First Parish of Watertown

“Walking Through Many Lives” Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - January 25, 2009

Call to Worship - The Layers” by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Readings - from Listening is An Act of Love, edited by David Isay
from An American Requiem by James Carroll


Sermon - “Walking Through Many Lives” Mark W. Harris

I have been worried that you my parishioners might be getting tired of the personal stories that I use in many of my sermons to illustrate the topic of the day. You probably realize that I am a firm believer in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s preaching philosophy that the true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life; his life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, you cannot tell if he or she is married or single, a parent or not, has loved or lied and so forth. The goal of course is to use an example from my life, and try to universalize it, so that it has meaning for you as well, and does not just appear to be that I am merely talking about myself. How boring! It can be a thin line between meaningful self-revelation and narcissism. The problem is that I am now in my thirteenth year here, and as I sometimes write down a story about my love for dinosaurs or my father’s business, I humbly think, they have heard this story countless times before, and are probably sick of it. At the moment I have no computer search device for repeated personal stories. I sometimes think I am like that boring uncle who comes to Thanksgiving dinner, and retells the same stories every year, like the time his brothers were chased by the cops while driving go-carts, or when his sister snuck all the pies out to the barn and ate them all before dinner. These are true family stories. Maybe what we can do is something like the family joke system where they are numbered and don’t have to be retold. You just know them from repeated retellings. For example, I shout out “3” , and you know it is the one about Why did the UU cross the road? Answer: to help the chicken find her own path.” So with personal stories, I’ll now say dinosaurs is #1 or Dad is #2, and you will get it.

The sermon today serves as an introduction to a course I plan to teach in February and March. It is called Spiritual Autobiography. Don’t think this is a private chance for me to hold a group captive to yet another retelling of my stories. On the contrary it is a chance for you to reflect and write about your own personal journey toward wholeness. Part of the course is to reflect upon a mentor or friend who has inspired you. Perhaps that friend has shown you the path to forgiving another, or making the most of your talent or intelligence. From them we learn to stop being so judgmental or discover an ever renewing love for learning. What they gave us reflects those values we hold most dear. Who were those people for you? This journey may also include a road map of your life. Where did you begin this journey, and how did that inform who you are today? Where were the detours and the accidents, the true turning points? Did you ever have free and open highway? And where is that road headed now? What would your map look like? Get your kicks on Route 66. Another class asks you to draw your favorite childhood room. Which room in your childhood house was it? Do you find yourself in the solace of your own bedroom, or is it a kitchen table where people are together communicating support, fighting, eating. Which room is it? Who is there? And, what is there? Do you love the camaraderie of food and companionship or the quiet inspiration of a full bookcase.

Which room would it be for you? There is a famous passage from the Gospel of John that is frequently quoted at funeral services. Jesus is reputed to have said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” This is usually interpreted to mean that there is going to be a lot of room in heaven, and the deceased is going to be part of this diverse body of house dwellers. But it also tells us that are many different ways to be faithful people in this life. It also reflects the meaning found in our opening words. As we age, like Stanley Kunitz, we know we have walked through many lives, and like him we feel, “I am not who I was.” There are abandoned campsites. There are the true affections of our past. There are people we left behind as we moved on. A minister deeply feels these breaks in connections with people once he/she has left a parish. In life there are many mansions, and we are different in each of those times and places. We are changed by each of these mansions, or each of these layers, as Kunitz calls them. Each of those layers has brought something to us as we navigate the map of our lives, and recognizing that is much healthier than treating it all as litter we have thrown away. Life is these changing layers, these many rooms. In her book, Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup gives a good perspective on the need for building on these layers. In reflecting on a traditional view of an afterlife in heaven, Braestrup asks if we could imagine spending forever with ourselves. She believes none of us could stand it. Speaking of herself, she writes, “eternity is a long time to spend with someone who, for all her good qualities, talks a lot, is a compulsive knitter, and can’t keep track of car keys.” Then she goes on to reflect upon idea of being perfected in heaven. What good would that do us, she wonders. “If I’m perfect”, she writes, “I won’t be me.”

We build our self from the layers of struggle, the layers of both pain and glory, and each layer is a part of the story, not a rejected portion, but a building block to a fuller realization of the potential for love in each of us, and yet as Braestrup says, those nagging genetic failings, and those nagging traits of stubbornness or anger, or pride make it pretty unlikely that we will find a perfect soul waiting at the end of the line. The story of life is not so much the pure march to glory, but the coming back, the layers built on failure or the times to engage in what Mary Livermore calls the battle of life, and simply build layers that prove we have done the best we could have with what we have been given, and we must forgive ourselves for the perfection that will never be ours.

Mary Ashton Rice Livermore was one of the most famous women in the nineteenth century, and probably the most famous women lecturer in the world. Called the Queen of the Platform she gave her most enduring address, “What Shall We Do with our Daughters?,” a call for equal education for women, over 800 times. Her life was changed on Christmas Eve 1844 when she was out for a walk feeling lonely and adrift. As a strict Calvinist, she had been taught as a young girl to shun the wanton celebration of Christmas, but this night the music of the Universalist church in Duxbury drew her in, and she heard a message from the minister Daniel Livermore of God’s love for all. That one decision changed her life, as she went on to marry that minister and devote her life to greater service including the abolition of slavery, the care of wounded soldiers and finally, women’s suffrage. This last was not a battle she wished to lose, and she is probably most famously credited with this quote: “Whoever said, 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts.' probably lost.”   Livermore wrote about her experiences in the Civil War, concluding, “For humanity has moved forward to an era when wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life.” Then near the end of her life, she wrote, The Story of My Life. She gives us some insight into our own reflections on spiritual autobiographies, when she wrote: “But it requires some courage to write one’s biography. Every human soul has its secret chamber, which no one is allowed to invade. Our uncomforted sorrows, our tenderest and most exquisite loves, our remediless disappointments, our highest aspirations, our constantly baffled efforts for higher attainments, are known only to ourselves and God. We never talk of them.”

Reflecting on the story of your life gives you the chance to talk about what has evolved in your soul, and hopefully continues to evolve. “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the title of Paul Gauguin’s most famous painting. It is housed at the MFA in Boston. He considered it his masterpiece; the culmination of all his work. His answers to these questions were embodied in a work of art. How would you articulate your answer? What are you doing to keep composing your masterpiece? About a year and a half ago, a colleague used those last words of the poem by Stanley Kunitz, “I am not done with my changes,” and implored a group of clergy not to be done with our changes, for he said once we ministers stop growing and changing, then the ministry in the congregation is over. It’s dead. The same is true of congregational life. I don’t mean in terms of numbers, as in drawing in more people, but rather that our purpose as a congregation must be spiritual growth for each and over member. Some of this is embodied in how we respond to our faith and go out and live in the world seeking justice and equality. For some this spiritual growth is fostered in public worship, as they find the courage to speak at Joys and Sorrows, and some of it may continue when you respond to a joy or sorrow and reach out to another person in some way, or it may be a quiet tear of resolve in the sanctuary, or the provocation to make the world a better place by giving time or energy to a cause or a program. Spiritual Autobiography may sound self-involved, but what it really means is that you find meaning in the experiences of your life, and greater understanding of your own strengths and weakness, talents and flaws that make what up what it is to be human - imperfectly human.

