The Deep Way (January 19, 2014)

I am not sure you can become a Unitarian Universalist minister without knowing at least a few poems by Mary Oliver. When I was in seminary, we used her poetry in worship again and again because it seemed to speak right to our desire to live in the world in a deep way.

One poem we often heard in chapel was “The Summer Day” which ends:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

On first hearing it spoke directly to my most urgent questions about what I was called to do with my life. What better life could I choose than being the minister of a church like this one? “To Serve Lovingly, live ethically and grow spiritually."

And so these past 15 years I have poured myself out into the shared ministry of our faith. I have tried my hand at just about every aspect of church life- I have been a church secretary, a church musician, a youth group leader, a Sunday school teacher. As a minister I’ve washed dishes and visited members in the hospital. I’ve weeded the garden and officiated at weddings. I’ve organized political action and led discussions of biblical criticism. And through it all I learned the hard way that it's not more meetings, more spreadsheets, more programs, or even more skillful preaching that lead to spiritual growth. As some of you dedicated volunteers know, it is possible to spend all of your spare energy serving your church, your community, your principles until you are all used up. If we are only serving lovingly and living ethically without growing spiritually, the quality of our presence, the spark of life we bring to one another sputters and goes out. 

When I shared Mary Oliver’s poem from the pulpit a few months back, I was startled to find a whole new way of looking at this question “What will I do with my one wild and precious life.” There’s nothing in that poem about the work of building up our world, instead she writes:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

What Mary Oliver has chosen to do with her one wild and precious life is "to be idle and blessed."  

I want to acknowledge right now that this is profoundly counter-cultural. As I mentioned in my sermon on “emptiness” last month, we have come to value the worth of our lives by our productivity, by how much we do and the profit therein. But when we seek healing for the broken parts of our world, I don’t feel like we are a few over-time shifts away from repair. I don’t feel, as I walk through the mall, that we are a few more sales away from repairing the environmental damage to our planet, or one more iPad upgrade away from mending the broken hearts in our community.

For millennia, religious community has offered something different than the status quo. The great Unitarian religious educator Sofia Fahs wrote:

"The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship." [ii]

I think this is a great explanation of what we mean by “spiritual growth” in our mission statement. We are growing high, wide and deep. We are looking for the intangibles at the heart of everything.

Like everything of importance in our lives, this deep way takes time and attention. Spirituality doesn’t just happen. Okay, sometimes it does. Sometimes you find yourself gazing at a sunset from the peak of a mountain, or at the hospital bed of a beloved who is suffering and something deep comes to your heart and soul un-bidden. But most days we choose, consciously or unconsciously, whether to take the deep way or to skim along the surface of life.

I submit to you that it is possible to do each and every one of the long list of action items that make up church life without growing a jot. This happens not only when we are “going through the motions” instead of bringing our full self to a task, but it also happens when we confuse the purpose of our task with religious purpose. We can create worship that is excellently prepared, but still does not help us touch the ineffable. We can have meetings that complete every task on the agenda, but that still do not satisfy the longing in the soul. For this is the other part of what I am proposing; it is also possible to do each and every one of that long list of action items that make up church life in a deep way, in a religious way. You get this- this is part of what I love about you- you know the difference between what is important and what is merely urgent. I see you looking for the heart of our shared life together in this beloved community. I see you looking for the deep way.

My seminary professors Bob Kimball and Til Evans used to talk a lot about this-- about that special thing that can happen between people when they are really truly present with one another, something deep and real. We don’t have complete control over when and how this will happen but, as Bob used to say, we can do things that “increase the odds” that such moments will occur. This, they felt, was the essence of the religious life, the essence of ministry. Sometimes, as a clergy person, I forget that it matters more HOW we are at a meeting, than WHAT we accomplish. I notice that the busier I am, the more things on my to-do list, the easier it is to forget. My attention strays from the needs of the soul to the needs of the agenda. That is part of the reason that ministers take a study leave in the summer and a sabbatical every few years--creating a space that “increases the odds” of authentic, real, presence.

And of course, ministers are no different than any other person when it comes to the need for deep, authentic, relationship. It’s not just ministers and academics (and I hear now researchers at Google take sabbaticals). Everyone needs the time and the space to connect to the deepest wellsprings of life. Every soul needs space and time to develop. Every spirit needs room to grow. That is to say, as a Universalist, I believe that no one comes into this world cut off from their one-ness. We are all part of this amazing unity that is life, though sometimes it’s easier to remember that than other times. I believe therefore, I take the Universalist leap, that true religion must be accessible to each and every person. The religious life, life on the deepest level is by this definition something that every living being is connected to. Living a religious life is about our attempt to renew that connection to our one-ness with all that is.

I believe with Fahs that “The religious way is the deep way.” So I hypothesize that to find the “heart of every intangible thing” you go deeper and deeper until you reach the point where everything actually is one. Go so deep that there is not even the distinction of “this is a religious life and that is not” or “this is me but that is not me.” Seeking such a level of being is, to my mind, the essence of both the Unitarian tradition — the one-ness of God, and the Universalist tradition — the one-ness of our common plight.

Many people have asked what I will be doing on my sabbatical, and the training I will be doing in Spiritual Direction is just part of the answer. A better answer is that I want to go deep. Recently I mentioned to some friends that in addition to taking a leave from my usual work here in this congregation, I will be taking a break from all the committees on which I volunteer in the community as well. They were amazed-- Darcey without committee meetings? My partner Eric said “I don’t think I’ve ever known you when you didn’t have committee meetings.” A friend said “I’m looking forward to getting to know what you are like when you have no committee meetings.” I replied “me too!” What will this look like? I’m not totally sure. If I’ve learned nothing else about trying to follow the deep way it is that the first step is letting go of expectations, letting go of attachment to the outcome.

The spiritual adventure can look many different ways, it can take many different forms. It can look sometimes like sitting in meditation, and other times like weeding a garden or being fully present in conversation with a toddler. It takes patience and a persistent curiosity to penetrate beyond the surface of things to the deep well-spring at the source of life. 

Raised as we have all been in a culture that measures our value by our productivity, I must reassure myself that restoring, nurturing, lighting my soul with this in mind is not insular and selfish, but is one of the critical pieces of co-creating a religious community like ours, and co-creating our world through these troubled times. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in her “Letter to a Young Activist”:

“...One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ... causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.”[iii]

 If we believe that a soul who is “fully lit” is important to our world, then we must give whatever time and attention is necessary to “shine like gold in dark times.” As far as I know I am the only person in this congregation who is headed off on sabbatical this spring (and I am deeply deeply grateful to you for this gift of time to re-ignite my own soul) but I invite each of you, as you are willing and able, to follow the deep way, the religious way. While washing the dishes, while meeting in committee. I invite you to taking time for contemplation or to fall down in the grass-- to be idle and blessed. To “see what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon.”

