A Language of Reverance (September 16, 2012)

I grew up in a UU church, and my parents gave me the gift of religious freedom. As Nancy Shaffer writes in her poem "A Theology Adequate for Night" in her beautiful UU meditation manual:

Not God as unmoved mover:

One who set the earth in motion

and withdrew. Not the One to thank

When those cherished do not die ---

For providence includes equally

Power to harm. Not a God of exactings,

As if love could be earned or subtracted

But during certain moments freedom from dogma is not enough for me. What I needed as a small child, and what I want today is simply something to get me through the nights when one feels adrift in an infinite universe, and your non-being sits like a chaperon in a dark corner of your bedroom making the "why" of life seem urgent and ever-present.

Shaffer continues:

But-- this may work in the night:
Something that breathes with us, as others
sleep, something that breathes also
those sleeping, so no one is alone.
Something that is the beginning of love,
and also each part of how love is completed,
Something so large, wherever we are,
we are not separate; which teachers again
the way to start over.

Night is the test: when grief lies uncovered,
and longing shows clear; when nothing we do
can hasten earth's turning or delay it.

This may be adequate for the night;
this holding; something that steadfastly
breaths us, which we are also learning to breathe."

This was the comfort I needed and could not find as a child in my UU church: to learn again and again that there is something steadfast in the universe, to learn how to remember it in the dark of the night, and to breathe. And yet I know now that this is absolutely part of our religious tradition, so the question I would like for us to answer together today is why? Why as a child who went to Sunday school every Sunday did I not know this?

When I was in Seminary, everyone was talking about the Baby Boomers, and a whole new wave of un-churched folks entering our churches who were hungry for more spirituality. This idea was met with the collective sound of tens of thousands of UU humanists groaning, as they worried that the rational Unitarian Universalism that had been a refuge and a sanctuary for them would be irrevocably changed forever. Then in 2003 our UUA president Rev. Bill Sinkford set off a “firestorm” of reaction by suggesting that:

"I would like to see us become better acquainted with the depths, both so that we are more grounded in our personal faith, and so that we can effectively communicate that faith-and what we believe it demands of us-to others. For this, I think we need to cultivate what UU minister David Bumbaugh calls a 'vocabulary of reverence.' …we need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence. To name the holy, to talk about human agency in theological terms—the ability of humans to shape and frame our world guided by what we find to be of ultimate importance.”

Now, almost a decade later, I believe this conversation is still relevant. Some folks in the pews and padded chairs of UU congregations sought us out precisely because we did not talk about God. As Rebecca Parker enumerated so beautifully in the open letter you heard Brian read today, “God-talk has often aided and abetted injustice and oppression.”  If a little girl grew up in a religious community where not only was God not female, but the religious leaders could not be female, it stands to reason that as a woman she might abandon such a God. If you went to a church or synagogue where you were told that God judged queer folks, no wonder you would abandon such a God. If you left your childhood faith because you just could not repeat those parts of your church’s creed that did not match with your knowing of the world, perhaps you came here and were relieved to be away from that which oppressed your spirit. Perhaps it is a comfort to sit through a whole Sunday morning with your beloved community where no one uses traditional religious language. And yet…

A parent who raised her child UU recently told me that on the ride home from church one day her child said “UUs don’t worship god, they worship famous UUs.” This cuts right to the heart of things, doesn’t it. Have we, by avoiding religious language, also avoided the important conversations that  our beloved community is uniquely called to facilitate?  Perhaps because many of us have been oppressed and stifled by religious language, we sometimes miss “the possibility of reverence”?  This astute UU child noticed that instead we tell stories from our history, of role models for living out our humanity.  That comment challenges us to wonder-  do we leave ourselves with enough language to discuss those things that are larger than ourselves, the mysteries of life?

In my first year as a religious educator I taught a wonderful 1^st grade curriculum called “Around the Church Around the Year.” I wanted to apply all I had learned in seminary, so I tried to find the “null curriculum” that is what we teach by what is left out. I noticed that not once in the whole curriculum did we mention God, or the spirit, or really any theological or spiritual concepts at all. Theology was our Null curriculum, with which we were teaching our children “Church is a place where we never talk about God, or our spiritual lives.” This was quite a shock to me at the time, and now that I am a parent myself,  I ask with even more urgency -- do we give our children a language to confront grief and despair and to feel they are not left alone with only their 2 hands to change this broken world? As Nancy Shaffer writes

“Night is the test: when grief lies uncovered,

and longing shows clear; when nothing we do

Can hasten earth’s turning or delay it”

It is easy for us to inhabit our religious plurality as a congregation by sticking to common ground. Our humanity is part of what binds us together. Our belief in reason, in the strength of our human capacities to grow and to heal ourselves and one another. But I think there is more we have in common that we do not often explore together. And I think some of these things that lay unspoken are the very ideas, stories, symbols that comfort us in despair, that help us express our most exalted joy, that help us save and savor life.  I said to my theology class one day in seminary – “why don’t we talk more about our own experiences of the divine, of the transcendent?” and after a silent pause, a classmate answered “because they are private.”

Why don’t we talk about holy things in church? More than one member of our congregation has told the story of being told explicitly by their Sunday School teacher or other religious leader to “stop asking so many questions!” There wasn’t just a null curriculum suggesting that we don’t talk about our deepest religious questioning and yearning, but a full on explicit finger wagging from someone in authority. And this is not to cast aspersions on other faith traditions. I myself remember a time when I preached a sermon on Channing’s use of the word “soul” and had a long-time member of that church say to me “I don’t think you should use words like that in church. I don’t think it is very UU.” So in part we may be reluctant to ask our deepest questions, to talk about theological issues because some explicit, implicit or null curriculum taught us that we were right to be reticent.