The story of our spiritual journeys starts for each of us in our childhood. For me, a crisis point was the rejection of the fundamentalist dogma of my childhood Sunday School that afforded me no place to engage in a free search for truth and explore those darn dinosaurs (that’s #1). This morning we heard a story from Listening is An Act of Love, about a man who was caught in a lie as a child. We saw how that lie was challenged and the great matriarch, shamed him a bit. While this might not be our stereotypical UU style of dealing with the lie, I kind of like the decisiveness of it. He never lied again, after she made him go to Sunday School in his pajamas. Most of us have these kind of indelible experiences in life that taught us something that is forever tattooed on our souls or psyches. Touching these stories of our lives reminds us of the powerful truth we each carry if given the chance to share that truth with others.

There is something powerful about sharing a story of your life. I was bemoaning the fact the other day that I did not get a chance to read or tell one Christmas story this year - no Polar Express, no Night Before Christmas, no Santa memory from my childhood dashing across the lawn. My boys are getting older and don’t clamor for stories much anymore. I still relish those moments when I get to read to them, telling a story, sitting close to them, watching for their engagement. James Carroll reminds us that the very act of story telling is holy, calling it a version of what God does. Telling your story is what brought you close to the person you love the most. And you tell them again as the layers grow, and the meaning deepens. The relationship falters when we stop talking and listening to one another. Carroll tells how another’s story became a resolution for him. Maybe we listen to another’s story and realize that is what I need to do. We often wait for others to tell us, you are real or or acceptable certified now. Ministerial students wait for the stamp of approval from some committee. But the truth is they become a minister in other ways. Perhaps it is as they sit with a family whose daughter has just died of cancer at the age of 34, for instance, and hear all about her life. That was the first funeral service I ever conducted. We hear of another’s pain or frustration or fear, and while we cannot give a answer of a perfect heaven waiting for all our loved ones and us, we can assure each person that they are loved, they are forgiven, and we are there to listen to their story.

James Carroll was already the real priest, but had to discover the vocation was in him. He didn’t need the pope. He needed the little child who he could anoint, and touch with a bond of eternal life. It was the little child’s story that gave him the strength to grasp his own spiritual power. That is why we need to listen, and keep listening, keep building new layers. We long to find a sense of our own spiritual vocation, and how we can fulfill it in the world.

One of the most effective books on we grow and compose new layers for our lives, is Catherine Bateson’s, Composing a Life. Bateson tells us it is possible to “create a context of sharing with very simple material cues.” She relates this to the traditional idea of sacrament. Many of us learned that sacrament is an outward sign of a deeper spiritual truth. Bateson says she prefers the idea that a sacrament effects what it signifies, so the lighting of candles, the giving of gifts, the preparation and sharing of of food, all refer to human closeness - warmth, what the other loves, and what we share together. They all have the potential to bring that closeness about. I invite you to take this class with me, or if not, then to share your story again with another, in the communion of the coffee hour even. Challenge yourself to return to that deep truth that is your story, someone is waiting to hear it.


Closing Words - from Mary Livermore

We may prove deserters or traitors, and struggle to the rear during the conflict, or go over to the enemy and fight under the flag of wrong. But the fact remains that we are all drafted into the battle of life, and are expected to do our duty according to the best of our ability.

“Long Time Coming: Race and Family” - Mark W. Harris

January 18, 2009

Call to Worship - “I Dream a World” by Langston Hughes

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn.
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind --
Of such, I dream, my world!


Story for All Ages - Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Doreen Rappaport

Reading - from Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by Barack Obama (quoted again in his Campaign Speech on Race)

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters…And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

2nd Reading - from Howard Thurman - "Facing the Problem" from For the Inward Journey


Sermon - “Long Time Coming: Race and Family” - Mark W. Harris

When Barack Obama resigned from his U.S. Senate seat in November, he wrote a letter to the people of Illinois quoting Abraham Lincoln: "I ask for your support, your prayers, and for us to 'confidently hope that all will yet be well.' " In his acceptance speech on election night, Obama used Lincoln as a model for his vision of governing. We have heard how he has tried to assemble his own “Team of Rivals, like Lincoln’s advisors, bringing disparate viewpoints under one big umbrella. Like Lincoln he hopes to unite a divided nation, so that our divisions will not "break our bonds of affection.” Even the theme of Obama's inauguration comes from a line in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "A New Birth of Freedom." We have Lincoln’s words, his themes, and even his style of governance all echoed in Obama.

The chronology of the road to African American freedom in America is striking. School children remember Lincoln for freeing the slaves, but then we lived through a 100 year period as nation where that freedom was not realized, but rather prejudice was written into law, and racial discrimination was practiced everywhere. Ironically, this was evident when the very memorial erected in Lincoln’s memory was dedicated in 1922, as those blacks who were present that day had to sit in a special segregated section of the audience. The lone black speaker that day had his text censored, so that a passage which said the memorial would be a mockery of Lincoln’s name, and a symbol of hypocrisy, unless the principles he died for were made real in every state in the union, was never spoken. Then a half century ago our nation witnessed the advent of Martin Luther King, Jr. who used the “Big Words” of freedom and equality he heard as a boy at his mother’s knee, and in his father’s church, that he was as good as anyone. He embodied those words with his acts of truth speaking enacted through love to create a civil rights revolution in our land. He gave his greatest speech at that very Lincoln Memorial. And now, a half century removed, that memorial is the centerpiece of the inauguration of the first African American president in our history, and Obama’s hand will rest on the same Bible used by Lincoln to recite his oath of office. Is it a continuum of parallels from Lincoln and black freedom; to King and black equality; to Obama and mission accomplished?

While outgoing President George Bush made a terrible mistake by hoisting those words on a banner of victory on an aircraft carrier, we, too, would make a grievous error if we presumed that racial equality had been achieved by the election of the first black President, as remarkable and exhilarating as that is. We would also be foolish to presume that Obama is going to save us and the world from all of the serious economic, environmental, military and political problems confronting us. The condition of the world is sobering, and the divisions great, and one man cannot alone shoulder all the burdens of despair and longing we might like to lay at his doorstep, while hailing him as Father Barack, just as Lincoln was once Father Abraham to the freed salves. Perhaps we were able to elect the first black President because he, like King, and Lincoln before him, spoke of how we could be united, how we could dream once again that there was a vision of togetherness stronger than our fears, our differences, or our greed. But we have to work for it, and we have to work for it together. No one person can do it for us. As great a day as this, we should also remember that racism persists, and that one person cannot save us.

