SpecK's blog

This was the "sermon-ette" I gave at the International Affairs Conference on Star Island on July 23,2010.


Many mark the new year on January first. Others, perhaps as part of the Chinese New Year, recognized in many, but certainly not all Asian countries. There is, of course, Rosh Shoshanah, situating itself on a lunar calendar, so it flits about the Gregorian calendar, just as Muharram, the Islamic New Year holiday, does.

There is the school year, with its nostalgic start in September, though for many colleges and private schools, it's really the end of August that sees students entering a new grade. And there are, of course, fiscal years to help guide business: the feds have their October 1st and for many other municipalities, July 1st is the start of new monies.

Then there is Star. Then there is IA.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Tonight’s reading from T.S. Eliot.

I'm not sure if Star -- IA -- is the start of the new year or the end. Perhaps it is a start for some of us, an end for others. Or maybe -- and this is most accurate for me -- it is neither AND both. It is not an end, not a beginning, but an inextricable link between the two, some perfect blance between new and old, between young and older, between start and stop, between heady international affairs and romps on playgrounds that hold tire dragons.

There exist something called coastal dune lakes. They exist in a few places on this planet: Madagascar, New Zealand, Australia, and Walton County, Florida. These coastal dune lakes are precious and unusual in that both fresh water and salt water species co-exist in the same place. Some exquisite balance has been created, has evolved. When I think of Star and our time at IA as neither end or beginning, but some something that is a marvelous mix of both, then I think that maybe IA is like a coastal dune lake with its exquisite balance and its encompassing environment that allows for what otherwise might not be able to co-exist.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

There are always transitions in our lives: comings and goings, gains and losses. For the significant ones, the ones woven deeply in the fabric of our lives, our week on Star can enhance our experience of these transitions, bring them into starker relief. In some cases, this relief holds no promise of ease -- who among us hasn't spent a painful moment or hours alone or in the arms of a friend while here, while this starker relief works its way towards what we hope will eventually be emotional and spiritual relief? I think we all have been there at one point or another.

It makes sense that while writing this short sermon, my thoughts have returned again and again to transitions -- there has been the passing of the youth director baton onto two rather fabulous women; there is the witnessing we all do tonight as Suellen passes the baton of Conference Chair-ness onto Nick, we looked on as a bunch of fabulous youth made their way to adulthood within our IA community. We have written in the memory book of Mary Mooney Getoff, who passed just a few weeks ago, and we have watched in delight as one of our youngest, Miss Roxy, was dedicated in the chapel just yesterday afternoon. The air is rife with transition.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

CALL TO WORSHIP

A Prayer (Sort of)

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice —
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good —
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.
(Phillip Appleman)



Words to Kindle the Chalice

Spoken in response; borrowed from the West Cummington Church

There was something formless and perfect.
before the Universe was born.
It is serene.
Empty.
Solitary.
Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name, I call it
(____________________________)
And although I lack nothing,
I call it.


READINGS

“At noon comes the lift…”

At noon comes the lift – sunlight
Pries open a first section of afternoon
So that my shadow can begin a career.

With a little wise adjustment my whole life
Might move into some phase not evident
When my parents made their plans.

Quiet as the sun, my breathing slides
Past barriers and hours; “Night, I’m coming,”
My little spaceship calls.

And, oh, all else is waiting for whatever
Turn my fate gives forth toward evening
And the dark and the patient stars.

William Stafford (The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems)


Concerning the Atoms of the Soul

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the centre

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that's what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on another's heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the centre of whatever the suspected
centre is, or might have been.

~ John Glenday ~

Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, ed. by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce)









Cosmic Contusions and Dark Matter:
How Tender, How Small
August 1, 2010


It was two and a half years ago, but it feels more like it was last week. We were with my brother and his family for Thanksgiving. We used to do Thanksgiving around here, when my brother lived in New Haven, but when they moved away we started going to Chicago. So that’s where we were: the Adler Planetarium in Chicago to be more specific.

Do you know how the things we do when we are younger, or for the first time, imprint on us differently than things that come later. They tend to stay with us longer. Not everything, but some things. I can totally attest to this phenomenon because I grew up in the 1980s, one of the worst – if not actually the worst – decades for popular music and yet, I groove to that terrible stuff because it insinuated itself in my brain when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It is a tragic fate I share with my same-aged peers. Sometimes we bare this burden with grace, sometimes with shoulder pads and teased up hair and parachute pants and misplaced nostalgia.

Before the 1980s, in the 1970s, my brother and I grew up going to OMSI—Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. My memory says our mother took us there ALL the time, but given that she was a single mother raising two kids on a secretary’s salary, I’m guessing that time has warped itself a bit there.

Cool irrelevant fact number one: in the early 1970s, my mother’s job was secretary to the lawyer who eventually became not only the first woman supreme court justice in Oregon, but who came out of retirement to marry the first lesbian couple in the short period of time when a county in Oregon okayed (then revoked) the right to same sex marriage. You probably won’t find that helpful when playing Trivial Pursuit, but I think it might count as my fifteen minutes of vicarious fame.

Some of my best memories are of OMSI, specifically the planetarium, so it makes sense that my brother – whom I adore as only a little sister can -- and I brought our kids to the Adler on the day after Thanksgiving in 2007. I remember standing in front of the “edu-tainment” designed for laypeople such as myself, a map of the universe in the simplest of language and brightest of colors and being somewhat blown away. Okay, I’ll admit it: really blown away. I was reading over and over what space is now, how it is not a vacuum (which is how I was taught, back in the day), but fabric, dark matter smattered between bright objects, some of which are the same as what I remember from thirty – okay thirty-five – years ago.

But not all of them are the same. Stars are, thankfully, still stars, but Pluto is no longer a planet. My intellectual mind gets that nothing really changed, just our understanding and our scientific classification system, but my spiritual mind thinks that the impermanence of something as tremendous as a planet is apropos.

I’m in the planetarium, and I was reading how gravity isn’t centered deep inside each planet, which is a concept I had come to depend on – that I am being pulled toward and kept somewhat safely on this terra firma. Turns out that gravity is a pucker in the fabric catching celestial bodies so that they roll, roll, roll. My mind likens it to those wide-mouthed donation contraptions you sometimes see at aquariums and museums, with quarters and pennies and dimes spinning at an ever-increasing velocity. Well, not really spinning, so much as spiraling downward, echoing until it falls into the dark center, which is, I guess, a kind of piggy bank.

I could go on here and liken that piggy bank to a black hole, because that’s what it is – not a cosmic one, but a dark hole at the center of the donation devices – and maybe it’s a fair comparison, because those contraptions are put in place to raise money for cultural institutions and there never seems to be enough, there always seems to be a hungry sore searching for more, because it’s been sucked away by a whole host of things, but I’d say the primary culprit is the never-ending war machine, that’s my best scientific guess as to what’s at the center of that black hole.

And I was still struggling with this new concept – dark matter. What is dark matter? Let’s see what the web site Astronomy Today tells us about dark matter:
Dark matter is non-luminous matter, that cannot be directly detected by observing any form of electromagnetic radiation (light), but whose existence is suggested because of the effects of its gravity on the rotation rate of galaxies and the presence of clusters of galaxies.
(http://www.astronomytoday.com/cosmology/darkmatter.html)
Okay, so we know that something (dark matter) is there not because we can observe it or measure it, but because of its impact on other things, other so-called measurable things like the rotation rate of galaxies or by the very fact that galaxies cluster (rather than position themselves randomly).

If I were a deist (which I am on alternate days), I might say that sounds a lot like God: un-measurable, but discernible. I leave that to you to mull over. Oh, and while you’re doing that, just one last thing for clarity’s sake: dark matter is different from dark energy or dark fluid (neither of which can I yet bring myself to read about….).

Can we return to something more familiar? Perhaps a bit more comforting? I need to. Even if just momentarily.

Probably like you, I had heard of the Big Bang – how the Universe started by a very big expanding explosion – and at this exhibit there was text and pictures and interactive displays galore about it – except it turns out that there’s also a theory of the Big Crunch – and maybe all of you know about it and I was just catching up, but it turns out that some scientists thought that the Big Bang was kind of like a rubber band: stretching expansion that would snap back on itself (hence the highly scientific moniker: the Big Crunch).

I was trying to take it all in and I couldn’t help thinking about Hindu cosmology, which I had a chance to learn about when I was teaching Religious Education curricula, I, The Creator, years ago. The Hindu version of the universe’s creation involves cyclical birth, destruction, and rebirth over trillions of human years ( which equals about 100 years for Brahma). I’m looking at the exhibit at the planetarium with its awe-striking photos from the Hubble telescope and I think: damn, they got it right! Over a millennia ago and the Hindus got it right and without a whole heck of a lot of advanced technology, but a basket full of deep spiritual “technology.”

So in the midst of this intellectual and spiritual cacophony that has attracted out-of-town tourists and Chicago residents alike, I turn to my brother and I say – and this is not poetic license here – “I am despairing.” I know, I know: it sounds rather melodramatic. Maybe it was. I would not have been the first time.

Nevertheless, I meant it.

As I said, I adore my brother and he adores me. We’re really lucky that way. We are both well aware of our individual flaws and we’ve made our peace with such things. Even though he is not inclined towards such emotional outbursts, at this point in our adult lives, he (mostly) admires my capacity for them.

I don’t know if he fully understood what I meant with those three heavy words. I am despairing. I know that I meant that I am despairing of the life we have constructed – well, actually, destructed – for our children. And not theoretical children of rhetorical generations that we hear about in nauseating political speeches, but our children – his two boys and my two, the children that I steward on Star Island, the ones we guide on Sunday mornings in our classroom.