And I want to say that I am so sorry for each child who was told to stop asking questions. I am so sorry for each adult who got the impression that their most deeply held beliefs were not a topic of polite conversation. I am so sorry for each of you who has heard words like “God” or “sin” used in a way that felt like a cudgel, a weapon against you or against any person in this world.

My seminary was full of long-time UUs who knew this pain. My classmates asked again and again “Can we use words like “god” and “prayer” in a congregation where we KNOW that beloved members sitting in the pews still have bruised places, muscles that clench in defense against such language? Can we talk about Jesus when we know that folks who heard his story about separating the sheep from the goats felt like they must be the goats? And the answer always was the same; the job of the beloved community is not only to be a sanctuary for people’s tender places, but also to challenge. We must be a  loving, compassionate community that listens so deeply that we can sit with and love one another, especially  through those difficult places into deeper healing and understanding.

I’m sure some of you are thinking- “why bother?” Why even bother to reclaim or reconstruct all this old fashioned religious language so piled with baggage that each use carries with it thousands of years of misunderstanding and hurt? Because for thousands of years when people just like you and I have tried to express something larger than their own daily worries and troubles and tedium; we as a human species have created this language to try to communicate to ourselves and to one another.

There was a wonderful study done by a cognitive psychologist at Harvard called Elizabeth Spelke about language and the brain showing that having language actually allows certain functions of the brain, actually allows certain kinds of concepts, like space and color to be connected, allows us to have thoughts like “left of the blue wall.”

And in fact adults who have their language capacity temporarily disabled loose their ability to think certain thoughts. [i]

Now I’m going to make a huge leap here, because my field is applied theology, not science, and say if we know that language itself helps us solve certain problems, helps us synthesize information, I wonder… could we be handicapping ourselves by avoiding using certain words? My old theology professor Rebecca Parker pointed out that when you go to the index of your UU hymnal, you won’t find the word “God.” Instead you find “Transcending Mystery and Wonder” You won’t find the word “salvation” though there is an entry for “hope.” And I wonder, are there thoughts we could have, are there links we could make with the word “God” or “divine” that we can’t make with the words “Transcending Mystery and Wonder” or “spirit of life”? Are their literally thoughts we can’t have without certain words?

I also think it’s important to remember that these words allow us to talk across traditions, (I don’t think you will find “Transcending Mystery and Wonder” in our neighbor’s hymnals) and allow us to follow the evolution of concepts across time. Katie and I were cleaning out the library the other day and came across a worship resource for lent. We had been pretty mercilessly pruning the library so that all the books fit on shelves and there would be no piles left on the desk or floor or other books, but we wanted to keep all the books that would help us hang on to our UU history. We agreed that our current worship team would probably not use a book on lent very often. Then she noticed that this was a Universalist publication! We had allowed the word “Lent” to turn us off from a conversation with Universalists from just maybe 50 years ago. Universalist theologians have done some really important thinking about things like “sin” and “evil” and “salvation” and “hell” --thinking that lead the way for other American religions. If we refuse to engage with those words we lose all that theological heritage.

These are not “other people’s words.” Our library is full of these words. I will be the first to agree that when I say “Soul” I probably mean something different than that preacher on the Family Life network does. I guarantee that how  I define “sin” is different than his. But those words belong to all of us. No one gets to define what they mean for me. Our theological history is one that has, for over 400 years, made our neighbors think twice about a less constrained understanding of these ideas.

But if we are going to use these powerful, dangerous words overlaid with centuries of meaning, we have to be ready to listen. Really listen to one another. If our brothers and sisters are going to talk about that which comforts them when “grief lies uncovered.” We must promise to listen to one another with open hearts. When our sisters tell us how the spirit moved in their lives, or when our brothers and tell us how the word “spirit” grates against a tender place, we must listen ever more deeply.

Finally, we must remember that we are talking about things that often defy words, things that are ineffable, that no words can do justice to: the pain of childbirth, and the inexpressible mystery of seeing a new life enter the world. The pit of despair and the embracing love that calls us back to life,

 “What wondrous love is this, o my soul, what wondrous love is this that brings my heart such bliss, and takes away the pain of my soul?”[ii]

Our deepest feelings, our most profound experiences can make words seem small and petty. Theologians have always grappled with and confessed the audacity of using words to describe things no words can every really contain. In even beginning a conversation about those things most precious, most (if you will) holy to us, we must admit that we are merely fumbling in the dark.

This year the worship team will, over the next few months, consider a Language of Reverence. They will ask you to think about those difficult words so overlaid with meaning that sometimes they mean nothing at all. We will talk about reclaiming the words that may be useful to us, and finding new words when the old ones fail. We will have a chance to talk about the words that are difficult for us, and just be present in that discomfort with one another. But ultimately this must not be a conversation about words. Let it be instead an opening of our hearts to one another, fumbling and gesturing wildly to express whatever gets us through the night, to express our gratitude when this sun rises again.

---

[i] Radio Lab does a wonderful presentation of this here: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/words-that-change-the-world/ starting around 11’30” 
 [ii] -lyrics Connie Campbell Hart “What Wondrous Love”

---

The End of the World? Apocalypse and the mythic imagination (August 26, 2012)

It has become a frequent turn of conversation at our house:

“Should we be putting more away for our son’s college tuition?”

“It doesn’t matter because the world is going to end in 2012.”

“We should go visit our cousins in North Dakota some day”

“Sure, if the world doesn’t end in 2012.”

We don’t really believe that the world will end on December 21, 2012, but all the hype about 2012 causes me to wonder: “how long can things go on as they are? Is there a radical or catastrophic change on the horizon? Could society come apart in our life time?