While viewing Obama’s election in racial terms is a disservice to his vision, it does help give us perspective on the enormity of the struggle, and just how far we have come. This day was not really conceivable in the world I grew up in, and yet despite the persistent racism that existed then, Martin Luther King’s dream of realizing equality in America and his daunting courage to achieve that society made it possible fifty years later for a black person to be elected President, and now perhaps we might add a woman, a Latino, or an Asian. While it is not the melting pot of our immigrant past, it has become the unity in diversity of the 21st century, so that coalitions of diverse peoples can be built. We know that America has not only lived through racial strife, but that it has changed and grown, too. This means two things to me. First, there would be no Barack Obama without Martin Luther King, Jr. Someone had to show us that achieving equality was possible. Now that we have achieved that on the highest political level, what grows from this moment in history is that now we know anyone truly can be President. It is not that romantic tale we were told as children, but a living truth that is enormously compelling. Every child born in America will know that political power can be claimed by all races, and most especially those who have been traditionally excluded from voting and holding office. When I was a boy no one dreamed that a Black person could be President.

There is a section of Barack Obama’s book Dreams of My Father that he also quoted in his speech on race that occurred during the campaign. You recall that after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had damned America for its history of racial injustice, Obama used his speech to explain these You Tube moments in the broader context of the man and the church. As you heard in that brief reading, the Biblical stories became personal stories in the Black churches that affirmed the people’s own journeys and also more universal tales so that all people can claim memories that build strength rather than bring on shame. As individuals, and as a people the community learns we can survive hardship, we can achieve freedom from whatever enslaves us, and there is hope that tomorrow may bring about a new world if we strive for that together. They are Puritan themes. They are African American themes. They are American themes, too.

Obama’s struggle with the meaning of the legacy of his father is striking in the context of African American history. Obama literally goes in search of his father to give context and meaning to his life. Obama’s father of course is not present. He leaves the family and returns to Africa. In some ways this could represent the stereotypical shaming that occurs for black men who do not have fathers. Historically the lack of economic opportunities for black men have contributed to the destruction of family life. There is no strong tradition of following the father, or looking up to the father because he is not there. It is part of the cycle of absence and failure and anger, and even violence. And, of course, it is tied into poverty and economic inequality, too. One thing that has struck me in the last month is how many men follow the line of work or profession that they learned at the knee of their parent. I began to think about it when I was listening to sports talk radio, and they were talking about a couple of local coaches, both of whom had fathers who were also coaches. It made me wonder how many of us do this because it is an affirmation of the parent who has shown us how to support a family in the context of their particular job, but it is also the profession we have come to know, and thus it is also one way we know how to get a job. From teachers, to nurses to small business owners to ministers the pattern is repeated. I am somewhat of an anomaly because there are no ministers in my family. Andrea has helped clarify this by pointing out that churches are kind of like small businesses , always trying to keep the customers happy.

The politics of a small business that I learned at my father’s knee does remind me of the parish ministry as cultivating enough resources to keep it running and knowing when to be assertive and when to back off, and always being the friendly, helpful neighborhood presence. It is interesting to me that my son Joel is now a small business owner himself, back to what my clan seems to do best, as seen especially in my nephew, brother and father in a three generation span of family business ownership. The interesting thing about Obama is that even though he had this absent father, he became a government official like his father, even without being at the knee. His father aspired to be a spokesperson for economic progress in his homeland, but his struggles politically and personally got the best of him of . The son who had wrestled with that ghost of a father, became that father’s political vision writ large. This life pattern is replicated with Martin Luther King, as well, with his minister father showing the way, and King replicating the life, but again, most definitely writ large. Obama wrote, “All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own - - - the brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader -- my father had been all those things."

This reminds us that parents give us dreams to act upon. Those dreams can be a mixed message, and can lead to personal and vocational confusion. Do I work for you or do I become you or become like you. My father struggled with his poverty stricken upbringing, and then responded to the life he endured by becoming another small business owner like his failed father, but he renewed the dream with his own dream of economic success. He at once wanted me to fulfill that dream of his and keep the business alive, but he also wanted me to have all the education, and the seemingly more leisurely life that he did not have. But as we all know, any small business, restaurant, oil company or church can be all consuming. What he did give me, while not my exact vocation was a firm value that I must work hard for all I achieve. You must fulfill your responsibilities and your promises. You must hold yourself to high standards. Perhaps the important thing is no matter whether it is Obama or me or you struggling with what we make of our heritage, we must develop a strong sense of self so that even if we live as an outsider, as Obama always did, we would not succumb to doubts and fears that will lead to self-contempt. It feels like in Obama’s case that his diverse and international background has nurtured him in a way that breaks the chains of clan to a broader vision of multiracial life that is the only peaceful future we can forge on this planet.

Self-contempt has long dominated black history in America. The black power movement, and the empowerment controversy within our own Unitarian Universalist movement were attempts to have some means of black control and power over communities and institutions and thus the direction of people’s lives. Obama writes that being black often only meant the knowledge of your own powerlessness. This is of course why the black church was so important, and why African Americans have never joined our mostly white churches in great numbers. There has traditionally been no opportunity for black power here, and the stories of the Bible could also be lived out as ones that built not only a personal sense of worth, but also a larger sense that the greater society could achieve freedom and justice for all people, black and white. Living with the privilege of being white while calling for an end to racism from the safety of liberal, white enclaves, I had never truly realized the depth of prejudice until I witnessed it first hand, and lived with it, as when I resided in Milton, and saw countless instances of people being stopped in traffic for DWB, driving while Black.

Black anger was often born as a result of these kinds of criminal assumptions exacerbating joblessness and powerless and the destruction of families. In his speech on race during the campaign, Obama spoke of anger in the black community founded upon traditional hopelessness and humiliation. This anger though was often counterproductive. At the same time there were white resentments over welfare and affirmative action. There were traditional fears and stereotypes which added to the racial divide. I have often felt like the growing economic inequality in recent years that was cultivated by economic policies that favored the greedy and the rich few fueled our racial divisions. Our inauguration won’t heal those divides, but they will invite us to look at inequality again and work toward changing our society once again so that there is hope for all economic classes and races. This has been a long time coming. In our reading today, Howard Thurman suggests a wonderful New Year’s resolution is to face the problems you have been putting off. Thurman tells the story first of the drama student who weeps when she reads before the class, and the teacher demands that she do it until she weeps no more. If you want something, face it until you can overcome the issue. He then goes on to speak of St. Francis who feared lepers, and would not go near them. I grew up in a family that feared African Americans. I learned Blacks were not the equal of whites. They were lazy and shiftless. I learned all the stereotypes and all the words at the knee of my father.