Endnotes:
[i] http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2012/06/in-honor-of-the-solstice-mary-olivers-the-summer-day.html
[ii] Sophia Lyon Fahs, Today's Children and Yesterday's Heritage, from Cornerstones, p.5. [iii] http://mavenproductions.com/index.php/services/dr-clarissa-pinkola-estes/dr-clarissa-pinkola-estes-letter-to-a-young-activist-during-trou/ 

Boundaries, Membranes and Walls (January 5, 2014)

Part 1

In the beginning, okay not really the beginning, but 4 billion years ago when the earth had cooled enough for rocks to harden and for water to settle into oceans, life first emerged on earth. How amazing! We can’t really know exactly what happened in those early days of life on earth. All scientists can do is create theories based on the geological evidence that we do have and the life that survives today. We know that due to the tremendous creativity of life, many forms of being emerged and only a fraction thereof survive. Today, in honor of Evolution Weekend, we honor this incredible journey we share with all living things.

First, as the story goes, simple organic molecules began to emerge, chains of simple nucleotides. While scientists haven’t been able to exactly replicate conditions on the early earth, back in the 1950s a scientist called Stanley Miller showed that when electric sparks were discharged into water containing the building block elements, organic molecules would emerge. [i] Then RNA evolved – chains of nucleotides that could reproduce its own patterns and pass these patterns on to offspring. Now the base molecules of life could learn and remember and grow. Those patterns that were most successful in the conditions of that early earth would continue to reproduce themselves. Other patterns that were less effective at surviving or replicating would fade into extinction.

One of the patterns that emerged was to for the genetic material to be enclosed in a cell membrane made up of chains of hydrocarbons- they were similar to modern bacteria. This was so effective that it quickly outpaced the “naked” molecules- those without membranes. This is successful because without a membrane to keep the enzymes you produce for yourself, those enzymes will tend to get co-opted by your neighbors- as if all the neighboring molecules are parasites. A cell with a membrane, on the other hand, can keep its enzymes all for itself. Having a membrane also meant that the contents of the cell could be different from the outside environment- helping these complex molecules remain stable. [ii]

I know on a cold week like this one you have thought a lot about how to stay warm. The thing is it’s much easier to STAY warm than to GET warm. We all know the difference between a well-sealed house on a cold day. Imagine if we opened the doors and windows right now- all the heat we’ve generated here inside would vanish in a few minutes. This was the evolutionary benefit that made those first cells so successful. But we have to open the doors to let in everyone who wants to come to services. So we need not walls, but permeable membranes.

We call those early forms “proto-cells” because they were so much simpler than many of the cells that make up living beings today. These early cells continued to evolve, becoming more complex like the ones in your body today. It took 2 billion years for those proto-cells to involve into new more complex cells, we call eukaryotic because they have all their genetic material separated from the cytoplasm by yet another membrane around the nucleus- this is called the nuclear envelope. (Karyon is the root word meaning “nut” or “kernel”) All the cells in your body today are eukaryotic, and so each has at least 2 membranes.

These cell membranes are not impermeable barriers; they have the job not only of keeping things out but also of letting things in . And the important job of knowing the difference. [iii]

 About 700 million years ago the first multi-cellular beings evolved. The first multi-celled organisms looked something like modern algae, or worms or jellyfish. There are several theories of how this happened, but the most prevalent says that and first they were just a loose affiliation of identical cells, that over many generations began to divide up the work of the colony, and those cells began to evolve in a way that optimized their form to optimize their job. Your human body has about 200 different kinds of cells! These multi-celled organisms developed membranes of their own. Your body has 5 types of membrane- the most obvious being the skin- the “cutaneous” membrane.[iv]

As we heard in our opening reading from the “Journey of the Universe” these membranes, whether the most primitive or the most sophisticated, these are where “the capacity for discernment resides.” Pretty amazing, to think of your tiny little microscopic cells being capable of discernment, and realizing that this is a quality they share with ancestors 4 billion years ago.

Part 2

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall” writes the poet Robert Frost. I feel this too. As a person who is looking for the religious life, the deep life, I am constantly challenging myself to break down walls in my own heart and mind. I want to be more patient, more giving, more generous. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” they seem almost contrary to our UU values of openness, service, growth. But I have learned the hard way that as for those early proto-cells, good membranes are life-promoting, are crucial for our health and for the integrity of self.

Endocrinologist Hans Selye, who made his name studying biological stress, quipped:

“At first sight, it is odd that the laws governing life’s responses at such different levels as a cell, a whole person, or even a nation should be so essentially similar”

So I propose that some of those same principles that apply to cell membranes are true for the human being, and for the human community- that to be healthy each of us need permeable membranes. Or, that in community, as Robert Frost says “Good walls make good neighbors.”

Now of course a membrane is not a wall- it is much more sophisticated. A membrane does more than just keep cows in and keep neighbors out. The most healthy successful boundaries are a delicate balance of strong and permeable. Finding this balance is a perennial struggle for individual and society alike. The tension between liberal and conservative religions, between liberal and conservative politics is often said to be the tension between love and the law. Liberals tend to lean heavily on the idea that “love is all you need” and conservatives tend to lean on the idea that tougher laws, tougher punishments create safety and justice. In reality, the evolution of life on this planet shows that an organism without any membrane is quickly out-survived by one with a membrane. And on the other side of the polarity, a being surrounded by an impermeable membrane will suffocate and die. The question is not really whether open is better than closed, but what is the delicate balance that keeps us most healthy and life-giving.

Let’s review the jobs of a membrane and see how we can use this living text to inform our daily lives.

The first job of a membrane is to keep things out. When you shower, for example, some of the water is absorbed by the top layers of the skin (your cutaneous membrane) but doesn’t penetrate into the body. There is a lot of controversy right now about which chemicals do penetrate through the skin into the body. But big things, like marbles, or cookie crumbs, or most if not all the water in your shower stay outside your membrane all-together, or don’t get any deeper than the outer layer of the membranes. But skin is not an impermeable wall. Some things do get through – like oleoresins of certain plants (like poison ivy and poison oak), or the salts of heavy metals such as lead,[v]

In our bodies different kinds of membranes are more or less permeable. Remember when everyone was unsure how people contracted HIV and aids? People were afraid to hug or even shake hands with people who were infected. Later we learned that the skin is a good barrier against transmission, but mucus membranes are not. This is why people contacted aids from infected dentists or sex partners.