By now most of you have heard 2012 spoken of  as a metaphysical or historic turning point. On December 21, 2012, the  5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar  comes to an end. In honor of this auspicious moment in history I thought we should take a moment this morning to talk about the “end of the world.” The number of Facebook posts and web sites imagining what this coming winter solstice might portend shows us that the “end of days” is on our minds right now, as a culture. As an avid reader of Sci-Fi, I’ve read many stories over the past few decades that are imagined visions of what the end might look like- it’s a favorite theme of Sci-fi authors. But Sci-Fi authors are by vocation at the far edge of imaginative thought. So what interests me is that right now in our culture you don’t have to go to the Sci-Fi channel to find the stories of the apocalypse and what comes after. Look at the success of the Hunger Games- the young  adult novels about a dystopian post-apocalyptic world. Television is filled with shows set in a post-apocalyptic world like “Falling Skies” about the remnant of humanity trying to survive after an alien invasion, or “The Walking Dead” about a world ravaged by a zombie epidemic or this new show they are pumping up for the fall “Revolution” about life after an electromagnetic attack disables our plugged-in society.

And whether you watch TV or not, I know you have heard the apocalyptic stories told by politicians and preachers. Both the right and the left have these stories- have you noticed? The story the right tells is about the rapture, when all good Christians will be raptured to heaven, and the rest will be left to experience the end of the earth. The story the left tells is about an environmental catastrophe which will be the results of global warming, or the end of fossil fuels, or the collapse of the global food market. In this version of the end days, the size of the human population shrinks back to that of Neolithic times, and without fossil fuels the surviving remnant of humanity must grow their own food from depleted soils without the aid of trucks or tractors or petroleum based fertilizers. In other more dire versions, we come to the extinction of the human race all together, as the earth heals herself and new species evolve that can survive in the mess we’ve made of our biosphere. Right now, the imagination of our culture is captivated by these apocalyptic stories. Why?

I want to approach this question today not from a political or stewardship or justice perspective. I want to look at this as a story, a dream, a not-yet speech ripe emergence from our collective unconscious. Lets call it a figment of our collective imagination. Imagination uses different language than journalism or science. It must combine the known with the unknown, it must use symbols and broad artistic license to leave room  for what-might-be.  Sometimes folks look at imaginative stories with too much literalism,  and so miss all the richness, all the wisdom, all the truth that the imagination has to offer in it’s strange, elusive way.

For the past couple of years a small group of us has been meeting to talk about our dreams, believing that there is something in not only our own dreams but in one anothers' dreams which is valuable, which may not be available in the normal ways of looking at our lives and at our world.  What if we looked stories of the apocalypse this way? What if we looked at them as nightmares? I studied projective dreamwork with Rev. Jeremy Taylor, a Unitarian Universalist community minister, and he tells us that:

“For millions of years, the ability to pay immediate and focused attention to nasty, threatening stuff has been a primary survival test. The creatures who pay effective attention to threats tend to survive, and the ones who don't tend not to survive. In this way, we have been shaped by natural selection to be inherently predisposed to pay attention to ugly, scary, and menacing experiences.

As a consequence, when the deep source within (from which all dreams spring, spontaneously and unbidden) has potentially important information to convey to the waking consciousness, it is very likely to dress that material up in the form of a "nightmare," simply to get our attention.”

This is not the first time we as a culture have had nightmares about apocalypse. There is a whole group of writings called “apocalyptic” in our Judeo-Christian scriptures. The first such books was Daniel, written around 164 BCE, and the last was Revelations written around 90 years into the christen era.  And it makes me wonder – why is this recurring nightmare coming back to humankind right now?

When we moved from the east coast to California almost 20 years ago, one of the first events Eric and I went to was to see was a talk by a fellow called TerenceMcKenna, an author and pop icon,  at our local book store. The place was packed. He believed that time unfolded not in a steady line, but like a sine wave. Periods of great novelty arose in history, he said, and in 2012 we were headed for a period of tremendous novelty- where anything was possible the likes of which had not been seen in history since the time of Jesus. My husband and I immediately dismissed this because it was an idea that came to him while he was on one of those psychtropic vision inducing drugs that anthropologists are always taking while working on their studies in the Amazon. But my husband and I have been paying attention to that date, especially when we noticed it coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar on the winter equinox in 2012.

Reporters on a recent show on public radio talked to some actual Mayans about this, and to scholars of Mayan history and found that in Mayan culture the date is no more important than having a really big New Years Celebration. But it has captured our imagination in a huge way. If we look at the 2012 phenomenon as rationalists, this report gave us all the information we needed to dismiss the whole business. No one should stop investing in our children’s college fund, or stop brushing our teeth.  Just as when we wake from a nightmare, we can easily say “oh, what a relief, it was just a dream!” and think no more about it.

When the year 2000 came, many were expecting an apocalypse, or at least a major collapse of our technology. Folks use the Y2K scare an example of how it is silly to pay attention to such things. I think it’s useful to note, however that there were folks working overtime for months in response to the fear of that nightmare, to make sure that data transition was smooth. We will never know what constructive steps our anxiety about Y2K compelled us to take. If our apocalyptic nightmares are trying to wake us up to pressing danger, maybe the Y2K nightmares did their job.

The symbolic thinker in me wonders if maybe we are looking at the millennial drama too literally. Since zombies do not currently roam the streets, and the internet did not collapse throwing us back to the stone age, our literal minds skip right over the MASSIVE changes that did take place over the past decade. In the year 2000 many members of my congregation did not even have e-mail, and almost no one had their own cell phone. We were in the middle of one of the biggest housing bubbles the country had ever seen. Technology stocks were like helium balloons floating off into the stratosphere. This was a world before 9-11, back when you could wear your shoes or carry a water bottle through airport security. This was a world before the Patriot Act, before Citizens United.

But our apocalyptic nightmares didn’t go away after New Years Eve 2000 came and went. We see them changing form and gaining in frequency. If this were my dream as an individual, it would mean that there is something important in my life that I am ignoring. Some threat to the wholeness of my psyche, to my unfolding as a person. And this dream we dream as a culture will not stop appearing until we have addressed the underlying concerns. Rev. Taylor suggests that when our lives are threatened in a dream, this usually symbolizes a threat to our identity, a threat to our sense of self. It shows us that we are on the verge of a change so huge that it feels like dying. That part of our self will have to die in order to allow the transformation that is needed. And as one of the dreamers of this apocalyptic dream, that notion rings true for me.