And yet he was strangely attracted to this race he had grown up learning to hate, based not on experience, but culture and family. While he had no personal experience of living with or knowing blacks, I used to watch my father with some amusement when Diana Ross and the Supremes would appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. While wanting to see her as the black person he feared, he could only acknowledge upon this television meeting time and again how compelling and beautiful she was, and how marvelously she could sing. It helped me a few years later when his racism was confronted at a dinner here in Boston when he met some Boston Celtic basketball players, the Jones boys, Sam and K.C., athletes who he might have once scorned like they did Jackie Robinson, but who became fully human, fully equal when he shook their hand, and truly had to confront their greatness, not only athletically, but humanely. These were the days when African Americans could only know acceptance and success as athletes and entertainers. It was the beginning for him, and for the nation of finally coming to terms with slavery and segregation.

It was meaningful to me to have this rural father of mine who had few experiences with African Americans come face to face with his fabricated enemies. Fathers do show us the way, whether they are in our lives or absent. We long to know them. We long to know what they desire of us. We long for them to be proud of us. We wrestle with the demons of these absent fathers. The father who is about to become our first African American president wants us to face our problems. He want to look at the massive inequality that has developed in our nation in recent years, and answer it with greater measure of equality, of economic parity. We wants to bring us together as a people. His election helps us celebrate the great distance we have come, building upon the vision of Lincoln and King along the way. His election does not mean problems are solved or racism is over, but rather that we are challenged to look at these inequalities again, and confront them, not in a divisive way, but in a way that bring us together, not tears us apart. We can now move from the prejudice land of our fathers to a multiracial society where all people can pursue excellence in all walks of life. Think about it. The #1 Job in our country is held by an African American - it is the greatest possible symbol for the achievement of equality, success and economic justice. Just as there are biological fathers that we search for in our dreams and in our lives so that we might learn who they were, and we can understand who we are, there are also figurative fathers. Dr. King was the father of a movement. They may be founders, or inspirational leaders or keepers of the dream. In a way the President of our nation is the keeper of our dream. He is our father, or a woman could be our mother. In any case, we need someone calling us to our best selves, calling us to face our problems together as one people. Things won’t be perfect. And it may not happen tomorrow, but in the shadow of Lincoln, and Dr. King, we can start on Tuesday to echo the words Barack Obama repeated in the closing weeks on the campaign trail, “we have a righteous wind at our back, but we can’t slow down now.”


Closing Words - “Dreams” by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Prayer for Nonbelievers
January 11, 2009
The First Parish of Watertown
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood

Opening Words from the Tao teh Ching, Lao Tse

The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.


Meditation
"What I Know for Sure," by Bob Hicok

Some people, told of witness trees, 
pause in chopping a carrot 
or loosening a lug nut and ask, 
witness to what?
So while salad is made, or getting from A to B is repaired, these people 
listen to the story of the Burnside Bridge sycamore, 
alive at Antietam, bloodiest day of the war,
or the Appomattox Court House honey locust, just coming to leaf  as Lee surrendered, and say, at the end, Cool.
Then the chopping continues with its two sounds, 
the slight snap to the separation 
of carrot from carrot,
the harder crack of knife against cutting board, 
or the sigh, also slight, of a lug nut 
as it's tightened against a wheel.
In time, 
these people put their hands 
under water and say, not so much to you 
but to the window in front of the sink, 
Think of all the things  trees have seen.
Then it's time  for dinner, or to leave, and a month passes, or a year,
before two fawns cross in front of the car,
or the man you've just given a dollar to lifts his shirt to the start 
of the 23rd psalm tattooed to his chest, "The Lord is my shepherd, 
I shall not want,"
when some people say, I feel like one of those trees, 
you know? And you do know. 
You make a good salad, change a wicked tire, you're one of those people, 
watching, listening, a witness 
to whatever this is, 
for as long as it is 
amazing, isn't it, that I could call you  right now and say,
They still can't talk to dolphins but are closer,
as I still can't say everything I want to  but am closer, for trying,
to God, if you must, to spirit, if you will, 
to what's never easy for people  like us: life, breath, the sheer volume 
of wonder.


Reading from Listening is an act of Love

This is an excerpt from the Storycorps project, in which sound booths come to town and you schedule an appointment and folks are interviewed -- by a friend or a family member, or by staff from storycorps. In this section, Janet Lutz, a 62 year old hospital chaplain in Atlanta is interviewed by her friend Lori. She starts off by talking about her work twenty years earlier, saying:

... I was on call, and there had been a fire, and two little kids were killed from smoke inhalation. The grandmother had tried to rescue them, and her hands had been burned, and they asked me to go see her. It was such a crowded, busy night that they put her in a storeroom with two other women who were also patients, and they were separated by moveable partitions so they couldn’t see each other. And I went in to see this woman whose hands had been burned. She was African American, and her two grandchildren had died. She asked me to pray with her, and I started to pray. I would say a sentence, and she would repeat it back to me. And pretty soon the other women we couldn’t see but knew were in this room started to repeat this prayer back also. You know, there’s a place in the Bible where Moses is looking at the burning bush, and he takes off his shoes, because it’s holy ground. And I really felt in that moment that we ought to take off our shoes; that we were all standing on holy ground, that these three women patients who didn’t know each other and couldn’t see each other could pray together in this room.....

Then Rev. Lutz changes the topic, and starts talking about how department directors in the hospital call on her when they are having staff conflicts. She goes and interviews all the staff individually, to see if she can figure out the difficulty and get them through it. She talks about an area of the hospital where they pack instruments for surgery. Each surgery has a list of all the instruments they need, and at the top of the list is the patient’s name and then this whole list of what’s needed. “And these technicians work in the basement of the hospital in a huge, cavernous, windowless room with lots of instruments. They’re given this list, and it’s up to her or to him to pack these instruments” and seal them with tape and take them up to the O.R.

“And they were telling me their stories and the more I listened to them, the more touched I was by who these people were -- people who to most of the hospital were basically anonymous. One of the women told me that as she packed the instruments and she knew the patient’s name, she would pray for that patient. And she had been doing that for 40 years. I thought, Nobody knows she’s doing this. Nobody knows. Here she is, a person who has been working at that hospital for for longer than most of us, who is doing this incredibly important job that has to be done precisely and carefully, and is fairly complicated. And as she’s doing this, she’s praying for the patients she will never meet and the patients she will never see. She’ll never know the outcome. She only knows she is helping to make the surgery possible.

