Lake Chalice

Strangers in the Land of Egypt

2012-01-24T13:24:00.000-08:00

My heart had a visitor this week.

Knock, knock.

"Yes?"

"Hi, I’m anger."

"Oh, yes. I recognize you by the tightening I’m feeling. You’re here about that letter. Come on in.”

The letter was one that Yency got. Yency, for those of you who don’t know, is the Honduran young man LoraKim and I adopted when he was 17. He is now 24, and last September we celebrated his swearing in as a US citizen. He proceeded to get a US passport, which he used over the Christmas break to go visit his family back in Honduras. Before he left, I went with him downtown to register to vote. We took his official certificate of US citizenship, his social security card, his passport with us. But the only thing he was asked for was his drivers licence, which they photocopied and attached to half-page form he filled out, and that was that. He didn’t need any of the other documentation after all.

I said, “I guess your drivers license number was part of what you provided in the citizenship process, so their computers will be able to match your drivers license with your citizenship status.” And I didn’t think more about it. The letter from the voter registrar came while Yency was in Honduras. I figured it was his voter registration card. I put it on his desk to be there for him when he returned and forgot about it. He shared with me this week that it wasn’t his voter registration card. It was a letter saying his drivers license didn’t go through. Wasn't verified. Would he please provide further documentation.

I know that every time you impose one extra step in the process, then a certain percentage of people won’t do that step. Imposing additional steps and requirements and inconveniences on target populations succeeds in reducing the voting representation of those populations. That’s when I felt anger knocking.

"Come on in, anger. What can I do for you?"

Anger said, “I appreciate the attention you’re giving me. You used to push me away, and I’d have to go around and slip in the back door. But since you’re being so attentive -- and that’s really all I ever wanted -- let me ask if I can help you.”

“I’m feeling the energy I’m getting from you,” I said.

“I offer you that energy at your disposal as my gift,” said anger, graciously.

So I started looking up what’s going in Florida. Certain of the powers that be in this state are prepared to use any means they can get away with to disenfranchise any population that’s less likely to vote for them. For example, Florida is one of 13 states in which convicted Felons permanently and forever lose the right to vote.
Most states allow felons to return to voting after they have completed their incarceration and all supervised release – and some never suspend voting rights: people can vote from prison.

For a second example, just a few years back, in 2008, Florida had a big purge of voter registration rolls that removed 12,000 voters mostly due to typos and other obvious clerical errors. And I’m in favor of cleaning up the typos, but, lookit, something other than an OCD impulse for clerical accuracy is going on here. Seventy percent of the flagged voters in Florida’s purge were African American or Latino.

For a third example, it turns out that voter registration drives accounted for 15% of all Latino registrations and twenty percent of all African American registrations, but only 6 percent of white registrations, so the state of Florida passed a law last spring to substantially restrict voter registration drives. I thought it was curious when we couldn’t get Yency registered at the local library, or, indeed, anywhere, I discovered, other than the one office downtown, which is not in a major governmental office building but tucked away in its own little storefront where it’s just a little harder to find. But find it we did.

A study released last month by the think-tank Demos found a huge gap between registration rates of native-born citizens and naturalized citizens. Complexity of registration is part of the problem. The study noted:

“There are also discriminatory policies that inhibit their ability to register to vote. These include ethnic minorities being blocked by election administrators in the voter registration process; laws requiring voters to prove their citizenship prior to registering to vote; and inaccurate database citizenship checks.”

For the Demos study: click here.

"How you feeling now, Anger?" I asked.

"Going strong," said Anger.

I guess we’ll be going down with Yency to visit the registrar on Monday, tomorrow. Yency, however, was not much bothered. He been through much, much worse bureaucratic run-around than one more visit to an office to clear up some paperwork. He’s used to, and patient about, bureaucratic hurdles, and it reminds me that my own impatience when I hit much smaller snags is a luxury of my own white privilege.

I learned a lot about that the four years LoraKim and I lived in El Paso: 700 thousand people, the Census Bureau reported. For three-fourths of them a language other than English is spoken at home. From the roof of our house, we could look out over Juarez, Mexico, a city of 1.4 million. During 2003, I was staying up in Albuquerque five days a week on a ministerial internship, and back home in El Paso for two days.

Every week, I’d be on an early morning bus for the five-hour bus ride from El Paso to Albuquerque.
And every week the bus pulled into a Border Patrol checkpoint, and an agent would board the bus and go through checking papers. Sometimes some of the passengers were taken away. I never had to show any papers – never even had to show an ID. Week after week, month after month, I got this reminder about my privilege. And each week it made me a little sadder.

It was in the 7th month of internship, when this had been going on every week for more than half a year, when, after one such episode, I got my journal out of my bag, and this is what I wrote:

80 miles north of El Paso
on I-25 headed for Albuquerque
my bus pulls into a Border Patrol checkpoint.
Weekly, I participate in this ritual.
The green clad agent steps aboard.
"If you are a US citizen, state the city and state of your birth
If you are not, show your documentation."
As far as I can see, the green agent and I
are the only Anglos on this full bus.
Border Patrol makes her way down the aisle,
frowning at papers of widely varying size, shape, color,
sometimes also asking for separate ID, sometimes not.

My head bows under the world's weight upon this spot.
This posture cues me to a whispered prayer.
"May there be an end to invidious distinctions
including those based on whether our mothers,
when we first peaked out from them into the world,
were north or south
of a line
a few politicians and generals drew
more than 150 years ago.
May I find ways to help bring
justice from my unjust privilege.
And blessed be all of us on this bus, including the Border Patrol agent,
as we all struggle in our diverse ways
to realize the fullness of our humanity."

She gets finally to me on the backmost seat.
This week no one has been hauled off.
I look up from clasped hands in lap
For a flicker our eyes meet.
My voice says, "Richmond, Virginia."
This only is asked of me, no papers, no ID.
Pale skin and the right sort of accent clinch it,
if I will but utter the name of an approved holy city
as the weekly sacrament of transition
from El Paso husband to Albuquerque minister intern.

I only have to say out loud my condemnation.
Richmond is a city much farther away than Mexico,
and memory recalls only a few passings-through,
none recent.
Of Richmond, I vaguely know a view of a skyline from the interstate, nothing more.
Not that it matters.
What I'm saying with those two words is:
I am on your side, Agent Green Jump Suit.
I deny Yahweh's call for a preferential option for the poor.
I deny Buddha's call to live compassion rather than fear.
I deny my faith profession:
the unitarian commitment to the unity of us all
the universalist commitment to universal community
From my lips, this two-word Peter's denial: "Richmond, Virginia."

Peter, having spoken, saw in a dizzy flash, as I do:
We who long to be merely good,
Are revealed as rotten with complicity with the empire.
And what could show more clearly than that
That the world’s brokenness and mine are one?

That’s what I wrote. Looking back, I see that as an important lesson in the Education of Meredith. The weekly bus ride experience on the way to my internship was one of the important lessons of that internship.
It showed me my unfair privilege over and over until I began to see it. Since then, things have grown worse out west – and all over. Arizona passed that bill SB 1070 to target Hispanic immigrants.

UUA President Peter Morales in
yellow, and Rev. Susan
Frederick-Gray, center, in white

In July 2010, a number of Unitarian Universalists went to Phoenix to protest and engage in civil disobedience. I’m sorry I wasn’t with them. My colleague, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix was among those who went to jail. As she related in a subsequent sermon:

“Anyone who was in that jail with me on those days can not deny the racism that underpins this rhetoric of fear around illegal immigration. I was surprised how openly the Sheriff and his deputies tried to draw lines between the protesters along race. I am told the Sheriff went into one of the cells with some of the protesters and asked the white protesters what they were doing and why they cared about these Hispanics. Didn’t they see that they had more in common with him? Audrey Williams, an African American woman who needed a wheelchair while in jail, was put in solitary confinement for almost 20 hours. When she made repeated requests to be put with the other protesters, her friends, they told her “those white people don’t care anything about you.” They tried to bait us and divide us with race and they spoke of their own work along racial lines. No matter what our politicians say, unequal treatment along lines of race was in effect during our time in the jail.”

There is a fear and a hatred in the land. As people of faith we are called to stand against it, to stand on the side of love, to know and to renounce our unjust privilege in the name of the much greater rewards of connection and solidarity and siblinghood. We have a long and deep theological grounding for this stand. It’s a grounding that goes back to roots of Judaism, from which Christianity sprung, from which Unitarian Universalism sprung.

Exodus 22:21:

“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

It's a point the Hebrew Scriptures repeated for emphasis. Exodus 23:9:

“You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

And repeated again. Leviticus 19:33:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Many rabbis consider these texts among the most central in Judaism. The theological grounding for the importance of this commandment is that the Jews are given to understand that the land isn’t theirs. The land is God’s – as God tells them in Leviticus 25:23:

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.”

This was their way of making the point that there is no true ownership of land – the land and the trees and the water under it and flowing over it – belong to the earth, belong to all life, not to me and you.

LoraKim and I have deed and title to our house, and the law says we own it – but I know this is a legal fiction. The squirrels, woodpeckers, owls, armadillos, gopher tortoises and the occasional fox who pass through know it too. The spiritual truth is that all of the Earth belongs to all of life.

If the spiritual is whatever lifts us out of “I, me, mine,” lifts us out of protective fear into a spacious perception of abundance -- lifts us out of any “we, us, ours” that doesn’t include all sentient beings, then recognizing that all of the Earth belongs to all of life is a spiritual act. I believe that’s what the Hebrew people were really saying, in their own way. The moral and emotional truth of “the land is mine, saith the Lord, with me you are but aliens and tenants,” is that the Earth is not truly ours.

The American poet Emma Lazarus was Jewish and would have known well that teaching, do not oppress the stranger for you too were strangers in the land of Egypt. In 1883 she wrote a sonnet called "The New Colossus" which was later inscribed on a bronze plaque at the base of the statue of liberty.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Certainly no person is refuse. I understand Lady Liberty, as written by Emma Lazarus, to be saying: "Even if you have been treated as refuse, I welcome you. Even if your ethnos or class has been regarded as refuse by the prevailing prejudices of the powerful for centuries, I will take you in. Even if you have come to think of yourself as nothing but wretched refuse, I show my light for you, shine the way to the door of freedom for you, and thereby announce to the world, and to you, that you are nothing of the kind."

We do have in our hearts a yearning to be a hospitable and welcoming people – it’s at the foundation of our most cherished emblem, the Statue of Liberty. Yet our national heart is closing against itself.

As the good Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray said:

“We must see that it is unconscionable to fail to create legal avenues for people to come to this country to work, yet provide abundant jobs and opportunity that draw them here. It is unconscionable to allow companies to take vans to Mexico to recruit workers, and now claim that those workers came her illegally and attempt to criminalize them. It is unconscionable to criminalize and put in jail young people who were brought here as children, who had no criminal intent—to criminalize them for the decisions of their parents. It is unjust to have a situation where people have been working here for decades, owning homes, building lives, raising families and all of a sudden try to deport them from their lives. It is unjust and sinful to have law enforcement going into predominantly Latino neighborhoods in the middle of the night knocking on doors, pulling people over for minor traffic violations like illegal lane changes and asking them for papers. Yet this is what is happening, to neighborhoods, to citizens, to families, to children. And it is a fundamental violation of their human dignity and their civil rights.”

I would add that the devices we use to limit voting are unconscionable.

Let us be hospitable. Let us be welcoming of the stranger, for the Earth belongs to all life, and we, too, are but tenants. You’ve known what it was like to be in a situation that didn’t feel welcoming – you have been, in a manner of speaking, strangers in a metaphorical land of Egypt. You know the heart of the stranger.

Our neighborhoods are visited from people from afar. May you welcome them. And until our country becomes the place that lives up to its own principles, may you also welcome into your heart another visitor: righteous anger.

A Wednesday Morning in 2003

2012-01-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

In 2003, LoraKim and I and a nanday conure parrot named Exodor lived in El Paso. LoraKim was the minister to the Unitarian Universalist Community of El Paso, and I was in training to become a minister. I was doing my ministerial internship at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque -- a four-hour drive north from El Paso. Not that I drove. I took the bus. It was such a well-traveled route by folks without cars, that an independent bus company had formed that charged $35 for a round-trip bus ticket from El Paso to Albuquerque and back -- less than seven cents a mile.

My "weekend" was Monday and Tuesday. After the Sunday church services in Albuquerque, followed by early-afternoon meetings or visits or adult classes, I'd get on the 5:00pm bus back home to El Paso. LoraKim would pick me up at 10:00pm at the El Paso bus station -- if the bus didn't break down, which it did a couple times. On those occasions, I'd borrow a cell phone -- since I didn't have one myself in those days -- and call to let LoraKim know we'd be getting in later.

The El Paso bus station was a rather run-down sort of place in a rather run-down part of town. I'd arrive hungry, often not having eaten since breakfast, and we'd go to a rather run-down restaurant and get some cheap enchiladas. Life was good.

I'd have a couple days with LoraKim and Exodor. Monday was LoraKim's day off, and we'd go hiking about in the Franklin Mountains or some other spot nearby. Tuesday, she'd be at work most of the day and I'd work on stuff at home. Tuesday evenings, I met with a Zen group at the UU Community of El Paso. Then early Wednesday morning, I'd be back on the bus to Albuquerque.

Life was good, and at the same time life was, well, life. El Paso, apparently, is in a kind of "buffer zone." It's right on the border, and immigrants who make it into El Paso have crossed only some of the hurdles to getting to any more interior part of the US. All the roads out of El Paso have "check points" where all traffic pulls in. A Border Patrol agent asks for identification, or waves the vehicle on, depending on the length of the line and the skin tone of the vehicle's occupants.

Every Wednesday morning I was on that bus as it pulled into the check point north of El Paso. After one such experience, I pulled out my journal and wrote this:
- - - - - - - -

Wednesday, 9:23am

80 miles north of El Paso

on I-25 headed for Albuquerque

my bus pulls into a Border Patrol checkpoint.

Weekly, I participate in this ritual.

The green clad agent steps aboard.

"If you are a US citizen, state the city and state of your birth

If you are not, show your documentation."

As far as I can see, the green agent and I

are the only Anglos on this bus.

Border Patrol makes her way down the aisle,

frowning at papers of widely varying size, shape, color,

sometimes also asking for separate ID, sometimes not.

My head bows under the world's weight upon this spot.
This posture cues me to a whispered prayer.

"May there be an end to invidious distinctions

including those based on whether our mothers,

when we first peaked out from them into the world,

were north or south

of a line

a few politicians and generals drew

more than 150 years ago.

May I find ways to help bring

justice from my unjust privilege.

And blessed be all of us on this bus, including the Border Patrol agent,

as we all struggle in our diverse ways

to realize the fullness of our humanity."

She gets finally to me on the backmost seat.

This week no one has been hauled off.

I look up from clasped hands in lap

For a flicker our eyes meet.

My voice says, "Richmond, Virginia."

This only is asked of me, no papers, no ID.

Pale skin and the right sort of accent clinch it,

if I will but utter the name of an approved holy city

as the weekly sacrament of transition

from El Paso husband to Albuquerque minister intern.

I only have to say out loud my condemnation.

Richmond is a city much farther away than Mexico,

and memory recalls only a few passings-through,

none recent.

Of Richmond, I vaguely know a view of a skyline from the interstate, nothing more.

Not that it matters.

What I'm saying with those two words is:

I am on your side, Agent Green Jump Suit.

I deny Yahweh's call for a preferential option for the poor.

I deny Buddha's call to live compassion rather than fear.

I deny my faith profession:

the unitarian commitment to the unity of us all

the universalist commitment to universal community

From my lips, this two-word Peter's denial: "Richmond, Virginia."

Peter, having spoken, saw in a dizzy flash, as I do:

We who long to be merely good,

Are revealed as rotten with complicity with the empire.

And what could show more clearly than that

That the world’s brokenness and mine are one?

Nonviolent Social Change

2012-01-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

On the third Monday of January, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s legacy is most clearly and publicly embodied in The King Center in Atlanta: The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. It’s not the center for civil rights; it’s not the center for advancement of minorities; it’s not the center for anti-racism and multiculturalism; it’s not the center for civil disobedience; or even the center for justice – though King stood for all of those. It’s the center for nonviolent social change.

(King Center web site: click here.)

In honoring the work and the heart of this human being today, I want to look at this idea of Nonviolent Social Change. Building from King’s life and work, what have we learned since his time? King had a dream of peace and justice. Are there resources available to us that weren't available to him for realizing that dream?

In the years just before and just after Martin Luther King's death in 1968, the Unitarian Universalist efforts to address racial justice tore us apart. We were, and are, proud of our presence and support in Selma in 1965. Five hundred Unitarian Universalists participated with Dr. King in that march from Selma to Montgomery, including over 140 Unitarian Universalist clergy -- 20 percent of all UU ministers in final fellowship at that time. We seemed -- to ourselves -- so clearly to be on the "right" side. The line between us (the good guys) and them (the racists) seemed well-established.

Then, in 1967, 135 UUs came to New York for an "Emergency Conference on Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion." Almost as soon as the meeting was called to order, 30 of the 37 African American delegates withdrew to form a Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus (BUUC). They developed a list of what they called "non-negotiable demands" to be submitted to the conference and, ultimately, the UU Association's Board of Trustees. The core demand was that the board establish a Black Affairs Council (BAC), to be appointed by the BUUC and funded for four years at $250,000 a year -- which would have then been 12 percent of the UUA's entire budget. The next General Assembly approved these demands. Then the General Assembly after that, finding that funds had grown tighter, wanted to spread the million dollars over five years at $200,000 a year instead of four years at $250,000 a year. The BUUC seemed heavy-handed to some, and another group, "Black and White Action" (BAWA), formed -- also sincerely wanting to advance the cause of civil rights.

Very hard feelings erupted on the floor of the General Assembly 1969 in Boston. Almost all of the 200-300 black delegates there got up and walked out. The BUUC folks denounced the BAWA folks. Our denomination, over 42 years later, is still struggling to come to terms with the events of that General Assembly and the issues raised. Yes, it seems the leadership of the UUA had some paternalistic civil rights attitudes. And, yes, the BUUC leaders might have chosen to be content with recognition and funding and not vindictively insisted on "not one penny for BAWA." And, too, the BAWA supporters might not have reacted against the BUUC as if their lives depended on it.

As I read the accounts about that awful fighting, it almost makes me cry.

(read Warren Ross's article here;

and read Mark Morrison-Reed's illuminating reflection here)

We so wanted to fight for justice. And we so didn't know how. We didn't have the skills, the resources, to hear each other with compassion.

Do we now? It is with our specific Unitarian Universalist history in mind that I ask this question: are there resources for nonviolent social change -- for hearing each other in compassion -- that weren't available in King's time? On the day when King would have been celebrating his 83rd birthday, and almost 44 years since his death, how stand the prospects for nonviolent social change?

As we gather here for worship today, hoping to open our hearts to an experience of something that some of us call sacred, I know we bring with us our awareness of this unique moment in history. This time when Time magazine’s person of the year was “The Protestor” – when the Arab spring toppled regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and appears possibly on the verge of bringing regime change in several other countries – this time when, in recent months, we have seen the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the country and to other countries – what now have we learned, are we learning, about nonviolent social change?

(for Time's article, click here)

The collective composite person Time calls “The Protestor” has sometimes been quite violent this last year – yet the influence of the nonviolent ideal can also be seen at work, both in the Middle East and in our Occupy movement.

This is also a time when, this week, we learned about a video of US marines urinating on the bodies of dead enemy fighters. A much less publicized story I also came across this week is that another video has emerged that shows a soldier beating a sheep apparently to death with a baseball bat to the whoops and laughter of other soldiers looking on. That article also mentioned that last year a video appeared that shows a US marine throwing a puppy off a cliff.

Oh, my. I would have liked us – us as a species – to have that not included in our accounting of ourselves on Dr. King’s 83rd birthday.

The shortest poem in Mary Oliver’s considerable body of work is just 20 words, 21 syllables:

That God had a plan, I do not doubt
But what if the plan was that we would do better?

OK, the plan is that we do better – and videos like these show some of us not doing better. I don’t bring this up just to bemoan the fact. I mention these videos because they, and the reaction to them, tell us something about the nature of violence and nonviolence.

The news coverage about the desecration of bodies also covers the attention it’s getting. We see that the Afghans, all the US military and political leaders, and, indeed, the world community all condemn this act. We are all horrified and appalled. Why? Why do we think it’s OK to shoot people – but certain things done to their bodies when they themselves are beyond caring are off limits? How could being urinated on be worse than being shot dead?

We react the way we do, I believe, because at a visceral level we recognize an important truth. The essence of violence is in the heart.

The essence of violence is in the heart.

Bombing people, shooting people, gassing, stabbing, clubbing, hitting, and torturing people are not the core of what violence is. Those things are merely the manifestations of a heart that is disconnected. We are shocked – rightfully shocked – by desecration because it reveals to us an essence of violence – a dehumanizing hatred behind the shooting and killing – an essence that we had preferred to pretend wasn’t there.

But, of course, it is there. Young men in their teens and twenties are not the most serenely wise demographic to begin with, and when you throw them into nerve-racking battle for months at a time, when you ask them to fight and kill and be in harm’s way, they are going to find hating and dehumanizing expedient for the task. So desecrating enemy bodies is as old as war. Its shock value is part of the conscious or unconscious strategy to demoralize the enemy side and harden our own side to be able to keep up the killing.

What this latest episode reminds us is that nonviolence is not merely refraining from shooting, stabbing, clubbing, kicking or hitting others – as important a step as that is. Nonviolence is a heart committed to softening instead of hardening. Nonviolence is a heart that loves, that respects, that reveres life, that connects and wants to connect. And we are violent to each other – whether we ever raise a hand or raise our voice to each other – whenever we fail to respond to each other out of reverence for the wonder of the life that is before us.

The heroes of nonviolence pictured on the right -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Su Kyi – weren’t just effective political organizers who happened to tell their followers, "Oh, and, by the way, no hitting." They were at the forefront of social change that we call nonviolent because they understood that the essence of violence is in the heart.

Before Gandhi, massive opposition to a prevailing government was called revolution if it succeeded and rebellion if it didn’t, and it involved weapons and fighting and lots of violence. Such a scale of opposition had never been nonviolent.

Martin Luther King picked up Gandhi’s ideas and brought them to the civil rights struggle in our country. Again and again he urged his followers and all those working for justice to set aside the impulse to riot, to burn, to strike back. Keep the righteous energy of anger without letting that anger make its home in hatred. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us:

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi continues the tradition of nonviolent social change. Her work for democratization of Burma led to her being under house arrest for 15 of the last 22 years. The Nobel Committee, in awarding her the peace prize, cited her nonviolent struggle against the oppressive military junta as

“one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.”

Each of these three was or is deeply grounded in a religious tradition.

Gandhi was practicing what his Hindu faith teaches of ahimsa: the principle that all living things are connected and form a unity requiring respect and kindness.

King was practicing what his Christian faith teaches of love – often referenced as the Latin caritas, or the Greek agape: a spiritual love. Agape, as one theologian puts it, is “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.” King took to heart Jesus’ words, “love your enemy,” and his faith tradition taught him to answer hatred with love.

Aung San Suu Kyi is practicing what her Buddhist faith teaches of karuna (compassion), and anatta (no self). There is no self separate from others; each of us is all of us; we cannot truly want to hurt them.

So who is that guy in the fourth picture? That’s a man whose work is not confronting political regimes, doesn’t give rousing speeches at political rallies, or organize marches, boycotts, sit-ins, or hunger strikes. Yet his work treats of the essence of violence and nonviolence, and it paves the way for profound social change. He is psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of nonviolent communication and the founder of the center for nonviolent communication.

Rosenberg has outlined a simple – deceptively simple, for it is very challenging -- four-step process for both speaking and listening. To learn and implement nonviolent communication takes both a lot of desire to address the violence in our hearts and in our relationships, and also a lot of skill.

Observation
Feeling
Need
Request.

It doesn’t seem that complicated or hard. Our lives subject us to stresses and conflicts – and while I hope that for you they are a much milder form than what our soldiers are subjected to – we respond with an analogous form of heart-hardening that is no easy matter to train out of us.

