landfill system.) But once the right balance is achieved, the compost practically creates itself. What do you need for balance in your life right now?
And here’s the most amazing thing of all. What feeds the soil? Builds the soil? Waste. Death. Decay. Think about an old growth forest. There are trees there in all stages of life- young, old, and those laying there on the forest floor decaying. It can take a tree the size we see in our backyards about 20-25 years to decompose. All through that time it is food and habitat for many species of bugs, birds, rodents, bacteria, moss, even new trees. The leaves that drop from the trees in autumn become over the next few seasons the very food that will feed those trees and other members of the eco-system in future growing seasons. But what do we do in our own yards? We rake up all those leaves, haul away the dead trees, burn them or send them to landfill to keep things looking tidy. Then if we want to feed our yard we go buy fertilizer at the store. Here’s the wisdom I take from this scripture. What you need to feed your spirit is in you right now. It’s in your life, in your relationships, in the traditions and heritage you were born into. We so easily go looking far and wide to find food for the spirit, but all the basic building blocks are already around us. It’s in a story your grandmother told, memory of time shared with your father; it’s in this 400 year old religious tradition. Each generation does not have to start from scratch, but can let the leaves of past seasons, the lives of fallen trees that were the lives and work of our ancestors feed and nurture you. The same is true within your own life and spirit. You already know a lot. Experiences that may have seemed incidental at the time can come back to us later as wisdom. I never did become a professional ballet dancer, but I was so amazed to find that 20 years later all the work I did in ballet class as a child made yoga so much easier and fun for me as an adult. And as counter intuitive as it may seem, What you need to feed your spirit is in the loss you have experienced. Instead of raking loss and grief away to keep things tidy, sometimes the greatest gift we can give our spirits is to allow those griefs to remain where they are, to decay and change and be transformed into new life.
The main message I want to leave you with this morning is the same one we started with today. The earth, the sacred ground we walk upon, is our mother. All life comes from her, and she turns death back into new life. We must take care of her. We care for her by allowing deep roots to grow, by creating communities of balance, and by allowing the soil to rest and be renewed. The earth is our mother. She will take care of us. She will feed us and our children for generations to come if we remember to nurture and care for her.
For years I have been singing the song “The Earth is our mother” and in my mind I pictured the globe- Gaia – our blue boat home. Recently, however, I heard Vandana Shiva, Physicist, Environmental Activist, talking about the role of earth in her culture in India. "For us,” she says “mud is not just the matrix of life in which we grow our plants, it's our building structure - it's our very sense of who we are." [quoted in a movie I recommend highly- Dirt! The Movie]
I realized she was talking about earth- the soil out of which we are all born. The soil which carries the building blocks of life, all those minerals and elements that make up our bodies, and the bodies of the plants and animals we eat. Says Physicist Fritjof Capra "The living organisms on earth have used the very same molecules of air, water and soil over and over again. Not just the same types of molecules but the very same molecules.", [Dirt! The Movie] Image singing that chant again- the earth is our mother, and picturing not the shining blue sphere, but a handful of dirt from your garden: the soil that feeds you and your children, the soil that turns fallen leaves and apple cores from garbage into life. As it says in the book of Genesis: [3: 19] “for out of [the ground] you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” The earth is our mother. It literally gives us life.
When I first read the passage by Wendell Berry we heard this morning, it awakened some deeper knowing in me- knowing in a deeper way what I had known since I was a child-- that everyone, everything I love as they die becoming part of the soil, and (I’ve been very clear with my family- when I die I want to be buried in a plain pine box) my own body will be part of that soil. I want to rejoin that millennia old chain of life, and when I die I want to rejoin it as soon as possible. When I thought of the soil that way, suddenly I was filled with an awe-filled reverence. That soil IS my ancestors, all our ancestors, all our loved ones, it is us.
As we saw in our opening meditation, dirt is not some inert material, soil is incredibly alive. I recently saw a movie called “Dirt! The Movie” and in it wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk said "With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt, I think it's very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are."
Because we live in a very fertile area, we take for granted that something will grow out of the ground, bidden or unbidden. We have to mow and cut back and sometimes even use poisons to keep thing from growing out of every bit of dirt. If we lived someplace like Africa we would know better. There about a third of the continent is dessert. Most of the continent is savannah, some naturally occurring, and much of it created when forests were cut down or burned to create farmland Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai has devoted her life to planting trees to try to reclaim that desert, the desert that was created when we humans cut down or burned the trees and plants that held water and nutrients in the soil. Pierre Rabhi: Philosopher, Agro-ecologist Farmer turned philosopher has spent his life helping farmers in such arid landscapes to rebuild soil damaged through cultivation. He is quoted as saying "Africa is not poor. Ethiopia alone, if properly cultivated, could feed the entire African continent." [Dirt! The Movie.]
It is scary to realize that we in North America are not immune to this desertification. Our Top soil is not inert- not something that will always be there no matter what we do. We take it for granted, perhaps the same way we took our mothers for granted when we were children. The way we practice farming in modern times we lose six tons of topsoil for every ton of food produced "The Dust Bowl was an event, not quite on the same scale, but comparable to what happened after the last Ice Age. We made a really big change in the landscape just by bad farming practices” -- to quote urban arborist Bill Logan. [Dirt! The Movie ]
But this is not a sermon about science, this is a service about renewal. I am proposing that the earth itself- the soil is a kind of sacred text that can help us understand how to prevent the burn out, the desertification of our own hearts and minds, and can help us renew ourselves when we need it most.