Then I found out that most of them did it. I interviewed a whole lot of them and we worked out the issues that they needed to work out in that particular instant, but I think partly what they liked so much was that someone was listening to them, somebody was hearing their story. That’s the key, I think -- listening to the stories of the people who are so essential but often not seen by patients and families....

One of the things we do each spring that I instituted at the hospital was we go around and bless the hands of all the people who work in the hospital. For me its a very powerful experience, to touch the hands of all these people. I go around and find the people in the basement, the people who are cleaning the toilets, and the people who are serving the food, and I look for those people and make sure their hands get blessed. And last year one of them said to me, This is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened to me, that somebody blessed my hands. That’s not something I invented -- it’s done in a a number of hospitals around the country -- but it is a very special experience to be able to bless the hands that work, because people work really hard in the hospital. I’m sure they do in other jobs, too, but it’s very difficult work, much of what they do. And their hands get dirty. And they’re not always as valued as they should be. And so when I go around finding people, wherever they are, to bless their hands, they’re often startled, and then really touched by it, as am I.


Sermon
My last year of seminary, my friend and I escaped from University Housing. We got the janitor’s apartment in a luxury condo building. It was in the basement, next to the furnace. What this meant was that we had free heat, which was incredible in Chicago. We were warm for the first time ever. It also meant that there were no windows, and so it was easy to forget what it was like outside. I was almost always the one to get the paper, which involved going upstairs into the lobby and sticking my hand out the front door. One January day the paper was too far down the walk, and although I held the door with my foot, the wind blew hard and soon I was stuck outside in nothing but my bathrobe. At first I was more worried the embarrassment. Then I grew more worried about dying of exposure. I rang our bell relentlessly for an hour. I knew that my house mate was up. But he never answered. Eventually someone suited up for work left the building, and conceded to let me in though I could tell he was wondering if I really belonged at this building. My housemate’s explanation later was that he was meditating, a discipline he took very seriously and would not interrupt for anything. He was proud of himself for concentrating right through that incessant bell ringing, and thought that his success in blocking it out and only being mildly annoyed at me were a sign of progress in his prayer life. He told me this as he read the Tribune while I had my hands defrosting in a sinkful of warm water.

My conclusion was that there was a correlation between deep devotion to meditation and the most seriously messed up students. I also thought that the whole meditation thing did not work, but it occurs to me now that it did -- he felt centered and focussed, which is what he wanted. It just isn’t what I thought meditation and prayer were for. My expectation was that such an activity was to make us be of service -- say, by letting the frozen person inside. He did not care about that. He wanted to be able to remain unruffled, able to face everything and not panic; not try to fix the world. Calm soul of all things.

Perhaps I was primed to believe that it was the messed up students who were into prayer because of Franny Glass. Some of you may remember Franny. She was a creation of J.D. Salinger, and could have been the model for the old ad campaign that asked “Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?” She was the original postmodern girl: half-Irish Catholic and half-Jewish, and seriously tutored in the ways of Buddhism by her revered older brother, Seymour, who happened to be a psychiatrist. She was everything, and nothing; a fact made abundantly clear when Seymour went off on a holiday with his wife and killed himself. Franny starts looking for wholeness, for something to rest in, and she reads an old work called The Way of a Pilgrim. The book is mentioned by one of her professors, but it is on the desk of her deceased brother that Franny finds the volume It’s by an anonymous Russian Orthodox peasant who took the apostle Paul at face value, and decided that he must pray without ceasing. Franny takes up the task and recites the Jesus prayer endlessly, but grows increasingly depressed instead of enlightened or relieved. The prayer, whose words are “Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner,” gives her no respite. A lifetime of being schooled in Buddhist meditation does not do it for her either. Being all things worked when life was good, but under stress, it was the nothing that surfaced.

So I have been thinking about all of this -- about prayer and meditation, and whether the words are interchangeable; about the belief systems implied in each; or the discipline required; but also about the purpose. What do we pray for? I have never liked the part of a church service for prayer, because I don’t know who or what I would pray to. Yet I like the word prayer a lot, especially in poems. There is a Tagore piece that has always spoken to me: we pray not to avoid problems, but to have the strength to face them. In church, it is usually the music that is a prayer for me, but sometimes it is just the way the light moves in the room. Meditation sounds more in line with my belief systems, but I don’t like discipline very much, unless it is self-imposed, and basically rebel against anything that proscribes behavior. I am sure that the sample I have is skewed by the fact that I went to seminary, but the people I have known who were really into meditation seemed like they were holding an awful lot of demons at bay. But the story of Franny Glass could also be a warning to Unitarian Universalists: being too inclusive can end up isolating us. Consolation becomes intellectual, and ever expanding breadth prevents us from growing deeper. Being too even-tempered can do us a disservice. We don’t really change; but instead think of wholeness as being restored to the way we were. While that may be what we long for, it isn’t going to happen. That fact is why we pray.

Prayer is supposed to be the central piece of religion, but in our tradition we tend to be purposefully vague about its role. I am definitely guilty of this. But I also resent it, and feel like we have something to teach those who are too literal in the practice; who insist that prayer is about communication with a God who can be addressed; a God with some kind of permanent substance. When we let that definition rule, it excludes many of us who do embrace the spirit of prayer; who believe that prayer is an attitude that relates us to our bodies, our actions, our communities, and our world. It isn’t a separate practice, walled off and done ritually. It is your whole life; where everything that lets us grow is born. It is the way we habitually live. Your whole life a prayer is what it means to pray without ceasing. When something becomes a habit, it means we do it without thinking AND we aren’t just doing what we feel like. We don’t have feelings about it at all; we just do it. This is why we have to develop good habits -- they really do become our lives, even if we were not planning for that to happen. Endlessly calling yourself a sinner and hoping for mercy from outside yourself is not a good habit.

Habits can be our consolation. our comfort, our strength. My own form of meditation began as a habit long, long ago in the dentist’s chair. As a child, we had a dentist whose hands were so big we all wondered why he had chosen this work. Pediatric dentistry is not the right field for a guy who looked like a line backer and had fists the size of hams. I have never known if that line from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, where the elves ridicule poor Herbie for wanting to be a dentist, was intrinsically funny, or if it just struck a deep chord within me: why couldn’t I have a cute elf for a dentist instead of this giant of a man? This was in the pre-rubber gloves day, so we made jokes about how we didn’t need to brush because the wiry hairs on his fingers did the job for us. As a child, I was allergic to Novocain, and if you stop and picture for a moment the process by which one might discover such an allergy, you might get an idea of how the posture for prayer developed.