Observation: to notice without mixing in evaluation of what we’re seeing;
Feeling: to identify a true emotion without mixing in blame or criticism;
Need: to separate the universal human desires, the things everyone wants, from particular strategies for getting them;
Request: to be able to ask and not demand.

These are subtle skills. It’s no wonder that our Gandhis, our Martin Luther Kings, our Aung San Suu Kyis have been so rare in human history. The extensive spiritual training and depth they each had allowed their hearts to soften and become wise enough to lead their heads. The world, is full of Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Unitarian Universalists, and others whose hearts are not where Gandhi’s, King’s, and Suu Kyi’s were or are. The teachings of a faith tradition alone don’t magically make it happen. It also takes deep commitment to the vision the teachings point to. Otherwise folks hear the teachings, nod, and proceed to largely ignore them.

Or – I see this a lot, have you noticed it? – some wonderful, inspiring teaching is presented, and afterward I hear people saying, “That was great. I sure wish my in-laws would learn that," – or, "wouldn’t it be nice if our politicians knew that," – or, "I’d like my boss to have heard that.”

I am so prone to that myself. When I am studying or hearing the important teachings about peace, justice, loving-kindness, I have to remind myself over and over – yes, I may want to try to offer this teaching to others, for that is a role my calling includes, but first and primarily, it is for me. It would be nice if I would learn this. I pray for courage to remember that that’s always first.

The four-step process – observation, feeling, need, request – is one more teaching to nod at and forget – one more thing for us to wish other people would learn – unless our hearts truly yearn for the vision this teaching points to. The vision is creating a quality of connection among people that supports getting needs met through natural giving. The vision is a focus on two questions: what is alive in me and alive in you – and how can we contribute to making our lives wonderful.

There are resources available to us that weren’t available in Martin Luther King’s time for realizing his dream of peace and justice – and the resources of the teachings and methods and commitments of Marshall Rosenberg and his team at the Center for Nonviolent Communication are, to my mind, the most significant, and the most promising hope for nonviolent social change. There is much to learn here – a lot to take in and practice and internalize – that I can’t go into today.

(See the web site for the Center for Nonviolent Communication here,

and order the first and primary text of Nonviolent Communication here.

For info on Florida's only certified trainer in Nonviolent

Communication, Rev. LoraKim Joyner, see here.)

I’ll share one story to convey a small taste of it. This is Marshall Rosenberg in his book, Speak Peace in a World of Conflict:

“I was working with a team of minority citizens who wanted to change hiring practices in the health services department of the city of San Francisco. These citizens felt that the hiring practices were oppressive because they discriminated against certain people. They wanted me to show them how Nonviolent Communication could be helpful to them in getting their needs better met. For three days I showed them the process and how it could be used – and then they were to go out that afternoon and come back the next morning, and we would see how it went.

The next morning they came back very discouraged, and one of them said, ‘We knew it wouldn’t work. There’s no way to change the system.’

I said, ‘OK. I can see you’re really discouraged.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘So, tell me what happened so we can learn from this.’

The team of six of them had gone into an administrator’s office, and they told me how they had used Nonviolent Communication very well. They hadn’t gone in and diagnosed the system as oppressive. Rather, first they had made a real clear observation of what was going on. The identified the law that they felt was discriminatory because it didn’t allow for the hiring of certain people. Second, they expressed their feelings, how painful it was for them because they needed work and equality. They believed they could do this work, and it was painful for them to be excluded. They made a clear request of the administrator, saying exactly how they would like to see the hiring practices changed to better allow for them to be hired.

They told me how they said it, and I was very pleased. They incorporated beautifully the training we had gone through. They had stated clearly what their needs were, what their requests were, and they didn’t use insulting language.

I said, ‘I like how you expressed that. What was his response?’

And they said, “Oh, he was very nice, you know. He even thanked us for coming in. He said it’s very important in a democracy that the citizens express themselves, and we encourage that in this organization, but at the moment your request is quite unrealistic, and I’m sorry that it won’t be possible right now, but thank you for coming in.’

And I said, ‘Then what did you do?’

‘Well, we left.’

I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What about the other half that I showed you? How to hear behind the bureaucratic-ese to what was in his heart, what he was feeling, what his needs were? Where was that human being in relationship to what you wanted?’

One of them said, ‘We know what was going on in him. He wanted us to get out of there.’

‘Well, even if that’s true, was going on in him? What was he feeling? What were his needs? He’s a human being. What was that human being feeling and needing?’

They forgot to see his humanness because he is within a structure. And within the structure he was speaking structure language, not human language. As Walter Wink points out, organizations, structures, and governments have their own spirituality. And within those environments people communicate in a way that supports that spirituality. Nonviolent Communication shows us a way, no matter what the structure, to cut through it and see the human being within it.

I could see that I hadn’t trained them well enough on how to do that, so we practiced. We practiced how to hear the needs behind all that bureaucratic language, how to see the human being and make a connection that strengthens our ability to work toward social change with that person. After our training at that level, they made another appointment with this man. And they came back the next morning delighted.

When they saw what was behind his messages, they saw that he was scared. He actually shared their needs – he didn’t like to see how this law was discriminatory – but he had another need: to protect himself. And he knew that his boss would be very upset with this suggestion, because his boss was vehemently opposed to what they were after. He had a need to protect himself, and didn’t want to go to the boss and help them make the change.

Once this team of citizens saw what his needs were, they worked together, but in a way that got everybody’s needs met. What happened is that he mentored them. He led them through what they would need to go through to get what they wanted, and they met his need by protecting him, by not letting anybody know that he was mentoring them. Eventually, they all got the change in the structure that they wanted.

Effective social change requires connections with others in which we avoid seeing people within these structures as enemies – and we try to hear the needs of the human beings within. Then we persist in keeping the flow of communication going so that everybody’s needs get met.”

Last night at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship we had a gathering and dinner to welcome prospective members. I was fielding questions. One of the questions was, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the way the world is going?"

I don’t know which to be. There is so much in the bud that seems so promising. And then, every week the news brings some further reason also to despair of our species. I am in awe of what we have learned, and almost simultaneously have the sinking feeling that we haven’t learned anything.

So I make no predictions. Instead, I am hopeful. The plan, as Mary Oliver intimated, is that we do better.
God’s plan, the plan for which the divine spark in our hearts is trying to shine us the way, is for connection, for equally caring for everyone’s needs, for self-understanding and compassion beyond judgments of right-doing and wrong-doing.

I don’t know if this nonviolent social change will happen, but I know that it could. And I know that if it does – if we shall overcome -- it will happen one heart at a time.

Let it begin with me. Let it begin with us. Let it begin right now.

Amen.

Who Are We?

2012-01-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

"Who am I?" "Who are we?" We hunger for an account of ourselves, a story about what sort of being we are. We seek such an accounting to help us discern what is ours to do, and to help us come to terms with our life and our world. To be at peace, we perceive, entails being at peace with who we are. Who, then, are we?

Arriving at self definition involves the interplay of sameness and difference. What category am I in, and what are the features that the members of this category share? And, within my category, what makes me distinct? Each of us belongs to many categories: we are female or male; we have a nationality, or a mix of nationalities; we have ethnicity, or a mix of ethnicities; we are members of a political party, or call ourselves "independent," we have a religious identity, which might be "none." We are human, ape, primate, mammal, vertebrate, animal, alive. Though there are times when we rightfully resist categorization -- when the confines of a group identity are constraining and the advantage of what the category label reveals is outweighed by the disadvantages of what it obscures of our individual uniqueness -- we also depend on what we see in "others like us" to learn about ourselves.

For much of human history, "others like us" meant the other members of our tribe. What we might or might not have in common with members of other tribes seemed largely beside the point. In the last two or three millennia, more of us began to see our identity as humans as increasingly important. "What does it mean to be human?" grew into a compelling question for many philosophers, poets, and other writers and thinkers.

In the 1970s and 80s, I was a philosophy student: undergraduate, then graduate. I remember that the question, "What does it mean to be human?" made me feel in the presence of something vital and important. The question seemed to matter because whatever it was that was unique to our species would therefore be a precious and sacred thing, something to cultivate. If reason is what makes us human, then we ought to try hard to be rational in all things. If use of ethical principles is the defining feature, then those principles take on grand significance. Or if humor and laughter make us human, then it behooves us to laugh. Presumably, whatever is uniquely human is something of which we humans should want to have more, or should, at least, vigilantly guard our store – lest some horrible result occur, called “forfeiting one’s humanity,” or “becoming inhuman.”

Moreover, the notion of "our shared human condition" appeared to promise a grounding for values that we could share and build upon to create a more just and peaceful world. The more we could discern and discover about the content of our shared human condition, the better our prospects for peace and justice.

What many of us have begun to see in the last 40 years is that what it means to be human is more deeply tied up with what it means to be animal than we had imagined. More of us have noticed that understanding who we are has more to do with grasping our commonality with other species than with distinguishing ourselves from them. The prospects for peace and justice call for attention to our shared human condition -- and also for attention to our shared animal condition. The task of self-understanding before us since Socrates urged, “know thyself,” is to bring awareness and presence to all of what and who we are. We are now better situated to see that this means not merely attending to our human nature, but to our animal nature.

There are some things we humans are really good at: like communicating learning and preserving it so we can build on it. We’re not the only ones that do that, but we are really good at it. Other things, humans are not so good at. Other species have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs live in a world of smells that we can but dimly imagine, and bats and dolphins live in a world of echolocation that we imagine, if at all, even more dimly. There are various differences between any two species.

Quite a large part of what I am, however, lies in the connections and similarities I have with all mammals, with all warm-blooded animals, with all vertebrates. I’m not going to truly know myself by picking out one or a few unusual skills. I know myself by grasping the inheritance I share with the gorilla, gazelle, goose, and gopher tortoise. My world is taken in through eyes and ears that work pretty much like theirs do. Many of them live in, and are guided by, a world of smells that I am mostly oblivious to – but not entirely. The fast-track connection between the olfactory and memory is something my brain also has. I hunger as they do, I am susceptible to the same the fight-or-flight adrenaline surges.

I do have a thin neocortex layer on top of the older paleomammalian system (the amygdala and the rest of the limbic system of emotions) and even older reptilian system (brainstem and cerebellum), yet I remain largely driven by those brain systems that all mammals have – and even those that all vertebrates have. The cognitive processes of the neocortex govern me much less than the neocortex likes to believe. Indeed, perhaps the neocortex’s greatest glory, ironically, is that it has, over the many millennia since its emergence, developed the means to investigate itself and reveal its own relative insignificance.

For centuries in the West, the prevailing attitude has been, roughly, that nonhuman animals are basically machines, their behavior merely conditioned responses, while humans are more than that: free, capable of exercising intention and forming responses that transcend conditioning. Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), for instance, influentially declared that nonhuman animals were complex organic machines without the immaterial mind or soul that only humans have. Since the 20th century, however, research has been steadily closing the gap between our conception of humans and our conception of other animals. Studies have noticed, or elicited, elaborate, intentional, and apparently creative behavior in various species. Other studies come at the gap from the other direction: revealing that humans are not nearly as intentional as we often think we are. On this latter point, findings by Benjamin Libet and Michael Gazzaniga are especially instructive.

The Libet Experiments. In 1983, Benjamin Libet and others at the University of California, San Francisco, published the striking results of their experiments. In the study, participants were asked to voluntarily flex their wrist at a time of their choosing. Libet found that the neural signals for motion preceded the conscious awareness of intention to move by 300 to 500 milliseconds. “Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move!” Conscious intentions to move aren’t what cause our movements. This begs the question: why do our brains bother to create for us this illusion of conscious intentional control? Janet Kwasniak suggests that “the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action.” She suggests that “this marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions” were “ours” or just happened. The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened,” the effects on my wiring are different. Thus, what we call “volition” is a perception of our own behavior rather than a generator of it. The illusion of intention (or, more precisely, the illusion that intentions precede and determine action), might be an illusion that human brains generate more strongly and consistently than any other species -- that remains to be seen -- but it is, in any case, a by-product of the systems that all animal brains have for learning from experience. We can no longer plausibly claim, “We humans are in control of ourselves while nonhumans are machinelike bundles of conditioned responses.” Either they are not machines, or we are too.

The Gazzaniga Experiments. Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga flashed two different images at the same time into the subject’s visual field. One image was in the part of the field that could only be seen by the left visual cortex, and the other only by the right visual cortex. The right brain saw a picture of snow covering a house and car. The left brain, at the same instant, saw a picture of a chicken claw. Gazzaniga then asked the subjects what they saw. The left brain has the language centers, so the left brain can articulate what it saw. “I saw a chicken claw,” reported the subjects. So instead of asking for words, Gazzaniga then presented an array of pictures and asked subjects to point to what they saw. Subjects’ right hands (controlled by their left brains) pointed to the picture of the chicken claw that the left brain saw. At the same time, subjects’ left hands (controlled by their right brains) pointed to the picture of the snow-covered scene that the right brain saw.

Gazzaniga then asked each hand to point to a picture of something that goes with the picture seen. The left brain saw a chicken claw, so subjects' right hands pointed to a picture of a chicken. Chicken claw goes with chicken. The right brain saw a snow-covered house and car, so subjects' left hands pointed to a shovel. Finally, Gazzaniga asked his subjects, "why is your left hand pointing to a shovel?" Now we’re in the language realm where only the left brain can express itself. If left-brain knew the truth, it could say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel. It must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left brain instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

Our brains create a running commentary on whatever we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. When Gazzaniga flashed the word "walk" to just the right hemisphere, many subjects stood and walked away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get a Coke," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.

My language centers and neocortex notice my behavior, and they make up a story about this character named “Meredith” who is heroic, yet with certain endearing foibles. At each moment of the day this “Meredith” can be found deliberately and intentionally acting. Whatever it is he’s doing is a reasonable part of his pursuit of reasonable purposes. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know.

In discerning who we are, this is a crucial understanding: our story about ourselves as intentional, purposeful, and rational is made up after the fact. My neocortex and forebrain and language centers are really, really good at making up stories to rationalize whatever it is they notice I’m doing. But that’s not where the doing came from. Yet my brain makes it seem to me that everything I did was just what I “meant” to do. That’s the delusion I live in.

We cannot dispel, once and for all, the illusions of control, and the rationalizing stories of ourselves that our brains concoct. We can, however, better understand the ways we are fooled, and how our fundamental animal nature is at work. This understanding helps us begin to befriend our animality, our selves.

I am made, as many species are, to walk the savannas and woodlands of this wild earth. It is where deep parts of me find their greatest comfort and ease. Human social systems eventually yielded our technological systems, and between the two, I often find myself sitting indoors in front of a computer for hours at a time. If I am in touch with all of myself, then I feel those other parts biding their time, quietly yearning for their element. David Abram writes of “becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.”

I do not disparage the fine things my neocortex can do, nor the level of detail of envisioning the future that my more developed forebrain can do, nor the wonders of language produced and comprehended by my human versions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. These functions are great. They are only a small part of who I am, and they are a part that raises challenges. The language centers can generate powerful narratives that hold me enthralled and leave me oblivious to nonlinguistic awareness of the world around me.

Descartes posited a dualism of immaterial mind and material body. For Descartes, the complex organic machine of the body determined most of human behavior and all of nonhuman behavior. The immaterial mind/soul unique to humans guided only a small part of what humans do, Descartes acknowledged, yet that immaterial mind was the crucial separator of humans from all other animals. A “naturalized,” updated version of Descartes' thesis might replace Descartes’ concept of a special immaterial mind with a concept of special material brain parts. The point that these brain parts are only a small part of what we are would then seem to parallel Descartes’ acknowledgment that the complex organic machine he called “body” determines most of human behavior.

To understand who we are, I believe we must go beyond Descartes, even in a naturalized version. Certainly, the human brain is distinct from any other species. After all, every species' brain is distinct. The distinctions are matters of degree, not of kind – and the distinctions of degree to which the human brain can lay claim are slight. Other mammals have versions of the forebrain that imagines the future, the neocortex that cognizes, and Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, the human versions of which comprehend language. The human versions are as animal as the nonhuman versions, and as animal as our bones and guts are. Our animality, then, is not merely most of what we are; it is all of what we are.

Closer contact with, and awareness of, the animal in me engenders a greater respect for my fellow beings who share the burdens and the glories of the human condition -- and those beings who share the burdens and glories of the mammalian condition, or of the warm-blooded condition, or of the vertebrate condition. Heightened self-awareness leads to greater respect for my fellow vertebrates, and greater respect for my fellow vertebrates heightens self-awareness.

Where will deepened awareness of our animality take us? There is an emerging theology of nature that seeks to honor wildness as sacred. An earlier time described the material world as fallen, sinful, or, at best, crass. Then the scientific view has encouraged seeing the world as mechanical and inert. The emerging ecospirituality connects in wonder to the aliveness of the world. Connecting to our own animality – attending to, honoring, and loving what in us is wild and unpredictable – is of a piece with connecting to our world as well as understanding who we are.

Both ancient and medieval theology and modern science have told us that our senses are not to be trusted – that the true reality of gods, God, Platonic forms, or of quarks, quasars, and black holes was not to be grasped by the senses. Yet it is corporal sensations that offer us the enchantment of birdsong or the wonder of the moon. The ever-shifting reality in which our animality resides resists any finished theory, refuses the would-be tyranny of our concepts, and loosens the constraint of experience into expected categories. To consciously cultivate self-awareness of animality is to become more present, to become more open to the nuances of the unexpected in experience.

We humans have for so long defined ourselves only as members of the category human. I have spoken of the value and necessity of recognizing and connecting more deeply to other categories: primate, mammal, warm-blooded, vertebrate. In this essay, I have stopped at vertebrate in order to focus on expanding our self-awareness and identification that far. It’s a start. Yet this delimitation, too, is finally false. Ultimately, what I am is also the crustaceans, the arachnids, the insects. In the end, each of us is also the oak trees, the algae, and the bacteria. In the end as in the beginning, we are the mountains and rivers, stones and dirt, air and clouds, moon and stars.

Unitarian Universalists covenant to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. It remains to us to grasp that we are not part of this interdependent web. Each one of us is the whole thing.

Oliver-Berry Reading

2012-01-04T15:27:00.000-08:00

READER 1: "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

READER 2: "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

[READER 1: right justified plain text. READER 2: left justified italics. BOTH: Centered ALL-CAPS]

The Peace of

WILD

Geese

Things

Mary Oliver.

Wendell Berry.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about

When

DESPAIR

for the world grows in me

yours,

AND I

will tell you mine.

awake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I

Meanwhile the world

GO(es)

and lie down

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of

Meanwhile the

WILD

geese

things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water and

high in the clean blue air,

I feel above me the day-blind stars

are heading home again.

waiting with their light. For a time I rest

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

in the grace of

THE WORLD

offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

and am free.

Saturdao 10

2012-01-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

Dao De Jing, verse 5b
16 translations

1. James Legge (1891):

May not the space between heaven and earth be compared to a bellows?
'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power;
'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more.
Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see;
Your inner being guard, and keep it free.

2. Archie Bahm (1958):

No matter how deeply natures are torn by opposition, Nature itself remains unchanged.
In conflicts between opposites, the more one attacks his seeming opponent (upon which he really depends for his completion), the more he defeats himself (and thereby demonstrates that only Nature, and not any opposite abstracted from existence is self-sufficient.)
So, likewise, no matter how much debaters argue, their argument proves nothing.
Things are what they are, regardless of how much we disagree about them.

3. Frank MacHoven (1962):

The universe is like a bellows: empty, yet quite full. As it proceeds, it produces. Much talk, much exhaustion. Keep your thoughts within!

4. D. C. Lau (1963):

Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?
It is empty without being exhausted:
The more it works the more comes out.
Much speech leads inevitably to silence.
Better to hold fast to the void.

5. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (1972):

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.

6. Stan Rosenthal (1984):

The sage retains tranquility, and is not by speech or thought disturbed,
and even less by action which is contrived.
His actions are spontaneous, as are his deeds towards his fellow men.
By this means he is empty of desire, and his energy is not drained from him.

7. Jacob Trapp (1987):

The universe, like empty bellows,
Is ever giving forth;
The more it yields the greater the supply.
Who knows the meaning of all this?
To argue, to be overly concerned,
Is to exhaust one’s wits to no purpose.
Things are what they are regardless.
Better to let things be, to be still at the core of one’s being.

Stephen Mitchell

8. Stephen Mitchell (1988):

The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.
Hold on to the center.

9. Victor Mair (1990):

The space between heaven and earth,
how like a bellows it is!
Empty but never exhausted,
The more it pumps, the more comes out.
Hearing too much leads to utter exhaustion;
Better to remain in the center.

10. Michael LaFargue (1992):

The space between heaven and earth
isn't it like a bellows?
Empty, but not shrivelled up,
set it in motion and always more comes out.
Much talking, quickly exhausted.
It can't compare to watching over what is inside.

11. Peter Merel (1995):

Nature is like a bellows,
Empty, yet never ceasing its supply.
The more it moves, the more it yields;
So the sage draws upon experience
And cannot be exhausted.

12. Ursula LeGuin (1997):

Heaven and earth
act as a bellows:
Empty yet structured,
it moves, inexhaustibly giving.

13. Ron Hogan (2002):

Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:
It's empty,
but it could help set the world on fire.
If you keep using Tao, it works better.
If you keep talking about it,
it won't make any sense.
Be cool.

14. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (2003):

The space between the heavens and the earth –
Isn’t it just like a bellows!
Even though empty it is not vacuous.
Pump it and more and more comes out.
It is better to safeguard what you have within
Than to learn a great deal that so often goes nowhere.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura (2004):

Manifesting the Tao Eteranl,
The kosmic space is like a bellows.
Empty, yet inexhaustible.
The more one activates it, the more it generates.
Being full, too many words lead one nowhere;
Impartially, keep to the silent core of emptiness.

16. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (2007):

Yet Heaven and Earth
And all the space between
Are like a bellows:
Empty but inexhaustible,
Always producing more.
Longwinded speech is exhausting
Better to stay centered.

Move! Get going. Empty yourself out. That is: (1) give everything you have, hold nothing back, bestow all that you have upon the world; and (2) become an emptied person, empty of desire and judgment.

I'm reminded of Yeshua/Jesus saying, in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." (The canonical Jesus sounds a similar theme as when he urges us not to put our light under a basket, and in the parables of the talents [Luke 19:12-27 and Matt 25.14-20], which urge putting our "talents" to use rather than keeping them safe and hidden.)

We are afraid this will exhaust us. Way-making teaches that in the giving-forth motion, our power grows. But talking about it -- like this! -- that's what's really exhausting. Especially, excited or prolonged talking agitates the mind and makes us "full" rather than calm and empty.

* * *
All Previous:
Saturdao 1: verse 1a
Saturdao 2: verse 1b
Saturdao 3: verse 1c
Saturdao 4: verse 2a
Saturdao 5: verse 2b
Saturdao 6: verse 3a
Saturdao 7: verse 3b
Saturdao 8: verse 4
Saturdao 9: verse 5a

Parts of Speech, Parts of God

2012-01-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

When it comes to God-talk, there are a lot of different conceptions. It’s a common reply, when someone says they don’t believe in God, to answer: “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in that one either.” However many conceptions of God you don’t believe in, there are further conceptions available – and maybe some of them, you do believe in.

Imagine a survey that presented respondents with a list of various sentences about God and asked them to mark each one “true” or “false” (in their opinion). If we make the survey long enough and finely worded enough, we can well imagine that no two people would have matching answers all the way down. Even people the same age, raised in the same church, sitting next to each other in the pew every Sunday for their whole lives will have some different conceptions of God. In fact, the same person’s conception of God varies over time, depending on her recent experiences, what book he’s just read, what movie she’s just seen, or what sermon he’s just heard.

Flimer Dirthus Schleckentay

There are so many ways that people have and do think about God. Of course, we all have slightly different associations with any word. Yet, by and large, we more or less manage to communicate with most of our terms. “God,” however, is so variable – a term used to assert so many divergent and incompatible things – that to simply assert God’s existence or nonexistence doesn’t say anything. Such assertions serve only to affirm the speaker’s group identification: “I’m in the group that says God exists,” or, “I’m in the group that says God doesn’t exist.”

Both “God exists,” and “God doesn’t exist,” are like the foreign-language motto of a club in which every member recites the motto, but the last member who knew what the phrase meant died a century ago. Every time they get together, they say, “Flimer Dirthus Schleckentay,” and the words have no meaning at all except for re-affirming to each other their shared group identity and loyalty.