I think we should start with roots. Roots hold the soil together. Roots draw water and nutrients down into the soil and up into plants. Without an interconnected of roots the soil washes away, or is blown away as in the days of the dust bowl. This is what causes desertification. This is why it is so important for farmers to plant cover crops in the off season- it keeps the soil healthy and whole when it is not producing crops. When we go through a storm, if we have laid down a web of connections, to one another, to our community, to the earth, it helps us stay whole during times of change or times of loss. Moreover, the deep roots help us through droughts, through times of scarcity. In times of drought the deep roots reach sources of water the more shallow roots cannot reach, they can also reach elements, nutrients from deep down. If the soil is low on phosphorous, say, but there is a layer several feet down the plants with deep roots can reach those nutrients that those annual plants with shallow roots cannot. Deep roots are the ones that take time to lay down, the roots that last from year to year, decade to decade. The earth teaches us that it is worth laying down roots slowly over many years, of keeping connected to the sources of nourishment and connection from long ago, because while we grow new roots every year, the plants that have deep roots have special sources of nourishment and strength to draw from. My grandfather told me once about how hard they worked to encourage their neighbors to plant a row of trees at the edge of their fields to help preserve the soil and slow the wind. Even in a life which depends on the annual crops, there must be trees, there must be deep roots for the health of the soil and of ourselves.
We also learn from the soil that we need change, and we need rest. A piece of land that has grown corn for too many years will bear less and less produce as the nutrients that corn needs are used up. Sometimes we need to just let the land rest- to lay fallow. By lay fallow we don’t mean that the bare dirt is just exposed to the sky for a year, we mean that it is uncultivated. In the same way rest for our soul is probably not sitting on the couch watching tv, but when soil is lay fallow it is “left to its own natural growth.” I guess for me this means to leave some time unscheduled sometimes- to be spontaneous and see what grows. Good farmers also rotate crops to keep the land fruitful. We all need change in those things we cultivate in our lives.
A natural ecosystem will find its own balance over the years if “left to its natural growth.” But when we cultivate land, when we cultivate ourselves, we have to very carefully keep track of the balance, to build a relationship of plants that are mutually supporting- elements that work in harmony with one another. It is widely known that it was the custom among the first nations people in this land to plant corn, squash and beans together- this is referred to as “the three sisters. Squash protects her sisters from weeds and shades the soil from the sun with her leaves, keeping it cool and moist. Beans help keep the soil fertile by converting the sun's energy into nitrogen filled nodules that grow on its roots. And the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb. Or think of the compost pile. Most folks use a layering of dry and wet compost materials (lasagna is the common metaphor) Too much wet stuff and it will not get hot enough to transform. If there’s not enough oxygen it doesn’t transform (this is part of the problem with our current landfill system.) But once the right balance is achieved, the compost practically creates itself. What do you need for balance in your life right now?
And here’s the most amazing thing of all. What feeds the soil? Builds the soil? Waste. Death. Decay. Think about an old growth forest. There are trees there in all stages of life- young, old, and those laying there on the forest floor decaying. It can take a tree the size we see in our backyards about 20-25 years to decompose. All through that time it is food and habitat for many species of bugs, birds, rodents, bacteria, moss, even new trees. The leaves that drop from the trees in autumn become over the next few seasons the very food that will feed those trees and other members of the eco-system in future growing seasons. But what do we do in our own yards? We rake up all those leaves, haul away the dead trees, burn them or send them to landfill to keep things looking tidy. Then if we want to feed our yard we go buy fertilizer at the store. Here’s the wisdom I take from this scripture. What you need to feed your spirit is in you right now. It’s in your life, in your relationships, in the traditions and heritage you were born into. We so easily go looking far and wide to find food for the spirit, but all the basic building blocks are already around us. It’s in a story your grandmother told, memory of time shared with your father; it’s in this 400 year old religious tradition. Each generation does not have to start from scratch, but can let the leaves of past seasons, the lives of fallen trees that were the lives and work of our ancestors feed and nurture you. The same is true within your own life and spirit. You already know a lot. Experiences that may have seemed incidental at the time can come back to us later as wisdom. I never did become a professional ballet dancer, but I was so amazed to find that 20 years later all the work I did in ballet class as a child made yoga so much easier and fun for me as an adult. And as counter intuitive as it may seem, What you need to feed your spirit is in the loss you have experienced. Instead of raking loss and grief away to keep things tidy, sometimes the greatest gift we can give our spirits is to allow those griefs to remain where they are, to decay and change and be transformed into new life.
The main message I want to leave you with this morning is the same one we started with today. The earth, the sacred ground we walk upon, is our mother. All life comes from her, and she turns death back into new life. We must take care of her. We care for her by allowing deep roots to grow, by creating communities of balance, and by allowing the soil to rest and be renewed. The earth is our mother. She will take care of us. She will feed us and our children for generations to come if we remember to nurture and care for her.
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