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out”

Sometimes liberals err on the side of making their boundaries too permeable. We are a hopeful people and want to believe that we can trust everyone. But the ability to say “no” to what is unhealthy for us is part of being a loving community. I love marbles as much as the next person, but I’m glad my skin keeps them outside my body. Being able to say “no” to things in the environment is critically important to survival. I can lock my door and choose who to let into my house. I can say no to physical and sexual abuse. I can choose to spend time with healthy people who help me be a whole person, and limit the time I spend with people who make me feel less than whole. I can even choose what issues and concerns I am going to let in and make my own, and which I am going to keep outside of myself. And I can change from day to day, year to year, what I let in and what I keep out.

The next job of boundaries is to take things in. We have to breathe. We have to eat. But we need to exclude poison and disease in the food we eat and the air we breathe. On the human scale, we also need information, we need relationships. Sometimes we err on the side of boundaries that are too rigid and we don’t take in enough from outside to allow us to thrive. It’s not hard to find examples in the news of people who simply will not allow new ideas into their minds, and so operate within a paradigm that denies them some of the information they need to effectively live in the real world. Okay, we all do this from time to time. We resist new ideas, ideas that are radically different from how we believe the world to be. But healthy systems tend to let in new ideas pretty freely. Our boundaries are the mechanism through which we discern what ideas will nourish us and which will make us sick.

Let’s extend this idea to relationships. On one end of the spectrum are people who close themselves off to friends and family, isolating themselves with rigid impermeable boundaries. At the other extreme are people who will let anyone into their lives, even people who will use or abuse them. Having good boundaries is about discernment- is this idea food, or is it poison? Is this relationship one that will help me grow and thrive, or one that will eat away at me?

The third job of boundaries is to excrete. After we take something in, we integrate the parts we need and excrete the rest. The word Excrete comes from the root cernere, which means “to separate.” It reminds me of the story of the two monks:

Once there were two monks traveling when they arrived at a river. At the river they discovered a woman struggling to get across. Without a second thought, the older of the two monks asked the woman if she needed help, then swiftly picked her up and carried her across to the other bank.

It should be understood that for monks, especially in ancient times, any contact with the opposite sex would be strongly frowned upon, if not forbidden. The actions of the older monk greatly troubled the younger monk, who allowed his feelings to fester for several miles while they continued their journey.

Finally, the younger monk confronted the older monk, "How could you have done such a thing? We are not even supposed to be in a woman's presence, but you touched her, carried her even!"

The older monk calmly replied, "I put that woman down miles ago, back at the river. But you are still carrying her."[vi]

In this story, the young monk’s boundaries are so rigid they do not allow him to help a woman in need, the older monk has boundaries that are permeable enough to allow him to transgress a taboo when it is the compassionate thing to do, and then to let go of the experience when it is time.

Even with our good friends, our favorite books or TV shows, healthy boundaries allow us to take in what we can use, and separate that which is not useful, or which is toxic, and to let go of it. With a family, within a community, things happen which makes us mad, or ashamed, or sad. If we allow it to sit inside us and festers it can make us sick. But healthy boundaries allow us to let things go that are no longer useful to us.

The final thought about boundaries. Apparently “the surface of the plasma membrane carries markers that allow cells to recognize one another, which …plays a role in the “self” versus “non-self” distinction of the immune response. “[vii] So boundaries help us tell the difference between “self” and “non-self.” When you are part of a group, sometimes we get overwhelmed or seduced by the dynamics of the group. This is the teenager who does something she would normally never do because “everyone was doing it.” This is the employee who does not notice that the demands of his work conflict with his ethics because it is “just the way things are done.” This is the family member who gets sucked into a holiday conflict that doesn’t really involve him. Systems Theory folks agree, the most important way to have healthy systems is to have strong individuals with have a strong sense of self. The teenager who says “hey guys, I don’t think that’s a good idea” not only protects herself, but may in fact help the group a reconsider a risky decision. The family member who says “That’s between Bob and Susan, I’m not getting involved” will not only reduce his own holiday stress, but may help the whole family become less anxious. Remember, even on the cellular level having a membrane means that the contents of the cell could be different from the outside environment. Good boundaries are like permeable membranes, they allow us to be in a chaotic environment and remain stable. They allow us to change and grow without disintegrating.

Throughout my life I have wondered “is love really all you need?” Now I think the answer is “love and boundaries are all you need.” Having boundaries is not contrary to love, they are part of being a good person and leading a generous, loving, compassionate, life. Every living thing on earth has at least one membrane allowing it to be who it is in a chaotic world. To be good neighbors we need not “good walls” but semi-permeable boundaries that support wholeness, and that allow us to let in all we need to thrive and grow and evolve.

---

[i] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/

[ii] http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIE2bDetailsoforigin.shtml

[iii] <https://www.boundless.com/biology/structure-and-function-of-plasma-membranes/components-and-structure/introduction/>

[iv] http://www.livestrong.com/article/209913-basic-types-of-membranes/

[v] http://faculty.etsu.edu/forsman/integument.htm

[vi] http://www.examiner.com/article/buddhist-parables-a-story-of-two-monks

[vii] <https://www.boundless.com/biology/structure-and-function-of-plasma-membranes/components-and-structure/introduction/>

 

 

Emptying (December 15, 2013)

I was at a committee meeting here at the church just this week, and each person, during the check-in, mentioned how busy they were; they felt scattered, overwhelmed by all that was on their plates. It’s not an unusual thing to hear at check-in, especially not during this time of year. Many of us have holiday traditions that require preparation, on top of the usual business of repairing the furnace, putting snow tires on the car, doctor’s visits, meeting deadlines at work, or volunteer projects we give our time to. If you are in school there are probably some kind of end-of-semester projects or tests.

On top of these very real demands on our time, there are the ones that come at us through the media. The whole world seems to have a lot of things I need to do right away, most of them at the mall. Economists and reporters call this “The holiday shopping season” because it accounts for between 20 percent and 40 percent of typical retailers' total annual sales.[i] This time of year I get a staggering number of e-mails from retailers insisting that I “Shop now and save” alerting me to “One day only special offers” to “get them now before they are gone. My inbox is also full of e-mail from non-profits who are needing end-of-year donations or end of congressional season action, whose subject lines all end with exclamation points.

Let’s interrupt that. This season, this “dark of winter” is a time of emptying and letting go. The trees have dropped their leaves, and now we have a wide open view of the sky. In the Christian tradition Advent is a time of emptiness, a time of waiting. A time of “emptying ourselves of ourselves” [ii] A time to remember that there is a value not only in the many things we choose to do each day, and the many things we never get around to and possibly feel guilt or regret that we just couldn’t cram them into our already full lives, but there is also value in empty spaces and places. As the Buddhist saying goes “Don’t just do something, sit there!”