Talk about dark matter.

~~~

In 1990, the space craft Voyager I sailed away from earth. Having completed its primary mission, Ground Control directed the ship to take photos of each of the planets it had visited. Four billion miles in the distance, it took this photo and Earth – as a pale blue dot -- was captured (you can see here between the two white tick marks). Enlarged in this photo, it’s actually smaller than a single pixel. Capturing the Earth so clearly in the photo happened by accident and has to do with the angle of the camera to the sun, about which I cannot offer many details though the internet would be a great place if you were interested.

The respected astrophysicist, now deceased, Dr. Carl Sagan was moved by this photo and gave a talk in 1996 at which he said,

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

He continued,

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

I don’t fully grasp that dark matter isn’t its own proof, that only observed phenomena infer its presence. Some days I get the dark part way more than I get the matter part. My heart can sort of grasp at it – because it’s kind of like God – no proof, just faith – by my head wholly misses the mark: ashes we come from and to ashes we go. We were here once, now the only indication is inferred by hearts still beating. That’s about as close as I get. And somehow, it’s good enough.

Somehow I find moments of solace, of relief, even of joy. It may well be irrational and unscientific, given the human penchant for warfare, given peak oil, given the state of global warming, given all of that.

I think of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his famous essay entitled, Nature, in which he wrote
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
It doesn’t have to be the woods. I know that works for some people. Sometimes it works for me too. But it could well be something else – like contemplating our place in the universe, like Dr. Sagan just did so admirably. That’s often where I end up.

I find solace in Hindu mythology that existence may well end as we know it, but that does not mean end, it just means as we know it. Maybe because my mind is so small, it fails to fully comprehend it and I am just throwing my human conceit into the ring. I guess that’s possible.

But it could also be that like Emerson, who believed in currents of Universal Being. Maybe, just maybe, we will become more than our inevitable absence, more than mere remnant of scientific inference. That we will not just be implications of something else careening through the universe, will not just warp in the weaving of dark matter, but will be all of it, none of it, eternally, one.



Words for Closing

Carl Sagan tells us that the universe is pretty darn big, that more or less, we are pretty much alone. Sagan died in 1996 but that likely fact still rings true today for astrophysicists. Most people don’t like to hear this.

Yet Sagan found solace in this “truth” and somehow, even though I can’t explain it, when I read what he wrote, I find it too. But as we end today’s worship service, we end with the other possibility: that we are not alone.

We end with a short excerpt from The Little Prince, as he is taking leave of his human friend and returning to his tiny planet with its one rose and three volcanoes (one of which is extinct)…
“That’ll be my present (…).”
“What do you mean?”
“People have stars, but they aren’t the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they’re nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they’re problems. For my businessman, they were gold. But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you’ll have stars like nobody else.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing. You’ll have stars that can laugh!”
And he laughed again.
“And when you’re consoled (everyone eventually is consoled), you’ll be gald you’ve known me. You’ll always be my friend. You’ll feel like laughing with me. And you’ll open your window sometimes just for the fun of it….And your friends will be amazed to see you laughing while you’re looking up at the sky. Then you’ll tell them, ‘Yes, it’s the stars; they always make me laugh! And they’ll think you’re crazy. It’ll be a nasty trick I played on you…”




References

“At Noon Comes the Lift,” William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems

“Atoms of the Soul,” John Glenday, Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, ed. by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translator: Richard Howard

“Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1863.

“Pale Blue Dot,” Carl Sagan, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

As part of a great worship service organized by the Big Ole Gay Committee at the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence in March 14, 2010, four of us shared our stories. Here's mine:

When I moved here, fifteen years ago, there was a group in the Valley, founded by one of our congregation’s members. It was called Valuable Families. It was refuge for “gay and lesbian-headed” families. It was visionary and provided an important way to build community among people who were the objects of overt discrimination and attempts to make them invisible. These were pioneers, people who helped to build enough critical mass so that nowadays – at least here in Northampton and in the wider Happy Valley– there are drastically fewer heterosexual assumptions.

For a year or so, I was president of this organization whose mission statement said it was for “gay- and lesbian-headed” families. This was, on two counts, ironic. The first was because I was not yet a parent – trying, but not yet.

The other irony was that I wasn’t gay or lesbian. I was then, as I am now, thoroughly and explicitly bisexual. I was in a committed lesbian relationship, one that I intended to last (which it did, but only ten years…) so I usually called myself a “lesbian-identified bisexual woman.” Those were the years when Identity Politics were much more in the foreground than they seem to be today. But bi is bi and it’s what I was, through and through.

So why was it important that I proclaim this aspect of myself, one that I expected to be primarily an internal experience, for the rest of my life? My explicit presence and advocacy there was pivotal to making an inclusive language change in the mission statement of the group. No more was it just L & G, but a B was brought into the alphabet soup.

I also wanted to make clear where my allegiance was – that I was allied with the queer community. Yet I didn’t want to take the chance that somehow I could in any way add to the fire of people thinking that queer identity was a “phase” – so I wanted to be clear what was potential in me. Naming myself honestly and out loud was one way to do that. Yet my worst fears whispered that my motivation could be something less noble – egotistical attention-seeking? Perhaps even worse: grasping in some twisted way at heterosexual privilege?

That was fifteen or so years ago and I now find myself at the other end of the bisexuality continuum: in another monogamous relationship, this time with a man I hope will last the rest of our lives, still wanting to be clear to everyone around me that this – or any relationship – does not define my sexuality or my sexual orientation. I stand before you now with a similar fear – am I here to wrongly draw attention to myself? Now that I am in a hetero relationship, do I really deserve to stand up here in such fine company, to call myself queer in public?

As many of you who’ve heard me preach know, I don’t usually have a problem with finding the words to say as I stand in this pulpit, but this topic has been much more of a challenge for me. A question has been echoing. What is the spiritual connection between sexuality and sexual orientation – these two separate but intertwined concepts – and spirituality and being a part of this vibrant, welcoming congregation?

In the end, I came up with the concept of being known.
I have two primary spiritual practices: Buddhist meditation and being a part of Unitarian Universalism. Though I am a part of a meditation center and practice with others, the former practice is, at its heart, a solitary practice. The latter – my connection to this place, my connection to Star Island, my connection to and with all of you – is primarily a communal practice. I can only do what I do here in connection, in relationship, with the plural you.

That communal aspect of this spiritual experience I am having with you, that I hope you are having with me, that we are having together, requires that I know you and that I allow myself to be known. This knowing is what allows each of us to go deeper than the Sunday morning handshake. Don’t get me wrong: that’s something I look forward to each service, mostly because that Sunday handshake is just the beginning of something much deeper, a wider way of knowing and being known.

Not at last UU auction, but the one before that, I won a service from one of our fellow members, someone I did not know well, but had greeted regularly and admired from afar. He came to my home, spent several hours there, and over the course of that time, I learned more about his life, including the fact that he and his girlfriend of one month had gone to Canada to evade the Viet Nam war draft. They stayed until pardoned by President Carter – not a short amount of time. To this day, they remain married. I find this story amazing – my admiration points quadrupled upon hearing it – but it’s not something I knew from our passing each other in the pews. In listening to this story of his past, I didn’t know him fully, but I came to know him more and to see facets and dimensions of his life I could not have guessed. I am a better person because he allowed me to know him more fully. I am thankful for that.

So many of the stories from our past don’t get told. Not so much because we aren’t paying attention, but because somehow we start from now (which is generally a good place to start) and keep going. It’s so human. Yet I think you’ll agree that it’s a rare treat to be able to hear the back-story of a middle-aged or elder friend when time allows the luxury of not rushing. Indeed, it is a deeply satisfying treat.

So when I tell you, or remind you if you knew me back in the day it was more obvious, that I am bisexual, that I still consider myself queer, it’s my way of offering myself to be known by you, to be known fully. I think that’s what today’s worship is about too. In my role as the chair of the Worship Committee, I have envisioned that this service is a way for our whole congregation to renew our vows to each other – not just GLBTIQ people to straight people, or straight people to queer people, but all of us to each other: we will know you, all of you, as you are – gender, transgender, sexual orientation, all of it. We will allow you to know us, all of us, as we are. I think that’s what people do when they renew their vows after ten years or twenty years of loving together – it is saying: we have spent this time together, we have grown together, we have matured together, we know each other and what we know is good. All of it – all of you – all of us -- is good.

I’d like to end with some lyrics from a song called Girls Like Me, written and sung by a friend of mine, Carrie Ferguson. I think it’s clever and simple, a great combination. In the end, the biggest reason I like it is because it acknowledges me in the world, it allows me to be known. For that reason alone, it’s worth a good listen:


Some girls like girls, some boys like boys,
some like both, it’s just a joyful noise.
But besides all that it’s just a borin’ debate.
Some people love to love, some people love to hate….
Girls like me like girls --
it’s just a beautiful thing in the world.
And you can call it a phase but you’ll have a long wait.
And it might be time to set yourself [straight]…

This service was given on Friday, July 24, 2009, on Star Island, as a part of the International Affairs conference. Thanks to the many people who gave of their time and talent to make the service shine: the adhoc Bread & Roses chorus, Maggie Swomley & Hannah Meharg, Bruce & Linda Pollack-Johnson, Ari & Jason Heitler-Klevans, Chaka, and Michael Pellegrino.


Words for Gathering

We come together once each year. We come together in Rye and we find ourselves together on the dock here. We come together on the morning stairs most every morning we are here. We come together at meals. We come together in the lobby, on the tennis courts, in the gift store and at the snack bar. We find each other on the porch, on the playground, on the rocks. We gather together and in so doing, we make special – we make sacred – this island which offers itself up to us to be holy ground. Year after year, this holy ground offers itself and we say yes – we make you holy by our gathering and you remind us of our own holy nature.

What Fuels a Star?

We think of the sun as a great ball of fire, but fire as we know it on earth requires oxygen, which does not exist in space or as part of the sun. It’s different than fires that burn here on earth, different than what burns here on Star. Basically, what fuels the sun – a small star compared to others in our galaxy – is the clumping together of hydrogen. When two hydrogen particles come together, they end up weighing less as one unit than they did as two separate units. Isn’t that strange? They end up weighing less because when they come together, they release energy and are transformed from being hydrogen to becoming helium. That energy release is what fuels the star we call our sun.

What Fuels Our Star?

Karen: Fuel is what it takes to make something operate. It is usually some kind of matter that is turned into energy. Our Star – this island – runs on all sorts of energy, all sorts of fuel. During one week – seven days - what fuels our Star?

Cindy: 360 pounds of liquid egg and 45 dozen shelled eggs

Emily: 75 pounds of whole bean coffee

Matt: 400 limes, just in the snack bar alone

Karen: 300 rolls of toilet paper

Holly: 12, 768 kilowatts of electricity

Lauri: 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel

Dave: 500 grilled cheese sandwiches

Erika: approximately 850 Island staff working hours

Tryst: approximately 5000 Pel working hours

Dumaine: if they were here, about 20 pounds of Swedish fish

Wendy: 40 loaves of sliced white bread, 30 loaves of sliced wheat bread, and 400 loaves of baked bread

As We Come Marching, Marching, performed by an adhoc chorus of generous and gracious adults

Homily

First off, I’d like to thank George Brandenburg, one of our IA conferees, who helped me to understand what fuels a star. I’d also like to thank Shannon Rocklein, assistant island manager, who helped gather the list of things that fuel a week on this island.

Some of you may remember that last year, when we gathered together on our last night on Star, I took you on a journey someplace else. We didn’t really go anywhere – we stayed in this room – but I asked if in your imaginations you might travel with me. Does anyone remember where we went together?

Okay, tonight we are not going back there, but I’d like to take you somewhere else. We won’t be going to Washington, DC a few years ago this time. This time, our journey is not so far away geographically – it’s just a few miles south and a bit inland – but it is further away in time: nearly a hundred years.

Ninety seven years, four months, and two weeks – give or take a few days – to March 14, 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. We have heard the beautiful singing – thank you – of the song some call “Bread and Roses” and which our hymnal calls, “As We Come Marching, Marching.” This song is based on a poem written by James Oppenheim. And though it was written and published before the textile strike in Lawrence, it is most primarily associated with that strike.

A strike is when people decide to stop working because they are being treated unfairly. Striking is their way of doing something about that unfair treatment. Nearly 100 years ago, in the mill factories Lawrence, the workers were not being treated fairly by the people who owned the mills. Even though the workers came from different places – often having been born in different countries and spoke different languages – they came together. Because so many of the workers employed in these mills were girls and young women, these workers who joined together to demand being treated fairly were mostly women – just like the song tells us.

Just like in the song we just heard, the workers thought it was unfair that ten people should work, while one person just sits around, doesn’t do much or any work, but gets paid more. “No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, but a sharing of life’s glories – bread and roses, bread and roses.” They thought it only fair that if they were going to do the work, they should also share in the glory, profit, and the joy that their work produced.

And it’s not because they were greedy. The amount of money they were being paid was not enough to make a decent living, wasn’t enough to keep their families from going hungry or to get them decent medical care. So they decided, together, that until they were treated in a fair manner, they wouldn’t work and they wouldn’t allow anyone to work in the mill until all workers were treated fairly.