What kind of prayer? Deliver me from this? Strike the doctor dead? No, it was a mind over matter thing. I chose to go without anesthesia and have a short time of pain rather than be sick for two days. So I would watch my hands on the arm rests, and will them to not clench; convince myself to be relaxed in my body. Then I would drift back into the moment, but when I saw my hands I would realize how tense I was, and start over again. It was a game and a distraction, but in my 20s I began taking it very seriously. Quarterly dentist visits seemed like about the right amount of time for a serious meditation practice to me. But as I grow older, I have had more and more time in the dentist’s chair -- partially because our instincts about that childhood dentist were right. He was simply living on too large a scale, and all of us who went to him now have the same problem: he drilled away so much tooth that as fillings age and need to be replaced, there is no tooth left. We all have mouthfuls of crowns. My meditation appointments have become much more frequent. And I have to say, I have not grown any better at it. Practice does not make perfect, even though the habit has spread and I now use my hands as a relaxation reminder in many stressful situations. But the dentist’s office is the real deal: It is new and the same every time. I approach the windowless room, climb into the chair, almost always noting how NICE dentist chairs are, and think I am fine; then I watch my hands and realize I am not open or relaxed. I begin again, and always feel a sense of triumph if I can control the muscles in my hands, which then control my brain. I think it’s odd how I tuning out what is happening on one level is what lets it in on another. Emptiness brings fullness. It is that storage closet where the chaplain in our reading goes, to help the grandmother who burned her hands in an unsuccessful attempt to save the children from the fire. The closet full of loss is where holy ground springs up; where unseen voices meet up and prayer is shared.

Perhaps more than formula for praying or meditating, what we need to understand most is the paradox of any activity that is so inward, so intimate -- and yet is something we would not and could not do if we were not set down in a very real and concrete world full of drills and dentists, of fires and unspeakable loss. Prayer really has two directions; there is our own yearning for connection, and our understanding that others, too, seek that connection. We both work at reaching out or up or in; and we rest, ready to see; open. But it is an active kind of rest; full of awareness and attention. It is not sleep. What we do with our lives; the work of our hands -- these are our offerings, poured out for the world, which is in our care. As the instruments are packed for surgery, someone in a windowless room is sterilizing needles, and praying that as they pierce the body of a stranger, there will be healing. It does not always go well, but the intent is there. And miracles, too, are there. As Barack Obama becomes our president, a honey locust tree that witnessed Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration is dying -- substantially destroyed by a storm that swept through the National Park on August 7, the tree has been hanging on. It had already lived more than 30 years longer than anyone could have expected, and very soon it will rest. Ashes to ashes. “I feel like one of those trees, you know -- and we do know.” as the poem said.

Think of all the things we witness; all the things we grow through. This is what prayer is really for; to know we are flawed and limited and have troubles and need help; while also knowing that anything is possible; that things change; and that we will, too. Prayer -- the habits we form and practice -- brings us closer to the people we want to be by making us aware of how we are not yet there. I loved the sentences from the Tao-Ching about the usefulness of emptiness at the center of things -- the middle of the wheel; the space inside a clay jug; even a room, Lao-Tse, says only becomes useful if you cut holes into it. Clinical health becomes human healing when we cut holes into those closed spaces; when the prayers that are locked in can be shared.

This year my schedule has allowed me to return to my other form of prayer, which is swimming. Again, this is something that I began as a child, but it has changed as I age. What was fun became a great way to earn money in school. What was a job became exercise. What was exercise became a break from too much mental work. As I moved around the country, pools were often the only place where I could meet people without being in a role; but I always used the pool as a measuring stick with which I could note the balance of my life. This fall, I was struck by the balance of my two disciplines: mind over matter in the dentist’s chair; matter over mind in the water. Although I had never entirely stopped swimming, the form had changed as my family grew. Now, back to counting strokes and timing laps, it becomes a sensory experience. It is mindlessness that somehow lets me work through what is on my mind, as I pay no attention to anything but moving through the water. It is profoundly restful. I remember years ago, there was a time when all three of my boys were in programs for 2 and a half hours at a time. A group of mothers were all going to Starbucks and invited me, and it was so tempting. I went a couple of times, but it became clear to me that a habit was going to develop, and I could pick one in which I would sit around and eat muffins and spend money, or I could go swim. It felt a lot more permanent then than it turned out to be, but the choice mattered. Now, it is a relief, not an effort, to swim. It is a return.

When I was ordained, the cover of the order of service had a quote from Simone Weil: Attentiveness without an aim is the supreme form of prayer. That is, we don’t pray for things; we don’t pray at all. We pay attention -- to our bodies, our breath, to the lives around us. There is no other goal; the attention is all there is. This sounds a lot easier than it is, especially with the lives that we sometimes want a break from. My youngest child really wanted to study karate. I was really not into it. I am not big on fighting; I am not big on the topdown leadership; and it basically is the opposite of everything I was taught as a child -- I grew up with the “strangers are only friends you haven’t met yet” philosophy; the consensus building; all that. Also, the program required a year long commitment and we had never managed to stick with anything a whole year. But Asher really wanted to do this, and things had been so bad for him for so long that I was afraid not to listen to him. I brought him to the studio where we knew Helena went, and another friend, and I was very unsure. I did not want to disappoint Asher, or have him mad at me; but I also did not want him to experience any more failure; and I was terrified of how he would react to the sensei correcting him in the way senseis do, no less. But I could not just stay home and never try. So I withheld judgment, met the sensei, gave him the information, and trusted him.

Well, it turned out that Asher was right. Karate has been a big gift to him; so much so that Levi goes now too. So I am glad for his sake that I listened to him, and I am happy to have my notion of what parents are required to do reinforced. But I also have been learning. What I see in karate is something I could have used, even though part of me still struggles with accepting the world view it comes with. The students get ready by being in what is called fighting stance. I have to work at listening to this -- I just react to the word “fighting”; but what it means is they are ready; centered and flexible, assessing what is happening, and able to anticipate what is coming next. It is a strategic position; neither offensive or defensive, but ready. It is a way of life that assumes we -- each of us -- are worth fighting for. If liberalism teaches this at all, we don’t do it very well. We assume there is value in not fighting, and that assumption makes us quite vulnerable. It is hard for me to look at the world as full of opponents, but prayer reminds us of something: Change does not happen easily or naturally. Sometimes we are changed in brutal ways. We resist it; put up a fight; but we do not have a strategy -- maybe because our belief that life is good and that people are good make it hard to be prepared. We switch from being everything to being nothing; just a sinner in need of mercy.

Sending Asher to karate is a prayer, in itself; and his practice is also prayer. Real devotion is a way of life, not something to be called upon in an emergency. It means we can listen, and see, and be ready -- ready in the way Moses was when he was tending his sheep and suddenly saw a burning bush, and heard a voice calling him to lead.


Closing Words by Philip Booth

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

“The God of Loneliness” Mark W. Harris

January 4, 2009- First Parish of Watertown, MA

Call to Worship - “Welcome Morning” by Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.