 Some of you were part of our fall adult RE offering “Spirit of Life” in which we provided a period of time for each person to share, and if they didn’t to use all their time, we would just sit in silence until the bell rang. The first session it was really weird. We kind of looked at each other, or at the floor, not sure what to do-- not sure how to be in those empty gaps. But over the 5 weeks we met together, we grew comfortable with those silences. We noticed how special it was to share silent times with one another, and then to share from that deep place of contemplation.

When I attended the first intensive retreat at the Linwood Center [this is part of the training to become a spiritual director in which I am enrolled for this next year] they told us that our training was to be contemplative in focus- that contemplation “is rediscovering your true self, your real identity, which has been buried and forgotten in the depths of our unconscious. Contemplation “ moves us out of a personal point of view, away from ego through the True Self.” But a Contemplative way of being in the world is different than the usual way of things in our culture. As a culture we believe very strongly that work, productivity, profit are the measures of our worth as persons. So contemplation is, therefor, countercultural. In our very first session our teacher Don talked about the barriers that come between us and contemplation. I want to lift four of those up for us today:

1) “Doing over being- This is want we were talking about before. Our culture is centered around “productivity, achievement, honor and success. Being for itself has diminished in value. Busyness leaves no gaps.”

2) “Noise- There is a constant background of noise so silence is more and more foreign, strange and disturbing”

3) “Technological imperialism- Technology has quickened our expectations creating an inability to wait” we have come to “seek immediate gratification.”

4) “Excessive restlessness-“ it is like there is a “hungry wolf inside who” consumes “whatever space exists.” We are uncomfortable with gaps and in-between spaces, so the restless wolf gobbles them up.

I recognized myself in this list. 

So the whole retreat was set up with these principles in mind. We ate breakfast in silence each morning. There was a kind of quiet that permeated the place. The schedule, though our seminar times overflowed with useful information and discussion about the practicalities of spiritual direction, had surprisingly large gaps in it. Breaks between sessions or activities would often be an hour or two long. Gaps were left in worship, in lecture, just moments of silence where we would just… wait, for whatever might come.

By the second day, what had seemed to be awkwardly long pauses now seemed very full to me, very important and precious. By the fifth day I felt a clarity about what I wanted and needed for my life, but also an open-ness to whatever might come. I felt both full and empty, still and peaceful, and with a renewed energy for life. All that business, all that chatter of the mind, tends to keep us from reaching the depth of things. When we are too full of doing it ruffles the surface of the water, and it makes it hard to see down into the depths. It keeps us from noticing our true nature, it keeps us from what we really need. This kind of emptying the mind and heart that we practiced at Linwood allowed the wisdom of that “still small voice” to emerge, a voice too quiet to be heard above the daily bustle. 

By emptying we also make space for the “other,” the unexpected. I remember one afternoon many years ago I was headed down to the marina to enjoy an afternoon off. I had intentionally kept this time unscheduled- leaving space for whatever might arise. As I neared the marina, I saw a car stopped in the middle of the street. The driver had jumped out to help a small dog who had wandered into the middle of this busy 4 lane road. I pulled over to see if my help was needed. In fact, this fellow was late for whatever was next in his day, and was very grateful when I offered to take the dog in my own car, my afternoon suddenly given an unexpected purpose. 

Emptying also allows us to learn and change and grow. Like the scholar in our story this morning, if our cup is too full, there is no room for any new ideas about the universe to enter in. Each of us has learned many things on our journey thus far, whether from academic journals or in the laboratory of life. Paradoxically, the more experience and knowledge we have amassed, the easier it is to forget that there are infinitely complex variables at work in the world. That each person is radically different, that each moment is fresh and new. In reaching for what we expect, we often forget to make room for all that is unexpected, all that is undiscovered. Sometimes someone dear to me will say “You’re not listening to me!” and I will realize that I am making assumptions about that they are saying, where they are coming from. (Has this ever happened to you? That you feel like no matter what you say, the person you are talking to has already heard what they want to hear, and you are talking to a brick wall?) If I can remember to empty my cup, to stop and say – “okay, try again. I’m really listening this time” I empty my cup of some of my preconceptions and try to hear something new, a deeper communication, a deeper relationship is possible. To truly be in conversation, we have to empty ourselves first, so there is room to hear something new.

A few years back I had the great gift of hearing author Thomas Moore speak at a minister’s convocation. He spoke about the “emptiness parables” in the Gospel of Thomas like [97] in which:

“Jesus says: "The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman who takes a vessel of flour and sets out on a long road. The handle of the vessel broke: the flour spilled out on the road behind her without her knowing it and stopping it. When she arrived at the house she put the vessel down and found it was empty." [iii]

He said the Gospel of Thomas is full of such parables about emptiness, and how at this time in his life, emptying was his core practice because “what you don’t know leads you to God.” What did he mean by that? Well, partly what we’ve been saying, that we can’t hear the deepest wisest parts of ourselves when our lives and minds are too cluttered. He also meant that we can’t really listen for something other than our own selves if we don’t make room first. And in his view, God is by definition “other” than us. When we are seeking for God, we are seeking for something that satisfies, that soothes, that endures beyond our experience of daily-ness, otherwise we would not be seeking. Whether we believe in a Transcendent God, or are instead seeking our truest deepest Self, he and many other wise religious scholars and practitioners advise us to begin our search at the edge of what we don’t know. Once we have decided we Know the Truth, we have constructed a false idol, because God, the Self, the universe is an ever changing, living, growing process. Once we pin it down, we have lost something crucial. Moore said that Zen, the emptying process of Zen Buddhism , is about not making an idol of anything. 

Then he said “life will empty you out all the time” through losing a job, through divorce and that “that emptiness really creates soul.”

Wow. That was not what I was thinking of as emptying. But he is saying that when we get into our familiar grooves, our habits of mind, we begin to feel comfortable that our teacup full. We think we know all we need to know to make sense of the universe. We see what we expect to see. It is sometimes through loss, through these often painful losses, when our cup spills, cracks, that we realize how much we don’t know. Now there is room for something new to enter in. Sometimes even a painful loss opens our eyes to some important new truth.

As we wait in this darkest time of year, let us allow something deeper, something more important than “the holiday shopping season.” Let us be grateful for the gaps and in-between times instead of rushing to fill them up. Let this be a time of emptying our hearts and minds -- a time of listening. May we find here a return to our deepest, truest self. And always the possibility that something new may enter in.

 Endnotes

[i] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/12/13/2013-holiday-shopping-season-10-surprising-statistics/ 10 Surprising Stats About the 2013 Holiday Shopping Season by Selena Maranjian Dec 13th 2013 5:00AM

 [ii] http://www.catholic.org/clife/advent/story.php?id=53354 “Prepare the Way for the Lord: Why We Celebrate Advent” By Deacon Keith Fournier 12/2/2013

 [iii] http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas/gospelthomas97.html 

Language of Reverence: Queer (November 17, 2013)

Story for All Ages

I think most of you probably know a story about a family of ducks, where all of the children were yellow and fluffy, except one which was sort of a subdued earth tone with a long skinny neck. He was not very attractive by duck standards, so they called him … yell it out if you know?