Some people put a little silver plastic fish symbol on their car. What does that mean? It means: “I’m in the tribe that puts little fish symbols on their cars.” Some people put a little fish with legs, and the word “Darwin” or “evolve” inside the fish. What does that mean? It means: “I’m in the tribe that takes umbrage at the tribal assertions of that fish tribe.” Myself, I have a silver plastic big fat fish with the word “Buddha” in it. Rather than put it on my car, I decided to put it on my filing cabinet at home. I do have a silver plastic chalice symbol on my car. What does that mean? Most people who see that have no more idea of what it means than “flimer dirthus schleckentay,” but we know what the chalice symbol means, don’t we? It means: “We’re in the tribe that would like all this tribal stuff to just be done with, but in the meantime, we do have our tribe, too.”

"Ladybug" by Joan Mitchell.
Possible product of theological debate?

When I interact with varying conceptions, I find that appropriation works better than opposition. I try to find a way to keep the baby when throwing out the bathwater – even if my idea of what’s baby and what’s bathwater may itself be a matter of difference. Speaking of babies, for example: Instead of saying Jesus isn’t our redeemer, instead of rejecting the concept of a redeemer born in flesh among us, we say every child born is one more redeemer. Our strategy is to slip in, take the stone arrowheads off their weapons, and replace them with rubber suction-cups. Or, maybe, replace the tips with paint brushes, and dip them into different colors, so that when they are fired, instead of harming each other, we create beautiful bright-colored abstract art on one another. Wouldn’t that be more fun?

So when it comes to differing conceptions of God, if we’re going to be a tribe, instead of being a tribe that puts its energy into refuting and defeating “false” conceptions, let’s be the tribe that delights in proliferating conceptions of God. After all, if God is the creator, then our divinity is in our creativity, so let us be playful and joyful in finding new, creative, poetic insightful ways to invoke “God.”

Billy Jonas

Billy Jonas’ song, “God Is In” (the lyrics of which we used as a reading earlier in the service) is one example of such delightful playfulness. (For both the lyrics and audio of this song: click here.)

There are infinite variations on the noun, “God,” but let us not restrict ourselves to the realm of nouns. God can be thought of as any part of speech. Do you remember your grammar – the “parts of speech”? There are eight of them, right? Let’s see . . . Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen . . . No, not those eight. The eight parts of speech are: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, interjections.

God the Noun

God the noun is the most common, of course, but, here, too, there’s still new territory to explore. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Person, or person-like, is the usual idea. Suppose God were a place, and the other name of that place is “here.” Suppose God were a thing, and the other name of that thing is “this.” What does that do – regarding every “here” and every “this” as God?

God the Pronoun

Goddess In

Then there’s God the pronoun. What pronoun refers to God? “He” and “him” are the traditional ones in the Western monotheism. For polytheism, the pronoun is “they.” Using “she” and “her” remind us of the feminine aspect of the divine, and that’s important. There are still times when referring to God as “she” can be a radical subversion of conceptions of God that reinforce patriarchy.

Let’s go further. Rather than merely looking at what pronoun to use to refer to God, what if “God” were itself the pronoun? Pronouns refer to a noun antecedent. If God were a pronoun, what would the antecedent be? God as a pronoun would have everything as its antecedent, wouldn’t it? We would say, “The universe unfolds in God’s own way” not to imply a separate intentionality – but as an alternative way of saying “The universe unfolds in its own way.”

Instead of saying, “Billy forgot his pencil,” we would replace the possessive pronoun “his” and say, “Billy forgot God’s pencil.”

“Maybe he’ll remember it tomorrow,” becomes “Maybe God’ll remember God tomorrow.”

Here are some sentences from this morning’s newspaper (Sunday December 18), replacing the pronouns with “God”:

“Flash floods devastated a region of the southern Philippines unaccustomed to serious storms, killing at least 450 people while God slept, rousting hundreds of others to God’s rooftops.”

And:

“Egypt’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters on Saturday, beating God and setting God’s tents ablaze.”

We would also get:

“The Denver quarterback, now dubbed the Mile High Messiah after leading God’s Broncos to seven wins in eight games . . .”

God the pronoun provides some interesting perspectives, doesn’t it?

God the Verb

Buckminster Fuller

Then there’s God the verb. There’s been considerable work on this one. Buckminster Fuller in 1940 wrote:

“God to me, it seems,
is a verb
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.”

In the last century a many scholars have written of ways of thinking about God as a verb. Process theologians and Naturalist theologians have produced such an extensive body of work that they’ve shifted the English language meaning of the word “God.”

Jean-Claude Koven

A tenet of process theology is that “reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events.” Author Jean-Claude Koven writing a few years ago (2005) expounded:

“God is . . . the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

Nice. Thinking of God as an active verb emphasizes the time during which the actions take place. It puts God in time, rather than removed from time. It invites us to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagining it in changelessness. My colleague Unitarian Universalist minister Stephen Phinney writes,

Rev. Stephen Phinney

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

Calling God a verb is a way of alluding to its active doing. A reality of events rather than substances suggests a more dynamic quality, but you may have noticed that “event,” “process,” and “creativity,” and “unfoldment” are still nouns. Suppose we take “God is a verb” strictly. How would that go? If God is the verb, what’s the subject of the sentence? The universe, perhaps. So we would say:
“The universe Gods.”
“There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly Godding along through the ages.”
“Reality Gods.”
Anything and everything is the subject. I God, you God, he she it Gods, we God, you God, they God. All God’s children God.

And what sort of activity is it to “to God”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians, to God is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the Godding universe. To God is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. To God is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic, not with, but as, the mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To God is to “laugh at the word two” (Hafiz). It is to swim in the sea of mystery, and quaff from the cup of abundance. To God is to lose all sense of yourself as a separate being in a creative project, or the creative encounter, in total freedom, with each moment.

Call that Godding to help you remember that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

We have been exploring God as an intransitive verb. Suppose God were a transitive verb -- the abiding transit between subject and direct object, doer and done-unto. If reality Gods, then what does it God? The universe Gods you, and me. Reality Gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It Gods Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad as well as Desmond Tutu and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Henry Nelson Wieman

There is, in other words, an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman says that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained full spirituality when everything signifies everything else. This is also where God-as-transitive-verb takes us. Everything Gods everything else. The butterfly in China Gods the rain in Omaha. You God the stars, and the stars God you.

God the Conjunction

Conjunctions, you’ll remember, hook up words and phrases and clauses. That makes sense: God connects things.

The two main conjunctions are “and” and “or.” Sometimes God is an “and”; sometimes God is an “or”; which is to say, God is the inclusive embrace, and God is the fact of choice.

God the Preposition

Prepositions describe a relationship: on, under, with, for. It might be helpful to think of relationship itself as Godly.

God the Adjective (My Favorite!)

Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked? This present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and “God” to help us notice it.

Let God be the name for the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there. An experience has God quality, religious quality, when it re-orients us to a greater sense of wholeness and peace. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is felt as a sense of abundance and gratitude toward things beyond our personality, that structure of ego-defense strategies with which we identify through most of our day.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis, wrote about a religionless Christianity. In a letter from prison, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329).

Religion, he said,

“is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind that religion denotes some set of doctrines and practices, but no one such set is necessary for giving experience God quality. Rather, a wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can be helpful in cultivating the God quality of experience. Very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – can facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God. Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

While no particular religion is necessary for bringing that quality to experience, all of them have proven sufficient, at least some of the time for some people in opening them up to experiencing the God quality in events and things.

If God is a noun, then we have to face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or the sort that the primitive Baptists describe, or the sort that the Eastern orthodox describe, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu. But if God is an adjective, then it’s easy to say that quality can be found anywhere, in any faith tradition, in any activity or practice, any work and any recreation (except bungee jumping, as Billy Jonas says).

I believe in the adjectives. I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful. I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life. I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful. I believe in full.

I believe in earthy. I believe in wise, and compassionate. I believe in a God world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals. I believe in the God life, which can be experienced by people of any religion, even those that say there is no noun, God – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them.

I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.

God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously.

John Steinbeck wrote that

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the [human] mind...it is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, or the forearms. The skin tastes like air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn."

We have experienced moments with those qualities.

God the Adverb

God the adverb expands on the idea of God the adjective. While adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs or adjectives or other adverbs. So things, events, experiences can have the God quality – and so can activities, and qualities themselves.

God the Interjection

Oh, God!

This is the most popular of all uses of God, isn’t it?

Interjections don’t assert, don’t make a claim, nor are they any part of the content of an assertion or claim. They just express. They are the speech of the speechless. Interjections are what we use when we are filled with something, and it wants to come out, but we don’t know what to say. They are a moan, or a yelp, or cry, beyond what we can articulate.

God is wow. God is ouch. God is yippee! God is arrgh! God is hmm. God is "yum!" and God is "ew, yuck." And certainly God is "Oh, God!"

“Oh, God!” may be the most honest -- and ultimately the most accurate -- God-talk there is. To that, I have just one further interjection:

Amen.

Saturdao 9

2011-12-31T14:56:00.000-08:00

Dao De Jing, verse 5a
16 translations

1. James Legge (1891):

Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be
benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt
with.
The sages do not act from (any wish to be) benevolent; they
deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with.

2. Archie Bahm (1958):

Opposites are not sympathetic to each other.
Each one of the many kinds of opposites acts as if it could get along without its other.
But Nature treats opposites impartially, dealing with each of every pair of opposites with the same indifference.
And the intelligent man will regard opposites in the same manner.

3. Frank MacHoven (1962):

Nature is indifferent to life. It realizes everything is as a straw dog. The truly wise are also indifferent to life. They realize humanity is as a straw dog.

4. D. C. Lau (1963):

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs;
the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

5. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (1972):

Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.

6. Stan Rosenthal (1984):

Nature acts without intent, so cannot be described
as acting with benevolence, nor malevolence to any thing.
In this respect, the Tao is just the same,
though in reality it should be said that nature follows the rule of Tao.
Therefore, even when he seems to act in manner kind or benevolent,
the sage is not acting with such intent, for in conscious matters such as these, he is amoral and indifferent.

7. Jacob Trapp (1987):

“Nature Seems Unkind”
Nature seems unkind,
As indifferent to its own offspring
As if they were but sacrificial straw dogs.
The Sage, too, seems unkind,
As impartial as Nature;
Yet, like Nature, he benefits all.

8. Stephen Mitchell (1988):

The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

9. Victor Mair (1990):

Heaven and earth are inhumane;
they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.
The sage is inhumane;
he views the common people as straw dogs.

10. Michael LaFargue (1992):

“Heaven and Earth are not Good
they treat the thousands of things like straw dogs.
The Wise Person is not Good
he treats the hundred clans like straw dogs.”

11. Peter Merel (1995):

“Nature”
Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.

12. Ursula LeGuin (1997):

“Useful Emptiness”
Heaven and earth aren't humane.
To them the ten thousand things
are straw dogs.
Wise souls aren't humane.
To them the hundred families
are straw dogs.

13. Ron Hogan (2002):

Tao's neutral:
it doesn't worry about good or evil.
The Master's are neutral:
they treat everyone the same.

14. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (2003):

The heavens and earth are not partial to institutionalized morality.
They take things (wanwu) and treat them all as straw dogs.
Sages too are not partial to institutionalized morality.
They treat the common people as straw dogs.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura (2004):

The Kosmos is not humane;
Impartially, it treats all things as transitory.
The sage is not humane;
Impartially, he treats all people as transitory.

16. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (2007):

Heaven and Earth are not kind:
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.
Sages are not kind:
People are straw dogs to them.

Eight of the 16 translations use the phrase "straw dogs." What are straw dogs anyway? Besides the title of a movie, I mean? ("Straw Dogs" is a 2011 movie with James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, which is a re-make of a 1971 movie with Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. A couple moves to a rural town and face increasingly vicious harassment from the locals. It's a psychological thriller.) In ancient China, straw dogs were ceremonial objects -- sacrificial animal-images. "These sacrificial objects are artifacts that are treated with great reverence during the sacrifice itself, and then after the ceremony, discarded to be trodden underfoot" (Ames and Hall). So when nature/reality/heaven and earth treats us as a "straw dog", are we talking about during the sacrifice itself or after? Interesting. If you find that life is treating you really well, it means you're about to be sacrificed. If life is trodding you underfoot, at least you know the sacrifice is over.

Lao Tsu begins by telling us what our parents and teachers so often repeated: Life isn't fair. Heaven and earth aren't kind. In particular, they are not "partial to institutional morality," -- which means the world isn't bound by your ideas of what's fair, or your ideas of right and wrong and good and bad.

Then Lao Tsu tells us that, if we are to be as the sages, then we, too, must treat people the same way. What does that mean? Kimura indicates this means treating them as transitory -- not getting attached to them, just as earth and sky don't appear to be attached to any particular individual. Others suggest this means treating people impartially, the same: "she welcomes both saints and sinners."

Virtue really must be its own reward. Nature won't treat you any better for it. Nor will the wise.

Likewise, it's not your job -- it isn't anybody's -- to praise and condemn, as if the world would want to change itself to accord with your judgment of what it should be.

* * *
All Previous:
Saturdao 1: verse 1a
Saturdao 2: verse 1b
Saturdao 3: verse 1c
Saturdao 4: verse 2a
Saturdao 5: verse 2b
Saturdao 6: verse 3a
Saturdao 7: verse 3b
Saturdao 8: verse 4

A Merry Unitarian Christmas

2011-12-25T04:25:00.000-08:00

Christmas is, after all, you know, our holiday. Unitarians made this season what it is.

Consider: what does Christmas mean? It means, of course, the mass of Christ, the celebration of the birth of a Palestinian prophet named Yeshua, or Jesus. But what exactly does that mean? Historians have no idea what time of year Yeshua was actually born. The early Christian church celebrated his birthday in April at first, and then in June for a while, before settling on a strategy of co-opting yule and solstice. The first December Christmas wasn't celebrated until around 380 CE.

In the last 200 years, Christmas has been radically transformed -- at the hands, largely, of Unitarians.

Christmas means we put a tree indoors, and we decorate it. It was a practice in Germany, brought to the United States in the early 1800s by the Unitarian, Charles Follen.

Christmas means dashing through the snow, one-horse open sleighs. It means bells that jingle, and it means laughing, all the way. That’s the song “Jingle Bells,” by the Unitarian, James Pierpont.

Christmas means music. In addition to "Jingle Bells," other Christmas songs include "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” "Watchman Tell Us of the Night," and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" These were written by, respectively, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Bowring, and Noel Regney -- Unitarians, all. Additionally, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," is by a Unitarian minister. More about that one later.

The instantly recognizable Ebenezeer Scrooge

Christmas means Old Ebenezeer Scrooge’s heart opens up to compassion and joy. It was a Unitarian named Charles Dickens who, in 1843, published A Christmas Carol. Scrooge confronts his past, when as a young man, his need for money -- that is, we suppose, his need for security or status -- caused him to lose his fiancee, Belle. He is shown the present reality of joy in gatherings of families, whether they are poor like Bob Cratchit's or relatively well off like Scrooge's nephew Fred. Then he is brought to an awareness of his own impending death. It's not that Scrooge had explicitly believed himself immortal. It's just that he had pushed the fact that life is temporary out of his mind. In pushing away death, he had pushed away life, for the two are the same.

Dickens' novella received immediate popular and critical acclaim, and almost as immediately shifted the way that Victorians celebrated Christmas. Over the next years, Dickens received hundreds of letters from complete strangers

"writing all manner of letters about their homes and hearths, and how the Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a very little shelf by itself."

A Christmas Carol was regarded as a new gospel. Critics noted that the book was, their experience, unique in that it actually made readers behave better.

A Christmas Carol remains the most widely read-aloud book. It has been theatrically performed countless times, and made into numerous movie versions. Other popular Christmas tales such as It's a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are but re-workings of Charles Dickens' Unitarian gospel. "According to historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol."

The Christmas gospel of generosity, gratitude, and the joy of family gathering is fundamentally Unitarian. The Christmas social gospel is also Unitarian.

Edmund Hamilton Sears
1810 - 1876

Christmas means the message of Peace on Earth, to all goodwill. In 1849, just a few years after Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, wrote the words to "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." With the war in Europe and the US war with Mexico weighing on his mind, Rev. Sears wrote a carol that urges us to hear the angels sing of peace on earth, to all goodwill.

The Gospel of Luke tells of angels proclaiming Peace on Earth -- but for most of the history of Christendom, that has been taken as referring to a private, personal peace. Few imagined that peace on earth actually meant we should stop killing each other.

Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, however, was at the vanguard of a movement to understand peace on earth in social, community terms – instead of merely a personal, private peace. He called us to task for not heeding the angelic call to peace.

"Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong,
and man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring,"

he decried.

His lyrics raised objections from a number of Christian conservatives of the time. Many people said, contemptuously, that Sears’ hymn was just the sort of thing you would expect of a Unitarian.

Yes, it is.

If Christmas season today is a time when our hopes turn to ending war and truly bringing peace on earth, it is because a Unitarian minister wrote a song inviting us to imagine the day:

"when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing."

This is our holiday. From the Christmas tree, to the jingling bells, to the Scrooge story, to the message of peace on earth, Unitarians made Christmas what it is today.

Respond to WHOSE Love?

2011-12-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

Text

The living tradition we share draws on many sources. . . . [including:] Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Abstract

"God" is a difficult topic among Unitarian Universalists. Some of us resist any use of the word or concept. For others of us, God is a central part of our understanding and our life. Is this an ontological disagreement (involving competing claims about the nature of reality and what reality does and does not include)? Is it a semantic disagreement (involving competing claims about what words do and don't mean)? Or is it neither of these so much as a matter of identity and group loyalty?

Respond to Whose Love?

My Mom recently recounted to me a story from my childhood. I had no recollection of the incident or any previous retelling of it. It’s an anecdote that reveals something of my mind, and my mother’s. I was about five years old, and we were at a fair or carnival where there were helium balloons. I'd never seen such things before, and I was fascinated.

“Mom, why do they go up?” I asked – or so I’m told I did.

Mom, rational scientist that she was and is, answered, “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Things go down,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “Why do they go down?”

“Because of gravity,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the balloon goes up because of levity.” And this satisfied me. What could I say?

When I heard Mom tell this story, it did not occur to me to think, “Egad, my mother lied to me!” After all, why not call it levity? Yes, it might imply a kind of Manichaean physics. (Manichaeans believe that good and evil are both substantive forces at war with each other, and in my five-year-old mind, maybe I had some inkling of a similar notion of there being two opposing physical forces named “gravity” and “levity.”) But I was also prepared to learn, had it ever come up again, that “levity” was the name for how, when something is less dense than air, gravity pulls the air down and under it, pushing the less dense object upward.

Mom wasn’t ready to explain all that – or, rather, she knew I wasn’t ready to follow such an explanation – so she me gave this word, “levity.” I delight in this new family story -- not because Mom’s answer was false, but because it’s so true. I had entirely forgotten it, but I love knowing again what apparently I first learned at age five: things go up because of levity.

The world is full of wonder. Just when I think that gravity makes everything go down, I discover that some things go up. Language is full of wonder, too. The words we select to express our experience give the experience meaning -- and sometimes delight.

The wonder of world and word comes to mind when I reflect on our text for today: the fourth source of the living tradition we share, "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbor as ourselves." (See all of the seven principles and six sources: click here.)

“Respond to whose love?” I have heard asked. It’s a topic that calls for both gravity and levity, isn’t it?

Unitarian Universalists have different experiences of the world -- different from people in other faith traditions and different from each other. People have different stories to make sense of our world.

Some stories about reality feature a creative force that is person-like in that it knows and it wants.
Other stories tell of a creative force that kind of has beliefs and desires – in a rather metaphorical sense.
Still other stories depict the forces of the universe creating and destroying utterly without anything that could be compared to knowledge, intentionality, or purpose.

We have different senses of what’s out there. Of course we do. We’ve had different experiences, so how could we not? I want a world in which that is not a problem, don’t you?

Besides different feels for what does or does not exist out there, we have different feels for how words may reasonably be used. I was poking around for definitions of "God" and I discovered that a blog up in Rhode Island had quoted me about that. It said,

Meredith Garmon . . . once observed, “The word ‘God’ points to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; a basis of ethics.” (Rev. James Ford, click here.)

After some further rummaging, I confirmed that, yes, I actually had written that some months back. OK, I’ll take it.

Source of beauty and mystery;
power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
ultimate context and basis for meaning and value;
widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
a basis of ethics.

This is what people have pretty-much-always been referring to when they said ‘God’ – regardless of whether they thought that these qualities attached to a person-like creator or not. Others, though, insist that the word ‘God’ unavoidably implies a person-like creator.

I believe that theology is a kind of poetry, not a kind of science or natural history. As poetry-making and poetry-hearing beings we need to use words creatively, to sometimes treat a peripheral association as a central meaning and ignore the meaning that had often previously been central. I want a world in which that, too, is not a problem. Don’t you? Is this so hard? A world in which different experiences of what’s real are honored, in which different styles of poetry and metaphor are honored? Why is that hard?

Call it tribalism. Tribalism was named as an issue in the controversy around Rob Bell’s 2011 book Love Wins. Reverend Bell argued, as Universalists have been arguing for over 200 years, that there is no after-life hell of eternal damnation. A loving god would not condemn creatures of God’s own making to an eternity of agony. While many Christian readers were affirmed and moved by Rob Bell’s universalism, a number of other Christians attacked Bell (as their predecessors attacked John Murray and Hosea Ballou) as a heretic. One of Bell’s defenders -- in fact, the editor of Love Wins -- decried the attacks. He wrote:

“As a young evangelical, I was socialized to see the biggest threat to the church as theological liberalism. But now I think the biggest threat is Christian tribalism, where God’s interests are reduced to and measured by those sharing your history, tradition, and beliefs, and where one needs an ‘enemy’ in order for you to feel ‘right with God.’” (Mickey Maudlin, source click here)

There is an awful lot of religion that is neither about a sense of what’s out there, nor is about a sense of the proper use of words. It’s just about: whose team are you on?

Religion can become talismanic – a mere talisman. Consider for example a report from this week’s Christianity Today: “Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition." Or, as Gallup and Castelli said in a widely quoted survey finding, “Americans revere the Bible but by and large they don’t read it.” Time magazine observed in a 2007 cover story that only half of U.S. adults could name one of the four Gospels. Fewer than half could identify Genesis as the Bible's first book. Jay Leno and Stephen Colbert have made sport of Americans' inability to name the Ten Commandments—even among members of Congress who have pushed to have them posted publicly. (Christianity Today, click here.)

Yet Bible sales continue at a brisk clip. For many, apparently, the Bible is a sort of talisman: an object to possess as a symbol of tribal loyalty, not a text to study and understand. In a similar way, tribal loyalties get in the way of honoring and respecting different experiences about what is real, and different poetic inclinations for choosing words. We have a hard time simply accepting our differences when those differences symbolize what team you’re on – and when team membership requires being opposed to certain other teams.

Tribalism isn’t always bad. Recall that religion fundamentally is about three things:

It’s about how you live -- the ethics and values that guide your life.
It’s about community -- who you choose to come together with and share in rituals that strengthen your sense of group connection.
It's about those moments of transcendence, one-ness, or mystery.

The task of faith and faith community is to bring those three functions together in such a way that each one supports, encourages, and strengthens the other two. Community is, indeed, an important part of religion. Being a part of a tribe can be a good and healthy part of the deal. We are social beings: we need community, and loyalty to our group is, by and large, a virtue.

The problem arises when the #2 function isn't facilitating either the #1 function or the #3 function -- that is, when one's tribal connection neither affirms and supports any ethic or value other than tribe loyalty, nor facilitates or helps integrate one's transcendent experiences of interconnection and peace. If the primary function of my community is to nurse a shared sense of who the enemy is, then my community isn’t healthy. People who want to post the ten commandments but don't know more than a couple of those commandments, are using the issue as a test to identify who their enemies are.

What about our own Unitarian Universalist forms of tribalism?