We know, all of us, deep inside, that the world we are living in cannot continue in this way; It is heading for transformation one way or another. Some folks say that we have passed peak oil, even the oil companies agree that it is coming though they project it further into the future. Change is coming. Maybe that change is a technological breakthrough. Maybe it is a leap in the evolution of the consciousness of our species. Maybe that change is societal collapse where only the rich can afford to drive cars and eat food shipped from across the continent while the rest of us struggle to feed our families. I am not going to list all the ways our culture feels like it is at the brink of either collapse or radical change, because you all will never come back to church if I do. But I think part of the reason that images of a post-collapse zombie-filled world are swirling around us is because we look into the future and we are having more and more trouble imagining that things will go on just as they are.

But as dream guru Taylor offers as one of his primary assumptions for dream work- dreams never come to tell you something you already know. They never come just to say “nya nya – you are running out of fossil fuel.” Every dream (especially the nightmares) has a gift in it.

Here is one of the most important gifts of our apocalyptic nightmare. In every story of collapse, there are those who act with ethical integrity, and those who abandon ethics. There are those who believe that once society collapses it’s every person for themselves, and there are those who believe, that in this time more than any other, our values will serve as the pillars that support life and culture. If this is my dream, I need to know who I am and what I stand for, and I need to know that there are those around me who will help me support and sustain those values. When the erosions of democracy I notice in my daily life remind me of any number of Sci-Fi novels, this is a sign to me that NOW is the moment when I need to ground myself in what I know to be ethical and compassionate, and hold fast to these pillars as the rivers of history unfolding swirl around us.

Another gift of this nightmare is that when we project our selves into a future so radically different from our ordinary lives today we wake in a sweat asking, “what do I need to do to prepare for such a future?” When Eric and I moved from California to Ithaca, we were thinking not only of our son’s future, which we wanted to support with an excellent public school system, but I confess to you that we also had a lingering nightmare in our minds which informed our choices. If we were going to put down roots for a time  beyond peak oil, we wanted to live in a pedestrian centered community. We wanted to be near fertile farm land and plenty of fresh water. No matter what the future holds, we are going to need to eat, and drink, and rely on a community of neighbors. Thinking about the kinds of dramatic changes history brings helps us make choices that not only support a lifestyle that we can enjoy now, but 7 generations into the future. And how can we really know what 7 generations into the future looks like when we don’t even know what tropical storm Isaac will look like when it hits Florida tonight or tomorrow?  As James A.Dewar of the Rand Corporation said “in long term planning we need to shore up our load-bearing assumptions.” And we are putting a lot of our load right now on fossil fuels, for example, which folks on all sides of the issue agree is  a finite resource.

I believe that this church, this beloved community could be such a pillar 7 generations in the future, no matter how different that future might be. It has, indeed, served this community for 7 generations already, and as we saw during the flood, we know that together we have the capacity to respond to the unexpected with compassion and integrity. I think Project Grow is another such endeavor. The goal of Project Grow, as I understand it, is to bring people of the Valley together in a web of mutuality to support our local food system, and to teach one another the skills needed to make sure that,  no matter what happens, we and our children can grow our own food. Because although the Valley still has more family farms than anywhere I’ve ever lived, we also know that it takes only a generation for a community to lose all its family farms, and to forget the complex techniques it takes to grow the food a community needs. This is the vision John Doscher has been holding out for us, of a community that can feed itself, sustain itself when dramatic change comes. Hopefully life in the valley will continue just as it is now, and the skills of growing carrots and milking goats will be just a wholesome hobby for our children and grandchildren. But just in case…

By imagining the collapse of society as we know it, we must also either resign ourselves to despair, or ask, as Ebenezer scrooge did “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?” When we remember this nightmare we can ask ourselves “is it too late to save our society, our planet, or is there something I can do to help change our course?”  This is the work our Green sanctuary committee is doing. Later this fall I will preach a sermon on the “great turning” and we can think together in more detail about a more hopeful dream, one where we turn away from societal collapse, and create something new together.

The next time you are overwhelmed by visions of impending doom, or you are just flipping past the zombie show on your television, I encourage you to think of these apocalyptic visions as a dream our culture is dreaming. And to remember that as Rev. Taylor explains “In my experience, all dreams (and particularly nightmares) come in the service of health and wholeness…The very fact that a dream is remembered in the first place means that the dreamer actually has at his or her disposal all the courage, creativity, strength, and wisdom necessary to respond creatively and transformatively to even the worst "problem" that the dream presents.” 

The Great Awakening (June 3, 2012)

The story of the great awakening is the perennial story of the struggle between thought and feeling. It is also the struggle between the establishment tradition and radical innovation. Now usually when I tell the story of the struggle between the establishment and the radical, we Unitarian Universalists identify with the radical. But at the time when the first great awakening swept New England beginning in  1734 our Unitarian roots were sunk into the  Boston Establishment. Those moved by the Great Awakening felt that the established religion of the day had strayed from Puritanism. One of these was Charles Whitefield who wrote in his journal that: “It has the form of religion kept up, but has lost much of it’s [sic] power. I have not heard of any remarkable stir for many years… There is much of the pride of life to be seen in their assemblies. Jewels, patches, and gay apparel are commonly worn by the female sex. The little infants who were brought to baptism were wrapped up in such fine things, and so much pains taken to dress them, that one would think they were brought thither to be initiated into, rather than to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.” [i]

But it was not just the worldliness and “lack of stirring” that concerned Whitefield, it was the theology that was emerging among the established churches.  Whitefield wrote that “Bad books are becoming fashionable among tutors and students” By this he meant the new tendency towards “Arminianism” which suggested that people are born with both the capacity for sin and for righteousness, meaning that God’s will was not the final factor; we could chose God’s grace, or we could choose to sin. These ideas, arose in contrast to Calvinism, which taught that God’s will was sovereign, and we were elect or sinners by God’s design, and became popular among Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists. It was those Congregationalist churches, that would one day be some of the first Unitarian churches; by the early 19th century, Unitarianism had converted 9 of Boston’s original 13 orthodox Congregational churches.