Well, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if those ducks had gone to the kind of church where the children’s teacher might have heard the mean things they were saying to that different looking duck, and said:

“you don’t have to be yellow to be beautiful,
a long skinny neck is just as beautiful as a short thick one.

But more importantly, Dave, the one you call the ugly duckling, is caring, and funny, and helps take care of the lake he lives in. His outsides don’t really tell you much about who he is.”

And even though all of you are yellow and fluffy,
that doesn’t mean you are all the same inside.

Why don’t we each share something that makes us different and special.”

And maybe then the ducks would have understood
how important it is that each person is unique,

The moral of my story was best said by one of my professors, Elis Farajaje-Jones "None of us is just like everybody else. We don’t have to be like everybody else to be guaranteed the right to safe and whole existences. We want to create a world where everyone is able to discover and define and live by who they are, who they are becoming, with the option to change several times throughout the course of their lives. "

Sermon
Maybe a decade ago I used the word “Queer” in a public meeting to describe myself. One of the members of my congregation came to me afterwards and admonished me “NEVER use the word queer about yourself- you don’t have to put yourself down like that.”

Her comment shocked me into remembering that for many people “Queer” is a sticky word. But for me it is just right. As a bisexual woman married to a man, I have always felt that both the words “gay” and “straight” didn’t fit right; either word felt a little dishonest. I’m also not crazy about the word “bisexual” – not only does it sound kind of clinical, but it doesn’t sound like you can be monogamous when you’ve got the prefix for “2” right in the word there.

When one of my seminary professors, who name was then Elias Farajaje-Jones, delivered the Sophia Fahs Lecture in 2000 (the lecture is named after the famous UU religious educator) I had just made the choice to enter into the Ministry of Religious education, which many people perceive as kind of a marginal sort of ministry that involves mostly cutting out construction paper shapes and lining up magic markers. When Elias delivered his lecture “Queer(y)ing Religious Education: Teaching the R(evolutionary S9ub)V(ersions)! Or Relax!... It’s Just Religious Ed” it was like some walls I had in my mind came crumbling down. I suddenly knew that I was a queer person doing a queer ministry. I knew that the ministry of Religious Education is not tame and marginal to our movement, but radical, revolutionary and at the core of religious formation as Unitarian Universalists.

So what do I mean by “Queer” in this expanded context? First, queer means “non-normative.” We have been raised to believe that some things are “normal” and other things are “not normal.” We get the message every day that being straight is normal, being white is normal, being able-bodied is normal, being middle-class is normal. (Or if you watch a lot of tv it starts to seem like being rich is normal). Living in this valley we start to get the impression that being Christian is normal, being politically conservative is normal. When I use the word “queer” I mean anything that defies those norms.

When the Gay and Lesbian rights movement started here in the US, those brave activists were fighting to add “Gay” to the possible categories that a person could be. So we had “Gay” and “straight” – expanding the number of norms to 2. It’s even in our Hymnal [sing] “we are Gay and Straight together” Then the Bisexual folks came along and said “Actually…” Our thinking has evolved as we realized that not only is straight not “normal” but there is no “normal” way to be gay. Being a person who identifies as bisexual, I don’t want my own third box, I want to queer all those norms. I want to have room to be whoever it is I really am. Dr. Farajaje said that day: “Heterosexual identity exists only by virtue of defining itself as the norm over against queer deviation. But if there really is no norm, then there aren’t really any deviations. We’re all then just a big mix of possibilities of desire just waiting to happen!” [p. 29]

I am reminded of a song by that great singer-songwriter Ani Difranco:

when I was four years old
they tried to test my I.Q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong

We were all taught at a young age to assume that if there is 3 of one thing it is “normal” and whatever is different “does not belong”. What I am trying to suggest that not only can the pear take pride in being “queer” but that oranges are not normative.

My fruit analogy is breaking down quickly, so let’s look at Race for example. Scientists tell us that race is not biological, but an intellectual construct. In American we often talk about race by dividing it into two neat categories “White” and “People of Color” even though we know that, for example, Irish immigrants used to be considered non-white and are now considered white. We know that President Obama is of mixed race, he is often referred to as the first Black president. What if we changed the way we thought about race to acknowledge that there is no such thing as “racial purity” -that we are all racially queer? It was only in the year 2000 that the US Census allowed people to check more than one box under “race”, that people didn’t have to choose one part of themselves and discard the rest.

Moreover, Dr. Farajaje is proposing, with many others in cultural theory, that gender, sexuality, race, class, whether we are temporarily able bodied, “These things are inseparable for us; we cannot and will not pull these apart without doing irreparable violence to our very bodies, souls, and minds.” [p. 26] He calls this “Intersexionality.” All the parts of who we are intersect. In our adult RE class last spring I invited all the participants to write down 5 identity words for themselves. People wrote things like “White, gay, mother, UU, able-bodied, male” Many of us struggled with the exercise- how do you know which 5 to pick? No matter what words you pick you are leaving out part of yourself.

Each of those words describes a whole multiplicity of ways of being. For example, how many of you self-identify as “white”? Now look around at all the different ways there are of being “white” --what Dr. Farajaje might call “multiplicities of whiteness”. Or let’s take another one- If you are willing to out yourself as identifying “temporarily able-bodied” please raise your hand. Look how many different bodies this describes! There are multiplicities of being temporarily able-bodied.

By looking at the world, at one another, in this complex, intersexional, holistic way, I propose that we are doing something radical. We are interrupting that conversation about “which one is different and does not belong” We are interrupting norms, we are breaking walls and boxes. Scholars in the field of cultural studies love to use words like “interrupting” or “interrogating” which to me is describes the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls the curtain back and we see the “wise and powerful Oz” as he really is- an ordinary man from Kansas who got lost. These boxes, these walls, these definitions of who we are and what is normal are not divinely given, which becomes clear as we pull back the curtain to see how they work and where they come from. This we can call “Queering” the conversation, because we are creating that space not defined by walls and boxes.

This is a dangerous act. Today we honored transgender people who have been victims of violence. Gender theorists believe this violence arises because our culture finds it so threatening that anyone lives outside the two-box gender system- male and female. We also honored those who took their own lives because it was too painful not to be able to fit easily into the two boxes our society defines… to painful to live in a culture which asks “Which one is different and does not belong.” I call us to interrupt this conversation, to “queer” this conversation by saying “everyone is different, and everyone belongs!”