They were on strike from January to March – nearly three months. Not three months in Miami or Arizona, where the sun shines. But three months in Massachusetts where it’s cold and it snows. And not three months and they still got paid – but three months when they had to help each other out with making sure that no one starved, that everyone still had enough medicine if they got sick. It was a long time and the workers didn’t know if there strike would make a difference. It must have been quite scary for everyone – for the workers and for their family members – so clearly it was important, very important to risk being treated fairly.

On March 14, 1912, the strike ended with a settlement between the owners of the mills and the workers. The workers’ pay would be increased. If they worked extra hours, they would earn more pay. And the mill owners weren’t allowed to discriminate or punish the workers who had taken part in the strike. This strike goes down in our history books as a success, and is also credited with inventing the moving picket line so that none of the striking workers could be arrested for loitering.

In the song we heard that has come to be associated with that strike, we hear that “our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; hearts starve as well as bodies – give us bread but give us roses.” This means that we all need more than the basic food for each of us to live and to thrive, to be the very best we can be. It’s sort of like, yes we need the green salad and the wonderful bread rolls, but we also need the lime rickeys or rootbeer floats or twislers. It’s sort of like we need a safe place to sleep and rest, but we also need time to come together, because that feeds us too.

We are lucky here on Star Island, here at IA. We get our bread, and we get our roses. When we come here for our week in July on this Star, we refuel in many ways. Each of us is a star that shines on this bigger star of an island – I know this is true because I see you shining and glowing here in the dark. There are many ways we fuel our own shining star, many ways we have both our bread and our roses, when we are here together. As you are moved, please share moments from this past week in which you were fueled up to shine for when you go back home tomorrow. Please share memories or experiences that were like roses you will carry with you when you get off the boat in Rye tomorrow:

[congregation shares]

I believe that I heard at least once someone mention polar bearing among the many ways we refuel here on this Star. I’d like to invite Linda and Bruce to sing a song for us tonight that they found that made them think of polar bearing here.

Closing Words

Our closing words are an excerpt from the poem, “Twig” by Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, who was born in 1931 and lives in Nazereth.

And so
It has taken me
All of 60 years
To understand
That water is the finest drink
And bread the most delicious food
And that art is worthless
Unless it plants
A measure of splendor in people’s hearts.


May you have bread, may you have roses, may you play fair, and may your life be a form of art that plants splendor in people’s hearts.

READINGS:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

Camas Lilies
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas
opening into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you — what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down —
papers, plans, appointments, everything —
leaving only a note: "Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming."

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Lynn Ungar ~
(Blessing the Bread)


Excerpts from Pearls Before Breakfast
#1
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?
** ** ** **
#2
A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of [the violinist] than [the newspaper stand clerk] did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.
J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in "Titanic," before the iceberg.
"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.
When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs. "Is he ever going to play around here again?"
"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."
"Damn."
Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.

Deftly Hearing Music

A version of this sermon was originally delivered last summer at the Family chapel at Star Island’s International Affairs conference. As part of my role as the director of the week-long youth program at that conference – about 60 kids, ages 18 months to 18 years -- I facilitate this chapel service, which is attended by folks of all ages – kids in the youth program, their parents, their grandparents, a few interested stragglers here and there and is our ritualized way of bring a wonderful week to a close.
Just so you know, Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoales, a collection of 9 or 10 islands (depending on high or low tide) that straddle the border between New Hampshire and Maine. On the island, there is a conference center that is jointly UU and UCC. At the risk of sounding silly, it’s a rather magical place.

I have been attending since 1996, usually as a member of the youth staff. It is one of the ways I manifest my spiritual intentions, as well as gain spiritual sustenance. It’s a place that helps me to slow down, to take notice, to be more thoughtful, more reflective. I also get to sing silly camp songs – but that’s beside the point. Or maybe not.

Being on Star Island expands my connection to Unitarian Universalism. Not everyone who attends this conference is UU, or even spiritual in intention or inclination. Many who come there do so to sit on the long, wide porch to read or relax or socialize, indulging in the famous Lime Rickeys from the snack bar (though my daughter and I prefer the rootbeer floats made with coffee ice cream). Inclined or not – or as Karl Jung would say, “bidden or unbidden,” there is a holy energy on this island surrounded by the Atlantic, the Milky Way a cottony visibility directly overhead, the foghorn’s forlorn, soothing grumble ever-present, the heat lightning off in the distant open ocean, the old chapel built by island stone and lit by candled lanterns.

[PAUSE]

If you are willing, I ask for a small indulgence. I would like to take you – momentarily – away from here, both time and space. Just for a moment, I’d like to take you to a Washington DC subway station – trains running underground, bringing people from one side of our nation’s capitol to a different side, or maybe all around the city and its suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. We are going to the subway station named for the man who planned DC transformation from a once-mosquito-infested swamp, to the diamond grid with streets named in alphabetical order, the number of syllables telling you how far you are from our nation’s Capitol building – except for those pesky avenues named after states, which follow along on random diagonals).

We are going to L’Enfant Plaza Metro station and we will be there three Aprils ago.

I promise we will come back to the Great Hall, but first, come with me to the part of the subway station with the turnstiles – or their modern counterparts -- where people come and go, not right near the trains, but just where you go in the station or where you leave it. Street level. In this place, it’s pretty darn busy: it’s early morning, adults dressed for work are rushing about, trying to get to their offices, trying to get their kids to school or day care before they are late to those offices. This subway stop is near the many federal government buildings, where the people work who make our nation’s government hum (and sometimes stumble).

In this place, April 2007, there is a street musician. He’s pretty common-looking: dressed in jeans, a beat-up t-shirt, a cap and he’s playing the violin. At his feet is the instrument’s case, a catch-all for copper and silver coinage, perhaps even some green bills fluttering onto the crushed velvet. He’s very much like when you walk out those doors in the back of this Great Hall and go down Main Street, where you just might find any number of street musicians.

Only this musician is a bit different (perhaps) than the ones we generally find on our Main Street. This one is playing one of the world’s most treasured violins. It’s called the Gibson ex Huberman, was stolen twice, returned twice, (once after the deathbed confession of a thief) and was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari at the end of his career, when his technique had been refined to perfection. You could say that this guy is in disguise because when he usually plays, he’s in elegant clothes, playing amid stage lights to adoring crowds, but not today.

Today, Joshua Bell, one the world’s most amazing violinists is playing this amazing violin, playing several amazing musical pieces, among which is Bach’s Chaconne, which is14 minutes long and “consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound.”

All those people rushing around – workers on their way to work, folks on their way to somewhere -- do not know that this guy is the very best. There’s no sign announcing who the musician is or that people usually pay hundreds of dollars to see him perform. It’s an experiment, devised by Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post. Weingarten wanted to see how regular people would respond to some of the world’s most beautiful music, played by the most famous violin player – he wanted to see if all those people would even notice the very beautiful music – if there was nothing to indicate how rarified and beautiful the music, the instrument, the musician were.

Would they realize they were listening to such rare talent? Would this professional musician who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars, who plays a violin worth $3.5 million dollars, in the world’s best concert arenas, would anyone give him money? And just how much?

Turns out: not so much.

Weingarten, the mastermind behind this experiment that resulted in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning article, Pearls Before Breakfast, invited Joshua Bell into this stunt and the young violinist, already known for his mischief, readily agreed. Let’s find out what happened:

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

They just didn’t seem to hear the music.

[Pause]

You might ask: why is this relevant? Why is this important to Unitarian Universalists -- especially living here in the art-filled Pioneer Valley -- who would surely pay more attention, would surely take note at a higher rate than some random sample of urban and suburban dwellers?

Well, maybe you’ve perfected your ability not to get sucked into the capitalistic, consumer-sadist, material-driven, hyper-scheduled, alienation-inducing shudder that is modern American life. If so, this might be a good time to leave because you may find the rest of this sermon boring. But if you are like me, still needing kind, gentle reminders, still moving towards slowing down, staying present – then I’m glad to be in your company.

I have read this article many, many times. I’ve not yet distilled what exactly it is I find so compelling. I’m okay with that. Each time I read it, I find something I’m sure I didn’t read the last time and I find that I get something new to reflect upon, often something that intrigues me into trying to be a better person, usually through the story of those few people who did stop to hear the music. I’d like to share some of these with you. Let me first introduce you to John David Mortensen:

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. [He] is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop….

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cell phone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes.

As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace."

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

Or this person, the one I told those children and youth and their families about last summer when we were together on Star Island.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

“…The behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.” I’d like to think that surprises no one in this room. We know the truth of this from our own children and youth here in the congregation. Each of them – and the group as a whole – has a keen sense of the vibrance, the musicality, the beauty, the sacred, creative energy around and among us. Part of why they can do this is because we allow it, we encourage it. And fortunately for us, we sometimes let them remind us, let them cue us into what we might otherwise be missing.

What do I take from John David Mortensen? From Little Evvy?

From Mr. Mortensen’s role model, I hope to cultivate an appreciation for things with which I am not familiar, the willingness to change directions even for just a moment, and the practice of showing my appreciation through generosity, even towards those I do not know, even those entities unfamiliar to me.

From Little Evvy and his mother, I hope to take a breath before the impulsive, habitual, nearly immediate “no” comes out of my mouth when my children speak to me. From Little Evvy, I hope to cultivate the ability to see the world through my children’s eyes, and because that seems to be getting harder for me now that my kids are in their teenage years, I hope to cultivate that ability to see through many children’s eyes – children in this congregation, children on that Island in the Atlantic, children forced to labor or have their bodies taken for violence or lust, and to do better in this world because of it.

I think of Evvy and I hope that if what Billy Collins said is true – that life chokes out of us our natural affinity for poetic rhythm and musical magic – maybe I can follow Evvy’s cue and find it again.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

These thousand passers-by – truly, at no better time has there been a better use of this word passer-by – were at risk and didn’t even know. Might not even know it now. The risk of losing out, of missing out, passing by something that could bring them to attention, that could bring them to their knees (in the best possible sense of that act.) They risked – some of them literally gambled with those lottery tickets -- and most of them lost.

At what risk do we find ourselves in? What might we be passing by? To what have we been temporarily deaf and blind, but that we might be able to sense, to see, to hear?

What music have you heard because some child has stood her or his ground, hasn’t allowed you or your family or this community to by-pass it? What new experience have you found as you approached some real or metaphorical stop-along-the-way and decided to not pass it by? Decided rather than to close your eyes and hope for the best, you opened your eyes, or your ears, opened them wide and stayed for awhile?

As you are moved, please stand up and share brief memories or descriptions of these moments. Please use your very loudest inside voice to let us all know.

[congregation shares]

We are so lucky here. We don’t need the music of a violin virtuoso, though my ipod has allowed us that too. We have our very own special, quite rare music here. And I’m not talking about our wonderful music director. What I’m talking about is music that is wide, music that is deep, music that is myriad, and music that goes beyond lyric or melody. Sometimes we can hear it. Sometimes we pass it by. Probably too often, we pass it by. But we come here, to this Great Hall, to each other, in hopes that we might pass it by less often. In hopes that we just might hear more music, just might sense greater beauty in this pained, in this overscheduled life in which we find ourselves.

There is one last person I would like you introduce to you…

The cultural hero of the day arrived in L’Enfant Plaza pretty late, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head. Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.
Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.
"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza."
Haven't you seen musicians there before?
"Not like this one."
What do you mean?
"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."
Really?
"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day."
Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.
"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me."

I think I’d like to be baffling more often. But I mean, not baffling like the thousand who couldn’t stop. But baffling like the few who stopped, the few able to step out, like Jon Picarello. Let’s be the ones who stop and baffle those folks who are moving on the assembly line life has placed us on, the one we have a choice to get off of, even if sometimes, it’s only temporary and we have to jump back on. Let’s be baffling, even if it’s awkward, or inconvenient, or embarrassing, or even if it makes us a little late for work.

When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away…
Let’s not win the lottery – the lottery where we have to buy the $2 tickets and have our heads filled with losing numbers, but not the music that is surrounding us. Let’s consider those callas lilies of the field. Let’s join the ranks of Monet and refuse the operation. Let’s be baffling and when we are, let’s be humble too.


Closing Words

This morning’s closing words, come to us from the Navajo Indians of North America, found in Singing the Living Tradition:

Beauty is before me, and
Beauty behind me,
Above me and below me
Hovers the beautiful.
I am surrounded by it,
I am immersed in it.