It's worth noting that where there are no tribal loyalties at play, we humans are generally pretty flexible about adjusting our understandings of words. For example, one of my former in-laws referred to her refrigerator as "the Frigidaire." She would say, for example, “There’s cake in the Frigidaire.” A glance at the manufacturer’s label revealed that her refrigerator was actually made by Amana. But even at my most churlish, teen-aged self, I was not inclined to say, “No, it’s not in the Frigidaire, it’s in the refrigerator, which happens to be an Amana.” Would you say that? Me neither.

We simply adjust to different ways of using words. Longfellow says, “By the shores of Gitche Gumee,” and most of us can go with that, without the annoyed feeling, "If he meant Lake Superior he should have said 'Lake Superior.'"

Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky tells us:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
all mimsy were the borogoves, and ye mome raths outgrabe.

Many of the words are made-up. You can call the poem “nonsense,” but it isn't meaningless. The sound and rhythm and context they create for each other invite us into a world of imagination, and most of us can go with that.

Tribalism, however, makes it difficult to extend the same flexibility and charity to language about God. To see how this works, consider the ways that some of us find our genial adaptability beginning to stiffen dogmatically when it comes to grammar. Attitudes about grammar illustrate how attitudes about "God" work.

For example, take me (. . . please!) I am sensitive to the difference between “lie” and “lay,” and I am capable of wishing that other people were, too. I have my pet list of words not to be used as verbs. Loan is not a verb, I say. Neither are impact, mandate, or critique. These words are nouns! The perfectly good verb forms are lend, affect, require, and criticize. Even more hideous: transition. Transition is not a verb.

You might remember a Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin uses verb as a verb.

I have mellowed out a bit through the years. I actually rather like the Southern expression, might could, as in, “We might could do that.” I know that grates on some ears, but isn’t it more elegant than “might be able to”?

When LoraKim and I were first dating, I was a bit of an insufferable grammar dogmatist. I think that if I had corrected her one more time after she said "with you and I," the engagement would have been off. We Grammar Nazis like to make protestations about preserving the language, facilitating clarity of thought, and guarding against language so decaying that it becomes an impediment to understanding. Those protestations are hollow. What it's really about is loyalty: tribal -- or, more precisely, class -- loyalty.

It would seem a betrayal of our grandmothers or parents or beloved English teachers if we were to allow ourselves to relax the guard against the barbarians at the gate saying “got” when they should say “have.” Those adults we admire were the upholders of our class identity. The adults who sought to instill in me good grammar were teaching me to be faithful to my socio-economic class. The hidden message of prescriptive grammar instruction is: Don’t sound like those people – the lower classes. Grammar will be emotionally important to me precisely to the degree that my class identification is emotionally important to me – the degree that I desire to preserve privilege and separation between the other and me.

I'm talking about separation between the other and me. But if it will help close that separation, then I will say, "between the other and I." Hurts a little bit. But I can learn. If it will help me connect with others, then I will (gulp) transition to the next phase. Any noun you might could verb, go ahead. And if I don’t know what you mean, I’ll ask. It’s not like speakers of upper-class English are really, on average, a whole lot clearer.

Tribal – or class – loyalty might make us balk at some language, but we noticed that when loyalty isn’t at play, as when reading Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, it’s relatively easy to practice the gentle arts of flexibility and charity.

I’ve come to understand that whether or not I want to insist that “God” necessarily must imply an entity with awareness and intentions is mostly about my tribal loyalty, just as my grammar pet peeves are. Can we Unitarian Universalists engage in a process we identify as discerning what God is calling us to do? Can we have conversations about the question, "How do we serve God?" Yes, we can. In talking about serving God, we would be talking about serving life, and good, and the flourishing of all beings, while also reminding ourselves of the finitude and corrigibility of our own conceptions of life, good, and flourishing – which is just what I think Jews, Christians, and Moslems are talking about when they speak of serving God.

When we say, with our fourth source, that we are called to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as our selves, we are saying that the moments when we have felt the greatest belonging and connection inspire us to want to help our neighbors also feel connected and know they belong – which is what I think it truly means to respond to God’s love, whether or not God is conceived of as a person-like entity.

This was once hard for me to say. I was the proud "Class Atheist" at my rural Georgia public school from fourth grade through high school. To change my language seemed like a betrayal of my standards, which, of course, really meant a betrayal of my tribe: us rationalist humanists standing courageously intolerant of the language used by certain people whom we accused of intolerance.

My journey slowly and unevenly brought me to a place where I could see connecting with others as more important than separating myself from them. If they -- if even, say, you -- talk to me about your faith in God, and if you do so with certain phrases that trigger in me remembrance of enemies past, if you use religious words that conjure the battle lines in culture wars in which I have fought for much of my life, please give me just a moment, and I will dismantle my trigger. I will. That's my promise. There might be some days where it takes me a minute to remember myself, but give me that moment, and I am committed to disarming that particular reactivity in myself. I make that commitment because . . .

. . . because if I have a chance to connect with you, whoever you are, then connecting with you is more important than separating myself from you;

. . . because I know that if you and I have each felt mystery, wonder, and beauty come together with peace, compassion, and the softening of ego defenses; if we have opened our hearts to love; then we have a shared commonality that transcends both your dogmatic opinions about God and my dogmatic opinions about how wrong your dogmatic opinions are;

. . . and because that shared commonality matters more than maintaining my tribal identity.

It turns out that I can still oppose mandatory school prayer, support mandatory inclusion of evolution, favor reproductive rights, legal recognition of same-sex marriage, abolition of the death penalty, and public programs to take care of all our people -- and talk about God. I can talk about the impetus of the universe as God’s call for us to improve our understanding, respect our differences, serve life and freedom, and share God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Willing to employ "God talk" judiciously, I can be more effective than I ever could by a fastidious refusal to invoke the one word that, more clearly than any other, conveys a sense of spacious mystery tugging us toward the better angels of our nature.

I find my wholeness and healing growing the more I perform the imaginative exercise of pretending that the world might be whispering to me, calling, inviting me to love if I but listen, listen. Listen: it is God’s love calling me to respond by loving myself and my neighbor as my self. It is God’s love lifting me up . . . as levity lifts a child's balloon.

May it be so. May it be so for all of us.

Journaling Your Way to Peace

2011-11-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

Who am I? Whose am I? What is mine to do?

Anything that I say about being good at some things, or not so good at other things, is going to be as much about other people as it is about me. If I think I’m good at something, it’s always good compared to somebody else. If I think I’m not good at something else, it’s always not so good compared to someone else. If I assess myself smart, or intellectually inclined, or big-hearted, or hard-working, or committed -- or if I assess myself as dim, or histrionic, or disorganized -- warm or cool, old or young -- I’m equally assessing other people as being, on average, less of whatever quality, positive or negative. If I were to say I thought I was a pretty good preacher, I'd be opining just as much on the quality of my colleagues preaching as on my own.

Who am I apart from what other people are? Who am I without the judgments, with neither positive nor negative self-assessments, for judgments are always comparisons? Who am I now?

There is a story that runs along through our heads, telling us about who we are. It’s a largely unquestioned story because we don’t take it out and look at it. Fragments of the story push us this way and that. The process of journaling invites us to take it out and look at it. When we start articulating our story, we begin to make it more coherent. We fit the fragments into larger chunks. Some fragments don’t fit. This is a new discovery for us! Only then can we choose to drop the incoherent fragments so that they won't pop up to push our life one way or another anymore.

Slowly, slowly, life begins to have a greater coherence. This increasing coherence naturally happens for many of us as we age anyway. Journaling helps it happen sooner, clearer, more thoroughly.

Anne Frank, a young girl imprisoned in hiding in an attic, was able to fashion a coherence out of self and life with a pen and some bound pages. Through journaling, she brought herself into being. It was not an ordinary girl’s diary, after all. As Anne Frank wrote at the beginning:

“I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried in my heart.”

What is it that lies buried in my heart? I don’t know, cannot know, what is in there until I see it manifest somewhere. Seeing it manifest on the page helps me see its manifestations elsewhere, too.

What lies buried in your heart? The journal is a life companion, always ready to help you be who you are but didn’t know it.

Life is lived, of course, day by day. The meaning of a life is the meaning of its days. Day by day we forge the chain we wear, link by link. Or, day by day, we walk an uncertain path to liberation. Or both.

Day by day.
Day by day.
Oh, dear Lord,
Three things I pray:
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day. ("Godspell")

Life comes at us and flies past us day by day, or, as the French say, au jour le jour. The French jour, meaning “day,” is the root of both journey and journal. Journey originally meant one day’s work or the distance traveled in one day. And journal is the record of the day, the recording of our life's journey.

Each fleeting day of our life, we travel one day’s distance. What did it mean? What was it for? Where did we go? Even though we were there, it is inchoate until we pull together the fragments and bind them together into a coherent accounting to ourselves.

Christina Baldwin

“Writing is sorting. Writing down the stream of consciousness gives us a way to respect the mind, to choose among and harness thoughts, to interact with and change the contents of who we think we are.” (Christina Baldwin, Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, 9)

In All the Big Questions, Rebecca Hill says:

“What is the purpose or meaning of life? To get your story straight. To create a safe and gentle environment for yourself, and help create one for other folks, for living what truth you can stand.”

Without some way to do what journaling does, I will not know who I am, and will even forget that I don’t know.

“On the days when I’m not sure what the journey is or why I’m on it, I can still be sure what the journal is and why I write. I can hold onto my journal, write in it, lament and question and celebrate. . . . The format changes, the pens change, the contents vary, the cast of characters comes and goes. Yet this tangible object reminds me that my life is being lived on many levels, it reminds me that I need to act, watch, reflect, write, and then act more clearly. It urges me to remember to pay attention to spirit,” (Baldwin 11)

to the impulses and intuitions that may not be getting things exactly right but that nevertheless have a source in something important.

Sometimes I want to say that it feels like finally taking charge of my own life, finally defining for myself who I am, weeding out the impulse fragments that do not cohere. Or I want to say just the opposite: that it feels like letting go of the illusion of control. Life knows better plans than I can imagine. Much of what I write is to recognize where my clinging is. Recognizing makes possible releasing.

Whether it feels more like taking charge or more like letting go, over time, the repeated noticing of the conversation the mind is having with itself begins to change that conversation.

“One of the greatest powers of journal writing is that over time it helps us notice, influence, and change the conversation the mind is having with itself. This dialogue is nearly constant. All I'm suggesting is that some of it, especially that which is directed to specific questions, is extremely helpful to write down.” (Baldwin 27)

The journal writer’s mission is reclamation:

“to reclaim a sense of place, a sense of empowerment, a sense of healthy relationship between our lives and times.” (15)

I called the journal a companion, for there is a sense of conversation, of dialog, in journaling. It’s common for journalers to give their journal a name, and write entries addressed to the imaginary personage. Anne Frank called hers Kitty.

“Spiritual writing expands the interior conversation of consciousness to include your relationship with the sacred. You are no longer alone on the quest, or on paper. You are in conversation with Something you perceive as beyond, or deep within, yourself.” (23)

There is no map anyone can hand you for your spiritual journey. So you must make your map as you go. As Ponce de Leon, we are voyagers into a new world. As he explored this land we call Florida, having no idea of its coastline, let alone its interiors, he mapped as he went. So must we.

The map we make as we go is a rough sketch of where we have been with maybe some even rougher indications of what may lie ahead, gathered from unreliable scouting reports. Since it shows only the path we’ve traveled, not the surrounding area, not the destination, or possible routes to get there, it doesn’t do much of what we want a good map to do for us. Nevertheless, the map we make as we go is essential in trekking this unchartered wilderness called life. Only with careful attention to where we have been, laying out the experiences of the day so as to clarify their spatial relation to one another, will we be able to recognize, and thus avoid, going in circles. Our journal is our map of where we have been on our spiritual journey – a sketch of the terrain covered during each day, sometimes with some guesses about what may be ahead. Without it, I go in circles and do not even realize that I am.

It is a terrain of questions: questions to explore rather than to answer, to savor rather than resolve. As writer Ingrid Bengis says,

“The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon you consciousness whether you like or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you ‘come to terms with’ only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, and most often against your will.”

Questions propel the spiritual quest and mapping them fills the pages. You might sometimes take a journal entry just to list questions you have, big and little:

“What’s for dinner? Who am I? What am I supposed to be doing with my life now? Who am I supposed to be doing it with? Will I have fun? What is the nature of spiritual fun? Will I recognize it when it happens? Is there a God out there, or is God all in here? Is God laughing at all the silly questions I ask? Are these silly questions? Is there life on other planets? Do they care about life on this one? Do I care about life on this one? What would I be willing to give up to save the world? What are life’s real essentials for me?” (36)

“The comfort that comes from questioning is this: even if there isn’t an answer, there is response. There is a sense of the sacred reaching toward us, as we reach toward it. . . . The voice of the sacred appears gently on the page, written in our own handwriting but carrying a message of support and comfort, sometimes challenge, which we do not generate alone” (39)

– at least, the conscious part of us does not generate it alone.

Open the covers, lay the page before you. The soul whispers vieni spirito creatore: come creative spirit. Be with me on this quest to create meaning from the flotsam and jetsam of this, the shipwreck of my life.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, instructs:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I like that. I neither find the answer nor have the answer nor know the answer. Rather, I live into my answer -- if, that is, I first put in the time living the question.

Nuts and Bolts

If you are just getting started, your question is: "How do I journal?"

There are two rules.

Rule #1: date your entries as you go.
Rule #2: don’t make any other rules.

The spirit listeth where it will. Try to get out of its way and let it. Spirit, however, sometimes requires some coaxing to speak up. You must decide upon a discipline. You can change it as you feel the need – yet creative freedom thrives best within a clear framework.

Here are five journaling exercises.

First exercise: timed entries.

Set a timer for 5-7 minutes, and write until the timer goes off. Stop writing when the time is up, even in the middle of a sentence. Close the journal and put it away until the next day. This primes the creative pump, helps give you a sense having more to write than you have yet written.

“The frustration of stopping creates the impetus to write more. You become more interested in the ideas and thoughts you want to put down,” (25)

more eager to get back to the journal. “A week of timed writing will sharpen your writing focus” (25).

Second exercise: flow writing.

“Pick a tangible object from your surroundings and use it as the opening image in your entry. Let your mind free-associate from one thought to the next.” (24)

You can go until you have arrived at a place that feels finished, or you can combine these two exercises, and make this a timed entry. You’re writing the stream of consciousness, “learning to trust that no matter where you start, words will come to you” (25).

Flow writing rides the surface of the stream, rather than diving deep. It glances among tips of icebergs, “touching on thoughts that ride deeply. You can expand the ideas that interest you at a later time.”

Third exercise: Dialog writing.

First, write a question at the top of the page. Take a breath, pause, listen. Write down the first response that comes. Ask follow-up questions, so as to create a rhythm of question-answer, a sense of back-and-forth dialog. Trust yourself to play both roles, to write in multiple voices. If you feel stuck and don’t know where to go next, bring in a third voice – an “overvoice” observer “that comments on how the dialog is developing and helps you see where it needs to go” (26).

“For example, if every time you talk to your exspouse, the two of you reach an impasse, don’t faithfully recite your exact words when you dialog about this situation, but drop beneath the verbal exchange. Ask yourself and ask the other with whom you write: Why do we get stuck at this point? What do you think is going on? How do you suppose we could get beyond this point? What are you willing to do? Here's what I'm willing to do. The more specific the quetion, the more specific the response will be. Dialoguin is such an imporatnt journal-writing tool, it will show up in many variation. Whenever you get stuck in your monolog, open your mind to dialog. You will be amazed at the insight waiting for you to ask instead of tell” (29).

Fourth exercise: Unsent letters.

Most of the time in journaling it is important that your only audience is yourself. If you are thinking that someday your journals will be discovered and published, or read by your descendants, then you begin to self-censor, to tailor yourself to your audience, to push aside the impulses that won’t make sense to them. Journaling is for your eyes only. So even when you imaginatively address yourself to a particular other person, be clear with yourself that this is to be an unsent letter. For your first foray, it might help to address a letter that cannot be sent: address it to yourself as a child, or to a child you never had, or to a fictional character in a novel you love, or to someone you knew who has died.

“The purpose of the unsent letter is to discover what impetus motivated it – which you may not know at the beginning – and decide what you need to do next, having discovered that impetus” (31).

The unsent letter may bring closure to an unresolved area of life – or it may bring new opening to a closed area.

Fifth: gratitude journaling.

I really recommend doing this one once a week. Do something else the other six days, and once a week, simply list things for the last week that you are grateful for. Nurturing the attitude of gratitude moistens the soil from which everything else green and joyful can grow. Please see the New York Times article yesterday (2011 Nov 21) on the value and power of gratitude: click here.

Conclusion

We might think of journaling as the keeping of a ship’s log. Note where you are, or you will be lost at sea.

Come to the edge of the ship's deck.

Through the telescope of the page, gaze out in wonder.

Cast your questions into the deep.

The wide universe is the ocean we travel.
And the earth is our blue boat home. (Peter Mayer, "Blue Boat Home")

Amen.

Nurture your Spirit? Help Heal Our World? For real?

2011-11-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I signed up at a web site for brain exercises. It's called lumosity dot com. (Click here.) I log on in the morning and I play a series of brain puzzle games that are supposed to keep my neurons strong. Some of the games exercise memory, others mental flexibility, or problem solving, or speed, or, attention. I don't know if it's really going to improve or help in maintaining cognitive function. But it might. It's only about 15 minutes a day, and it's kinda fun, so it seems worth a shot. And I got LoraKim signed up, too, so we can compare our scores.

I also do some physical exercises -- stretches, sit-ups, go for walks, ride my bike. Brain exercises for cognitive fitness (maybe), and physical exercises for physical fitness (definitely).

Then there's emotional fitness -- also called “emotional intelligence”: the ability to detect and identify emotions in self and others, harness emotions to facilitate the task at hand, and understand the language of emotion, including ability to recognize slight differences between similar emotions. Some of us are really good at that -- others, not so much.

Closely related to “emotional intelligence” or fitness is social intelligence -- because really resonating with someone, clicking with them, is a matter of knowing your feelings, recognizing theirs, and being able to synchronize with the emotion.

There's physical fitness, cognitive fitness, emotional fitness, and social fitness. So: Is there such a thing as Spiritual Fitness – spiritual health, spiritual intelligence? I have two things to say about that.

A pyramid of Physical, Intelligence, Emotional-Social,
and Spiritual Quotients.

Number one, yes, there is a way to measure spirituality, and there are exercises to boost your spiritual fitness.

Number two, no, spirituality is not at all one more kind of fitness, and the very idea of spiritual fitness completely misses the point.

First, let’s look at number one: there is spiritual fitness; it can be measured; and training can improve it.

According to psychologist Robert Cloninger's work in this area, "spirituality" cashes out as self-transcendence -- an orientation toward the elevated, whether that is experienced as compassion, ethics, art, or whether it is experienced as a divine presence. By orienting toward the elevated, we transcend the ego defense mechanisms by which most of us spend our lives governed.

Self-transcendence is the sum of three subscales:

self-forgetfulness;
transpersonal identification; and
acceptance.

C. Robert Cloninger (b. 1944)

Self-forgetfulness is the proclivity for becoming so immersed in an activity that the boundary between self and other seems to fall away.

Transpersonal identification is recognizing myself in all things, and all things in myself. As the poet Kabir said, "Everyone knows the drop merges into the ocean, but do you know that the ocean merges into the drop?"

Acceptance is the ability to accept and affirm reality just as it is, even the hard parts, even the painful and tragic parts.

Cloninger has devised a questionnaire to measure self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. Add those three scores together to get the self-transcendence score. Voilá, we have measured "spiritual fitness."

(See Wikipedia's entries on Robert Cloninger, here,

and on Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory [TCI] here.

November 11: Armistice Day

2011-11-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!

It's a day we call Veterans Day. It began as Armistice Day -- commemorating the armistice that ended World War I on 1918 November 11. Armistice: A cessation of hostilities as a prelude to peace negotiations. On the first anniversary of the WWI armistice (1919 Nov 11), President Woodrow Wilson announced:

"To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations."

Notice the double purpose of Armistice Day: (1) to honor the veterans, and (2) to show our "sympathy with peace and justice."

World War I was thought -- hoped -- to be the "war that ends all wars." No such luck, it turned out. Still, the idea of ending war, of governing our world nonviolently, of spreading peace and justice across the globe should not be forgotten.

In 1954, the US government changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The motive to honor all veterans, not just the World War I vets, was nice. But in the process, the other function of Armistice Day was lopped off. Attention was diverted away from "armistice" -- the laying down of arms, the ending of hostilities, the commitment to peace.

The hopes that lifted the hearts of North Americans and Europeans 93 years ago at the end of WWI may have seemed, by the 1950s, sadly deluded -- perhaps even a cruel hoax. The US had been through the carnage of WWII, and then embroiled itself in a Korean War for three years. The notion of ending all war seemed hopeless and unrealistic. The attitude was: war is going to go on, and on, for as far into the future as imaginable -- so let's just commemorate the courageous ones who fight our wars for us.

The building of peace is much tougher than many Americans in 1918 knew -- the skills of peacemaking require much more development. But the task of peace and justice (for no peace will be lasting, or worthy, without justice) should not be abandoned. Unitarian Universalists committed to that task with a 2010 Statement of Conscience, "Creating Peace." On this November 11, please re-read and re-commit to that statement -- click here.

So today I am celebrating Armistice Day. I honor the fire of youth -- the energy, the camaraderie, the commitment to a cause, the way they can fling themselves so passionately into harm's way. I acknowledge that it has been a while since our country has actually deployed that fire to protect the freedom of US residents, but I honor the effort and training and bravery that our veterans have displayed nevertheless. I also take this day to recommit to armistice; to lay down all instruments of violence; to promise again to myself and my world to forego thoughts, words, and deeds that treat a being as an object or diminish any being's sense of value or security; to truly walk the path of nonviolence.

* * * *
It's November 11, it's 1918, it's Armistice Day, and I,
I would have no arms.
I would have no legs.
I would live in Europe, Asia, America, south and north, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and all the wide deep blacken blue oceans.
I would have no Western front.
I would name myself Peace Among the Nations.
Finally undisappointable,
Hanging over the beleaguered of nations like a happy gracious fog, I would
Penetrate everywhere.
I would weigh you down with uplifting serenity.
I would double you four times, Woodrow Wilson World War.
All ate of you, consumed by love, would have a thousand arms each reaching and embracing every dying soldier every wailing mother every broken-legged horse, enfolding them in doesn't-change-a-thing compassion.
I would have no arms.
* * * *

Shaken And Stirred, 007?

2011-11-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

We are 007 -- that is, Oh! Oh! Seven billion! According to the UN, the world population has reached 7 billion. That's a lot of people.

To put this in historical context: In 1350, estimated total world population, following a number of years of famines and the Bubonic plague, was down to 370 million. A mere 661 years later, it is 2011, and we have almost 20 times that number of people.

(Interesting aside: 661 years is about 30 generations. The folks living in 1350 were my 28th-great-grandparents. Since the number of my ancestors doubles with each generation, then I have slots for over 1 billion 28th-great-grandparents. Each of the the 370 million people on the earth in 1350 would appear in an average of three slots on my family tree -- and that's true of each of the 7 billion of us alive today.)

In 1804, world population reached 1 billion.

123 years later, 1927, we reached 2 billion.

The next billion took only 33 years to add: in 1960 we reached 3 billion.

And the fourth billion took us only 14 years: 1974: 4 billion.

We reached 5 billion in 1987, and 6 billion in 1999.

We've been adding an additional billion people every dozen years since 1987. The total numbers are going up, but the rate of growth is declining. From 5 billion to 6 billion is a 20 percent increase while 6 billion to 7 billion is a 16.7 percent increase -- yet both the 6th and the 7th billion took 12 years.

In fact, the growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.2 percent per year. Does 2.2 percent per year seem mild? During the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, attracted a lot of attention, yet 2.2 percent per year might not seem very explosive. If the economy is growing at only 2.2 percent per year, that's regarded as sub-par: average US economic growth was 3.8 percent per year for the first 27 post-war years (1946 - 1973), and has averaged 2.7 percent per year since then (1974 - 2010).

However, it takes only a constant growth rate of 0.45 percent per year to get from 370 million to 7 billion in 661 years.