Whitefield criticized the puritan style churches of his day saying that Many Bostonians “rest in head-knowledge, are close to Pharisees”[ii] In contrast, this radical new movement, the Great Awakening, was characterized by “Great fervor and emotion in prayer”. Whitefield had grown up in England, and came to America in 1739 to evangelize. He worked here as an Itinerant Methodist preacher (traveling town to town) and is considered by many to be a central figure of the Great Awakening. Whitefield had a powerful preaching style that was quite new to his puritan audiences. He was known to preach out of doors, in part because he commanded crowds of thousands which couldn’t fit into the local churches but certainly also because in England the traditional churches would not allow him to preach within their walls. News reports of the day say that he would preach in a field, on  tree stumps, or even, one report said, on a horse. This was a movement that appealed to the lower classes, who felt that the establishment churches did not speak to them. Whitefield even preached to slaves, which scandalized many in the traditional churches. Evangelicals today believe that the Great Awakening fostered such revolutionary sentiment that it fomented the Revolutionary war.

Whitefield was a preacher who could engender great feelings in his audiences.  David Garrick, then the most famous actor in Britain said of his preaching: "I would give a hundred guineas," he said, "if I could say 'Oh' like Mr. Whitefield." Jonathan Edwards's wife, Sarah, remarked, "He makes less of the doctrines than our American preachers generally do and aims more at affecting the heart. He is a born orator. A prejudiced person, I know, might say that this is all theatrical artifice and display, but not so will anyone think who has seen and known him."

The opposition looked on this with suspicion. One of the folks at the center of that opposition was Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) minister of the First Church Boston (Congregationalist). He championed the  role of reason in religion, and was suspicious of all these expressions of emotion. Chauncey wrote on:

 “The next thing I shall take Notice of, as what I can’t but think of dangerous Tendency, is that Terror so many have been the Subjects of; Expressing itself in strange Effects upon the Body, such as swooning away and falling to the Ground, where Persons have lain, for a Time, speechless and motionless; bitter Shriekings and Screamings; Convulsion-like Tremblings and Agitations, Strugglings and Tumblings, which, in some Instances, have been attended with Indecencies I shan’t Mention; None of which Effects seem to have been … peculiar to some particular Places or Constitutions; but have been common all over the Land…” [iii]

Though Whitefield may have been a particularly skilled orator, the emotional and spiritual passions of  participants in services during the Great awakening movement, including visions and trances, seem to have been wide spread. The preachers would stress the sinful nature of humans and their utter incapacity to overcome this nature without the direct action of the grace of God working through the Holy Spirit. There was a focus, in these services, on the necessity of Conversion or “new birth.”  This conversion would be not a new understand of ideas, but a visceral, emotional, spiritual, transformative experience.

Another hallmark of this movement was the role of Itinerant preachers (often without formal ministerial training). Chauncy retorts:  “Some of these Itinerants, ‘tis evident, have travelled about the Country preaching under the full persuasion of an immediate Call form God; and as to most of them, it may be feared, the grand Excitement, at the Bottom, has been, an overfond Opinion of themselves and an unchristian one of their brethren. It has, therefore been their practice, too commonly , not only to boast of their own superior Goodness, wherever they have gone; but to insinuate suspicions against the fixed pastors, if not to preach against them, and pray for them, as poor, carnal unconverted men.” [in “Epic of Unitarianism p. 52] Chauncy worried about a preacher who “mistakes the workings of his own passions for the divine communications, and fancies himself immediately inspired by the SPIRIT OF GOD, when all the while he is under no other influence than that of an over-heated imagination.” (Robinson p. 12) Ironically one of those Chauncy mentions with suspicion  was “A stranger who has of himself assumed the character of a preacher.” This stranger was John Murray, the founder of the first Universalist church in America.

Another important preacher of the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational minister in Northampton, Mass. He had Studied at Yale, where he read Newton and Locke. He lost the church he served as their minister by stating that “a public profession of saving faith based on the candidate's religious experiences as a qualification not only for Holy Communion but also for church membership.” Dismissed from his church in 1750, got job in Indian mission at Stockbridge. Eventually he became President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1757. He died young from side effects of small pox inoculation. [iv]

What is important about Edwards is his Influence on Congregational and Presbyterian theology. Being a learned man, he was able to put together a Defense of determinism (Calvinism)-- a sort of neo-orthodoxy. He postulated that the notion of Free will undermines god’s sovereignty. He said in his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:"

The world of misery, the lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you...Hell’s gaping mouth [is] wide open, and you have nothing to stand upon or take hold of...It is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up...The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you. You have offended him...0 Sinner! You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe...and burn it asunder. You have nothing to lay hold of to save yourself. There is nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment. [v]

Another who spoke out in opposition to the Great Awakening was Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766). He was the minister of the West Church in Boston (congregational) and was a proponent of that Armenian Liberalism. Said Mayhew “God is a ‘Wise and infinitely gracious being’” by reason “we resemble God Himself.” He preached that Man can choose right and wrong (the central doctrine of Arminianism) and of the Trustworthiness of reason and conscience (a founding principle of American Democracy). Generally the tenants that held together that opposition to the Great Awakening were important tenants for Unitarians throughout our history: The belief in Human goodness and free will, the Unity of God and the importance of using Reason in studying scripture.