Readings - from “The God of Loneliness” by Philip Schultz

It’s a cold Sunday February morning
and I’m one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys R Us to open
in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.
We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game
that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited
three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me. The first today, bundled
in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light
reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid
when the others came, stamping boots
and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about
sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke
two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing
shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons
will leap into my arms, remembering this morning
all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,
just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says
from the back of the line. “He plays these games
in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,
he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas
founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.
Through a window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”
The others seem not to know what to do with their hands.
tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,
naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember
what they held, the promises they made? I know
exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.
Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it’s what men do for their sons.

2nd Reading - from Run by Ann Patchett



Sermon - “The God of Loneliness” Mark W. Harris

I recently wrote an entry for the Encyclopedia of Religion in America. My particular entry was on the Unitarian Universalist Association, and much of my writing centered on how the two separate groups had thought about joining for over a century before they actually accomplished it in 1961. As they planned this merger in the years just prior to 1961, the most significant conflicts were over theology and beliefs, not ecclesiastical structure. There was a lack of agreement over what the new denomination stood for. One participant said: “The Unitarians voted to strike God from the Principles and Purposes. The Universalists voted to add Christianity.” A compromise was reached when both sides agreed to change a reference from “our Judeo-Christian heritage to “the Judeo-Christian heritage,” making it more of a statement of fact rather than personal faith. So it appears that our predecessors were willing to accept the tradition as history, but not a living faith. Twenty-five years later when the current Principles and Purposes were adopted, there was again an argument over God, and at one stage of the process, a reference to God was removed from the statement, and so naturally Time Magazine, picked up on this titillating topic and headlined it as the “deleted deity.” Only the Unitarians could vote out God.

When the final version of the Principles was adopted, God was included in the wording of one of the many religious sources we draw upon, “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.” Now another quarter century has nearly passed, and the principles are being scrutinized again. Who knows whether God will receive the thumbs up or down? What’s interesting about this is that while we talk about it in the context of making rational decisions about whether to include God, because some of us are not sure, and others would rather not, it really shows that the passions the discussion raise are intense. We think these are rational discussions about what we believe, but in fact, they express what is most vital or important to us, and we are hardly dispassionate about that. Think of this in terms of intense emotional experiences. When you look upon an incredibly beautiful natural wonder, or have a wonderfully, fulfilling emotional experience, do you say, oh that is nice, or do you say, Oh My God!. And this is also true for many of us who experience something that makes us angry or upset when it goes awry. We probably say, Oh God, with a more disgusted or dismayed tone, or even, God, damn it! The chances are we do not say, that is indeed unfortunate. There is passion when we use the word God in either of these contexts, and I think it would be useful to consider them both.
First, there is the God of God, damn it. In the newsletter I quote the first line of a new book by Julian Barnes, where he speaks as an atheist who fears death. He writes, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” Since I have not read the book yet, I am not even sure what he says, but the statement is very compelling to me. He speaks as perhaps many Unitarian Universalists would by remembering the God they once believed in. We may think of an all powerful comforter who would grant special rewards for good behavior including the answering of prayers for gifts and love and health. Or we may even think of the one whom we feared that if we did not behave properly or morally, he would notice and punish us accordingly. There is a comforting notion for some of straight forward rules and regulations rather than chaos or make it up as you go along. It is the idea of something or someone being in control of what goes on, and thus you have assurances of how to fulfill those expectations to live an ordered life in response.

Unfortunately the all powerful God of our anguish is irrelevant to us now, and yet we still use the word, especially in anger. We say it when things do not work out as we expected, such as when the hammer misses the nail, or when the momentary controlled chaos of life that we haltingly maintain moves out of our grasp because someone else acted in an unexpected way, such as when that other car slid across the median strip, and crashed into us. Those may be the common usages, but there is also a deeper sense of anger and despair that comes when a diagnosis is not expected, and the prognosis is poor. Even when we don’t believe, we may feel as if we are being cheated by some larger life force. Even though we don’t have an all powerful God out there, we still respond as though we wish there were. We may think, why didn’t you take care of me? How could this happen to me, when I did everything right? In her book Run, Ann Patchett has Father Sullivan, the Catholic priest tell how over the course of his lifetime, God and he had changed together. “There was a time when Father Sullivan would have thought this confinement (in a nursing home) was God’s retribution for the enormous restlessness that had driven his life, or for the cigarettes he managed on the sly. He believed in a carefully ordered universe: action and reaction. But now he could no longer picture a God who kept track of such minutiae or would think to punish anyone for it.”

That is probably true for many of us. Our idea of God has changed over our lifetime. For some the word still has relevance, for others the word has become a barrier to any concept of the divine, and others may think it irrelevant to the conduct of their lives. If we grew up with a belief in an ordered universe, then we may miss those divine assurances that no longer exist. But perhaps most relevant of all, is not the belief, but the feeling. Without his assurances of salvation that he once knew, Julian Barnes says he misses God. There is loneliness in a world where God is absent. We are alone with no one to protect us. The loneliness of being bereft of a relationship with God who does not exist resonates for me in the poem, The God of Loneliness. I picture the man, the father waiting in line to buy the electronic game that will make his son happy. In the wake of Christmas, this rings so true. We would do anything for them so they would not suffer pain or disappointment in life. But as a man especially, I struggle relationally in communicating my love or my pride to my sons, and so there is a loneliness of unfulfilled relationships, that perhaps many of us fear will remain that way as we approach the end of our lives. We fill that love by giving them a gift, and the gift becomes the love, just as a baseball mitt to me one Christmas was the love and the connection to my father.

The poem also becomes a statement about the sacrifice of war, and the terrible agony of loss that parents and others have endured who knew soldiers waiting in line to die. Death, he says is the God of loneliness. And so there is a calling in the poem for deeper relationships that the father might see and confront the lonely, living death his son feels in post traumatic stress, and that we would embrace this God of loneliness in our lives with a deeper expression of love for one another in the moments we have together while we still embrace life. Ann Patchett brings this understanding of God to Father Sullivan’s life when he discovers even as his old faith is gone, that God is now more abundant to him than ever before. She writes that in his life God may well have been life itself - the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette. Why did the thrill of the heartbeat or the breath of life only indicate a steppingstone to something greater, such as an after life, when life itself had been so holy. He says, in whatever years we are given, we are brought forth from nothingness to see God in others, or in all our life, and at death go back to nothing, so that someone else can enjoy the view. “What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

This brings us back to the phrase, “Oh my God” when we have an experience of intense feeling for something we see or do. We say, “Oh God,” not as an expression of belief in a deity, but simply as alternative expression for Wow, this is intense or magnificent or beautiful beyond belief. And so couched within the term may be our feeling that my love for you when my eyes look deeply into yours is boundless or enduring, or that my reverence for the creation in the sight of that Milky Way moves me to tears. I think this is connected to those rational UUs who vote up or down on God. They are really not as rational as they appear. Their passionate search for meaning is not ended by scientific proof texting for God that will never be found, but rather in a powerful religious impulse that like Father Sullivan’s changes from the traditional concept of all powerful God in the sky that they have rejected, to the living God that is present in every day life, in the divine spark that is present in all. So while I resonate with Julian Barnes about the God he misses, I think the kind of emotion he feels around this loneliness about life, can be filled with an understanding that God is still on his mind in that very emotion, and that he simply needs to understand his God in the context of a metaphor that will work for him, and give him meaning.