In my youth, I am aware of it,
And, in old age,
I shall walk quietly the beautiful trail.
In beauty it is begun.
In beauty, it is ended.


References
Weingarten, Gene. “Pearls Before Breakfast,” The Washington Post , online, 4/4/07; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Mueller, Liesl. “Monet Refuses the Operation,” (Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

Ungar, Lynn. “Camas Lillies,” Blessing the Bread, Skinner House Publications, 1995

“Beauty is before me…,” Singing the Living Tradition, #682,Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, 1993

This sermon was given at the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence on May 31, 2009 as part of a service collaboratively led by members of the Worship Committee. Also a part of this were Reflections by Lynne Marie Wanamaker which may find its way to her blog, http://www.mindbodymama.com/ -- it's totally worth the read! -- KJ


Opening Words


A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

~ Denise Levertov ~

(Sands of the Well)



Readings


Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Evidence)


A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(Collected Poems)




To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

~ Marge Piercy ~




Inexplicable


It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
A poet friend suggests excising it,
since stumbling is a sign
of wrong word choice.

Yet inexplicable belongs in a poem.
Belongs in every poem.
Is a poem, in and of itself.

Inexplicable.
It’s why I bother to put pen to paper.
It’s the reason for ragged keyboard rhythm,
late night blue screen blanching my face.

Inexplicable.
How we rise each morning,
instead of burying our heads
under bedcovers,
sewing them shut.
Why we keep on
welcoming babies
with bone-deep joy
to this sordid world.
How we fill burlap sacks
with grit and gratitude,
our hands shredded
as we drag one over the other.
How we refuse the daily pull
towards greedy dark,
keeping at least one toe,
some of us whole torso,
in the light.

Inexplicable.
It’s what makes a poem
worth writing, worth reading,
worth flooding the world
with redundant, flawed attempts
at explanation.

It’s just the way it is.
There is no other way.
Stumbling every time,
practice or no.
Just part of the bargain…
the unavoidable,
intractable,
inexplicable
bargain.


Karen G. Johnston



Inbetween Times: Who We Are For Each Another

In our official by-laws, the purpose of the committee which stands here before you is “to work with the minister toward enrichment and variety in the religious celebrations of the Society.” We do this in many ways – meeting each month, communicating over email, sometimes via phone, engaging with the minister in a variety of ways, listening when you have a suggestion or concern, finding guest speakers and supporting them by being service leaders, yada yada, yada. I like to think that our goal is to cultivate a positive and rich worship experience through our support of the minister, support of guest speakers, and in our direct roles as part of worship.

Each of us was asked by someone to sit on this committee or heartily volunteered. I was asked sometime last spring. My children finally old enough that they don’t need my constant presence at home, I commenced to attend my first meeting last June. I thought I was going to get to do something I love – talk about worship, plan worship – all under the auspices of “doing good” and “giving back.” All the while, I get to do my geeky poet’s version of fun.

It turned out that there is a gift I did not know would come with this package of serving this congregation in this way. So obvious is this “surprise” gift, I now feel a bit embarrassed for not having anticipated it. It wasn’t the chance to write multiple emails each day. Or to find a time to meet with the minister when I was supposed to be working my day job. Or to find balance when there were divergent perspectives. It turns out that attendant to mundane committee logistics, being a part of this committee (and I’m guessing, part of any committee here, really) provides the chance to minister to one another, provides the opportunity to BE OF USE.

As Lynne Marie shared with us earlier, it’s not just about committee work, both the mundane and the sacred aspects of it. Here in the Great Hall, among us, between us, we all get the gift to be of use: we all get to hold each others’ hands, metaphorically and really; sometimes even more, a kiss on the cheek, a stabilizing caress of the back, perhaps even a full body hug in a time of joy, or among sorrowful tears.

[Pause]

A 2006 sociological study by McPherson and Smith-Lovin tells us what we may already intuit: the last twenty years saw a significant decline in the number of confidants we Americans have. We are becoming more isolated. From close to three, to just more than two. Though this may not sound like a huge change, it is the loss of nearly one third of our most intimate source of support.

More disturbing is the modal American’s situation. Not model, but modal – the value that has the largest number of observations. The modal American has no confidants. None. This means that of all the categories: Americans with, say, ten confidants and the category of Americans with, say, five, or three, or two, or one confidant – of these categories, the largest category – the mode – is those Americans having no confidants. In 1985, the mode was three.

There is a tide of isolation that is growing to Tsunami proportions. No doubt, given that so many of us here today are “good” thinking Unitarian Universalists, we likely have opinions about why this is happening. Certainly I do. The study describes contributing factors, such as marked decrease in participation in voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Maybe the study even speculates why this is happening – to be honest, I didn’t read all the fine print.

In the end, their speculation as to why, and even our or my own, does little to change the fact of it. Identifying the reason may be helpful in developing effective strategies, but it takes something wholly different to implement what it takes to change it. We don’t need another sociological study. What we need is a spiritual covenant, a spiritual showing up.

What we need is a real-life spiritual antidote. But before we know what the correct antidote is, we need to know what the poison is – not the symptom, but the root cause.

I believe that our increasing isolation – both on an interpersonal level and on a geo-political level that we saw sky-rocket under the so-called leadership of our last president – is based in fear. There may well be other factors – on that geo-political realm, I’d say an unhealthy dose of arrogance came into play as well – though again, fear is at the heart of arrogance, so we wind up back where we started.

With the UU value of freedom of the pulpit firmly in hand, I’m going to seek understanding through the spiritual paradigm that resonates most for me. According to the Buddha, the antidote to fear is compassion. My Western mind finds this especially interesting, because I was taught that the opposite of fear, and therefore somehow its remedy, is courage. Though they may share a connection, courage is not compassion.

Over the years (about 2500 or so of them) followers of Buddha, in seeking to cultivate compassion, have been directed to Metta meditation. Metta is the Pali word for “loving kindness.” Loving kindness in the face of fear. It takes courage to conjure loving kindness when one is afraid. Yet courage is only a tool to get to metta, to loving kindness.

Different Buddhist teachers have slightly different versions of the Metta meditation, which involves repeating specific phrases and directing them towards an ever increasing circle of beings, beginning with oneself. The following is the version I use, which I have adapted from use within the sangha – Buddhist community -- to which I belong:
May I be safe and protected from harm.
May I be peaceful and happy.
May I be healthy and strong.
May I be patient with all that arises.
May I be peaceful with all that arises.
May I be present to all that arises.

After speaking these phrases, one then directs these well wishes to someone who has been a benefactor or someone for whom you have much affection. For instance, may my beloved be safe and protected from harm. May my beloved be peaceful and happy. And so forth.

Then, they are repeated for someone or –ones with neutral standing. The cashier at your grocery store, for instance. Then to someone for whom one might have mild disdain – the driver who took your parking spot this morning. Then to someone with whom one is experiencing much more than mild disdain, perhaps an object of scorn or outright hostility. (I’m gonna let you figure out that one…)

As a way to bring a close to this meditation practice, which can last a very long time, depending upon on how many individual people or groups of people one includes, one directs the meditation to all sentient beings:
May all beings be safe and protected from harm.
May all beings be peaceful and happy.
May all beings be healthy and strong.
May all beings be patient with all that arises.
May all beings be peaceful with all that arises.
May all beings be present to all that arises.

Being of use to each other. To stand by each other. To be a gift to each other. To be at a crossroads of one known minister going, one unknown coming, and to be present, to be peaceful, to be patient with it all.

[Pause]

When I first read that sociological study, I thought of the loneliness it described. I tried to picture that modal American, that human being without any confidant, without any one in whom he or she could confide. Then, recently, the gift of someone here among us, sharing a tender dark moment of their life with me, trusting me that much, being brave enough to risk such a confidence. I realized there is something more than companionship that is missing when that modal American has no one in whom to confide.

There is also the loss of purpose, loss of meaning-making that comes from being in a mutual relationship – not just the chance to tell one’s own woes and joys to, but also the chance to listen to the woes and joys of another person. The modal American not only can’t share his or her worries, but also has no one with whom she or he co-creates purpose, no one with whom he or she makes meaning by witnessing the life of the other.

[Pause]

We have been in time period officially called “interim ministry.” Secretly, I have been calling it our Inbetween Time. “Inbetween” being one word, despite what the dictionary says, because, somehow, it’s not in [pause] between, but inbetween, a time together, not apart. Lines from Marge Piercy’s poem reminds me of this time when it invokes people who “move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.” We have done a lot of that in the past three years.

We have just said a rather “Ivory Soap” hello (99 44/100% pure, nearly like our vote) to Janet Bush, our new minister who will start officially with us this summer but who is already spending generous time planning and creating.

We are just about to say good-bye to Steve – a party was held two evenings ago and his last service with us on June 14. Steve: someone whose stewardship and ministerial presence has been a salve after years of…well, let us just say that Steve has been healing to this congregation at a time when we were so happy to have him be just that.

As a congregation, it sometimes has felt that we know better than any other that capital “M” ministers come and capital “M” ministers go. And hopefully we also know that as little “m” ministers, we are still here. We are here as each others’ ministers, as each others’ confidants, as each others’ antidotes.

[Pause]

In the Spring issue of UU World, Reverend Christine Robinson wrote of an experience she had at Disneyworld, and her reflections upon the commonalities between that experience and worship:

Why do people come to church? It is not to learn. People don’t even go to museums to learn. It’s not to be entertained. People don’t even go to Disneyland just to be entertained. They come to church – especially, they come to church – to quench a thirst, find meaningfulness, to have an authentic experience, or, in a more traditional religious language, to connect with mystery and see their everyday lives reflected in the mirror of eternity. Churches, then, and the lay and ordained people who lead them, are Imagineers of Soul, sorcerer’s apprentices in the art of quenching thirst, filling voids, opening the doors of meaning.

If we replace the word “church” with “house of worship” or “congregation” or something more inclusive, then this is just what the Worship Committee – in cahoots with the minister, in connection with each of you, aim to do: to support your being of use, to help you make meaning, to provide opportunities to cultivate confidants.

At our Annual Meeting a few short weeks ago, our new president, read aloud something apropos for marking this Inbetween Time. Here it is, in part.
[We] are called to stand in that lonely place between the no longer and the not yet and intentionally make decisions that will bind, forge, move and create history…. We are the ones called to gamble our lives for a better world.

Yes, it is a gamble, when we walk through those doors – the very first time and then ever since, whether it was 45 minutes ago or 45 years. It is a gamble and one that requires compassion of us and towards us. Given the general insecurity and fear in the world, given this tragic trend towards isolation, sometimes it’s hard to know why we walk knowingly into such a gamble. But like one of today’s poems tells us:
It’s just the way it is. // There is no other way. // Stumbling every time,
practice or no. // Just part of the bargain… // the unavoidable, //
intractable, // inexplicable // bargain.

We may well be mirrors that reflect eternity, but we are and must be mirrors that reflect each other’s everyday lives in this world as “common as mud.” We gamble by taking in a family in desperate need, by showing up even when we are bone tired or just want to read the Sunday paper, or by sitting next to someone unfamiliar and striking up a conversation. It’s even a gamble not knowing if we will take part in yet another three-hour, emotion-filled Annual Meeting, or – surprise! – the quickest, quietest one in the record books!

It turns out that when we need something or someone, the solution just might be for us to gift the very gift we seek. For us, in the midst of being our own flimsy web of questions and needs and loneliness and wants, to take in our cupped palms the fragile butterfly questions and needs and loneliness and wants of those around you, of those in this holy hall, of that one sitting next to you. It may well be awkward. It may not be easy. In fact, sometimes it will not be easy. As Wendell Berry told us, it will be “very arduous and humbling and joyful,” but he told us too it is a spiritual journey, “by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.”

Words for Parting



Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out -- no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

~ William Stafford ~

(The Way It Is)



References

Anderson, Mary Lou. Meditation for Leaders. Source unknown.

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems. North Point Press, 1987.

Levertov, Denise. Sands of the Well. New Directions Publishing Corporation,1996.

McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears. Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades, AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2006, VOL. 71 (June:353–375)

Oliver, Mary. Evidence. Beacon Press, 2009.

Piercy, Marge. Circles on the Water. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1982

Robinson, Christine. “Imagineers of Soul,” UU World, Spring 2009

Stafford, William. The Way It Is. Greywolf Press, 1999.

This sermon was delivered at the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence in Northampton, Massachusetts, on August 10, 2008. Thank you to Sarah Metcalfe, Mark Dunn, Flora Majumder, and Patti Benson for their assistance with the service.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Opening Words

Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to one's own.... When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies equally to all. --The Dalai Lama, Compassion and the Individual

Making the Most of Muck

Have you noticed the tugboat-like vacuum on Paradise Pond that arrived mid-June? It’s part of Smith’s regular efforts to reduce the silt and sediment build up. In the past, the pond has been drained but this year, they are using new technology. The process was described by the local Gazette reporter, Ellie Cook,
the sediment is vacuumed up and pumped into Geotubes - "essentially large socks" - to contain the sediment while letting clean water go back into the pond. The dried muck is hauled away.
When complete, the pond should be at least five feet deep, no wildlife will have been disturbed and no sediment released downstream. Pretty darn amazing, if you ask me.

I’m envious. I wish there was some new technology to clean up the muck of the world, and if not the whole world, at least my little life. A technology that lets stay the clear water of my life while taking away the muck, no disturbance to those around me or to myself, nothing messy about the process at all.
~~~
A poem from Jane Hirshfield, called The Weighing:

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

~~~
I have been lucky enough to preach a few times from this pulpit, amid this textured, motley congregation. It has been nothing short of thrilling for me, each and every time. I do not mean thrill in the transitory, immediate gratification sense, but in a transcendent sense. I have stood before you, with you, and my connection to the Holy has come closer for me. Thank you. It is my humble hope this may end up true for you, as well.

The rhythm of this sermon is going to be a bit different than some of my past ones, with poems interspersed as part of the sermon. As someone said last week at this same time, there are events and topics when prose just doesn’t come close enough to be satisfying. Most assuredly, these poems speak with an eloquence I can only hope to approximate.

In one of my past sermons, I referenced a list of ten qualities of spiritual intelligence put together by the Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend Kendyl Gibbons. That list is included in your order of meeting, but I will take the liberty of reading it aloud now:
• the ability to enter into a covenant
• the ability to celebrate and also to mourn
• an attraction to beauty, mercy and justice
• fluency in the use of metaphor
• a capacity for intensity and also for ambiguity
• Mitake Oyasin , from the Plains people of this continent, the Lakota and the Ojibwe, and others: connection to the earth and other creatures, "all our relations"
• Memento Mori : the constant awareness of death; acceptance of mortality and dedication to life regardless
• Islam : submission to circumstances and recognition of power, our own and also power we cannot control
• Tonglen , from the Buddhist tradition: the ability to absorb and transform suffering
• Teshuva , from Judiasm: the ability and willingness to repent

Today’s sermon is inspired by the eighth: the Buddhist practice of Tonglen.
~~~
And here: a poem, called Testimony, by Rebecca Baggett.