Here's a breakdown of that 0.45 percent overall Average Growth Per Year (AGPY):

AGPY for the 454 years, 1350 - 1804: 0.22 percent

AGPY for 123 years, 1804 - 1927: 0.57 percent

AGPY for 33 years, 1927 -1960: 1.24 percent

AGPY for 14 years, 1960 - 1974: 2.08 percent

AGPY for 13 years, 1974 - 1987: 1.73 percent

AGPY for 12 years, 1987 - 1999: 1.53 percent

AGPY for 12 years, 1999 - 2011: 1.29 percent

So the population growth rate is slowly coming down from its peak -- but is still higher than the AGPY between 1927 and 1960 -- or any period before that. In fact, a growth rate of 1.29 percent per year would still produce a population doubling every 54 years. If the AGPY of the last 12 years were to continue, we'd reach 14 billion (twice the current population) by 2065, like so:

YEAR WORLD POPULATION

2022 8 billion

2031 9 billion

2039 10 billion

2047 11 billion

2054 12 billion

2060 13 billion

2065 14 billion

Fortunately, this is not likely. The growth rate has been declining since 1963 and is expected to continue to decline. The US Census Bureau projects that we'll reach 8 billion in 2027 (rather than 2022), and 9 billion in 2046 (rather than in 2031). Most of the studies predict the growth rate to reach zero around mid-century. World population would then flatten out around 9 or 10 billion, and may even begin to decline a bit.

Education -- particularly the empowerment of women is a crucial variable. The more we can accelerate empowerment of women, then the sooner we'll see a variety of positive developments, including faster declines in the population growth rate.

Can the earth support 9 or 10 billion of us? Can it even support, sustainably, the present 7 billion of us? If all 7 billion people consumed resources at the rate of the average US lifestyle, the answer is clearly no. It would take 5.3 earths to supply 7 billion people with what the average US resident gets.

So. One of the following must occur:

1 - Sharp population declines. We'd have to get down to less than 1.5 billion if the one earth that we have were to supply us all at a level of the average US citizen; or

2 - Substantial reductions in consumption for the wealthy. Those who consume at or above the US average will need to adopt lifestyles consuming less than a fifth of what we now consume; or

3 - Massive poverty for the majority. We might try continuing to let a few people consume vastly disproportionate shares of the resources by forcing 90 percent or so to live in poverty; or

4 - Some combination of #1, #2, and/or #3; or

5 - We'll run out of earth -- with attendant massive famines, resource wars, etc.

Your assignment, Agent 007 -- the assignment of the oh, oh, seven billion agents on the planet -- is to avoid #5. We also need to avoid #3 as much as possible. The risk of instability, unrest, and violence -- not to mention the moral wrong -- of #3 should be avoided. #1 ain't gonna happen -- unless #5 happens first, thereby causing #1. So that leaves #2 -- or some form of #4 that consists mostly of #2.

That's what we gotta do. It's enough to leave us shaken. But will we be stirred to accept this assignment?

Start by learning more:
Good introduction to the population issue: here
Ian Angus and Simon Butler argue that enviornmental crises come much more from the wealthiest 1 percent than from the rest of the 7 billion: here.
Article about Bill McKibben's take on climate change and population: here.

Scary!

2011-10-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Scary! Tomorrow is Halloween. Will you be choosing the trick? Or the treat?

Life is such a treat – yet sometimes we choose the trick. We choose to trick ourselves into allowing the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid instead of letting them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what is scary.

Ah, Halloween! Ghosts, goblins, spiders, haunted houses. It’s a strange holiday, isn’t it? Every culture has its celebrations, festivals, holidays, but modern Halloween in the United States is just bizarre – celebrating, as it does, a roughly equal mix of fear and chocolate.

Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy!
Dressing in costume and going door-to-door begging!
Pumpkins, candied apples!
The day of the dead! Samhain! The evening before all saints’ day, or all hallows’ day.

Through the accidents of history, a lot of very different things are all cobbled together and called “Halloween.” If there is a center, it’s: Being Scary. For the children, it may be a way for helping them cope with their fears. By dressing up as something that scares them, they move toward accepting their own fears. Dress up as a monster, get a bag of candy, and monsters aren’t so frightening anymore.

It works for children. Maybe it would work for us, too. What is that you’re afraid of? What bogeymen haunt your dreams? Maybe it would help grown-ups to dress up as the things that we are scared of. We worry about our health. We worry about our finances. Disease, and running out of money take the place of zombies and werewolves as the things that scare us. It might seem self-indulgent, or in bad taste, or insensitive, maybe, to dress up as a cancer cell, put on the costume of a osteoporotic bone. Or maybe we could dress up as a bank statement with a zero balance. If we had a costume party and dressed up as the things that scare us, it would not make the fears go away – but it might help the fear weigh a little more lightly. Or maybe we could go door to door dressed up as the thing that most scares us, and instead of candy, at each house, have a little wine. What we can bring right out in the open and laugh about we can live with more comfortably, don’t you think?

Go to the places that scare you. That was the advice of a Tibetan spiritual teacher. He said:

“Confess your hidden faults. Approach what you find repulsive. Help those you think you cannot help. Anything you are attached to, let it go. Go to the places that scare you.”

Go to the places that scare you – that’s kind of what children do at Halloween, dressing up in scary costumes. They’re plunging into the places that frighten. So maybe us adults should try it. Maybe the thing that scares us most is loss. How could there be a costume for that? Loss has touched each of us – and it was no fun – and we are afraid of losses to come. We have lost, and will lose again. Living means losing. Out of our very loss, we are able to turn to each other, reach out, take hands and enter into covenantal relation of community.

The Rev. John Corrado, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Michigan, writes:

In a culture that worships winners,
Some people say the church is a place for losers –
And they are right!
This is a place for losers!
This is a place for people who have
Lost their hair,
Lost their teeth,
Lost their memories,
Lost their savings,
Lost their jobs.
It is a place for people who have
Lost their parents,
Lost the love of their life,
And even lost their children.
It’s a place for people who have
Lost their way,
Lost their faith,
And, worst of all, lost all hope.
This is a place for losers – us!
Let’s see who we are
And how we are
And how much we need and can help one another.
We are the losers.
God bless us, every one!

"This is a place for losers!" So "Let’s see who we are And how we are. And how much we need and can help one another." From the very loss we fear emerges the community we need.

We’re also afraid of failure. Yet failure is a good thing. I don’t mean that failure is good because we learn from it, and pave the way for success. I suppose that failure does pave the way for success, but it’s equally true that success paves the way for failure. A character in Tom Robbins’ novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, put it this way:

“…if you have any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. Embrace failure! Seek it out! Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

Paving the way for success is not the point of failure, any more than paving the way for failure is the point of success. The point of failure is to set you free. Its message, if we will but hear it, is that what you are is enough. You don’t need more. As the losses come: hair, memory, health – at each step, what we are left with is somehow also enough. Yet fear constricts our lives, shuts out the beauty that is all around us right now by filling our consciousness with a future in which we’ve lost something we cling to, or have gained something we really didn’t want.

More precisely, it isn't fear that constricts our lives, it is we ourselves who do that in an attempt to make the fear go away. "If I stay within my protected cocoon, then I won't experience fear," we think. The genius of Halloween is its encouragement to go toward our fear rather than pull back from it -- for the pulling back is what constricts our lives. When we simply experience fear just as it is -- without wanting it to go away, without fighting it, without the judgments and opinions and reactions that we throw up to protect ourselves from it -- then fear isn't nearly so frightening.

Let’s look again to the children. The lessons we try to impart to them, are the lessons we still need. You remember Robert Fulghum’s 1988 book: All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten? It’s so true. Be kind. Say please and thank you. Remember to flush. The seed in the paper cup – the shoot goes up and the roots go down. Hold hands when you cross the street. Stick together. Take naps. Play some and work some everyday. Share your toys. As grown-ups, we so often forget the very lessons that we teach our children.

So let me share with you a children’s story about fear.
Let’s remember together the lessons simple enough for children.
Scaredy Squirrel, by Melanie Watt.

Scaredy Squirrel never leaves his nut tree.
He’d rather stay in his safe and familiar tree than risk venturing out into the unknown.
The unknown can be a scary place for a squirrel.
A few things Scaredy Squirrel is afraid of: Tarantulas. Poison Ivy. Green martians. Killer bees. Germs. Sharks.
So he’s perfectly happy to stay right where he is.
Advantages of never leaving the nut tree: Great view. Plenty of nuts. Safe place. No tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, killer bees, germs, or sharks.

Disadvantages of never leaving the nut tree: Same old view. Same old nuts. Same old place.
In Scaredy Squirrel's nut tree, every day is the same. Everything is predictable. All is under control.
Scaredy Squirrel’s daily routine:
6:45am: Wake up.
7:00am: Eat a nut.
7:15am: Look at view.
Noon: Eat a nut.
12:30pm: Look at view.
5:00pm: Eat a nut.
5:31pm: Look at view.
8:00pm: Go to sleep.
But let’s just say, for example, that something unexpected did happen. You can rest assured that this squirrel is prepared.
A few items in Scaredy Squirrel’s emergency kit: Parachute. Bug spray. Mask and rubber gloves. Hard hat. Antibacterial soap. Calamine lotion. Net. Band aid. Sardines.

What to do in case of an emergency, according to Scaredy Squirrel:
Step 1: Panic.
Step 2: Run.
Step 3: Get kit.
Step 4: Put on kit.
Step 5: Consult exit plan.
Step 6: Exit tree (if there is absolutely, definitely, truly no other option).
Exit plan: Top Secret
Exit 1: Parachute. Note to self: Watch out for green martians and killer bees in the sky.
Exit 2: Note to self: Do not land in river. If unavoidable, use sardines to distract sharks.
Exit 3: Note to self: Look out for poison ivy and for tarantulas roaming the ground.
Exit 4: Note to self: Keep in mind that germs are everywhere.
Remember: If all else fails, playing dead is always a good option.

With his emergency kit in hand, Scaredy Squirrel watches. Day after day, he watches, until one day… Thursday. 9:37am. A killer bee appears.
Scaredy Squirrel jumps in panic, knocking the emergency kit out of the tree. This was NOT part of the plan. Scaredy Squirrel jumps to catch his kit. He quickly regrets this idea. The parachute is in the kit. But something incredible happens. He starts to glide. Scaredy Squirrel is a flying squirrel. Scaredy Squirrel forgets all about the killer bee, not to mention the tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, germs, and sharks. He feels overjoyed, adventurous, carefree, alive. Until he lands in a bush, and plays dead. 30 minutes, 1 hour, two hours.
Finally, Scaredy Squirrel realizes that nothing horrible is happening in the unknown today.
So he returns to his nut tree.
All this excitement has inspired Scaredy Squirrel to make drastic changes to his life.
Scaredy Squirrel new and improved daily routine.
6:45am Wake up.
7:00am Eat a nut.
7:15am Look at view.
9:37am Jump into the unknown.
9:45am: Play dead.
11:45am: Return home.
Noon: Eat a nut.
12:30pm: Look at view.
5:00pm: Eat a nut.
5:31pm: Look at view.
8:00pm: Go to sleep.
P.S. As for the emergency kit, Scaredy Squirrel is in no hurry to pick it up just yet. (It fell into a patch of poison ivy.)

That's a helpful story for kids -- and for grown-ups. All we really need to know, we learned as kids -- or we could have learned, had we had stories like Scaredy Squirrel.

"Scaredy Squirrel never leaves his nut tree. He’d rather stay in his safe and familiar tree than risk venturing out into the unknown." The unknown is filled with scary things. Maybe the fears of your life lately have not included tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, killer bees, germs, or sharks. Whatever it is, the fear, or your attempt to avoid fear, keeps you from life.

What do children learn from the Scaredy Squirrel story?

One. Plans are silly. The glory of life is most present when we stop pretending to be in control, stop trying to control everything, jump into the unknown. That’s what faith is about. Faith is not about believing without evidence. Faith is the act of opening our hearts to the unknown. Faith is about taking that leap. So faith is the antidote of fear.

Two: Fearlessness is our unfinished project. Scaredy squirrel has learned to jump into the unknown. At exactly 9:37am. And then he plays dead for two hours. He has let some of his fear fall away, but he is not yet living in each moment, present to what is there without trying to control it, creatively open to engaging in joy with what’s there, whether it be killer bees, poison ivy, or green martians. Scaredy squirrel has more work to do. I know. Because I'm Scaredy Squirrel. And I know I have more work to do. I can tell myself: live life as an experiment. Inquisitive. Open. Curious about everything. Flexible. But telling myself that reminder quickly fades. It takes doing the work to build the habit of openness into our lives.

What’s scary is THE UNKNOWN. Learning more about whatever you are afraid of can help, but that’s not real liberation. Real liberation is in our attitude to the unknown. Liberation comes from having a heart of faith -- that is, a heart that is ready to open to the unknown.

The Zen monastic, Fayan, lived from 885 to 958. He studied under Dizang. After a number of years with Dizang, one day Fayan went to tell Dizang that he was leaving.

“Where are you going?” asked Dizang.

“Around on pilgrimage,” said Fayan.

“What is the purpose of pilgrimage,” said Dizang.

“I don’t know,” said Fayan.

“Not knowing is most intimate.”

Intimacy. Leaping into the unknown might help you learn some things about that world out there that had previously been unknown. You don’t know: go out and learn. Sure, that’s valuable. That’s great. It is not, however, the intimacy that Dizang was talking about. It’s not about, "go get one more bit of knowledge and add it to the stockpile so as to diminish the realm of unknown." It’s about bringing an openness to every moment.

Every moment is filled with the unknown – even when all we do is cower in our nut tree. In fact, knowing about something can get in the way of learning about it. Oh, that’s a pine tree. I know about pine trees. Evergreen. Pine needles. Flaky bark. And then you’re not open to what that particular experience of a pine tree might offer. There’s a saying, attributed to Lao Tzu, the founder of Daoism.

"For knowledge, add. For wisdom, subtract."

To grow truly wise is an ongoing project of paring away your conceptions, peeling back what you’ve learned before, so as to more closely – more intimately – approach what’s right here now. Not knowing is most intimate. In the space of not knowing is the liberation.

Loss and sadness come – and we can take them in as one more experience of life.

Pema Chodron tells the story of being a child herself. Six years old, walking in her neighborhood one day feeling lonely and unloved. A neighbor woman saw her and laughed and said, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.”

So Pema writes years later:

“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”

And I think each of us have known people who made each of those choices. I think you know people who experienced a deep loss or failure, and it hardened them. They became the disillusioned cynic. Nothing in life was ever again beautiful or good enough for them.

If you are lucky, you have also known people who were able to go the other way – like my friend I'll call "Clare" [Mentioned in previous post, "The Upsides and Downsides of Spirituality."] Clare had one daughter, Zoe, a love of her life and shining light of her heart. Zoe grew up, went away to college. Clare and Zoe remained close, spoke often by phone. Zoe was 20, still in college, living in an apartment, when an intruder broke in and murdered her. Clare felt that loss as deeply as a human heart can feel. She lost her child! She wept, wailed, and cried curses to the heavens. She also knew how to do her work. She knew how to go to the places that scare. She understood grieving, and was able to be with her feelings instead of wanting to push them away. There was no denying that rebuilding a life of meaning and hope for Clare was hard and slow work that, at some level will never end, yet Clare had a deliberate plan for doing that work – various spiritual practices. I first met Clare two years after the tragedy. I know her as a woman of remarkable joy, a ready laugh, and a lovely friend.

“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”

What do you choose?
Trick or treat?

Upsides and Downsides of Spirituality

2011-10-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

In Roland Merullo’s recent novel, Breakfast with Buddha, the first-person protaganist is Otto Ringling, age 44, upper-middle-class, intelligent, and devoted to his family, a wife and two teenagers. The Ringlings live in a suburb of New York.

Otto is an editor for a publisher of food books – and, not coincidentally, is himself a foodie. Otto is competent at his job, common-sensical, no-nonsense, straightforward, and upbeat. Otto has one sibling, a sister, Cecelia, four years younger, who lives in New Jersey. While Otto makes a comfortable living, Cecelia barely scrapes by in her line of work. Her line of work is indicated by the lavender and cream sign in front of her house: “Cecelia Ringling, Tarot and palm readings, Past-life regressions, Spiritual journeyings” (23).

“’Journeyings,’” mutters Otto. “What kind of word is that?” Otto describes his sister as: “a nice enough woman who is as flaky as a good spanakopita crust” (6). Otto has little interest in “the types of things my sister was always talking about: synchronicity, psychic wavelengths, auras, healing energies, all the frizz-frazz of people who couldn’t deal with solid reality” (54). Cecelia has a penchant for “floppy, too colorful dresses” and “sandals that were supposed to massage your acupuncture points and keep you free of illness” (318).

You recognize these types, don’t you? These characters are archetypes of the contemporary scene. People with the same backgrounds, siblings in fact, can end up so different in their basic sense of the way life works. Perhaps Cecelia represents what you think of as spirituality: séances and reiki and healing touch, and that sort of thing. Cecelia is certainly interested in spirituality. While it is true that many people with a highly developed spirituality have no interest in those things that Otto calls “the frizz-frazz of people who couldn’t deal with solid reality,” it’s also true that Cecelia represents one form that spirituality does sometimes take.

We Unitarian Universalists have our Otto types: we think of ourselves as oriented toward dealing with solid reality and not escaping into magical thinking and woo-woo, new agey stuff. We also have our Cecelia types here. What seems to Otto to be dealing with solid reality seems to our Cecelia-types to be limiting oneself to a very narrow, restricted portion of reality. The congregational president of one UU church I was part of was, owned a couple of dogs she loved very much, and, concerned to relate to their inner life, she was, I learned, regularly on the phone with a pet psychic.

And we have a lot of folks who are kinda in-between, I guess you could say. These are the folks who would never pay good money for an astrological forecast, but in their medicine chest is a bottle of herbal pills that claim certain benefits that, the asterisk explains, “have not been verified by the FDA.”

I just love being a Unitarian Universalist. We’ve got a very full spectrum here – and the chance to be a part of a community of such diversity is an enormous joy, blessing, and grace.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will let you know, that while I honor and support every Unitarian Universalist on her or his path – I love you all -- I am myself, personally, mostly toward the skeptical-rationalist-materialist end of the spectrum when it comes to psychic powers or astral projection or crystals or pyramids or channeling or reincarnation. Still, many, many years ago I did own a pair of Earth shoes. And a couple or so years ago, when I was preparing for my trip to Japan, 13 hours ahead of Florida-time, I was down at the health-food store looking at those bottles with claims not verified by the FDA and asking which ones might help re-set my circadian rhythms so as to minimize the effects of jet lag. Some of you will be disappointed in me for that and others of you are like “yeah, of course, that’s what you do.”

I’m also a meditator, though I think of meditation as a way to strengthen certain neural pathways. I believe that our neurons can be trained in the habit of nonanxious presence – that is, attention and engagement along with equanimity and inner peace – and that compassion and wisdom flow more freely when this habit is developed. Meditation as an exercise to strengthen, stretch, or relax certain parts of the brain is no more mystical than push-ups and yoga as an exercise to strengthen, stretch, or relax certain muscles.

There is work being done that aims to be scientific, yet crack what some call “the materialistic bias” that many scientists have. Robert Cloninger, MD, is professor of psychiatry and professor of psychology and genetics at Washington University School of Medicine. His 2004 book, Feeling Good is subtitled The Science of Well-Being. The book is full of analysis of empirical findings, statistical tests establishing validity and reliability of surveys measuring temperament and character, and reports of brain scans that show what areas of the brain are active during what experiences and activities. Lots of charts and graphs and tables. Yet Cloninger identifies himself as a transcendentalist, in opposition to what he calls materialism. Cloninger writes:

According to transcendentalists, a mind fully aware of itself is unbounded spirit, nonlocal, and aware of participation in the universal unity of being. . . . Appropriate psychological conditions for nonlocal consciousness have been described as loving union with goodness (Plato) or loving union in nature (Thoreau, Krishnamurti). Materialists regard all claims of nonlocal consciousness as illusory. Transcendentalists, on the other hand, say the individual mind is like a node in a universal Internet of consciousness and that these individual nodes vary in the speed and depth of their access to the whole web. . . . Materialists assume a human being is only matter.

Materialism cannot be right, argues Cloninger, because “if consciousness is an attribute or product of matter, it is necessarily finite, determined by antecedent causes, and local.”

Do you feel – ever – that you participate in the universal unity of being? Having such an awareness, it seems to me, does not require nonscientific beliefs. Modern physics describes for us a world in which there are no truly separate discrete objects, just clouds of probability, constantly shifting wave packets, and gravitational and electro-magnetic fields. Matter itself is congealed energy, and the universe is one big flowing, swirling energy field – a.k.a., a universal unity of being. This is one point where Otto Ringling, if he remembers his college physics, and his sister Cecelia would be in agreement, I think. It turns out that the “solid reality” that Otto so prides himself on dealing with isn’t really so solid.

For myself, I don’t see why we can’t cultivate self-awareness in the transcendentalist way that Cloninger describes it, and also say a human being is only matter. I remember the verse of William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

The whole universe is in each grain of sand. In my previous forays into describing a physiological basis for spiritual experience, I have been accused of reducing people to mere matter, nothing but meat. I don’t think of it so much as reducing people to matter, but as heightening my awareness of matter so that it fills me with awe, and beauty. This meat – and yours and yours – makes my heart sing.

Cloninger says that “if consciousness is an attribute or product of matter, it is necessarily finite, determined by antecedent causes, and local.” But this inference holds only if we view matter itself as “finite, determined by antecedent causes, and local.” Matter-energy is, in effect, boundless. Fields of gravitation and the weak force and the strong force reach across light years. Matter is nonlocal. And given what physicists know about quantum indeterminacy, matter-energy is not fully determined by antecedent causes either.

So I may be disappointing those of you toward the Cecelia end of the spectrum, but I have no problem with the idea that consciousness is an attribute or product of matter. I’m both a materialist and a transcendentalist. I’m a materialist in that I think of consciousness – including the experiences we might call “spiritual” – as an attribute or product of matter, and I don’t think there’s any problem of “materialist bias” in the sciences. I’m a transcendentalist in that I feel matter itself as transcendently significant – as evocative of deep awe and wonder. For me, matter itself is a constantly unfolding wonder.

The question isn’t, “Is there more than matter?” Rather, the question is: “What more is there to matter – what riches of mystery -- are available to open myself to in this present moment?”

I have heard people speak of deep experiences of what they feel sure is a depth or a force much greater than matter. I think I’ve had those feelings, too. The difference is only that they like to talk about connectedness and oneness beyond matter, and I prefer to talk about connectedness and oneness of matter. If you can’t imagine that mere matter could manifest the wondrousness of your experience, maybe this reflects the limitations of your imagination.

In the end, perhaps the materialism versus transcendentalism contrast is just semantics – not a real contrast at all. Perhaps these labels, materialist and transcendentalist, are not be very helpful. Cloninger’s work in developing a survey – the Temperament and Character Inventory, TCI – may be more interesting. One of the seven scales the TCI measures is what Cloninger calls “self-transcendence” – or what he also calls spirituality. Of course, like any survey, there is inevitably some slippage around words – your interpretation of what the question is trying to get at may differ from how the baseline population would interpret it – and when it comes to a concept like spirituality, issues of question-interpretation would seem especially big. Yet I’m impressed with levels of validity and reliability that Cloninger is able to report. According to Cloninger’s research, spirituality, i.e. self-transcendence, is the sum of three subscales: self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and spiritual acceptance.

First, self-forgetfulness. This has to do with experiences of “flow” – with being immersed in an activity, being “in the zone”, and you’re

performing at peak efficiency while having no sense of boundary between yourself and others. Most people have had this type of experience at least a few times in their lives. Spiritual people tend to have them more frequently . . . People often experience flashes of insight or understanding when they are in this frame of mind. Creativity is maximized, originality is fostered. Even the most ordinary things seem fresh and new. (Cloninger)

Second, transpersonal identification.

The hallmark of this trait is a feeling of connectedness to the universe and everything in it – animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, anything and everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed. People who score high for transpersonal identification . . . sometimes feel that everything is part of one living organism.... Love of nature is a recurring theme in spirituality, from the beginnings of civilization up to the present. (Cloninger)

Third, spiritual acceptance. This measure has to do with the sense that underneath, or behind, or in the midst of all the pain, and the tragedy, the suffering and the anguish, there is a fundamental joy of being.