Rationalism, Biblicism and moral aspiration- these were the early response to 1^st great awakening. Perhaps for some the cool light of reason was a relief set alongside the heated passion of the revival meetings. For some the use of reason in interpreting the bible restored sure footing in a time when itinerant preachers teaching out of a personal sense of call, imbued with the spirit. And Moral Aspiration- the idea that we could of our own free will choose to do right, is it any wonder that this idea grew in response to the hopelessness of feeling oneself held over a fiery pit on a slender thread “There is nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.”

It turns out there were 4 “great awakenings” all together, and I think the Second Great Awakening (1825-35) had the most direct impact on Universalism. This great awakening was another revival movement that emerged during the early 1800s, This second great awakening was a reaction against rationalism and desire for a church that served the needs of common people. The theology of the second great awakening embodied a transition between Calvinism and Arminianism, expressing a movement from god’s absolute sovereignty to god as “moral governor.” In this theological movement sin is seen now as a result of human action rather than predetermination by an all powerful God. There is still the immanent threat of Hellfire and damnation (which once again figured powerfully in the sermons of this second great awakening) but now the response to this knowledge is for humans to “repent.” It was called “New Haven” theology because of influence of Yale. Once again it was characterized by a  personal, emotional response to god. In Kentucky and Tennessee folks held interdenominational 4 day events called “camp meetings” which attracted thousands of people. The Camp meetings emphasized conversion with singing and shouting and dancing, and  folk style music. And once again Unitarians criticized the emotional displays of the revivals and argued that goodness sprang from gradual character building, not sudden emotional conversion.[vi]

One of the leaders of this movement was Charles Grandison Finney (August 29, 1792 – August 16, 1875) who has been called The Father of Modern Revivalism. He was an extemporaneous preacher, known for his innovations in preaching and religious meetings. For example, he  developed the "anxious seat", a place where those considering becoming Christians could come to receive prayer, and he lead public prayer for people by name. He also bucked the establishment by having women pray in public meetings of mixed gender. Finney was also an abolitionist. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a movement where both women and black persons participated, and a movement where folks were responsible for their own moral choices  would spark social action in areas like temperance and abolitionism. This was something I hadn’t realized -- I hadn’t realized that abolition was an area where liberal and evangelical theologies came together to create change. It makes me wonder how many other times liberals and evangelicals have stood shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for social change. I wonder if it could serve as an important model for us today.

This was not the only powerful religious movement  of the day that swept through Western New York in particular. It is because of this period of religious fervor that the area between Albany and Lake Erie is called the “burned over” region of New York. The term was coined during second great awakening by Charles Grandison Finney, one of those 19^th century evangelicals, who had said that “the area had been so heavily evangelized as to have no "fuel" (unconverted population) left over to "burn" (convert).”

Universalism became a major antagonist of the Second Great Awakening and evangelical culture under the leadership of  the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou. By articulating a doctrine of universal salvation, we pointed out and challenged the Protestant drift away from traditional Calvinist orthodoxy because this idea of repentance actually challenges god’s sovereignty. So in a way, the universalists were the orthodox Calvinists during this period, because they believed that God was still all powerful, but had a loving, rather than a judgmental character.[vii] Between the first and second Great Awakenings, that “stranger” John Murray spread his radical idea through itinerant preaching, and we saw the settlement of the first Universalist churches (including the church of the Restoration in Philadelphia and later UUCAS) Now during the time of the second Great Awakening Universalism grew from the radical fringe to be the 6^th largest denomination in the country, as folks were hungry for an alternative to hellfire preaching. It was during this period that many of the churches in the Pennsylvania Universalist Convention were born.

As 21^st century UUs, we sometimes look at the passion and drama of the revival movements, those “great awakenings” from the vantage point of cool reason. We are proud to bring our rational minds into those most important questions- of who we are, of how we are to live, of how we are saved, and for what we are saved. It feels good to know that we can figure out with our own minds the important truths of life.  But sometimes we look at the passion and inspiration of these evangelical services, both in history and in our neighboring churches, wishing we could have that much heart, that much spirit in our Sunday worship.  A few years back I was teaching a class on “religion and the media” and we showed the clip of a revival meeting from a popular movie. When the clip was over, a number of us said things like “I wish I could feel the spirit like that in worship” but one of our older members who had been a child in Germany at the time of the second world war said “Oh, I don’t like it, it reminds me of the Nazi rallies during the war.”

This is, perhaps, the natural ebb and flow of religion. We become tired of the old established ways, which seem to them boring, stale, bereft of inspiration. We worry that we and our neighbors are following their religions teachings in name only,  that “one would think they were brought thither to be initiated into, rather than to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.” Long to wake up from this spiritual sleepiness, we  long for revival. So we shake off the head-bound sermons of the learned clergy, and sing and dance and yell in a field or on a tree stump.

Sometimes this divide between those who let the heart rule and those who are ruled by the mind, the reason, can be  the deepest divide in religion, perhaps deeper than that of theological conflicts. If we understand and explore both kinds of knowledge, both kinds of spiritual truth, we increase not only our own spiritual wisdom but also our capacity to understand the spirituality, the theology of our neighbors. Our UU faith is not just the cool reason of our enlightenment forefathers. We have also in our history the passionate preaching of our itinerant Universalist forbearers. In fact, this very church, so the story goes, started out as a Baptist church. When an itinerant preacher called Noah Murray began  preaching in this area he drew such crowds that the Rev. Moses Park (minister of the Baptist church here) went to debate with him but was himself  converted and soon his congregation with him”

This morning’s service seems kind of rooted in the head. We sang kind of old timey hymns and talked about our history, (except joys and concerns, which many call the heart of our service) but those were hymns of the great awakening. The words of John Edwards of dangling over hellfire seem strange to us now, but  that same preaching sent folks into visions and trances. Yes sometimes, we are  rooted in our heads, but also in our hearts and in the spirit of life. About a month ago we gathered in a park down the street to sing and dance in celebrate the earth. So Awakening, reviving is not something that can be done once, but is something which must be done again and again, each time we fall into rote routine, each time we fall out of balance whether that be as individuals, as a congregation, or as Unitarian Universalism. Let us always be awakening.