(for my daughters)

I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you that despite
children raped on city streets,
shot down in school rooms,
despite the slow poisons seeping
from old and hidden sins
into our air, soil, water,
despite the thinning film
that encloses our aching world.
Despite my own terror and despair.

I want you to know that spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby’s fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring
miracle. I want to tell you
that the river rocks shine
like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death,

I want to remind you to look
beneath the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle. I want
you to understand that you
are no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
“a great and common tenderness”,
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.
~~~
There are many ways to want to save the world. So many ways to turn our attention on this heart-breaking, heart-healing task. I want to share with you today one way that has existed for over a millennium.

In the tenth century, a man in India named Atisha heard of a practice that centered on using difficult circumstances to move towards attaining enlightenment. He traveled to Indonesia to learn it. He then brought this practice to Tibet, where it acquired the name, Tonglen. Tonglen became part of an unbroken lineage of teachings handed down from teacher to student and written down by a monk, Geshe Chakawa, in the 12th century.

At first, most of his students were lepers. According to Tibetan lore, Tonglen healed them. Healed them from an incurable disease. Is that just the stuff of legend? Just Tibetan mythology substituting the very concrete disease of leprosy as metaphor for a larger human condition? Or, were they actually healed through this very focused meditative practice?

Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun from whose recorded and written teachings I have learned about Tonglen, speaks of Tonglen being taught nowadays in hospice settings and other situations where there is no hope of cure. She says that Tonglen isn’t taught because it is believed it can cure AIDS or cancer like the Tibetan story of Geshe Chakawa’s lepers, but because it heals the spirit. The pain of cancer, of AIDS, of a terminal illness does not end, but the suffering can be transformed. The Buddha said something like that: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is not.” Perhaps the lepers were healed not of their pain, but of their suffering?

~~~
A poem by Anne Sexton. It is called Courage.

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.


~~~
Here is a description of the actual practice of Tonglen. It came to me through a friend whose teacher, Matt Flickstein (EE), describes the practice as learning

to take into ourselves that which we have typically rejected, and to send out to others what we have always desired for ourselves. This practice “rides with the breath.” With our in-breath we breathe in the sufferings of other living beings, and with our out breath we send forth our healing thoughts and feelings of health, happiness, and good wishes. This practice can feel very threatening for some people since it feels like we are taking in physical, psychological, and spiritual poisons, and at the same time breathing out our own source of good health and joy. Paradoxically, this powerful and effective process actually increases our inner well-being as our hearts learn to transform misery or suffering, into a profound experience of love and peace.

Though drawn again and again to Buddhist philosophy and practice, let me tell you here and now that I have basically little discipline when it comes to practice. I share this with some embarrassment, but also so you know that I’m not up here suggesting that this stuff is easy. In fact, one Buddhist teacher with whom I spoke about Tonglen said rather matter of factly that it should not be done unless under the guidance of a teacher, it is that powerful.

I get that. I bet you do too. ‘Cause it does seem just a bit more than counterintuitive:
I have to breathe in suffering? Not happiness, but suffering? Okay, okay, I hear that part about breathing out again, but, uhh, what if some of it gets stuck? What if I get stuck with someone else’s – or god forbid – the world’s suffering? Not so sure I want to do that.

~~~

The poem, Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye:


Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

~~~

Actually practicing Tonglen in the pews is not part of today’s service. You can rest easy. There is, however, something from this tradition that can inspire us, that we can let guide us. It doesn’t have to be about sitting on a meditation cushion, you don’t have to know the Pali or Sanskrit words for compassion or suffering. Yet the concept of Tonglen might guide us, it might give us a name for something we already know, it might even make us more spiritually intelligent.

About two years ago, I was walking in Boston and saw a white man in a business suit, dapper and uptight looking, walking. It was cold and misting. In a split second, he slipped. He caught himself, but just barely. He righted himself, and quickly kept walking, trying to act like nothing had happened. Without thought, even though I have to admit to some prejudices against uptight, business-suited white men, I began to breathe for him. As I did, I felt the uncomfortable adrenaline rush of his body, the cold fear of what might have happened, but hadn’t. I breathed, over and over, wishing him to breathe, wishing him to slow, wishing him well. I had never heard of Tonglen, but I did know of shared humanity. I knew, I sensed some kind of force that bound me to him and let that move me.

~~~
For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield:

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

~~~

Maybe you too have done something like Tonglen these past two weeks, since the shooting at the Knoxville Unitarian Church. Yes, we have all sat with the sorrow, the outrage, the confusion. But more than that. Maybe you have also gone beyond your own confusion and imagined, empathized, perhaps even breathed in some of the confusion, some of the horror, some of the sorrow of those who were there.

Perhaps you had a moment like I did: imagining the fear of a small child in that church, at first an intellectual image, then breathing more deeply, feeling the tears fall down my cheeks, then the breath out, and somehow, it wasn’t my chest expanding, it was the small girl’s. It was as if my breathing in her suffering, then breathing out love could expand her world that become so small and frightening. It was in that moment, when I thought I felt her chest become less constricted, become more relaxed, that I understood that I could not stop her pain – that none of us could take back the violence that had happened – but that maybe – just maybe – we could make smaller her suffering.

And not just the small girl or small boy’s suffering – who watched what none of us would ever want them to have witnessed. And not just the suffering of the congregation, shattered, and in pieces, and on their way to a place of peaceful strength – we pray, we hope -- again. But also for the gunman, whose misguided suffering is now, in hindsight, tragically clearer.

As I was reminded last Sunday, at the service in this Great Hall, there is immeasurable power not only in our compassion for those who suffer senseless violence, but also compassion towards those who inflict it. We are reminded of this when we remember the small Amish community, also struck by a gunman’s violence, who offered support to the gunman’s widow. We see it when H.H. the Dalai Lama speaks sincerely of dialogue with governmental leaders in China, a nation that has brutalized his homeland, made him an exile, and continues to vilify him.

Pema Chodron speaks of people who “do” Tonglen long before they ever hear of the practice. It is what I think is happening in this section of a poem by Suheir Hammad, a Palestian poet and performance artist, who was born in Jordan and grew up in this country. The poem is called First Writing Since (Poem on the Crisis of Terror) and was written in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. This stanza comes as part of a long litany of reasons for gratitude.

thank you to the woman who saw me brinking my cool and blinking back tears. she opened her arms before she asked "do you want a hug?" a big white woman, and her embrace was the kind only people with the warmth of flesh can offer. i wasn't about to say no to any comfort. "my brother's in the navy," i said. "and we’re arabs". "wow, you got double trouble." word.

Though it is words and hugs, not breathing, I think this is Tonglen. Taking on someone else’s suffering and transforming it through empathy, the ability to see our common humanity, to see what commonly binds us together. The pain is still there, but the suffering is lessened.

~~~
Now a poem from Alison Luterman, called Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

~~~
“I … thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night, the slow, unglamorous work of healing….The work of my heart is the work of the world’s heart. There is no other art.”

Just what is this invisible work of the world? It’s recognizing the common humanity of someone AND acting on it with your words, with your empathetic gesture, with your political activism, with your big, fleshy hug… and with your breath. Like Anne Sexton told us: It’s picking the scabs off your own heart and wringing it out like a sock so that you might wake to the wings of roses and find your suffering, and that of others, transformed.

Let us do this invisible work. Whether it is to be of service or to act to change things or to bring an essential element of reflection to the chaos of the world. Or perhaps some delightful, difficult, determined mishmash of all three.

Let us do it for ourselves, for each other, for all in this world, whether we know them or not, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with their politics or not, whether they have given us pain or pleasure. Let us breathe in suffering and breathe out relief. In doing so, we see our own suffering as part of the larger human condition and therefore, miraculously, lesser.

There is an art to practicing whatever form of Tonglen you choose. It is not the kind of art that demands talent, just willingness and an open heart. Not an unscathed heart (if such a thing exists), but an open heart. The poet Jane Hirshfield reminded us
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Though there might be science and technology on the side of mucking out Paradise Pond, there is no science to mucking out the human experience. It is neither scientific nor easy, but it is artful – to find the strength when we have already given all, to take in others’ suffering when we already have enough of our own, thank you very much.

But what else is there? What else can we do? The work of my heart is the work of the world’s heart. When it comes down to it, there really is no other art.


Closing Words

This morning’s closing words come to us from Gregory Orr and his book entitled, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved:

When I open the book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
Laugh ad lament.

In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
Is love, which casts its wing
Over all suffering, which takes
In its arms the hurt child,
Which rises green from the fallen seed.”



References

“Walking the Beat: Muck we Must,” Ellie Cook, Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 1, 2008
Rebecca Baggett Women's Uncommon Prayers
“Tonglen” by Matt Flickstein
First Writing Since (Poem on the Crisis of Terror) by Suheir Hammad
Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels and October Palace
Alison Luterman, The Largest Possible Life
Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved
Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Towards God

I just spent the last full week of July at the international Affairs Conference on Star Island, where I am currently the Director of the Youth Program. I love this "job", especially the kids (who range in age from 18 months to 18 years) and the youth staff, who were phenomenal this year. As part of the responsibilities of my position, I get to create an intergenerational chapel service. This means, I get to create a chapel service that is accessible to three year old, engaging of 14 year olds, and won't bore the parents and grandparents to tears. I enjoyed putting together this year's chapel service, which included Chaka's instrumental guitar version of Bruce Springsteen's Into the Fire and a energetic rendition of Ella's Song, sung by Robin and Becky, accompanied on drum by Jon. We also had a group sing of Come, Come, Whoever You Are, led by Cindy & Erika. Opening words were spoken by Lauri, closing words by Holly. The chalice was lit by no other than my son. Thanks to all of you!

This homily was delivered on July 25, 2008. The sharing of "musical" memories from the congregation was rich and lasted a good long time, creating a beautiful symphony of its own.

Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoales, a collection of 9 or 10 islands (depending on high or low tide) that straddle the border between New Hampshire and Maine.
~~~~~~~~


If you are willing, I ask for a small indulgence. I would like to take you – momentarily – off island. Just for a moment, I’d like to take you to a Washington DC subway station – one of those places where the trains run underground, bringing people from all parts of our nation’s capitol to other places in and around that city. It is the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station – we can just call it the Elephant subway stop – and we will be there two Aprils ago – not this past April, but the April before.