As a professor at predominantly African-American Fisk University, and later, as a divinity student for a couple terms at a predominantly African-American divinity school, I’ve had repeated exposure to Black Church worship and culture. One of the things I often heard, like a mantra of affirmation and hope, was: “God is good all the time; all the time god is good.” These were people that were not oblivious to, nor in denial about the very real pain, suffering, injustice and oppression in life. They or their families had often directly seen and felt the worst effects of prejudice and bigotry. They were not retreating into escapism from that reality, nor were they complacent about the need for the very hard ongoing work for social justice. When they greeted each other, and me, with a bounce in their step, a broad smile on their face, and an outstretched hand if not two outstretched arms, and the buoyant words, “God is good all the time; all the time, God is good,” they were expressing a deep sense of the joy of possibility and hope back behind or underneath the tragedy they were keenly aware of. It’s true that, if you had the chance, as I did on a few occasions, for a longer conversation, and you pressed them on questions of theodicy – why do bad things happen to good people if God is so good – in my experience, it was always pretty easy to pick holes in the logic. But it isn’t about logic, or lining up all your concepts so that they cohere. In the end, I felt, it wasn’t even about whether there was anything in this wide reality that can appropriately be called “God.” It was about context. It was about the felt sense, more than words can say, that the tragedy and unfairness and pain exists always within a wider context, a context deeply affirmable. Indeed, only within a context that ultimately felt holy, sacred, could tragedy be fully seen as tragedy instead of random pain. From this kind of acceptance comes equanimity but not complacency. And without the calm, abiding equanimity to leaven the energy of anger that so often arises when working for social justice, activists burn out.

So that’s spirituality. Spirituality is self-transcendence, and self-transcendence consists of self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and a fundamental, underlying acceptance. One advantage of this account of spirituality is that it avoids the materialism question. You can be spiritual whether or not you’re also materialist.

Dr. Cloninger finds that individuals with low scores on self-transcendence “inevitably confront problems and obstacles for which they are not prepared, which leads to a downward spiral.” On the other hand, high self-transcendence is a vital contributor to the type of character that is “unlikely to develop psychiatric disturbance, even after a severe disaster.” Coherent attitudes, like hope and kindness, come more naturally, and these traits correlate strongly with a resilient psyche that can weather personal catastrophe. People like Otto are often reasonably kind and hopeful, though it comes more naturally and easily to people like Cecelia, for all her flakiness.

Almost a decade ago, when LoraKim and I were living in North Carolina, we knew there a woman, about our age, a few years older. Call her ““Clare.” She was every bit as flaky as Otto thinks that his sister Cecelia is. She regularly consulted her spirit guides, and she’d consult yours too, if you asked her to. Clare had one daughter, a love of her life, the shining light of her heart. The daughter grew up, went away to college. Clare and her daughter remained close, spoke often by phone. The daughter was 20, still in college, living in an apartment, when an intruder broke in and murdered her. Clare felt that loss as deeply as a human heart can feel. She wept, wailed, and cried curses to the heavens. Because she was also self-aware, she knew what she was doing. She never imagined her world as narrow and rational, and when the emotions came, they were not surprises. She grieved deeply, and she knew that she was. Self-awareness made the difference between having her grief, and the grief having her. There was no denying that rebuilding a life of meaning and hope for Clare was hard and slow work that, at some level would never end, yet Clare knew how to do that work. I first met Clare two years after the tragedy. I knew her as a woman of remarkable joy, a ready laugh, and a lovely friend.

Thus, in Merullo’s novel, when Otto and Cecelia’s parents are suddenly killed by a drunk driver, the loss throws Otto’s world for a much bigger loop than it does Cecelia.

Studies on identical twins indicate a person’s spirituality level, high or low, is about fifty-percent inherited and fifty percent from experience and training that cultivates spirituality. We can’t do anything about the genetic half, but if we wanted to, we could work on the other half.

If we wanted to.

There is an upside to spirituality: it provides resilience in the face of life’s vicissitudes. And there’s also a downside. One might wish to be careful about just what one undertakes to do with one’s brain. Brains that are wired and primed for self-forgetfulness and transpersonal identification are more inclined to see significance in the events of life, even if those events are actually random. It’s good to be adept at finding meaning in the events of your life. A life that is open to meaning-making possibilities at each moment is a life that is creatively engaged with everything that happens. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe the fact that the pattern on your grilled cheese sandwich kinda looks like the face of Jesus is just a coincidence. It could be that the fact that your heart line on your palm ends just under your index finger, and you’re a Leo with Jupiter rising in Scorpio means neither that you will have problems in your fourth chakra, nor that you’re going to have good luck finding a parking place downtown. The downside of spirituality is that meaning-making and sensing connections in the world can sometimes get a bit goofy.

On the other hand, palm reading and tarot cards and astrology might be approached as kind of practice exercises – like a creative writing exercise or a piano drill or a sketch exercise: just a fun way to sharpen up skills at making connections and meaning, a way to strengthen up your creative meaning-making muscles for a time when you'll seriously need them.

Dean Hamer writes,

The fact that spirituality has a genetic component implies that it evolved for a purpose. No matter how selfish a gene is, it still needs a human being as a carrier to perpetuate itself. There is now reasonable evidence that spirituality is in fact beneficial to our physical as well as mental health. Faith may not only make people feel better, it may actually make them better people.

OK. But the research shows that genetic proclivity to spirituality is widely variable. If it’s really so good, then don’t we all need it? I think it turns out variable, because human societies need people like Otto, who are good at what he calls “dealing with solid reality,” even if that reality is rather narrow and constricted and they don’t have the broader meaning-making resources to cope very well when tragedy turns their world upside-down and turns their solid reality liquid. We also need people like Cecelia with a proclivity to be creative, to construct wider meanings from events – even if that proclivity also predisposes them to interpret bumps in the night as a special communication from the netherworld, see auras, and practice nontraditional medicine.

In Merullo’s novel, Otto is set to drive out to North Dakota to settle his parent’s estate. Cecelia talks him into giving a lift to her new friend: Volya Rinpoche, a Mongolian spiritual master. So the bulk of the novel is a road trip story. Along the way, Otto shows the Rinpoche American restaurants and bowling and miniature golf, and the Rinpoche slowly and gently helps Otto become a little more self-aware. By the end, Otto is a bit more awake to meaning-making possibilities – though he will never be the sort of character who would go in for past life regressions.

Can we get the up-side of spirituality without falling prey to some version of the down-side? Can we become more self-aware without having to believe in astrology, angels, or astral projection? Of course we can.

A mind fully aware of itself is unbounded spirit, nonlocal, and aware of participation in the universal unity of being (Cloninger).

Such a mind has a heightened capacity for meaning-making, and is, statistically, more likely to be attracted to making meaning out of, say, an arrangement of Tarot cards – but that is a resistible attraction. It’s possible to train ourselves in both scientific rationality and creative connection-making and participation in universal unity. Indeed, the best scientists – as well as many of the best artists and spiritual leaders – are good at both.

The trick, always, is to pay attention to when the meaning-making may be running away with us – while also listening to what interesting or helpful metaphors it may be offering.

This Man's Thealogy

2011-10-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

What is holy for me? What evokes in my heart the feeling of being in the presence of the sacred?

These words “holy,” “sacred”: I don’t know what they mean. I only know that people speaking of these things are feeling something that humans can feel. Their faces show a calmness and an awe. The speak in hushed tones, and allow long pauses.

I have been there. And sometimes – not always – it feels like a person. Do you feel that, too?

Maybe you talk to trees. “Hello Mr. Pine, Ms. Oak, and how are you? You’re looking…tall today.”

It does the heart good.

A couple months ago I was sitting at a retreat and a black cloud of fear enveloped me. It had no object – no particular thing I was afraid of – just generalized fear. After a moment of panic, I took a breath and greeted it, as I would a person. “Hello, fear. So you have come to visit me. Welcome to my heart. Can I show you around?” Fear was silent. “I guess you already know your way around the interiors of my heart,” I said internally. “Let me just sit here, then, and keep you company.” As I did that, there slowly emerged a sense of surrender: liberating surrender.

Gladness – and fear – together. I have had that feeling before...

It was on my wedding day to LoraKim.

I was scared then, too – and passed through to surrender and freedom. On that occasion, over 11 and a half years ago, I wrote:

The owl has special wing feathers that quiet its flight,
So the prey never detects the predator.
One noiseless flap, two, and the small mammal is caught.
As out of the soul’s dark night, love is suddenly there, upon us:
Talons and beak.
We succumb,
And turn our bodies over to the nourishment of a grander thing.

So eleven years later, there I was: fear, and yet out of it a kind of freeing peace. On this occasion, too, when I got up from the cushion and had a chance to get to my journal, it was metaphors of predation that presented themselves as expressions of my heart. What came out of me this time was this allegory of evolution
spirituality.

Prayer to the Rabbit God.

the night is dark and this I know:
the rabbit god herself made the foxes.

she put bunnies all over
gave them a green planet to eat
made them love to hump
like rabbits
and love their babies.

bunnies make bunnies faster than plants grow, she noticed.
so the rabbit god made foxes.

predation is kinder than starvation, she said.
and foxes will give my lovelies sharp ears
beautiful speed
a touch of cleverness.
let them be grateful for the red fur death
and the fear that makes them bright alert.

thus the rabbit god became the fox god too.
bodies are made of nutrients,
there being no other way to make them,
how could there not be carnivores?

dear god of hunter and of hunted
I, too, a body of walking food, pray
to be eaten rather than starve
to love
the beauty of this fear.

So it is that sometimes – not always – it feels like a person. The world that brought forth trees and rabbits and foxes and you and me seems to want to present itself to me as person-like – a rabbit god, this time. When the world is ready to tell, or when I am ready to hear, the holy, the sacred, then the world (sometimes) dons the robes of personhood. In that presence, fear – anything that I might fear – transforms, and I am not afraid. By, "I am not afraid," I mean, of course, that I am afraid, but that underneath, or behind, or within, the fear I find a fearlessness. To give over my flesh to service – to a grander thing – to, as it were, die into life, to perish into this world, is scary. And at the center of that fear is fearless peace.

Strange talk, is this not?

These words, “holy,” “sacred”: I have to say, I don’t know what they mean – only what they feel like. When I feel the holy, sometimes it feels like the presence of a person. It seemed that way to our forebears from time immemorial. It’s what our brains do.

What, you may be wondering, has this to do with thealogy-with-an-A as opposed to theology-with-an-O? What has this to do with the feminine divine? With Goddess worship? I’m getting there. And at the same time, what I’ve been saying is already there.

When our spiritual imaginations find it satisfying to relate to the wonder of reality as if it were person-like, we may conceive of the divine aspect either as male or as female. Gender is so integral to our experience of persons that imagining something as person-like so readily includes imagining it either as female or as male.

Experiences of transcending wonder can transform our lives, reorient us to a more full, fun, whole and healed way of living, so naturally our ancestors who had such experiences wanted to share them – to join with others in spreading, maintaining, and deepening the sense of connection and the fearless peace now recognized as our true self of giving buried in the middle of all our protections and defenses. So we made stories – stories to evoke awe, to show us “the beauty of this fear.” For a long time in human history polytheism was the norm – in other words, any given society would have many such stories for the many different aspects of reality any of which might evoke awe, mystery, and wonder. Polytheist cultures had both female and male gods – to use the Greek, both Theos and Thea. As monotheism came to predominate, and there was only one person-like representation of the holy, that one was Theos. Thea was shut out.

Limiting our spiritual imagination to a male god privileges the styles of thinking slightly more common among men. We know that lots of women are linear thinkers, abstract, lead with their head, incline to dominate, and orient toward control – but the frequency of those characteristics has been slightly higher among men. We know that lots of men are highly relational and nurturant, lead with their heart, are in touch with their feelings, and have a deep emotive connection with the natural environment around them – but the frequency of those characteristics has been slightly higher among women. And the effect of having god stories about only one gender was to push the genders further apart. Privileging men made the men try to be manlier – whatever that might be.

So the style of doing theology – study of Theos – has been abstract, impersonal. Theology books read as if their authors have never been lonely or hurt, never surprised by joy, never fallen in love, or out of it. In the attempt to present universal reasoning, they leave out the unique experiences that made them care about Theos in the first place.

So here we are. We have inherited certain central texts: the Torah, the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, the Quran. And we have inherited not only the texts but longstanding habits of interpreting them – cultural understandings of what they mean. Women, as represented by Eve, are the source of sin. Women, as indicated by their scant representation in the Hebrew Scriptures, are appropriately invisible, passive, insignificant, subservient. Then the Apostle Paul, in his First Corinthians letter, wrote:

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home.
For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (14:33-36)

In the centuries after Paul, with Christianity spread across Europe, the male-dominated Christian church, in fear of losing its power, tortured and executed millions of women identified as pagan witches, many of them healers, herbalists, keepers of ancient customs and lores. The only approved medical practices were taught in medical schools that did not admit women.

Theology – study of God-as-male, Theos – aims to systematically develop the implications of scriptural interpretation. Theologians have too often exacerbated rather than mitigated the patriarchal biases of Western religion. Two of the most renowned theologians of the 20th century were Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Karl Barth once wrote:

Properly speaking, the business of woman, her task and function, is to actualize the fellowship in which man can only precede her, stimulating, leading, and inspiring . . .
To wish to replace him in this, or to do it with him, would be to wish not to be a woman.

And Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote:

A rationalistic feminism is undoubtedly inclined to transgress inexorable bounds set by nature.

Theos without Thea made our religion patriarchal – which reflected and reinforced patriarchy throughout society.

Mary Daly, circa 1970

Mary Daly’s 1973 book, Beyond God the Father, was a groundbreaking rebuke of patriarchy – and a profound eye-opener for many women -- and men, too.

In claiming or reclaiming stories of the feminine divine, writers such as Marija Gimbutas, Charlene Spretnak, Riane Eisler and others have given us variations on the Prehistoric Matriarchy thesis. This thesis is that, before there were written records, society was centered around women, with their mysterious life-giving powers. Goddesses were the primary objects of worship, and women were honored as incarnations and priestesses of the Great Goddess. In these halcyon days, people were nonviolent, never had war, and, in particular, peace reigned between the sexes. Then, about 5,000 years ago, warring, dominance-based tribes arose and began conquering the peaceful matriarchal people. Patriarchy arose and ruined everything ever since.

The Prehistoric Matriarchy thesis was such a powerfully attractive idea. I wanted to believe it – and I did for a while. If that kind of society could have existed once, then we could hope it might again. If Patriarchy can be seen as a 5,000-year aberration from the natural order of things, then prospects for a return to that order look much better.

Most anthropologists, though, saw the matriarchy thesis as long on wishful thinking and short on unambiguous evidence. Cynthia Eller particularly took the matriarchy thesis to task. Her book, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will not Give Women a Future, argued:

The evidence available to us regarding gender relations in prehistory is sketchy and ambiguous, and always subject to the interpretation of biased individuals. But even with these limitations what evidence we do have from prehistory cannot support the weight laid upon it by the matriarchal thesis. Theoretically, prehistory could have been matriarchal, but it probably wasn’t, and nothing offered up in support of the matriarchal thesis is particularly persuasive. (Eller 6)

I believe that, ultimately, this does not matter. I believe that what the goddess can teach us – what it does to us when we address the deep awe of reality as if it were a person, and that person is conceived as a woman – does not depend on what sorts of societies and forms of worship humans had or did not have 5,000 years ago. As we face our world today – highly urbanized, highly technological – we (humans as a whole) are slowly becoming less violent. Yet this progress is painfully slow, and our world remains dominated by dominance: by hierarchy, control, war, and greed.

On some accounts, traditional Theocentric western religion is the root cause this problem. On other accounts, traditional Theocentric religion has merely been co-opted by the tendencies toward greed and violent domination, so that Theocentric religion is now powerless to offer a counter-cultural peaceful, egalitarian vision. Either way, we needed an alternative.

In the last 40 years, women’s spirituality groups, and the writers informed by those groups, have explored the idea of the feminine divine as an alternative to the hierarchy, control, dominance, war, and greed that traditional Theocentric western religion has caused or been co-opted by. They have developed practices of Goddess worship that explicitly celebrate and revere equality, peace, care and nurturing of one another – men as well as women – empowerment through power-with rather than power-over, and relationships of nurturing care with our earth itself.

Many women – and men -- have found a powerful healing and wholeness in Goddess spirituality. As one of woman put it:

There's a worthiness that I've found through the Goddess....You're already worthy. Your spirit is whole. It's OK to be worthy, powerful, spiritual and sexual, a fully integrated woman.

Men, too, have found Goddess practices helpful. On one level, they’ve helped us men learn the strengths of nurturance, patience, and even passivity. On another level, it’s helped us see that these traits traditionally held up as feminine actually belong equally to us all. Said one man:

On a soul level...we're not men or women, we're souls, and let's get beyond the matriarchy/patriarchy discussion....We're programmed into men being masculine and women being feminine, and it's so limiting.

While Goddess spirituality celebrates the personal, the intuitive, the embodied, the experiential and is therefore less centered in what can be written down, it has also spawned a lot of books. Thealogy, the study of thea, the Goddess, entails a different sort of literature.

Brock, left, and Parker

One striking and powerful example of Thealogy, I would say, is Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock’s 2001 book, Proverbs of Ashes. It’s not about Goddess at all, but it represents a very different way of engaging the theological questions – highly personal rather than dispassionately analytical, yet as thoughtful and rigorous as any theological writing ever has been. Parker and Brock give us a thorough-going critique of the theology of atonement, and show how an emphasis on Christ’s obedience to God and sacrifice on the cross sanctions violence, exacerbates its effects, blesses silence about the abuse of human beings, and hinders recovery and healing. Parker and Brock tell their own personal stories of dealing with male violence and the ways they found that violence abetted by theologies of redemptive suffering. They weave those stories together with careful historical and scriptural analysis to produce what I found to be a powerful and moving critique of traditional Christian atonement.

I read Proverbs of Ashes in Divinity School and it was a revelation – very different from the kind of theology I’d gotten used to from reading St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Barth, Niebuhr, and Tillich.

So, you see, when I spoke earlier about my experience with disturbing fear and fearless peace, and how that expressed itself in a parable of the person-like and female rabbit god, I wasn’t just leading up to thealogy, I was demonstrating it.

What is holy for you? What evokes in your heart the feeling of being in the presence of the sacred?

These words “holy,” “sacred”: you don’t have to know what they mean. But enter into creative playful relation with the people and animals and trees and rivers and sky of your world. What sense of personality can you let yourself detect or imagine in things and tasks? Do they seem male or female? What lessen might they have to teach? What funny jokes might they tell?

It’s a free, and creative, flowing, often laughing, way of being.
"Hello, tree."
"Hello, engine failure in my car, you wily goddess, you."

Hello, dear you.

It does my heart good.

When I enter that flow, or it enters me, I feel myself again dying into life, perishing into love for you.

Deportations: Getting Our Money's Worth?

2011-10-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

In this morning's news, I learned that 396,906 people were deported during the year that ended September 30, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is the highest single-year total for deportations in ICE's history -- 3.4 times the 117,000 total deportations in 2000. Fifty-five percent -- the highest proportion in a decade -- of last year's deportees had felony or misdemeanor convictions. More than 180,000 were deported without any conviction.

These record-breaking deportation rates cost US taxpayers last year over $9 billion: $23,000 per individual for a complete deportation process. What are we getting for our money?

1. Pointlessness. Undocumented immigration rates have plummeted since 2007, the undocumented population is down substantially, and violent crimes are at their lowest levels in 40 years. If deportation was ever necessary, it is less so now.

2. Destruction of families. Deportations wreak devastation on Latino communities across the US. Millions live with the prospect that a simple traffic stop could lead to the breakup of their families.

3. Harm to our economy. Undocumented immigrants purchase goods and services, contribute labor, and pay taxes. Our country is spending over $ 9 billion just to be able to shoot itself in the foot.

4. It makes us meaner and sadder people. Compassion, however, brings joy to those who give as well as receive it. As Bob Hope once said, "If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble."

The Unbearable Tediousness of Denial

2011-10-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

Denial is so tedious, isn't it?

I know, I know: there are times when someone says something outrageously false, and it's important to point out that it's false. If someone says that tax rates reached their highest under Clinton, it may very well be worthwhile to point out that during 1944-45, income tax ranged from 23% to a top rate of 94%. OK, that was war-time. But under Eisenhower, income taxes were close to that -- ranging from 22% to a top bracket at 92%. Nixon, Ford, and Carter maintained the same tax brackets from 1971 to 1981: from a low of 14% to a top bracket taxed at 70%. Under Clinton, the top tax rate was 39.6%.

I can see how correcting factual inaccuracies has a place.

At other times, though, it works better to embrace the language rather than keep on tediously denying it. For instance, who wants to put energy into denying the claim that homosexuals are possessed by demons? It's ever so much more effective (and fun) to embrace the claim -- and give it new spin. Like these folks do:

Awesome!

The name "Unitarian" was originally a pejorative term hurled at those who read the Bible with thoughtful attention and didn't find the doctrine of the "trinity" supported. When we decided to go ahead and embrace the term, we took the sting out of it.

The cross, as used in crucifixion, was a symbol of disgrace in Roman-occupied Palestine. The early Christians embraced the cross and turned it into the symbol of the identity they were proud of -- thereby rendering it unavailable as an insult.

You might be concerned about the way that evangelical, fundamentalist religion uses claims about God to promote exclusion, hate, violence, and injustice. So what's the best way to resist?

Strategy 1: Take the stand that there is no God.

Strategy 2: Take the stand that God calls us to love and justice.

Notice that the guy with the sign isn't locked in to a commitment to the independent objective existence of demons. He's just going with the metaphor. You may think that God is a fictional character. Fine. Fictional characters say and do a number of things: Oliver Twist asked for more gruel, Scarlet O'Hara coped with the Civil War, and Beowulf fought Grendel. Those are all true. Maybe you want to say that "God calls us to love and justice" is true in the same way, and maybe you want to say it's true is some other way. Either way, it's true.

Moreover, consider the set of things that are all fairly close to the center of what "God" has meant in Western religious traditions:

a source of beauty and mystery;
a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value;
the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
a basis of ethics.
a person-like entity (person-like insofar as having knowledge and desires);
an entity with supernatural powers

Even if we were to dispense with the last two items, we may still want to refer to the source and context from which we experience beauty, mystery, gratitude, humility, wonder, awe, meaning and value. "God" is the traditional word for so referring. We don't all have to have exactly the same conceptions of "cat" or "water" in order to say things to each other about cats and water.

Better to take the language that's out there and go with it. It's more rational, more effective, more creative and fun.
(Isn't "Demons of awesomeness" a lot more alive than "Humbug. There are no such things as demons"?)

Sometimes Identity gets in the way of rational and effective. Some folks have built an identity for themselves as "a person who denies the existence of God." Strategy 2 would feel like a betrayal of the identity in which they are so heavily invested -- no matter how ineffective and even irrational that identity may be. I understand that identity isn't about rationality. The very tediousness of denial can become a point of pride. It may be creatively stultifying, but it offers a kind of security in identity.

I don't mean to disparage strategies of identity. I, too, need to know who -- and whose -- I am. I'm not suggesting pretending to be identity-less. I'm suggesting that we take on the identity as "those who affirm that the ultimate context and basis of meaning and value inclines toward love and justice" instead of the identity as deniers.

What Has Queer Theory Done For You Lately?

2011-10-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Have you got your shirt? The shirt says we are standing on the side of love.

Smaller print above LOVE: "Standing on
the Side of".
Below: "www.StandingontheSideofLove.org"

If you don’t have yours yet, get one! And wear it proudly at the Gainesville Pride parade on Sat. Oct. 22. The parade starts at 1:00pm at the Ayers Medical Plaza , 720 West University, so be there by 12:30. And have your shirt. (Also: Read up at the "Standing on the Side of Love" website: here, and see previous blog entry on "Knoxville's Legacy" here.)

We are standing on the side of love. So simple. So…basic. The childlike simplicity of this response is underscored by the decorations that our children have put on the shirts. The heart leads us, and the heart yearns for connection in love. That's clear, that's basic. Who needs theory? Do we not simply need love?

Actually, I’m going to say the Beatles had it right: yes, "All You Need is Love." (Wikipedia entry: here. Video: here.) Let the heart be our guide. The thing is, the head is all the time cooking up one idea or another, and the ideas sometimes get in the way.