That is why Queering the conversation is also healing. Back when I was doing the internship every UU minister has to do in a hospital, I worked in the outpatient Cancer center. A kind, wise, circumspect woman I had the privilege of talking with told me: “my doctors don’t treat me, they treat people like me, that is --people with cancer.” It is hard to heal when people don’t see you, they just see a box. When her treatment wasn’t working like it should, when she had unusual side effects, or when she wanted treatment alternatives, she was constantly banging up against the walls of that box “Cancer patient.” I suspect every one of us has some part of our self that does not fit neatly into boxes-- some part of ourselves that does not look like the images we see on TV or in the movies. This leads us to feel “broken” or “incomplete” or “damaged” or “abnormal.” By radically acknowledging all that we are, we become whole just as we are. By radically affirming that each and every one of us belongs, our communities are made whole.

For me, reframing myself from “not-really straight and not-really gay” to someone who was perfectly and completely queer filled me with a sense of pride and belonging. To hear that my non-normative call to the Ministry of Religious Education was still at the heart of ministry, to hear that I was not giving up my radical, questioning revolutionary self to in taking on “religious Educator” as part of my identity was so healing and affirming. This reframing helped me realize that I didn’t have to throw away the box called “religious Educator” to enter a box called “parish minister” when I came to this congregation, because religious education is not just something that happens upstairs with children, if we let it out of its box, it is happening right here, right now.

When I was in the process of applying to seminary, I sent away for the catalogs for the 3 uu seminaries. I looked over the high gloss brochure from Harvard and noticed that there was a page about their “women’s studies” department. I read the brochure from Starr King and I noticed that women and queer people didn’t have their own department, they were right there in the body of the catalog. As Dr. Farajaje, who joined the Starr King faculty when I was in my last year at the school, writes about his approach to teaching “Each class that I teach, whether it be liberating the Bible for UUs , African Religious in Diaspora, or the Divine Feminine in Russian Orthodox religious thought is taught in a way that calls us to continually and simultaneously consider issues of race, class, gender, embodiment, environmental issues, cultural representations, sexualities etc. These are not treated as peripheral considerations.”

We often wonder “what is UU?” Members of every congregation I’ve ever served have come to me and said “Can I really be UU because I am … in the armed forces, republican, Christian, a person of color, transgender, Jewish, pagan, atheist, undecided?” “Do I fit in this UU Box?”

This, I believe, is part of our calling as Unitarian Universalists in the 21st century. Let this church be a place where you don’t have to leave your sexual orientation at the door, you don’t have to leave your financial situation at home, you don’t have to leave your body at home. Theology, spirituality is not something that hovers above the body, but I believe it is deeply embedded, imminent in everything that we are. We are all part of one interdependent web of life. From the very first days of Universalism we were rejecting the two-box system (the elect and the rest of us who were damned) We reject the two box system of heaven and hell. We reject the two box system of God and the Devil. Back in 1805, the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou suggested:

Is [God] not perfectly joined to his creation? Do we not live, move and have our being in God? …to take the smallest creature from him, … you have left something less than infinity.” (Treatise on Atonement p. 81-82)

We believe in a God who can hold all our queerness, all our multiplicities.

Our Unitarian Tradition has always been one that looks behind the curtain, to see who is defining the parameters, who is making the boxes into which we are asked to fit. Our Unitarian Tradition challenges us to open our minds beyond the conventional ways of looking at things. Our Universalist Tradition challenges us to open our hearts to hold every being in the oneness of the divine.

This is why I propose to your with great pride, that ours is a queer theology. Or perhaps that in this ambitious tradition we stand in, we are “queering” theology. We are “queering” church. We have talked about many words over this past year that constitute for us a “Language of Reverence.” I humbly suggest that we add “queer” to this list, because it honors something special about the radically inclusive place we strive to occupy among religious communities, and because it honors the wholeness of each and every one of us; all that we are, and all that we bring.

Gun Violence: A Dialogue (November 3, 2013)

Note- This sermon was part of a dialogue. A member of the congregation spoke first about the right to bare arms, then I spoke, then he spoke about the responsability for safety, then I spoke again. I will try to encourage him to consolidate his remarks in writing so they can be included here.

First Reflection

I remember walking home from the bus stop with one of the older girls from my elementary school. I can’t remember how the conversation started, but I remember her asking:

“Would you kill someone if you had a gun, and they had a gun, and you knew if you didn’t kill them they would kill you?”

“No” I said.

She pushed again- disbelieving: “But they will kill you if you don’t shoot them.” As a kid prone to night terrors, I could easily picture the scary man with the gun.

“No” I said “I would never kill anyone for any reason.” It’s surprising to me today that I came to have such strong pacifist convictions at such an early age.

Later, in I was in high school, I remember learning about the Vietnam war from my freshman history teacher who was a veteran of that war. When he taught us about conscientious objectors, I knew that was who I aspired to be (a moot point since there was no draft, and women were not allowed in combat back then anyway.) This right seemed so precious to me- the right to be a pacifist, to refrain from bearing arms.

When I was in seminary, I heard that story about the general and the zen master. This seemed to me to be the pinnacle of Buddhist practice- to face peacefully whatever life presented to you, even if it be a violent threat against your life.

So the position I take about the proliferation of guns in America will not surprise you. I read the Literature review by the Harvard school of Public Health, and see that in study after study there is a direct relationship between the availability of guns and homicide. Across geographic area, across age, across economic class, the more guns that are available the more people die by gun violence. We choose not to have a gun in our home, and I prefer to live in a community where there are limits on access to guns.

When I was young I looked at that famous photo of pacifists putting daisies in the gun barrels of the national guard, and wanted to believe that “love is all you need.” I still believe that sometimes such a tactic does work to de-escalate a violent situation. But I also believe the presence of those guns in such situations were part of what escalated a moment at Kent State University from one of civil unrest into the violent death of 5 unarmed students shot and killed, and 9 others wounded, one of them paralyzed forever. Thinking about Kent State now with 4 decades of hindsight, it is clear that love is not all you need. Today I want us to think carefully about bringing guns into volatile situations because they seem to be too easily used.

I believe that pacifists have an important role in our world- a role I feel called to. A colleague once told the story, probably apocryphal, about a teacher who asked her students to gather in a circle. The students were invited to pass a touch around the circle, from student to student. As the contact passed, it escalated. Each student wanted to pass on a more violent contact than he or she had received. The contact escalated until finally one student stopped, choosing not to continue the cycle of violence. It only took one child to stop the cycle that day.

I choose to live in this country unarmed, even though I know there are 9 guns for every 10 people. I no longer have illusions that putting a daisy in a gun barrel is my best defense, nor that I can “be run through without blinking an eye.” Only that someone has to stop the cycle of violence, and there is a better chance I will make that choice unarmed.