---

[i] Robinson. p. 10- from Whitefield’s journal

[ii] Robinson. p. 11- from Whitefield’s journal

[iii] From Chauncy ”Seasonal thoughts on the state of Religion in New England” cited in  Epic of Unitarianism p. 53

[iv] [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/]

[v] [http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/sermons.sinners.html]

[vi] http://www.sparknotes.com/testprep/books/sat2/history/chapter9section1.rhtml

[vii] [From The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 by Ann Lee Bressler (Religion in America: Oxford University Press) http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/christianity/universalismR.htm]

Catch and Store Energy (April 22, 2012)

Each Summer Eric and Nick and I go to a music festival up in Trumansburg. Because we like to camp, we need to get up and get on the road as early as we can stand that first morning. But no matter how early you get up, as you turn onto the road approaching the festival you will see that the line of cars already waiting at the camping entrance goes farther than the eye can see. So you pull over at the end of that line of cars, turn off your engine, and get our your lawn chairs and your cooler, because you are going to be there for a while. Last year, this coincided with the hottest day of the year, maybe the hottest day in years. In an incredible stroke of luck, at the moment when we pulled up the end of the line was in front of an old old house with a border of old old trees about 10 feet from the road. We threw down a picnic blanket in the abundant shade provided by those trees and lay there reading and daydreaming as the day got hotter and hotter, until some hours later we finally we saw signs of motion up the road and entered the parade of vehicles into the camping section of the fairgrounds. As we crawled along in our station wagon loaded down like modern day pioneers, the hot sun blazed. It turns out there were very few trees on that road old enough, tall enough, with a canopy large enough to block out the mid day sun. We had been the beneficiaries of some wise person, generations ago, who had the foresight to invest in a few saplings, and the vision to see the shade canopy those trees would provide in their maturity to grandchildren or great grandchildren playing on the lawn.

It turns out, once again, that our grandparents were right; it is critically important that we put something away for a rainy day. I remember my grandfather was the one to walk me over to our local bank to help me open a pass-book account when I was just a little girl. I’m pretty sure he gave me $10 to get it started too. Because you all are a fair compensation employer, you make a contribution to my 401K each year so that I will have something tucked away for my retirement. Saving money is one way we “catch and store energy.”

It’s easy for us to forget, however, that money is only a means of exchange for what we really want and need. Eric and I once showed up at an outdoor concert where we were sure they would be selling food, and spent the day with grumbling stomachs wishing we had brought a couple of sandwiches instead of that $20 bill in our pockets. As the bumpersticker goes, “you can’t eat money.” My dad, who lived through the depression, taught me to always have reserves in my pantry as well as emergency savings in the bank. One of the most basic things that the Red Cross recommends people do to prepare for an emergency is to have an emergency preparedness kit- a backpack or trash can filled with things we might need in an emergency- bottled drinking water, shelf stable food, prescription medication – because when there is an emergency just having money in the bank will not get us through a time when basic services have broken down. We have only to remember the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and surrounding communities to know that this is so.

Because this is the last of this year’s sermon series on the “Principles of True Abundance” I want to talk a little bit about how nature catches and stores energy. The most basic form of energy that you and I and everyone being on this planet need is not fuel for our cars or electricity for our computers. It is the energy that runs our own bodies- food. And ultimately our food comes from the sun- the sun’s energy turned by plants into carbohydrates which we, and the animals we eat, turn into fuel. But plants also need good soil to grow. The soil itself is this amazing savings account, storing and transforming all the nutrients that arrive by rain and gravity, and the falling of dead leaves and bodies. All those nutrients of beings who have died become the ultimate inheritance for future generations. When you ask yourself, what is the best form of investment- is it stocks? Is it bonds? Gold? A mutual fund? Really, the best most enduringly valuable investment the best way to catch and store energy, is good fertile soil. Another one of Mother Nature’s good long term savings plans is seed. In these tiny packages not only all the Genetic material to create a highly evolved life forms, but also some really dense nutrition for that seed to start its life. This is why nuts and other seeds are so nutritionally dense, and also so fattening. This is why the great Indian environmental activist (and physicist) Vandana Shiva has devoted so much of her career to creating a seed saving bank, because no matter what the future holds, if you have a diverse collection of seeds and some good rich soil, you can feed your community.

Another of Mother Nature’s really long term savings plans … trees. Trees take carbon, one of the basic building blocks of life, and store it for hundreds, even thousands of years. We talk a lot about “carbon sequestration” when we worry about global climate change, because we know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to the green house effect that dramatically chances our earth’s climate. But Carbon Sequestration is not just about taking carbon out of the atmosphere. David Holmgren, one of the Co-Originators of the Permaculture Concept, reminds us what a great savings account a stand of trees can be. Wood is also a good way to catch and store energy, because not only can be used to fuel fires as humans have done for warmth for over a million years, but because homes, furniture, even battleships have been made from timber until quite recently. Trees also provide shade and habitat for birds (who, you will remember from a few weeks back, are one of nature’s best insecticides). And finally as the leaves fall to the ground or when the trees decompose and all that wealth joins the savings plan that is our humus. When I get my 401K statement in the mail, there is always a reminder to “diversifying my portfolio” Which usually means to have both stocks AND bonds. But they never mention trees. And not just trees, but all perennial plants. We’ve all enjoyed the abundance of our neighbor's rhubarb plot over the years. Rhubarb is a hardy perennial, an investment that pays off every after year as the plants catch and store energy that we enjoy in pie form.