I propose today to lead you on a journey – a quick tour through a landscape of ideas and concepts. What we will find is that we are led back to where we started – back to a trust in the heart, back to love. It is an Eliot-esque journey, for T.S. Eliot said:

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.

We’ll look at some concepts, theory, ideas that might help knock out certain other ideas that have been getting in your way. When we come back again to no side but the side of love, perhaps, we’ll find that our journey has helped us understand our original stance a little better. Perhaps we will, in some sense, know the place for the first time.

Ready? All aboard the head-trip train.

Concept Number One: (Try to) Ignore It

Concept number one: Let’s ignore it. What consenting people do in private is irrelevant – it has nothing to do with our shared life. Don’t ask, don’t tell. We don’t need to ask about people’s sexual orientation, and we don’t need to tell anyone about ours. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with character, reliability, competence, trustworthiness – nothing to do with whether a person has inherent worth and dignity. So let’s ignore it. Let’s dispense with labels like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and treat all people as just people. In race relations, this attitude was called being – or trying to be – color-blind.

Concept Number Two: Honoring Identity

The problem with concept number one is that people want to be seen and honored, acknowledged and respected for all of who they are. During the four years in the early 90s that I was a professor of philosophy at Fisk University – a school with a predominantly African American student body – I saw every day how important African American identity was to my students. Once I was a visiting faculty at Ripon College in Wisconsin. I remember being at a reception and chatting with one woman who professed such colorblindness. She didn’t understand why there would be a school where 99 to 100 percent of the students were African American. What difference does race make? Let us judge people, just as Martin Luther King himself said, by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Who wants to argue with Martin Luther King? But after a few years at Fisk, that perspective had become so distant for me, that I couldn’t even think of how to explain why I didn’t share it.

In that moment, adrift on a sea of white, from the faces in the room, to the thick cover of Wisconsin snow outside, I was stymied. It wasn’t until later that I thought: hey, wait a minute. What about our gender identity? If someone were to say to that woman, "I can’t tell whether you’re a man or a woman," I don’t think she would have been re-assured. More likely, she’d have been insulted.

When my name, Meredith, preceeds me, people sometimes assume I’m a woman. That’s OK – not a problem for me. If, however, they were to continue to regard me as a woman after we had met face to face, I imagine I’d find that disconcerting. Further, if I were to enter some situation where a number of people were doing that, I’d be a bit spooked, wondering what sort of Twilight Zone I had fallen into. Many of you, too, would find it disorienting if the people around you couldn’t -- or earnestly pretended they couldn’t – tell whether you were male or female. It’s not that we think there’s anything wrong with being the opposite sex – it’s just that we like to be recognized for who we are.

Similarly, for many people of color, racial identity may be important. It’s a part of who they are, and they don’t want that socially erased. We want to be proud of who we are, not told that a key part of our experience is meaningless.

Similarly, many LGBT folk want to be recognized and accepted for all of who they are. We are all entitled to equal concern and respect. But we don’t have to pretend that we’re all the same.

"Heteronormativity"

Indeed, colorblindness, or genderblindness, or sexual orientation blindness, in its pretense that we are all the same, has the effect of projecting the majority’s norms. That’s how it plays out. Pretending that there’s no difference between black and white has the effect of pretending that we are all white. Colorblindness allows the norms and assumptions of white culture to hold unchallenged sway. In the same way, sexual orientation blindness amounts to projecting heteronormativity.

Can you spot the heteronormativity here?

Heteronormativity is the privileging of heterosexuality as normal and natural. When straight office workers have photos on their desks of themselves and their spouses, that’s regarded as positive or benign, while gay workers with photos of themselves and their partners are “rubbing our noses in it” – that’s heteronormativity. When a person who goes through a series of different opposite-sex partners is judged less harshly than a person who goes through an equally long series of same-sex partners – that’s heteronormativity.

If your gym offers a family membership, do you know whether or not that that perk is available to same-sex couples? If it didn’t occur to you to find out because that doesn’t affect you, then you are unthinkingly accepting heteronormative privilege.

Then we start getting into areas that are going to be for many of us a bit more challenging. You see, while many in the LGBT community have worked hard for recognition of same-sex marriage, not all LGBT folk have unalloyed enthusiasm for the spread of acceptance of same-sex marriage. Marriage itself is heteronormative, they point out. Marriage takes the heterosexual model as the norm: one partner, living together and running a household together, for life – or at least starting out with the intention that it be for life. But maybe that model should be challenged rather than pursued. Some of queer theorists criticize the traditional family as a deeply problematic institution that ought to challenged and called into question. (Wikipedia, "Queer Theory" here; "Heteronormativity" here)

Concept Number Three: Identity (and Everything) Are Shifting Cultural Constructs

Some queer theorists also challenge the very idea of identity. Concept one was let’s ignore it. Concept two is let’s recognize identity as a way to respect who a person is. Now we get to concept three: identity is a problematic notion.

Starting with gender, let us acknowledge that the clear black-and-white categories “male” and “female” aren’t really so clear. Some people born intersex, where the biological sex cannot be clearly classified as either male or female. The practice of forcibly resolving the ambiguity, forcing the child into one box or the other, sometimes using surgery to help resolve the ambiguity on one side or the other, has been harmful and traumatic. Let us learn to accept ambiguity. In fact, suggest some queer theorists, more gender ambiguity might be good for us all. We might all dress and style ourselves in ways designed to make it harder instead of easier for others to categorize our gender at a glance.

Cultural studies professor Nikki Sullivan writes in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003):

Sexuality…is constructed, experienced, and understood in culturally and historically specific ways. Thus, we could say that there could be no true or correct account of heterosexuality, of homosexuality, of bisexuality… Contemporary views of particular relationships and practices are not necessarily any more enlightened or any less symptomatic of the times than those held by previous generations. (Googlebooks portions of this book here.)

Queer theorist David Halperin describes three very different cultures in which sexual contact between older men and boys has been acceptable: the ancient Greeks, some Native American tribes, and New Guinea tribesmen. He asks: Is this the same sexuality? Such contact has some superficial similarities, including acceptability, in all three cultures, yet the social contexts and meanings of that contact was so varied, the cultural understanding of what was going on so diverse, that we can’t call it the same sexuality.

The brilliant French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault, lived 1926-1984, pioneered new ways to think about and understand ourselves. Foucault is a founding figure for a number of kinds of study, including queer theory. His three volume History of Sexuality revealed how sexuality has been culturally constructed in Western civilization. In Britain, and much of Europe, prior to the 1880s, Foucault points out, “sodomy” meant any form of sexuality that did not have procreation as its aim. Using birth control counted as sodomy – and penalties against sodomy were severe.

Analysis of the time reveals that the laws were directed against acts, not against a particular type of person. There was no understanding of sexual orientation as an identity – any more than we have an understanding of adulterer as an identity -- or, say, “person who parks in a no parking zone.” It wasn’t until the later 1800s that “particular acts came to be seen as an expression of an individual’s psyche, or as evidence of inclinations of a certain type of subject” (Sullivan 3). Certain forms of sexuality moved from being seen as horrible acts to which anyone might succumb to being seen as the expression of a particular type of person. As Sigmund Freud expressed and magnified the new way of thinking, sex was at the root of everything about us. Thus, “the homosexual” became a personage – a life form, a certain type of degenerate whose entire character, everything about him, was corrupted by his sexuality. (Wikipedia, "Michel Foucault" here; Foucault's "History of Sexuality" here; SparkNotes on "History of Sexuality" here.)

That hardly seems to us like progress.

Yet, as traumatic and disastrous as that cultural phase was for many, it paved the way for our later attitudes. Once we saw sexual orientation as an identity – subject to treatment rather than criminal or moral judgment -- the ground was laid for the next step. Only then could culture move to seeing that identity as not harming anyone else. From there to: not harming themselves either. And then: to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being welcomed and celebrated as a worthy and beautiful part of the diverse spectrum of human expression.

That’s a huge change – a series of huge changes – all within the last 130 years or so. The field of queer theory, then, examining the vastly different ways that sexuality manifests and is understood in different cultures and times, raises for us the possibility that our cultural changes in the last 130 years might not be a matter of finally seeing the truth that has been there all along. Rather, they might be a matter of the contingent, accidental evolution of concepts – evolving in ways outside of anyone’s explicit control or intention, yet not dictated by something called objective reality either.

The evolution metaphor here is helpful. In species evolution, the objective environment establishes conditions in which many species will fail – will never appear or will quickly die out – yet the objective environment does not guide and direct evolution toward one true species. Rather, the objective environment is one in which increasingly diverse species emerge and find ways to be successful. By analogy, we might say that the reality of our biology establishes conditions in which many concepts of sexuality would never appear or would quickly die out – yet biological reality does not guide or direct our understanding toward the one truth. Rather, the array of possible ways of thinking about sexuality, while constrained by facts of biology, remains as infinite as the array of possible species.

OK. Where are we? This is all very heady – and unless you’ve spent a few of the last 25 years hanging out in university English departments, it might be strange and disorienting. What have we got? Let’s review.

Review

First level: forget about labels, categories. Just love people.

Second level: it’s not so simple: people want to be recognized and respected for who they are. We have an identity as a man or a woman – or as intersex or transgender; we have an identity as a person of color, or not; and we have an identity as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight.

My identity in these areas is not relevant to my rights, not relevant to whether or not I may be oppressed or discriminated against, not relevant to my claim to equal concern and respect. My identity is relevant to my sense of who I am, and I want my society to recognize and honor and respect who I am. A don’t ask, don’t tell policy requires me to hide who I am. (Actually, it doesn’t require straight white men like me to hide who we are because under white heteronormativity my particular identity happens to be the one that is assumed rather than hidden – which is why recognizing and respecting alternative identities matters.)

Then comes a third level: the notion of identity itself is challenged. Not only are the categories fuzzy and unreliable, with people falling along continua rather than into one neat box or another, but the continua themselves are contingent social constructs subject to deconstruction and reconstruction into something different. Sexuality is plastic, and the ways we make meaning of it are even more plastic.

Making Peace With Ambiguity

It’s confusing, it’s changing, we can’t really get a handle on the right way to think about it – because any way to think about it is one more temporary product of culture and language and power.

Queer theory helps us let go of our assumptions and not replace them with new ones. Queer theory itself is not so much a "theory," as an understanding that no theory can be the one right theory. Therefore, theory itself is less important. Queer theory helps us resist the temptation to resolve ambiguity, for in that space of ambiguity, we come back to where we started: simply standing on the side of love.

Tell me what’s important to you. It might be your sexual identity, your gender identity, your racial identity, or it might not be. Tell, or don’t tell. It's up to you. And I might ask, or not ask. If I do ask, you can answer, or not answer, or say it’s not important to you, or tell me that you really don’t know what category you’re in.

This is what standing on the side of love looks like: the courage to stand in ambiguity and shine a warm embracing light.

Our journey through queer theory has led us back to “arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” What we know about this place now is just how indefinite and undefined everything is.

Our stand on the side of love is grounded neither in a rejection of, nor an insistence on, any notion of identity.

Our stand on the side of love is grounded in the courage to take each ambiguous moment as it is.

Knoxville's Legacy

2011-10-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Our Unitarian Universalist Story has unfolded through the centuries. Today I tell a very recent chapter of our history. Many readers will remember it well. Let us never forget.

Just over three years ago, in July 2008, Jim David Atkisson walked into a Sunday service at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and began shooting. Two were killed, six others injured. Adkisson said he was motivated by hatred of liberals, African Americans, and homosexuals. (Wikipedia entry: here.)

Unitarian Universalists responded with an outpouring of support, and strengthening of resolve. The full-page ad in the New York Times, taken out by the Unitarian Universalist Association, appeared two weeks after the shooting. It said: "Our doors and our hearts will remain open." (PDF of the ad: here.)

We drew on our heritage that has for 200 years de-emphasized Jesus’ superhuman powers, de-emphasized the idea that his death atoned for us, and instead emphasized what he taught us and showed us about how to live: loving our neighbor as our self, recognizing our neighbor in the despised, in the least of these. We became and remain determined to answer Adkisson’s hate with love.

Therefore, our Unitarian Universalist Association launched the "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign: a public advocacy campaign to harness love’s power to stop oppression. ("Standing on the Side of Love" website: here.)

Seeing our communities threatened by fear and hate, seeing how fear and hate leads to exclusion, oppression, and violence, we resolve to levy compassion to influence public attitudes and policy.

The "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign focuses on public issues where hatred most exerts its distortions.

Fear and hatred distort the national discourse about LGBT people (here).

Fear and hatred distort the discourse about immigration (here).

On those two issues, and others, our "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign brings together people of faith to call for respect and inclusion. It's a relatively young campaign, yet it captures the essence of our Unitarian Universalist story through the centuries.

On Being Animal (revised)

2011-09-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

Compelling Question

Here are two questions:

Question 1: What does it mean to be human?
Question 2: What does it mean to be animal?

Question 1 is clearly a question about us -- who we are, what kind of being. Question 2 might or might not be about you and me. If we are not used to thinking of ourselves as animals, our first impression of Question 2 might be that it is equivalent to "What does it mean to be some other (than human) animal?" Even if we understand that both questions are asking about us, that both are seeking self-understanding by way of understanding the characteristics and qualities of a category of which we are a member, Question 1 might seem compelling while Question 2 seemed trivial. A generation ago, that's how it seemed to me: the first question compelling, urgent even, and the second question a bit silly.

Questions that seize our interests and imaginations may grow less compelling over time while other questions grow more so. This happens in the history of thought through the centuries, as well as in individual lives. A professor I once had for a history of philosophy class put it to us this way on the last day of class (as best as memory serves): “As we’ve seen, the big questions in philosophy have changed from century to century. All the old questions, though, are still unanswered. Western civilization didn’t answer them, it just moved on. In philosophy, progress comes not from answering questions, but from getting over them.”

Question 1 has attracted a lot of attention over the centuries. As a philosophy major and graduate student in the 1970s and 80s, I remember the question made me feel in the presence of something vital and important. The question seemed to matter because whatever it was that was unique to our species would therefore be a precious and sacred thing, something to cultivate. If reason is what makes us human, then we ought to try hard to be rational in all things. If use of ethical principles is the defining feature, then those principles take on grand significance. Or if humor and laughter make us human, then it behooves us to laugh. Presumably, whatever is uniquely human is something of which we humans should want to have more, or should, at least, vigilantly guard our store – lest some horrible result occur, called “forfeiting one’s humanity,” or “becoming inhuman.”

“What does it mean to be human?” inspired thinkers and activists to valuable work. As recently as 2001, an anthology of essays appeared titled, What Does It Mean To Be Human? Contributors, including the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa, Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias, and about 90 others, reflect, says the publisher’s description, "on our shared human condition and attempt to define a core set of human values in our rapidly changing society." Quite a grand project! While many of the short essays are insightful and beautiful, the announced project, a mere decade later, rings overreaching and dated. The titular question of the book may be one that we are beginning to get over. It’s too early to tell, yet possibly this anthology was a last hurrah for a way of thinking that was already on its way out, the contributors almost all over age 60 at the time of publication.

While this notion of “our shared human condition” once evoked a powerful and promising appeal, a vision of solidarity and cooperation and common cause – and perhaps for many readers, still does – for me, the notion has lost its panache. Once I was enthralled by this really interesting “condition” -- both the burden and the glory of my species. I don't think it ever entered my mind then to wonder about such things as, say, “the equine condition” or “the raccoon condition.” Now I find “our shared human condition” no longer seems more salient than “our shared animal condition.” Nor am I alone. There is a cultural shift afoot -- if not at hand. The general change in attitudes toward animals was reflected in a column by Sarah van Gelder:

Out of these contradictions, a relationship with animals that is both new, and very old, is emerging. We are questioning practices that treat animals as commodities, relationships with animals that are more like those of indigenous peoples -- seeing animals as fellow creatures living alongside us in complex interdependent ecosystems.

Question 1 is still around, but these days it invites quite a different sort of response. Today, an internet search for “What does it mean to be human?” turns up a predominance of material on human evolution – how our species’ traits and behaviors evolved over millions of years as our ancestors adapted to dramatic environmental change. Questions about how our evolution made us have been growing more compelling, while less compelling now is earnest investigation into “our shared human condition” aiming to articulate core human values to be the foundation for universal justice and peace. Where once we sought to identify what separates us from other animals, now we seek ever more detailed accounts of what unites us -- the breadth and depth of what human and nonhuman animals share. We emerged from a process of gradually distinguishing ourselves as an animal, not from animals – a process essentially similar to the way that, say, the kestrel and the peregrine falcon came to be distinguished.

The task of self-understanding before us since Socrates urged, “know thyself,” is to bring awareness and presence to all of what and who we are. We are now better situated to see that this means not merely attending to our human nature, but to our animal nature. To know ourselves, we must address Question 2.

Our Animal Nature

To get a sense of myself, to arrive at self-understanding, to feel my place and purpose in this universe, it is not, after all, terribly helpful to know what separates me from other species. It is, instead, helpful to know what connects me with other species. This is not to deny that there are differences. There are some things we humans are really good at: like communicating learning and preserving it so we can build on it. We’re not the only ones that do that, but we are really good at it. Other things, humans are not so good at. Other species have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs live in a world of smells that we can but dimly imagine, and bats and dolphins live in a world of echolocation that we imagine, if at all, even more dimly. There are various differences between any two species. Quite a large part of what I am, however, lies in the connections and similarities I have with all mammals, with all warm-blooded animals, with all vertebrates.

I’m not going to truly know myself by picking out one or a few unusual skills. I know myself by grasping the inheritance I share with the gorilla, gazelle, goose, and gopher tortoise. My world is taken in through eyes and ears that work pretty much like theirs do. Many of them live in, and are guided by, a world of smells that I am mostly oblivious to – but not entirely. The fast-track connection between the olfactory and memory is something my brain also has. I hunger as they do, I am susceptible to the same the fight-or-flight adrenaline surges.

I do have a thin neocortex layer on top of the older paleomammalian system (the amygdala and the rest of the limbic system of emotions) and even older reptilian system (brainstem and cerebellum), yet I remain largely driven by those brain systems that all mammals have – and even those that all vertebrates have. The cognitive processes of the neocortex govern me much less than the neocortex likes to believe. Indeed, perhaps the neocortex’s greatest glory, ironically, is that it has, over the many millennia since its emergence, developed the means to investigate itself and reveal its own relative insignificance.

Conscious Thinking Is Not In Charge

Millennia of assumed differences between humans and other animals have been crumbling under recent research. Roughly speaking, the assumption has been that nonhuman animals are basically machines, their behavior merely conditioned responses, while humans are more than that: free, capable of exercising intention and forming responses that transcend conditioning. Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), for instance, influentially declared that nonhuman animals were complex organic machines without the immaterial mind or soul that only humans have. Research has been steadily closing the gap. Studies have noticed, or elicited, elaborate and intentional behavior in various species. Other studies come at the gap from the other direction: revealing that humans are not nearly as intentional as we think we are.

The Libet Experiments. In 1983, Benjamin Libet and others at the University of California, San Francisco, published the striking results of their experiments. In the study, participants were asked to voluntarily flex their wrist at a time of their choosing. Libet found that the neural signals for motion preceded the conscious awareness of intention to move by 300 to 500 milliseconds. “Put simply, the brain prepared a movement before a subject consciously decided to move!” Conscious intentions to move aren’t what cause our movements. This begs the question: why do our brains bother to create for us this illusion of conscious intentional control? Janet Kwasniak suggests that “the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action.” She suggests that “this marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions” were “ours” or just happened. The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened,” the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is a perception of our own behavior rather than a generator of it. The illusion of intention (or, more precisely, the illusion that intentions precede and determine action), then, is a by-product of the systems that all animal brains have for learning from experience.

It remains an open question how many other species might also generate such an illusion as a by-product of learning. Whatever the answer to that question might be, we can no longer plausibly claim, “We humans are in control of ourselves while nonhumans are machinelike bundles of conditioned responses.” Either they are not machines, or we are too – and our vaunted human exceptionalism amounts, at most, to a unique capacity to be deluded.

The Gazzaniga Experiments. Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga flashed two different images at the same time into the subject’s visual field. One image was in the part of the field that could only be seen by the left visual cortex, and the other only by the right visual cortex. The right brain saw a picture of snow covering a house and car. The left brain, at the same instant, saw a picture of a chicken claw. Gazzaniga then asked the subjects what they saw. The left brain has the language centers, so the left brain can articulate what it saw. “I saw a chicken claw,” reported the subjects. So instead of asking for words, Gazzaniga then presented an array of pictures and asked subjects to point to what they saw. Subjects’ right hands (controlled by their left brains) pointed to the picture of the chicken claw that the left brain saw. At the same time, subjects’ left hands (controlled by their right brains) pointed to the picture of the snow-covered scene that the right brain saw.

Gazzaniga then asked each hand to point to a picture of something that goes with the picture seen. The left brain saw a chicken claw, so subjects' right hands pointed to a picture of a chicken. Chicken claw goes with chicken. The right brain saw a snow-covered house and car, so subjects' left hands pointed to a shovel. Finally, Gazzaniga asked his subjects, "why is your left hand pointing to a shovel?" Now we’re in the language realm where only the left brain can express itself. If left-brain knew the truth, it could say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel. It must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left brain instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

Our brains create a running commentary on whatever we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. When Gazzaniga flashed the word "walk" to just the right hemisphere, many subjects stood and walked away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get a Coke," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.

My language centers and neocortex notice my behavior, and they make up a story about this character named “Meredith” who is heroic, yet with certain endearing foibles. At each moment of the day this “Meredith” can be found deliberately and intentionally acting. Whatever it is he’s doing is a reasonable part of his pursuit of reasonable purposes. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know.

Our story about ourselves as intentional, purposeful, and rational is made up after the fact. My neocortex and forebrain and language centers are really, really good at making up stories to rationalize whatever it is they notice I’m doing. But that’s not where the doing came from. Yet my brain makes it seem to me that everything I did was just what I “meant” to do. That’s the delusion I live in.

Befriending Our Animality

We cannot dispel, once and for all, the illusions of control, and the rationalizing stories of ourselves that our brains concoct. Knowing about the ways we are fooled, and how our fundamental animal nature is at work, can help us begin to befriend our animality, our selves. I am made, as many species are, to walk the savannas and woodlands of this wild earth. It is where deep parts of me find their greatest comfort and ease. Human social systems eventually yielded our technological systems, and between the two, I often find myself sitting indoors in front of a computer for hours at a time. If I am in touch with all of myself, then I feel those other parts biding their time, quietly yearning for their element. David Abram writes of “becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.” Mary Oliver tells us we find our truest place in and through the sounds – and sights and smell and feel – of animals and the wild:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees through the desert for a hundred miles repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves . . .
High in the clean blue air, the wild geese are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.
Calls to you, like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

I do not disparage the fine things my neocortex can do, nor the level of detail of envisioning the future that my more developed forebrain can do, nor the wonders of language produced and comprehended by my human versions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. These functions are great. They are only a small part of who I am, and they are a part that causes problems. The forebrain that envisions the future can so easily start obsessively worrying about that future -- in contrast to the "peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." (Wendell Berry). The language centers, creating their own little world of story loops, can leave me oblivious to the nonlinguistic awareness of each moment.

At this point, there is a danger of merely recreating Cartesian dualism in naturalized form. That is, Descartes posited a dualism of immaterial mind and material body. For Descartes, the complex organic machine of the body determined most of human behavior and all of nonhuman behavior. The immaterial mind/soul unique to humans guided only a small part of what humans do, Descartes acknowledged, yet that immaterial mind was the crucial separator of humans from all other animals. When someone refers, as I did, to “the fine things” that a human neocortex, forebrain, and language centers do, they might be (mis)understood as having only “naturalized” Descartes – as replacing Descartes’ concept of a special immaterial mind with a concept of special material brain parts. The point that these brain parts are only a small part of what we are would then seem to parallel Descartes’ acknowledgment that the complex organic machine called “body” determines most of human behavior.