Everyone sees God differently. We know that from our Unitarian Universalist experiences. We often say there are as many definitions of the divine as there are UUs. This has always been true though. In the ages of history, each culture has found a way to capture its God as a reflection of its own deepest felt beliefs. This is true from animal worshipping cave dwellers to Elizabethan Bible translators who gave us Kings and Lords. Such monarchial Gods no longer work for most of us, but neither does modern science giving us all the answers either when we follow it in order to banish all notion of God. This often gives us liberals a tendency not to be open to the many ways to approach the divine. When Barack Obama named Rick Warren as his designated pastor for the inauguration, many liberals cringed that this evangelical of suspect political and theological beliefs was going to represent all religion on the appointed day when our newly crowned liberator took office. I think it may well be a good thing because it sends a signal that my notion of God is not here to beat up your notion. We who feel passionate in our liberalism often become rather fundamentalist in our liberalism. This is not an opportunity to prove how right you are, but an opportunity to go deeper in search of truth.

Does this mean UUs should go back to God? While the word itself is a problem for some of us, I think we need to reflect on a few things which appear to be true. Many of us who reject God, or miss God do so based on a deep passion or longing for religious truths. That is a feeling not to be ignored. If you are assured that you have God, or more likely as a UU, so assured that God does not exist, then it is probably time to lose that potentially rigid framework of reality, and go looking again. I even say this as a scientifically based UU, who knows that biologically there are natural, genetic impulses in each one of us that long to connect with the oneness of the universe, that there is an endless part of the self that is at home with the creation. While that oneness may not be God by any traditional definition; finding peace within, or connecting with something greater than the self frees us from the old God we miss, but gives us an avenue for the natural religious passions we feel that can be bottled up in the God of loneliness or the God of anger we often feed by buying those video games that keep the religious impulses diverted, but ultimately not fulfilled.

There is an interesting short article in the current issue of the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik called “Breathers.” Most of us who are parents recall times when our children were little, and they suffered a minor bruise or bump. After the hit occurs there are a few moments of a terribly, silent, forbidding, painful emotional confusion before the crying begins. It seems to last an eternity. In fact, the crying usually does not begin until the child knows the parent is present to make him/her feel better. They can let all that emotion out, and do. Most parents probably know the experience I am talking about. What is especially interesting to me is the comparison between this everyday childhood occurrence, and the current state of our world economy. Until this economic disaster of the last year, I had no clue as to the importance of feelings in our global situation. I thought markets, money, credit, etc. It is all rational dollars and sense (cents) stuff. Number, numbers. Yet I have come to learn that economies are emotional processes, like the injured child. Like the crying child, we have seen wild swings in the market, up and down according to mood. Those who are damaged require immediate, unswerving attention. Frequently the child can be diverted from his/her emotional outburst with a distracting bauble. Us, too. We can spend. But the outcome is largely based on feelings, which are an interplay of fear and faith. Of course we are all in a panic that it will all collapse, but ultimately that fear can be overcome if we have faith that it will be all right. Is it sound fiscal policies or bail outs, or sacrifices that will provide a rational solution to this panic? No, it is ultimately being positive. That is what it takes. Believe in the future, because, as Roosevelt once wisely told us, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We simply need to bide our time, have faith, and feel good about the future, and we can help make a recovery happen. Just let yourself be distracted with a few baubles for now. Take a breath.

After reading this article, I made a leap to the interplay between faith and fear. We have all this emotion, but we want to find a rational way out. We may say there is no God, or no God that is like my childhood idea of God. But I miss God, and I still have those feelings that I want to connect. I am lonely. I am afraid. The traditional God who answered these is now meaningless. So I distract myself. Well, should I just believe anyway, even though it is not true? Will that work? Long ago the Hebrew scriptures told us that the name of God cannot be spoken. It is not meant to be known. So when the Muslims say there are 99 names for God, they are right. When we say there are as many names for God as there are UUs, we are right. It is not about the truthfulness of any names, but about the validity of your emotional experience that there is a deep sense of being that connects us all, but cannot be named. But can we merely overcome this fear of being alone and lost with a positive outlook?

I suspect there are two things we can do. Like Father Sullivan we can see that God is really every experience, every person, every place that brings us right up to the present time, and is changing and growing as we do. If you truly believe all of that is God what kind of affect will that have on your life? If all of your life is God, then how will you make that manifest in your life, and when? Many of you are familiar with the story of the monastery where the question is raised how the monks will start treating each other if they come to believe that the messiah lives among them, and is in fact, one of them. The Hebrew scriptures also told us that we are made in the image of God. One way of looking at that metaphor is to understand that each of us is an impress of the divine. There is an African saying, “May the God in me greet the God in you.” If we are what we imagine God to be, then we imagine overcoming the fear and loneliness by believing and acting on our true intentions. Those true intentions that may be locked up in silence or anger or pain are what I long to say to my loved ones. My heart is open to you. I know you need to hear of my acceptance and love, We would live out of that image of the divine that dwells in each of us in wider and wider communities beginning with this one, this congregation. The divine is no longer an abstract idea, but a relational reality found in my opening my heart to another. The closest I come to it now is when I conduct a child dedication, a wedding, or even a memorial service, and especially as I get older and feel my chance to see the divine in another is passing, as I look in the eyes of a child. I feel tears spontaneously welling up - there is a love for another being, not family, but love for one who is part of my community, my world, and he/she will carry on that love, and will be my hope for its lasting into the future. The hands hold the child, and the promises are made. Perhaps you would see God if you opened your heart in that way, or perhaps not, but we would each have an emotional experience that fulfilled the longing for the holy, personal and lasting connection we desire. That is truly all that matters. We all see God in different things, places, experiences, and some not at all, but we can all live in a way that follows a path that connects us in new and deeper ways to one another.

Closing Words - from Robert Doss

For all who see God, / May God go with you.
For all who embrace Life, / May Life return your affection.
For all who seek a right path,
May a way be found,
and the courage / to take it step by step.