Then of course we must consider water. There can be no life for us without water. And it just falls right out of the sky around here- for anyone to use! Sure we could go to work and earn money and take that money to the store to buy bottled water for our emergency preparedness kit, but we could also build a water catchment system to use now when we water our plants, and also to have a self-renewing source of water should our local wells become contaminated. Creating small catchment systems (which, when mother nature does it we calls lakes or ponds or aquifers) is a great way of putting aside something for when we need it later.

But this year, our series on Principles of True Abundance is not just about how we can let Mother nature teach us practical lessons, like how to make sure there is always enough to eat, but to let Mother Nature be kind of like a scripture for us, to read the bio-systems of our world for wisdom we can use in our own spiritual lives.

For example, have you ever felt burned out? You know you are burned out when you have no energy for the work you are doing, and even though you know you should care, and even though the work may at one time have been something you felt very passionate about, now it just feels like something you have to slog through. A person whose spirit is burnt out is a lot like land that has been over-farmed. All the nutrients were taken out with no system for restoring those nutrients to the soil. Sometimes burnout is caused because we just plain work too hard for too long. Our society really encourages us to do this. In some workplaces seeing a co-working still plugging away at their work at 9:00 pm is considered the sign of a committed worker. In some work places going home before 7 shows that you are kind of a slacker. In most cases your boss doesn’t care if you are living a balanced life, or if you are spending enough time tending your relationships, their job is simply to increase productivity.

Have any of you read the books of Tamora Pierce? She is young adult author who has these great strong heroines. And when the heroine comes for her great battle with evil, she uses every bit of strength she has left, and then passes out. Seriously. Then the heroine wakes up later in a hospital bed or something, and the friend or nurse or teacher who has been caring for her while she was unconscious explains that she has used up all her energy and has been resting, unconscious, for hours or days trying to “get her strength back.” And I always wonder- what if that friend or teacher hadn’t been there to drag her off the battlefield and dress her wounds and keep her safe and dry while she “got her energy back?”

So part of burn out is using up all your energy, but the other part is about not catching and storing energy as you move through life. Where does our spiritual energy come from? It’s different than physical energy, right? I am crazy about the women’s marathon, and when those women finish, even if they can barely walk, they are not “burned out” they are flying high. They are proud and fulfilled even though they are exhausted. So part of catching and storing energy is about giving our energy to something that gives back. For me yoga is one of these things. I often go to yoga at 4:00, which is a time of day when I am normally grumpy and useless. So I go invest a little time in my physical health- in flexibility and strength, and in my spiritual health, by paying attention to my breasting and centering myself. I think of yoga very like the savings club at my son’s elementary school Every Thursday he brings a dollar and his Alternatives Federal Credit Union passbook, and builds his savings a count a little at a time. When I go to yoga I rarely see a big leap in strength or flexibility, but when I look aback over 5 or 10 years I a amazed at the changes I see in what my body can do.

There are also big investments in the spirit. 2 weeks ago I spent the weekend at the Rowe Retreat center with an old professor of mine. It was a weekend filled with “Aha”s that I am still unpacking and that are still feeding my spirit. I realized the other day that my last sabbatical, about 7 years ago, is still providing nutrients and richness for both my spiritual life and my professional life.

One of the best ways I catch and store energy in my own life is by giving energy to my relationships. It is invariably true that the relationships to which I give my time and attention grow and thrive better than those I neglect. And yes, probably that friend I spend so much time with will be there for me if I pass out unconscious after defeating the giant, or when I face one of those staggering losses that life deals out to all of us. But just as importantly, really good healthy relationships feed us as we feed them. And that nourishment is something we can draw on when things get tough. We are more resilient when we are healthy and nourished and strong, and less likely to pass out at the end of that important battle.

One more way we catch and store energy is one we talked about a few weeks back when we discussed the first Humanist Manifesto. They believed very strongly that not only was working for a just world for all the right thing to do, but they also believed that it feeds our spirits and helps us develop as persons. Sometimes, for financial reasons, we have to spend our days building widgets, even if we don’t particularly are about widgets. And if we are leading a balanced life and our work environment is decent this can be fine. But when we are doing work where we believe that we are making a real difference, whether we are paid for this work or do it as volunteers, the meaning of that work feeds us. Moreover, whenever we work for an equitable infrastructure to our world this is also like putting something away for a rainy day for ourselves.

Or consider art, or music. Think of all the hours Beethoven put into writing one of his great symphonies, or the time the Beatles took recording their albums. Every time we hear Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the radio, Every time we go to an art museum, or the library, we are enjoying the fruits of energy caught and stored for our benefit.

One of the keys to catching and storing energy is balance. First a balance between short term yield and long term security. In balance, that family vacation that deepens relationships and creates good memories may be just as good an investment as that same amount of money in a 401K. The other balance is investing in all the different kinds of vitamins and minerals a healthy person needs to live. I have known families where both parents work 50-60 hours a week or even more. They don’t’ have time to make their own food, or clean their own homes. The children are in daycare until 6 every night, or have a nanny to take care of them. And so such a system requires a lot of money to make it go. And all of the energy is being caught and stored in the form of money. I have seen a lot of burn out in communities that demand such long hours at work. But energy could also be stored in the form of a garden where we grow some of our own food, or a big Sunday dinner made from scratch with leftovers in the refrigerator for lunch the following week. Energy could be spent mending clothing instead of earning money to buy new clothing.

Like a tree we catch and store energy in the health of our bodies, in the trunks and branches of the lives we build for ourselves, and in the seeds we grow each year as hope for the future, and ultimately in the layer of humus, the minerals and nutrients that once made up the leaves of a certain season, and now are recycled, decomposed into raw fertility for all life to use, passed down from generation to generation like a family heirloom. This week, as you move through the patterns of your daily life, notice where you are catching and storing energy like a tree, and when energy is running out of your life like rain washing fertility out of un-covered soil. Notice where energy is being caught and stored all around you, like a row of towering shade trees planted by someone as wise as my grandparents.