Second Reflection
There are guidelines for pacifist safety too:
You can study how to stay calm and grounded at a political action (I don’t think you can throw a bottle through a store window or hurl epithets at a policeman and call yourself a pacifist).
There are martial arts traditions like Aikido that are purely defensive and never used to attack
There is a school of non-violent communication designed to bring peace and compassion even into our daily interactions. I should probably take this training one of these days- I can’t even get stuck in traffic without allowing my emotions to boil up and over.

What does it mean to be a responsible pacifist? When my friend’s son was born, they decided to raise him without toy guns. No Nerf guns, no squirt guns, no space-alien- laser-blasters. I remember one evening hanging out with that young family watching the child turned every stick, pine-cone and leaf into a pretend gun. His moms shook their heads at this collision of their ideals and their lived reality.
When I was young I believed that if we could just somehow clean every gun off the face of the earth we could all live in peace. Now I suspect that we must acknowledge the reality that we are living in a time and place where incredibly violent and destructive weapons are woven into the fabric of our society, and this is the context in which each of us must look deeply into our own hearts and choose how to live.

I want to be clear that just because I have searched my own heart and know that I am, at this moment in time, a pacifist, doesn’t mean that I believe that is the only position possible. So many peace- loving communities, like Tibet, have been swept off the map when an armed invading force has set their sights on possession and domination. This is a question with no easy answer- is it better to lose your country than to lose your principle of non-violence?

I believe that Martin Luther King’s commitment to non-violent resistance was critical in allowing race relationship in this country to evolve, yet I wonder about the impact of the emergence of the well-armed Black Panther movement. Did the brewing threat of violence hasten the desire to bring racial justice into the legislature? There is a complexity to the way this world works that defies simple answers.

I know that each of us hears a unique call in our hearts, which is why, though I would object and resist if drafted in wartime, I will fight for the rights of veterans returning from duty. In the Hindu text, The Bagavad Gita, the prince Arjuna rides out between two armies, poised to battle one another. He is overcome with a moral dilemma, saying: “We are prepared to kill our own relations out of greed for the pleasures of a kingdom. Better for me if the sons of Dhritarashtra, weapons in hand, were to attack me in battle and kill me unarmed and unresisting.” (p. 56) Sri Krishna (an incarnation of God in human forms) responds “Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate. For a warrior, nothing is higher than a war against evil.” (P. 64) I think as the minister of this community, my job is not to convince you all to become pacifists, but to discover your own dharma- the ethical path you are called to walk.

Perhaps you remember news reports about the Trappist monks in Algeria who found themselves in the middle of a burgeoning civil war. When the Prior of their community refuses armed protection on behalf of his brothers, they call him to task- they remind him that such a choice which puts all their lives at risk must be made by the whole community together in reflection and prayer. After many weeks of discussion and indecision, each eventually decides to stay in this community which has already witnessed increasing violence. They stay, not seeking martyrdom, but because they believe that their non-violent presence in their Muslim neighborhood offers much needed support to a suffering community. Sadly, the worst does come to pass, and 7 of the brothers are kidnapped in the middle of the night, held hostage, and killed. But each had time to reach a decision in his own heart, and each had the support of their brotherhood as they faced their end.

Each one of us has a choice to make, about how we will support and protect our community. We hold in our hearts all those [who were victims of gun violence] whose names we spoke at the beginning of our service as we choose.

The Danger of a Single Story (October 13, 2013)

This title comes from a wonderful Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, which was the inspiration for this sermon.

Tomorrow is Columbus Day. Going to elementary school in the 1970s we used to celebrate it by making construction paper cut-outs of ships…we all remember those ships right? The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria... and we learned the story this way:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I was taught that while most people in the 15th century thought the world was flat, Columbus believed it was round. We visualized how brave it would be to risk sailing right off the edge of the world for the great cause of science and navigation.

Columbus Day is a holiday in many places around the country, a day to honor Christopher Columbus as the first European to sail to the Americas. A day to celebrate Columbus as the brave explorer who discovered the New World.

If you are of Scandinavian heritage, however, you might point out that Leif Ericson, the Viking explorer, is thought to have landed in the North America some 500 years before Columbus.

And of course we should ask “how can anyone discover a continent already home to roughly 50 million people?” [i] When I was in elementary school, I was only taught a single version of this story, so no one in my class was even asking these questions (except my friend who lived across the street who had Vikings in her family tree. She sure had something to say about this.)

When I moved to Berkeley to go to Seminary in 1994 the holiday “Indigenous People’s Day” (celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day) was only 2 years old. Critics of the new holiday responded with a general rolling of eyes and complaints about the tyranny of “Political Correctness.” It was then that I started to hear other stories. These were stories about cultures and peoples long established in this land and Stories about the beginning of a genocide which decimated many indigenous cultural centers. Even the story of our intrepid explorer Columbus was being retold using more recent and comprehensive scholarship. For example, According to Bryan Strong in his new York times article:

“On his second voyage, in December 1494, Columbus captured 1,500 Tainos on the island of Hispaniola and herded them to Isabela, where 550 of ''the best males and females'' were forced aboard ships bound for the slave markets of Seville.

Under Columbus's leadership, the Spanish attacked the Taino, sparing neither men, women nor children. Warfare, forced labor, starvation and disease reduced Hispaniola's Taino population (estimated at one million to two million in 1492) to extinction within 30 years.”[ii]

Wow. That is a difficult story. Not one you would want to share with your first grade class.

How do we deal with these very different stories? It’s hard to hold those happy memories of cutting out paper ships along with the decimation of the Taino people. It’s hard to hold the bravery of an expedition across the Atlantic alongside acts of cruelty and injustice committed by the same men. Perhaps part of that eye rolling and diminishing as “political correctness” comes from the discomfort we feel at having to try to hold two different stories in our minds. Spiritual Director Janet Ruffing describes a “Fragmentation of identity and the erosion of meaning that often results from encountering conflicting viewpoints”[iii] – for example, when we first heard a new story of Columbus, it interrupted the meaning we had made about our country, and perhaps even about our right to be here. It invited us to question ourselves, to question what we thought we knew. That’s not comfortable.

One approach to this discomfort is to say “well, you have your story, and I have mine.” But I think we have to go deeper. This is different than me and my friend having conflicting stories about who was the first to own that Pat Benetar album when we were kids, because significant power is tied up in the stories of the moment Columbus and his crew first set foot in Hispaniola.

Says Chimamanda Adichie :

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.” [iv]

What happens if you start the story with the rich culture of the Taino people living on Hispaniola? The story of a matrilineal culture with nobles and commoners and priests. The story of an Island people who navigated the sea in dug out canoes, a people who farmed and fished and hunted. They were a people who had art and culture distinct from our own, who played not baseball but batu, a game played with a rubber ball with 10-30 players on a team for which ball courts were designed in the town centers. Their sculpture, their jewelry, their archeological artifacts are all that remain to tell their story.