I promise we will come back to Star, we will come back to this, our last night on Star, but first, come with me to the part of the subway station with the turnstiles, where people come and go, not right near the trains, but just where you go in the station or where you leave it. In this place, it’s pretty darn busy: it’s early morning, grown-ups are dressed for work and are rushing about, trying to get to work, trying to get their kids to school or day care. And in this place, two Aprils ago, there is a street musician. He’s dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and a cap and he’s playing the violin. At his feet is the instrument’s case, in case anyone listening wants to put money as thanks for the music.

How many of you here have seen a street musician before? What kinds of instruments have you seen them play?

Well, in this place, at Elephant subway stop, this musician is playing one of the world’s most famous violins and even though he’s kinda dressed in disguised, it turns out that he is Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most famous and best violin players there is!

But all those people rushing around – nobody knows that this guy is the very best because it’s an experiment. You see, this guy – his name is Gene Weingarten and he writes for the Washington Post newspaper – he decided he wanted to see what would happen – he wanted to see how people would respond to some of the world’s most beautiful music, played by the most famous violin player – he wanted to see if all those people would even notice the very beautiful music. Would they realize they were listening to a very rare talent? Would this professional musician who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars, who plays a violin worth $3.5 million dollars, in the world’s best concert arenas, would anyone give him money? And just how much?

In the Pulitzer-prize winning article that Mr. Weingarten wrote it’s clear: not so much. You see, they videotaped the experiment and talked to some of the people who rushed through Elephant subway stop that day. The videotape shows that well over a thousand people walked past this common-looking musician and the videotape recorded their reaction. Nobody – with one exception – recognized Joshua Bell. Most people – in fact, nearly all – just walked by and didn’t’ seem to notice. Didn’t seem to hear the music. In fact, you can count on the fingers of two Pelicans the number of people who actually stopped to listen – and even fewer who gave the performer any money. And just what were the riches this world-class violinist raked in? $32 and some odd change…

You might ask: why is this relevant to us here on Star Island? Why is this important to us here at the International Affairs Conference? Well, let me share with you one particular point of interest from this experiment and I think you might figure out why it’s important to us, especially to us who are a part of the youth program here at IA. The article tells us the story of one particular person who did hear the music:

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

(Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out. By Gene Weingarten. Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html )

Let me say again, at the risk of being redundant: “…the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.” I’d like to think that surprises no one in this room. We know the truth of this from our own youth here on island. Each and every one of them – and the group as a whole – has a keen sense of the vibrance, the musicality, the artistic sensibility, the sacred, creative energy around and among us. Energy that is far too often lost on adults. Well, let me not assume and just say, that is too often lost on me, and maybe lost on some of the other grown-ups in the room.

But I do like to think, not lost quite so often when I am – when we are – here on Star Island.

Again from the article: “And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.” If you are anything like me, you winced as you hear that, seeing in your mind’s eye the times you too have deftly placed your body between your child and whatever piece of the world has attracted their curious attention at a time not especially convenient for you.

But here we all are. Remember I promised to bring you back to the Island? So many of us have a commitment to bring ourselves, to bring our children, to make sure our children (or grandchildren or nieces and nephews …) get to this Island as often as possible. We do this because we ant them not only to hear the rare music that can be found only on this rock in the middle of the Atlantic, but also to make it!

And it is important that we say out loud, we are here this year after a full year missed – which had not happened since the World War II years. We are here on our very special Island and we are at IA with its very vibrant youth program. We are here with youth who say, unequivocally, “Oh! I hear music! Let’s stay! Let’s not rush away!”

And here on Star Island, we parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles don’t have to say not now quite so often. We don’t have to, quite so often, deftly maneuver ourselves between what calls our children and what our workaday lives demand of us.

Maybe the music is the music of the rocks: silent, but musically nonetheless, as the ocean pounds upon them. Maybe it’s the music of the tire dragon, weaving wondrous story telling music, coaxing yet another generation of kiddles onto its back for the ride of their lives. Maybe it’s the music of the bold leap into frigid polar bear waters. Maybe it’s the music of bonfires with s’mores on the rocks. Or the music of the famous Squeeze Trio: orange, lemon and carrot. It’s the music of the marine lab, capture the flag, softball versus the Pels, late night in Parker, lime rickeys, frozen Charlston Chews, and the list goes on. The music on this island is a symphony and we are ever so grateful to each and every youth who makes it and who compels us to listen to it.

What music have you heard this week? As you are moved, please stand up and share your favorite memories of this past week. Please use your loud inside voice to let us all know what you loved best about this week, what you will take with you off Island as we pack our bags and head off on the boat tomorrow.

[congregation shares]

We are so lucky here. We don’t need the music of a violin virtuoso. We have our very own special, quite rare music here. Music that is wide, music that is deep, music that is myriad. We have youth who will not only join us in our quest to creat a world that can co-exist in peace, one that can co-exist in justice, but who will carry on long after we have made our contribution.

And there is no music more beautiful than that.

(cc) Karen G. Johnston

This sermon was delivered at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence on Sunday, November 4, 2007.















Come sit here in this house of worship that welcomes you, that embraces you, that calls to the whole of you: your heart, your mind, your soul, your toes, your fingers, even the wisps of your hair. Come sit here and spend the next moments together, in this place made sacred by our presence together.




An excerpt about our principles, from Singing the Living Tradition:

“The Living Tradition we share draws from many sources, [including the] words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love…”

~~~~~~

From the introduction to Alice Walker’s We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For:

This does not mean we believe, having seen the greater truth of how all oppression is connected, how pervasive and unrelenting, that we can “fix” things. But some of us are not content to have a gap in opportunity and income that drives a wedge between rich and poor, causing the rich to become ever more callous and complacent and the poor to become ever more wretched and humiliated. Not willing to ignore starving and brutalized children. Not willing to let women be stoned or mutilated without protest. Not willing to stand quietly by as farmers are destroyed by people who have never farmed and plants are engineered to self-destruct. Not willing to disappear into our flower gardens, Mercedes Benzes or sylvan lawns. We have wanted all our lives to know that Earth, who has somehow obtained human beings as her custodians, was also capable of creating humans who could minister to her needs, and the needs of her creation. We are the ones.




from Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder

Farmer was learning about the great importance of water to public health, and he was conceiving a great fondness for technology in general, also scorn for “the Luddite trap.” He liked to illustrate the meaning of that phrase with a story of the time when he came back to Cange from Harvard and found that Pére Lafontant had overseen the construction of thirty fine-looking concrete latrines, scattered through the village. “But,” Farmer asked, “are they appropriate technology?” He’d picked up the term in a class at the Harvard School of Public Health. As a rule, it meant that one should use only the simplest technologies to do a job.

“Do you know what appropriate technology means? It means good things for rich people and shit for the poor,” the priest growled, and refused to speak to Farmer again for a couple of days.

Lafontant was also supervising the construction of a clinic to Cange – the South Carolinians had put up the money. The facility would have a laboratory, of course. Farmer got hold of a pamphlet about how to equip labs in third world places published by the World Health Organization. It made modest recommendations. You could make do with only one sink. If it wasn’t easy to arrange for electricity, you could rely on solar power. A homemade solar-powered microscope would serve for most purposes. He threw the booklet away. The first microscope in Cange was a real one, which he stole from Harvard Medical School. “Redistributive justice,” he’d later say. “We were just helping them not go to hell.” (pp. 89-90)



A word, first, about the title of this sermon, “Making Common Cause with the Losers.” I am not about to spend the next twenty minutes inspiring you to befriend that awkward teenage child within that you prayed you left behind when you graduated high school. Neither is it an endorsement of splitting the world into winners and losers; in fact, it is quite the opposite. The title is taken from a quote by Paul Farmer, as retold in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, written by local author, Tracy Kidder.

It is a different kind of loser altogether.

Paul Farmer was born in 1959 in North Adams; he grew up in both Massachusetts and Alabama. He attended Duke, then Harvard and earned a dual degree as a medical doctor and an anthropologist. He was raised nominally Catholic, but it meant little to him until he saw Catholicism embodied in the lives of the people whom he would come to serve in the poorest area of the poorest nation in our hemisphere: Cange, on the Central Plateau in Haiti. In other words, Paul Farmer has dedicated his life in service of so-called “losers.”

Farmer was drawn to not just any Catholicism, but liberation theology -- a version of Catholicism born among the poor of Latin America that spread to the Caribbean and even further afield. Liberation theology sees Jesus not only as a religious figure, but as a political figure; not only as a redeemer in the afterlife, but a liberator in this one. Lib Theo is inexorably linked to a preferential option for the poor. This principle is rooted in a biblical notion of justice, calling us to be advocates for the powerless, to create conditions for marginalized voices to be heard, and to assess policies and social institutions in terms of their impact on the poor, even if it means hardship for the rich. Paul Farmer has short-hand for this long phrase; he calls it “O for the P.”

For over twenty years, Paul Farmer has been working in Haiti to address desperately poor health conditions. In this country Paul Farmer’s work is called Partners in Health (PIH) and is headquartered in Boston. In Haiti it is Zanmi Lasante, and it is a sophisticated health clinic that has achieved the impossible: nearly eradicated tuberculosis (TB) in the area of Haiti where the people had been all but written off. Zanmi Lasante has also brought medical treatment to Haitians with HIV and AIDS, making available treatment theretofore not considered “appropriate technology” because it was too expensive for that part of the world.

Paul Farmer, in collaboration with other people who have become known as PIHers, did all this against the odds, against nay-sayers, and against institutional structures designed to thwart attempts to provide resources justly. PIH’s work has spread to other parts of the world – Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho – again proving that abject poverty is not the reason people are sick and dying of treatable diseases; it is structural bias and failure of political will on the part of rich nations such as our own.

In reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, in reading about Paul Farmer who is alive and well and working today, I felt a rush of possibility and hope.

Not simple hope, not simple possibility. Liberation theology does not offer a simple hope. It offers hope full of complexity for all involved, but most especially for people who experience privilege. People like me, like us, living in the richest country in the world. People like us living in a community that has many resources and sources of affluence. People like us who experience human suffering certainly and financial distress at times, but rarely chronic poverty and certainly not the kind of poverty found in Haiti (or Nicaragua or Mali or…unfortunately, the list goes on).

There is a story in the book that embodies this complexity from the point of view of a preferential option for the poor. PIH spends $20,000 to airlift a young child from Haiti to Boston for pro bono medical treatment, but he ends up dying. In the book, the author has questions about the use of resources in this way and eventually brings these questions to Farmer. He comments, “It’s a shame you had to spend so much, given what else you could do with twenty grand.” Farmer turns this perspective on its head:

“Yeah, but there are so many ways of saying that,” he replies. “For example, why didn’t the airplane company that makes money, the mercenaries, why didn’t they pay for his flight? That’s a way of saying it. Or how about this way? How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, That’s all it adds up to is defeat? …I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory…You know, people from our background – like you, like most PIH-ers, like me – we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no; it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat. (emphasis mine) …I would regard that as the basic stance of O for the P. I don’t care if we lose, I’m gonna try to do the right thing.” (highly excerpted, pp. 288-90)

~~

This is heavy stuff. When I first read this story, I felt inspired, yes, but I also felt inadequate to the task laid before me. It is hard to figure out how all this fits in our lives. If you find that you might be tuning out just a bit or feeling the weight of the guilt, let me stop you now. Stop. Stop the voice fed by guilt. Stop the voice telling you that the pain of the world is too much, that you are too little.

That is a trap and one we cannot afford to enter into. Neither can those living in poverty afford that we fall into it. To paraphrase one of PIH’s co-founders: “if the poor have to wait for a lot of people like Paul to come along before they get good health care, they are totally doomed.”

How do we, who live in relative privilege, how do we make the concept of a preferential option for the poor be real in our lives? How might we find ways to be “advocates for the powerless, to create conditions for marginalized voices to be heard, and to assess policies and social institutions in terms of their impact on the poor, even if it means hardship for the rich?”

As Unitarian Universalists, we need to look to those “words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” Like the words and work of Paul Farmer. Or magnificent voices even within our own congregation: Sanat Majumber has always been a voice for the voiceless, urging our congregation to be actively involved in human rights campaigns of Amnesty International. He recently wrote something and shared it with me. In it, I came across a concept that struck a strong and urgent chord: fierce empathy.

Fierce empathy is the bridge between our current relatively comfortable lives to those of the poor and marginalized. Fierce empathy means exposure to the reality of very difficult circumstances – not fictionalized versions, not photo-opp versions, not even reality-show versions, but real life. Stuff that makes us uncomfortable, that brings us closer to despair, that forces us to encounter the possibility that things might not turn out in the end, that in the end, we just might lose.

Some of us already do this in our paid work, some of us already do this in our volunteer work: engage with people in marginalized communities, in communities experiencing economic scarcity or violence or both. This is not wholly unfamiliar territory. Those of you who work in social services already know the truth of what I am about to say: it is getting worse out there. What people on the margins of our society are experiencing is much worse than it used to be. And the systems to protect people from bad things or to help them heal from those bad things isn’t working.

It is fierce empathy that moves us out of talking about “the Poor,” or other marginalized groups, as if this group were one monolithic distanced mass without faces, without histories, without joy. It is fierce empathy that reminds us that “the Poor” are not just our metaphorical neighbors. It demands that we understand neighbor not just to mean the one next to me on the street, but also the street over, or across town, or across an ocean. It is fierce empathy that moves what might otherwise be charity to an act of justice, redistributive justice, and not just as a political act, but a spiritual one as well. Fierce empathy compels us to use our privilege to at least know the truth of our messy, unjust world; it allows us to not wall ourselves off from its painful weight, and sometimes, to choose to do something about it.
~~

I am proud of the ways in which our congregation has embodied a preferential option for the poor, has chosen the path of fierce empathy. When I joined back in 1995, we were already one of the seven original houses of worship involved in the cot shelter program that evolved into a true, established seasonal shelter for the homeless in our community.

I remember this building back then. What delicious chaos! Each Sunday night from November to April was spent hauling cots from the attic to the social room downstairs. Dinner was cooked and provided, UU volunteers socialized with our homeless guests, and we even slept overnight. Monday mornings would be breakfast and pack up, only to repeat it the next Sunday after the other six houses of worship had provided their designated night of shelter.

There are other ways I see us, as a congregation, embracing a broadly defined preferential option for the poor. I see this when so many foster and adopted children enrich our community and become woven into our tapestry of belonging. I see this each weekday at noon, when our building hosts the downtown AA meeting, ensuring a reliable, safe space for that very important personal and community work. I see this when last year my daughter came home from her RE class with a list of companies whose practices support child labor; she set down the law in our home about what we could and could not buy.

Not many of us can just up and leave our current lives, join Partners in Health, the Peace Corps or some other worthy organization and live our lives among the poorest of the poor. Even if we could, not all of us are meant to do that kind of thing. Yet there are other ways to “make common cause with the losers.” There are ways we can do some of our own redistributive justice.

Now, I’m not advocating that we go “creatively borrow” from the Harvard School of Medicine as Paul Farmer did (unless you are so inclined and don’t mention me to the authorities). But I am asking each of you, each of us, to see how we can embody a preferential O for the P. Let us start to look first at what we are already doing, and then move to see what else we can do.

If you are a member of freecycle, the online re-use/recycle community, maybe you are already applying a preferential O for the P: instead of following a first- come-first-served ethic, perhaps you give your item away to the person whose need seems most in line with your values. I have given away a trumpet to child with autism and books to someone building a school in Uganda.

If you support Friends of Forbes or Lilly Library, could you consider tithing some of that money to a library in an impoverished community? Right now, money being raised by the Solentiname Friendship Group is going towards building a library for the children of that community in Nicaragua; several of our congregants are members of this small NGO and would be more than happy to talk to you about their cultural exchange efforts.

Or if you want to give closer to home, what about the Friends of Holyoke Library, a community just south of us that is rich in grassroots organizing, but poor in terms of material resources? Or the Reach Out and Read early literacy program that takes place in public health clinics all over, including Holyoke and Springfield, or Turners Falls, introducing young – mostly poor -- children to books by giving them at each well-child check-up?

So literacy isn’t your thing, but the environment is. How about in addition to cleaning up conservation areas, you build connections with people living in Hampshire Heights and Florence Heights – Northampton’s public housing projects. Find out what it would mean to help them make those neighborhoods in our community, home to many living below the poverty level, beautiful and safe.


There are many ways to apply a preferential option for the poor in our daily lives – if we intentionally let ourselves become accustomed to doing so.

~~

The UU Reverend Robert Hardies wrote an essay, “Loving the Contradictions.” In it, he tells of a lesson learned while studying with one of the greatest liberation theologians, Gustavo Gutierrez, who is the priest of a large, poverty-stricken parish on the outskirts of Lima, Peru.:
On the third day of class, a student asked Gutiérrez to explain how we, as residents of the richest country in the world, could best serve the poor in Latin America. After some silence, Gutiérrez confessed that he had always struggled with how to divide his time between being a parish priest and a theologian. Sometimes he felt guilty traveling the world giving talks and papers while his parishioners struggled just to survive. Other times, he felt frustrated that he couldn’t more broadly share liberation theology’s gospel of God’s love for the poor and oppressed. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve sought a theoretical or spiritual answer to this question of how I am to serve the poor: as a priest or as a theologian. But I haven’t found one. I simply try to find a balance between being a theologian and being a pastor. And in the midst of all the suffering—I know this might sound romantic—I try to be happy.”
“As for you,” he said to the student, “you have to find the answer for yourself.”

Hardies continues

At first I thought, “You can’t get off that easy!” But eventually the message broke through my resistance, and something shifted for me. I have accepted the complex notion that the contradictions in our lives will remain, and that in the midst of those tensions we must try to be happy and to love the world.

It is not that our libraries don’t need or deserve our money. They very much do. It is not like our very own congregation doesn’t need our money. It does! But it is very much like the scene from Fiddler on the Roof when the local beggar asks a neighbor for his daily tzedakah or alms. The neighbor offers half of what he usually gives, apologizing because he had been having bad financial luck. To this the beggar responds, “Just because you had a bad day, I should suffer?”


This morning’s children’s story tells us “It’s in our hands.” Alice Walker declares, “We are the ones.” Paul Farmer reminds us “to fight the long defeat.” Let us listen to these prophetic women and men. Let us make common cause with the losers.



Let us revisit the words we said to each other at the start of this morning’s service. They come to us from bell hooks, an African-American, feminist, self-defined revolutionary cultural activist who teaches at Berea College in Kentucky. For those of you who don’t know Berea, it was founded in 1885 and was the first inter-racial, co-educational college in the South. It charges no tuition and admits academically-promising students, primarily from Appalachia.

I like that the point of convergence of liberation theology, Islamic mysticism, and engaged Buddhism is the sense of love that leads to commitment and involvement with the world, and not a turning-away from the world. A form of wisdom that I strive for is the ability to know what is needed at a given moment in time. When do I need to reside in that location of stillness and contemplation, and when do I need to get up off my [butt] and do whatever is needed to be done in terms of physical work, or engagement with others, or confrontation with others? I'm not interested in ranking one type of action over the other. (bell hooks)

May we cultivate fierce empathy within ourselves and within others. Blessed be. Namaste.





Fiddler on the Roof, movie, 1971

Hardies, Robert; “Loving the Contradictions,” from UUWorld, Summer, 2007

hooks, bell; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Fall 1992 (Vol. II, #1)

Kidder, Tracy; Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man who Would Cure the World, Random House, 2003

Rumi; “My Heart is so Small,” from Whispers of the Beloved by Maryam & Azima Melita Kolin

Walker, Alice; We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness, New Press, 2006

Special thanks to Al Grandoit, who helped me with the pronunciation of the Haitian Creole words.