If you’ve been following the debate about the Doctrine of Discovery, you know that what story you tell can dispossess a continent full of people. In Columbus’ own journal he tells us that when he and his men:

“Arrived on shore, they saw trees very green, many streams of water, and diverse sorts of fruits. The Admiral called upon the two Captains, and the rest of the crew who landed, as also [the] notary of the fleet, … to bear witness that he before all others took possession (as in fact he did) of that island for the King and Queen his sovereigns, making the requisite declarations, which are … set down here in writing.

Columbus Continues “Numbers of the people of the island straightway collected together. …As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted,”[v]

This is the story of Columbus “taking possession” of the Americas, a joyful story of arrival after a long journey.

But as his journals continue, we see that it is also a story about greed: as he writes “my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April. But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.[vi]”

And it is a story about power; In 1495, Columbus and his men went on a raid in the interior of Española capturing as many as fifteen hundred Taino, men, women and children. He picked the 500 best of these Taino people and sent them to Spain. Two hundred of these people died on the way. Columbus’s response? "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."[vii]

As the scholarship about this historic event changes and grows, we learn that Columbus represented not only the best of European civilization- it’s technology, it’s ambition, but also the worst- it’s greed and cruel subjugation of other peoples.

To this increasingly complex story, let me add another. [viii] For Italian-Americans this day is a celebration of their heritage. Dr. JOSEPH SCELSA (Founder and President, Italian-American Museum; Professor Emeritus of Italian-American Studies, Queens College) offers this interpretation of the event:

“In 1892, when Benjamin Harrison, our president at that time, made this a national holiday, which was 400 years after the exploration of Columbus, it was done specifically to bring Native Americans and Italian-Americans and others together.

I mean, it was only two short years after Wounded Knee, and it was only one short year after the largest lynching in the United States, which was of Italians in New Orleans in 1891.

So it's really seen, by me at least, and by many others, as a bringing together of people, not a separating of people.”

Remember, for the first generations of Italian Immigrants to this country, they experienced discrimination, prejudice and even violence [ix] . Columbus Day originated as a celebration of Italian-American heritage and was first held in San Francisco in 1869. Maybe when Italian-Americans marched in their Columbus Day parades back then, it felt like I do at a Gay Pride parade- a day of pride in my identity, and pride in my community. Columbus is still a symbol of Italian American pride to many of that heritage.

But there is without question more than one story to tell on that day. Says Diana King, an enrolled member of the White Earth Indian Nation in northern Minnesota,

“Columbus Day is not a typical holiday. We don't celebrate 500 years of being dominated, exploited, enslaved and nearly exterminated by Europeans. But we do celebrate our survival.[x]”

"We should have been wiped out," she says. "It's a miracle Native people still exist. I have never liked the word 'conquered.' We are still here after 500 years. And maybe every time Columbus Day comes around, we should rethink who the real heroes are: the explorer or the survivors?"

Let’s go back to the discomfort we feel at having to try to hold multiple stories in our minds. Remember Ruffing describes a “Fragmentation of identity and the erosion of meaning that often results from encountering conflicting viewpoints.” Seeing these stories juxtaposed next to one another invites us to question ourselves, to question what we thought we knew. It invites us to a deeper, wider, more complex and mature view of the world.

So when we encounter multiple stories, our job is not to figure out which is the “right story.” Because there is no single story that holds our diverse experiences. The European colonizers did not move and think as one- take for example the Domincan Friar Bartolome De Las Casas, who came to live in the Americas in 1502, who wrote a treatise beseeching the pope and the Spanish Monarchy to end the enslavement of the indigenous peoples.[xi] Neither were the Taino people a monolith- sometimes answering the invasion of their land with peace, other times taking up arms. And Native Americans today are not a monolith- each has a different story of how this land was shaped and what it means. The single story is dangerous because it is another form of stereotyping which cannot hold the true complexity of our lives.

As Universliasts, we believe in an underlying unity beneath all things. We know that we are all part of one interdependent web of life. But the variety and diversity of the lived experience of all beings is incredibly complex. So our spiritual challenge is to be able to hold multiple stories. I don’t mean to hold them all equally- part of holding Columbus’s story when “he before all others took possession … of that island for the King and Queen his sovereigns” is to say “wait a minute now, you did what?” or when he says “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold” to say “That sounds like blatant attempt to use religion to rationalize of a truly unjust act.”

By recognizing the danger of a single story, it calls us to notice who is telling the story, and notice who is silent. Who do we invite to tell the story of the Taino people?

By recognizing the danger of a single story we recognize that, as my teacher Don said at my training this past week “each human being is a mystery- they are really mysterious. If we don’t really know that, we don’t know people, they become just a category.” The reality of multiple stories calls us into a deeper listening for the Other, allowing for their mystery to be revealed.

By recognizing the danger of a single story, we are invited us to notice where our own story leaves the dominant narrative. It allows us to cry: “but I don’t want to grow up to be Ozzy and Harriet- I want something different for myself. My story is a new one that has never been told.” The reality of multiple stories allows us to bravely honor our own story, to honor our own mystery. We are invited to see that there may be more to our story , to our Self than we have dared to imagine.

Universalism does not claim that “underneath, we are all the same.” Instead Universalism is a radical affirmation of the worth and dignity of multiple stories. It suggests that each story is like one thread in a technicolor web, of which we are all a part.

[i] (that figure is controversial- ranges are from 10 million to 100 million depending on the scholar) 
[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/04/opinion/l-slavery-and-colonialism-make-up-the-true-legacy-of-columbus-866089.html Slavery and Colonialism Make Up the True Legacy of Columbus. Published: New York Times November 04, 1989
For more information about the Taino People see http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/What-Became-of-the-Taino.html or http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/taino/taino-conquest.htm
[iii] Janet Ruffing “To tell the sacred tale” p. 21
[iv] from Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story http://dotsub.com/view/63ef5d28-6607-4fec-b906-aaae6cff7dbe/viewTranscript/eng
[v] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.asp Thursday, 11 October 1492
[vi] Friday, 19 October http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.asp
[vii] http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/taino/taino-conquest.htm
[viii] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130437796
[ix] http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/background-discrimination-against-immigrants or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism#Violence_against_Italianshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism#Violence_against_Italians
[x] An Ojibwe view of Columbus Day Article by: MARK ANTHONY ROLO , MCT Forum Updated: October 7, 2012 - 6:46 PM http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/172952361.html?refer=y
[xi] “Bartolome de las Casas: The Only Way” ed Helen Rand Parish