The understanding that will best facilitate befriending and coming into our animality goes beyond mere “naturalized Descartes.” The point, ultimately, is not only the point that our animality – the traits shared with other primates, other mammals, other vertebrates – is most of what we are. Rather, animality is all of what we are. After all, every species has a brain distinct, in some ways, from every other species. The distinct attributes of a human brain are as much animal attributes as the similarities we share with other species. The distinctions are matters of degree, not of kind – and the distinctions of degree are slight. Similar versions of the forebrain that imagines the future, the neocortex that cognizes, and Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas that comprehend language all exist in other species. The human versions are as animal as the nonhuman versions, and as animal as our bones and guts are.

Closer contact with, and awareness of, the animal in me -- "the soft animal of [my] body, lov[ing] what it loves" (Oliver) -- engenders a greater respect for my fellow beings who, with me, share the burdens and the glories of "the mammalian condition," "the warm-blooded condition," or "the vertebrate condition." Through a positive feedback cycle, heightened self-awareness leads to greater respect for my fellow vertebrates, and greater respect for my fellow vertebrates heightens self-awareness.

Where will deepened awareness of our animality take us? There is an emerging theology of nature that seeks to honor wildness as sacred. An earlier time described the material world as fallen, sinful, or, at best, crass. Then the scientific view has encouraged seeing the world as mechanical and inert. The emerging eco-spirituality connects in wonder to the aliveness of the world. Connecting to our own animality – attending to, honoring, and loving what in us is wild and unpredictable – is of a piece with connecting to our world.

Both ancient and medieval theology and modern science have told us that our senses are not to be trusted – that the true reality of gods, God, Platonic forms, or of quarks, quasars, and black holes was not to be grasped by the senses. Yet it is corporal sensations that offer us the enchantment of birdsong or the wonder of the moon. The ever-shifting reality in which our animality resides resists any finished theory, refuses the would-be tyranny of our concepts, and disallows the constraint of experience into expected categories. To consciously cultivate self-awareness of animality is to become more present, to become more open to the nuances of the unexpected in experience.

On Being an Animal Who Decided Not to Eat Them

Inner tensions and cognitive dissonance characterize much of human relationships with other species. We treasure wildlife, yet almost all of us, me included, find it really hard to stop the sort of spending habits that we know are causing a wave of extinctions. Many of us are outraged by abuses of dogs and cats, yet we eat food that comes from an industry that keeps equally sensitive and intelligent animals crowded in atrocious confinement. The meat industry, in the US alone, each year, slaughters 35 million cows, 105 million pigs, and almost 9 billion chickens. People of good will have different opinions about this, different strategies for dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

The view I have come to is that the slaughtering is not the problem. Putting them out of the unremitting misery and pain to which factory farms consign these animals for all or most of their lives is the kindest thing we do for them. It’s not that they die that is the issue. We all die. It’s the life that matters. What those numbers mean to me is that every year the US meat industry is bringing 35 million more cows, 105 million more pigs, 9 billion more chickens into lives of constant agony. We know enough about cow and pig and chicken physiology to know that what is going on in them parallels what goes on in humans under conditions of extreme pain and stress. The conditions at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) constitute the biggest, harshest, most painful ongoing cruelty on the planet. Many people, perhaps, choose not to know the details because the cognitive dissonance between, on the one hand, knowing the severity and massive scale of the suffering, and, on the other hand, knowing the ways one’s own eating habits contribute to it can be more than they can bear. The intensity of the suffering and the vast, vast scale of it can bring me to weep – when I’m not pushing it out of my mind.

My concern with the life rather than the death has a parallel in Unitarian theology and history. Four hundred years ago, Unitarians turned away from the prevailing European emphasis on Jesus’ death as the atonement for our sins. Sixteenth-century Unitarian theologian Faustus Socinus settled among our early Polish churches. His extensive works laid out a theology that told us, look to Jesus’ life, what he did, what he taught. It is the quality of his living that needs our attention, not his death. For the factory farmed animals today, I believe, it is the quality of their lives that needs our attention, not the fact of their death.

For me, then, deciding to be vegetarian has been a path toward greater self-awareness. When I no longer had to push certain knowledge out of my mind just in order to have lunch, then I was just a little bit more available to love and respect the creatures of my world. When my food choices no longer supported the harshest ongoing cruelty on the planet, then I was a tiny bit better able to respect and honor my whole self -- including the parts of me that are just like them: the pain receptors; the adrenaline, fear, and stress; the creature comforts, if they could get them; they all work in me as they do in them. Thus I was better able to be present to all the animal that I am.

We humans have for so long defined ourselves only as members of the category human. I have spoken of the value and necessity of recognizing and connecting more deeply to other categories: primate, mammal, warm-blooded, vertebrate. In this essay, I have stopped at vertebrate in order to focus on expanding our self-awareness and identification that far. It’s a start. Yet this delimitation, too, is finally false. Ultimately, what I am is also the crustaceans, the arachnids, the insects. In the end, each of us is also the oak trees, the algae, and the bacteria. In the end as in the beginning, we are the mountains and rivers, stones and dirt, air and clouds, moon and stars.

Unitarian Universalists covenant to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. It remains to us to grasp that we are not part of this interdependent web. Each one of us is the whole thing.
- - - -
For the original "On Being Animal" post, click here.

How to Succeed at Forgiveness Without Really Trying

2011-09-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

I must begin by asking your forgiveness. There's my title: "How to Succeed at Forgiveness Without Really Trying." Yet I must confess that I have no intention of explaining how to succeed at forgiveness without trying. The truth, in fact, is that -- except for small offenses for which casually tossed-off forgiveness suffices -- you have to try. Forgiveness takes work. It's a repair of relationship, and it requires the work of both parties: intentional, deliberate, and often hard. Forgiveness is a grace, and you know the saying about grace: it’s free, but it ain’t cheap. To “succeed” at forgiveness takes intentional commitment to a process.

On those small matters, as I noted, there are times when forgiveness is a casual matter – as easy as saying, “I forgive you.” I hear there is a Unitarian Universalist church out west somewhere, in a downtown area where parking is at a premium. A lot of people not coming to the church would park in the church parking lot. The church put up a sign:

CHURCH
PARKING
ONLY.
VIOLATORS
WILL BE
FORGIVEN.

Then there's this approach . . .

The congregation didn’t really mind people parking there through the week – and I’ve always thought that was a clever way to advertise the forgiving nature of the church.

So, yes, sometimes it’s OK to treat forgiveness in that way – for little things like forgiving me for my title. Other times the road to forgiveness is harrowing, soul wrenching -- about the hardest thing a person can do. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

The 1982 film Gandhi covers the violent rioting in which Muslim and Hindu mobs are forming -- attacking and killing each other all over India. At one point Gandhi makes plans to meet with Jinnah, a Muslim leader, to try to bring peace. One of Gandhi’s followers, a Hindu, cries out to Gandhi out of deep distrust of the Muslims, “don’t do it."

Gandhi says: “What do you want me not to do? Not to meet with Mr. Jinnah? I am a Muslim, and a Hindu, and a Christian, and a Jew, and so are all of you. When you wave those flags and shout, you send fear into the hearts of your brothers. That is not the India I want! Stop it! For God's sake stop it!”

But it doesn’t stop. Gandhi goes on a hunger strike – refusing to eat until the violence stops. And the fighting stops. In the film, we see Gandhi weak and in bed from fasting. Leaders of the fighting factions come in, throw down their swords and promise they will fight no more. One man then pushes through and flings bread on Gandhi.

“Eat!” he says. “I'm going to Hell! But not with your death on my soul.”

Gandhi says, “Only God decides who goes to hell.”

“I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall.”

“Why?”

“They killed my son. My boy. The Muslims killed my son!”

“I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed – a little boy about this high -- and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”

The man is astounded. He’s just been asked to do the hardest thing he could be asked to do. Forgiveness is more typically about restoring relations with a particular person, perhaps a specific group. In this case, the man seeks to restore right relations with his world. And to do that will require turning upside down the hate and division and the loyalties that have come to define his life. As all of this sinks in, the man’s stunned expression seems to turn from disbelief to wonder. That’s a subtle thing, the shift from incredulity to wonder. It’s the shift of glimpsing a way out, when you thought there was no way out of the hell of your life. The man turns to go. Stops. Turns back to Gandhi. Gets on his knees and bows to the ground.

The man has, we hope, committed to a very long process. A dozen years, at least, of raising a child – and adjusting to raising that child in a faith that, for now, he hates. For this man, his path to forgiveness will be long, and gradually unfolding.

This is not at all like:
“Sorry I’m late, please forgive me.”
“I forgive you. Let’s get started.”

In fact, it may make sense to say that in a case like this, moving toward forgiveness will be the rest of his life. Always headed there, never there. The way that folks in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous – the recovery community – have a saying: Always recovering, never recovered. There's a lot of wisdom in that for all of us. And as you engage in your spiritual practice and wrestle with your own demons and distractions, having reached the point at which you can no longer deny them, you might put it: Always becoming enlightened, never enlightened.

I can speak to you as a man who did find a child – about this high – of a different religion, different culture, different language. Yency Contreras was 17 when LoraKim and I met him while offering worship services at his detention facility in El Paso. (The recent documentary film, "Which Way Home" chronicles a story startlingly similar to Yency's trip to the US in 2004.) Our relationship, seven years so far, has been many things. We were not called upon, as the man with Gandhi, to actively raise him in a different faith – he had already been mostly raised in a different faith. We have, though, had to grow accepting of the Pentecostal faith he has maintained on his own. One of the things going on in all this – not especially on the surface – has been a sense of a process of partial atonement. We, with our pale skins and middle class US lifestyles, our undeserved privilege, depending as it does upon a constant flow of resources from the rest of the world, and upon global systems that encourage a number of countries, including those of Central America, to adopt policies that effectively impoverish the people and denude the land.

Having Yency has been richly rewarding. By no means a total atonement, but a step on a path. We are always atoning, never atoned – never through with the work of repairing.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are our themes of the month for September. We are honoring the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, which is late this year – from sundown on October 7 until sundown on October 8. So we’re preparing for it well in advance.Yom Kippur is the 10th Day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins September 28 this year. It’s a new year for us, as well, in many ways – about this time of year: school started back, labor day, last week our ingathering ceremony, this week the first Sunday of our kids Religious Education program – new year.

In the Jewish tradition, you have a period of celebrating the new year, and while it is still fresh – 10 days in – turning attention to atonement: forgiveness and reconciliation.It’s a really good idea. And for Jews this period, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is the high holy days. That’s another good lesson: weaving back together the torn fabric of relationship is the most sacred, holy, divine enterprise we can possibly undertake.

In Jewish teaching, there’s no atonement without sincere effort to make what amends as can be made. The Talmud says,

“The Day of Atonement absolves from sins against God, but not from sins against a fellow person unless the pardon of the offended person be secured.”

At the level of interpersonal relationship, there’s no atonement without forgiveness.

Forgiving is fore-giving: giving what was before. To forgive is to give back the relationship as it was before. When the offense is slight, we can just say “I forgive you” and it’s done. When the fabric of relationship is ripped through, it will take more than that.

I said that forgiveness was a grace -- that is, an unearned blessing. Ultimately, yes, it is unearned. Yet we also have to work on it. We have to earn our way up to the point from which grace takes over. In other words, do the work, but don’t think the work alone is sufficient. It's necessary, not sufficient. If repair to human relationship comes, it comes as unearned grace. Do the work, and see if the miracle happens, the miracle of human reconnection in love. Just saying the words, “forgive me” and the answer, “I do forgive you,” is a start. Only a start.

One woman said to her partner, “Why do you keep talking about my past mistakes? I thought you had forgiven and forgotten.”
Her partner said, “I have forgiven and forgotten. But I want to make sure you don’t forget that I have forgiven and forgotten.”
That’s a couple that only began the process.

The whole forgiveness thing can have its pitfalls. There are ways that forgiveness goes wrong. First, as in the this case, we might think it is done when it has only begun.

Second, forgiveness goes wrong when the forgiver comes off as superior. I say, “I forgive you,” and that can cast me as the magnanimous one, all superior. Rather than return the parties to equality, it maintains a reversed inequality. That can happen when we don’t seek a more extended reconciliation process.

Third, forgiveness goes wrong when it is expected or demanded. Recognizing the virtue of forgiveness, we can come to expect or demand that others – or ourselves – forgive.
“You should forgive him.”
“You really ought to forgive her.”
This sense that it’s easy conspires with the awareness that it is noble when it does happen.

Let me be concrete about this. Some minister or priest somewhere in North America will, today, tell a battered woman that she should forgive her husband and take him back, no matter how much he beats her, because marriage is forever and good Christians forgive. Here's a situation where an intentional and extended process is required if the relationship is to be repaired at all. Yet a certain concept of "forgiveness" -- as if it were easy and instantaneous -- short-circuits the process that is needed.

Gandhi could not have simply said to the man, “You’re forgiven,” or “Ask God to forgive you.”
When the tear is substantial, it will take a lot of sewing to repair it – it doesn’t happen just from saying the words. Even if they are heartfelt words. Tears and emotions of the moment all too quickly pass without commitment to the long-term work.

Fourth, things have gone wrong when we give up on the possibility of forgiveness at all. This is the flip side of expecting or demanding it or treating it as if it were an easy and momentary thing to do – a simple act of a moment that sets things right again. Once we see that forgiveness isn't simple and instantaneous, we might go the other direction and give up on it entirely. Don't demand it or expect it -- but please don't give up on forgiveness either.

The author Dwight Lee Wolter, was at a book-signing event for his book, Forgiving Our Parents. One person “merely glanced at the title, glared at Dwight and asked, ‘Why the hell should I?’” (Buerhens 6). That’s a person who has given up on forgiveness.

In such cases, the work will be hard, and no one can say “you should” – no one can say the work will be worth it. The grace of forgiveness – the grace of being able to forgive, and the grace of coming to be forgiven – can, if not short-circuited, have a power to raise new life from a kind of death – can “break through the normal calculus of morality that calls for evenhandedness and balance.” (Lewis Smedes, religious psychologist)

We can’t make the grace come. We can take some steps to invite that grace: steps for both the injured and the injurer. For the one who has been harmed, Rebecca Parker writes that the first step is to tell the truth about our pain. We have to be able to say that we’ve been hurt and how. Even articulating that hurt may be arduous. It’s often difficult to speak one’s pain frankly.One barrier is an inner belief in our invincibility. A person may deny her or his own suffering because to hurt is to have an unacceptable weakness. And acknowledging this hurt means recognizing that we can be hurt again. Or we may fear that acknowledging a hurt will make it worse.

An Offender Reconciliation Program in Wisconsin “brings the victim of a crime together with the perpetrator of the crime, in front of a trained mediator,” if the victim desires such a meeting, and the perpetrator is willing. One woman met with the drunk driver who had killed her husband.
He said, ‘I’m sorry.’
And she said, “‘I’m sorry,’ won’t cut it. I lost the love of my life. My other half. I suffered depression. I had to deal with being a single parent with three kids.” (Larsen 3-4)

Sometimes we aren’t ready to get, don’t want to get, don’t need to get, to forgiveness. Just the first step of speaking her pain – without expecting that she accept his apology: “it became possible for her to get on with her life” (Larsen 4)

At the next step, explains Rebecca Parker, we do face a choice. Having named our pain, grieve it. If we don’t grieve, we are much more likely to pass on the very same injury to others. She writes:

“The capacity to grieve unlocks the psycho-magic of passing the pain on to someone else. Grief allows the pain to pass through one with its full power. The ability to mourn is the foundation of the capacity to forgive, and it is strengthened by those operations of grace which mediate comfort and consolation to us.”

The final step, then, is letting it go. You can’t make yourself let it go, and you certainly can’t make anyone else let something go, but you can deliberately open yourself to inviting the release to come. Letting go releases the violator from the obligation you would place upon them to suffer for their violation, or be punished for their sin.

This is not a release from accountability. Forgiveness involves "calling another to accountability, but relinquishing the desire for retribution” (Parker 16). When I say accountability, I’m not meaning taking the consequences. I mean accounting for ourselves to one another – a relation in which we accept the task of trying to make our selves make sense to another human being – who has seen our past behavior as making no sense.

The injurer, for her or his part, also has steps that can help open the iron gate through which forgiveness may enter. Here, too, truth-telling must be the first step. Tell the truth about the violation. Acknowledge responsibility. Accept the call to accountability.

Step two is justice-making. This is about restorative justice, not retributive justice. “One cannot always repair the damage one does,” writes Rebecca Parker, “but one can commit oneself to create healing or transformation somewhere, somehow” (Parker 21).

Conflict can strengthen a relationship, or strain it. Conflict can get to the point where it is hard to say what the conflict is about – what exactly is the issue – because the energy of the conflict is oriented toward other people rather than the issue. You talk to the people involved, and you find you’re having a hard time getting a handle on the issue, but it’s real easy to tell the sides – “those people” this and “those people” that – then you’ve got a high level of conflict. When we feel in our hearts, “those people won” or “we showed those people” then we’re in deep need of a process of forgiveness.

We all need each other. Nurture your spirit, help heal our world -- that's the Unitarian Universalist slogan. We need right relation with each other. As Reinhold Niebuhr said:

“Nothing we do, however virtuous can be accomplished along.
Therefore we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own.
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

The miracle of Reconciliation can happen, and our flourishing, the blooming of our beloved community springs from the ground of that reconciliation. It makes sense, then, that the day of atonement and reconciliation, is not only the holiest day of the year, the most solemn day of the year, but also the most joyful day.

Begin Again In Love (9-11, forgiveness, and peace)

2011-09-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

Can we begin again? In love? With the arrival of the tenth anniversary of the events of 2001 September 11, I want to ask whether we can begin again. Of course, in one sense we can never really begin again: it is impossible to change the past. In another sense we are always, unavoidably, beginning anew. So we begin again today just like we begin again every day. It's a particularly good time, however, to reflect on those events of ten years ago and to see if maybe there's a way to make the new beginning of this day a beginning that faces our fears and turns toward love. Somewhere in between the impossible and the inevitable is the potential.

About 3,000 people were killed in the collapse of the twin towers in 2001. 3,000. Here are some other numbers for the last decade:

Almost 20,000: killed from our fighting in Afghanistan, counting US troops, coalition troops, contractors, Afghan troops, and Afghan civilians.
Over 4,500: US soldiers and civilian support personnel who have died in our Iraq war.
Over 100,000: Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq by military or paramilitary action.
About 5,000: people killed in one city, Juarez, Mexico, in a drug cartel war.
Over 200,000: people killed in the 2004 tsunami that struck Sumatra, Indonesia and other places along the Indian Ocean.
Over 300,000: people killed in the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
About 150 million: children dead from starvation over the last ten years, deaths that could have been prevented at a cost about equal to 10 stealth bombers or what the world spends on its militaries in two days.

Most of that is distant and impersonal. The events of 2001 September 11, however, touched many of us much more personally. We have friends or family who were in New York on that day – who were due to have been in the Twin Towers a day or two later, or who were nearby on that day and barely escaped with their lives.

The tenth anniversary of Pearl Harbor got very little attention. In that case, I think we felt like we knew how to respond, and by ten years out, we had responded. We had dispatched the threat and had turned our attention to cranking out the baby boom. With the September 11 attacks, however, we have been in a state of continuous doubt about how to respond: Have we done enough? Too much? Are we safe yet? In the one case we swelled the armed forces and the factories supporting the war effort. In the other case, we ruefully put shampoo and toothpaste in a separate baggie every time we fly somewhere. In the one case, we rolled up our sleeves. In the other, we take off our shoes…going through security. It’s a very different feel -- bare arms vs. bare feet.

Begin again in love? That would be nice. We began the first time, ten years ago, in fear. And the fear has been much more damaging than the airplanes were. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, it made us think, "oh, well, that’s nothing." Suppose he had said, the only thing we have to fear is that our brains will be seized by a force beyond our control that will cause us to behave irrationally and dangerously? Of course, that’s what FDR was saying.

In the one year after those airplane attacks, Americans were more afraid to get on airplanes. It took about 18 months for air travel levels to return to their pre-9-11 levels. During that time, we drove places more. We have ways of estimating total national automobile miles traveled, and analysis reveals that the ratio of automobile fatalities per million miles driven remained constant. But because there was more driving, there were more auto fatalities. A couple years after 9-11, driving was back down to where it had been, just as flying was back up. An additional 1600 people died in auto fatalities just from the increase in driving in the one year after 9-11. Those were people we can say were killed by fear.

Osama bin Laden single-handedly triggered fear reactions that have been estimated to have cost the US over a trillion dollars in the last ten years. Our costs and losses in Afghanistan make some sense. My sympathies lie with those who seek nonviolent alternatives to war in every case, but I acknowledge that most analysts and most US citizens agree that military intervention in Afghanistan was appropriate – just as fighting Japan after Pearl harbor made sense. But we never had any business in Iraq. And our internal private and public security apparatus has run up costs that could have provided free college for everyone, repaired the nation’s infrastructure, ensured universal health care, and green-fitted our industries to reduce CO2 emissions.

We allowed those attacks to undermine our way of life. The US responded, in our blind fear, by rolling back the freedoms and the civil liberties that I would say were the things about our country that made it worth defending. We responded by undermining our way of life. It’s popular to say that’s just what the attackers were after, but I have to say I really don't think they had passage of the Patriot Act as a specific objective.

"Our way of life" is a mixture of many habits and attitudes. Let me mention two, one very good and one very bad. First, our way of life is liberty and equality. The first amendment rights of free speech, press, assembly, worship; our system of checks and balances that prevent power from being concentrated in any one place; the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, and other protections against discrimination -- these are the shining gems of our way of life. Second, our way of life is consumption, privilege, and usurpation. The US has one-twentieth of the world's population, yet consumes one-fourth of the world-wide energy use -- and we behave toward the rest of the world as though we are entitled to this vastly unequal share, and will throw whatever weight around we need to to make sure we keep it. This is the festering blemish of our way of life.

The part of our way of life that the terrorists of 9-11 ten years ago would have liked to undermine is the part that has for most of a century treated their homelands as our own personal supply pump for the oil that fuels our consumerist way of life. Instead, what they undermined was the much more precious civil liberties part of our way of life. They undermined our tolerance – which has, historically, been problematic, but had seemed to be slowing improving. Too many of our neighbors have behaved abominably toward Moslems among us: mosques and schools burned and defaced, or banned, Muslim cab drivers and storekeepers attacked and threatened, Korans burned – not the way we wanted to put Gainesville on the map – Muslims denied equal protections, profiled and harassed.

Can we start again, please? Can we begin again in love?

Unitarian Universalists have usually not been among the worst offenders, but neither have we done all that we could to insist on liberty, and decent treatment for all. We, too, have been among the fearful: sometimes rigid and inaccessible, sometimes striking out in anger without just cause, inattentive to others needs, and allowing ourselves to be set apart and alone, for losing sight of our essential unity. Let self-forgiveness begin, and be the basis for forgiving others. Let forgiveness be the basis for beginning again in love.

We will begin again in love precisely insofar as we can bring peace to our hearts. Bring peace to our hearts. And I know that peace is not a matter of an intellectual conviction.

One of our members told me a story recently about back in the day, she lived in a commune. Hippie notions of peace and love were in the air. This particular commune had made an explicit commitment to peace and nonviolence in all things. They were deeply chagrined at the Vietnam War, and advocated energetically for peace in foreign relations as well as peace in our individual personal relations. Then one day, one of the members of the commune – I will invent a name for her – Katie – was the target of an attempted purse snatching. The purse snatching did not succeed. As the man pulled on the purse strap, Katie flew into a rage, kicking, screaming, and yelling obscenities and insults. Later, Katie was amazed at herself. There was nothing but a couple dollars in that purse. He could’ve had it. “If he came back now, I’d hand it to him.
Here I think I’m all about peace and nonviolence, but I was all over that guy, in a way that was anything but nonviolent.”

Peace in our heads – ideas about living peacefully, a philosophy of pacificism and nonviolence – is not the same thing as peace in our hearts, in our bones, in our deep habits of being. Peace as a cognitive concept, and an intellectual commitment, can, however, be a start. From that start, Katie might be motivated to undertake the deep training of reactivity, rather than merely the shallow training of cognitive thinking. For me, the cognitive was a start. For I, too, have those ideas, hold a philosophy of nonviolence, and that has been true for me since middle school. I did, after all, grow up Unitarian Universalist, shaped by our Religious education and worship services. But I still got irritable. I snapped at people. I was defensive. I was snarky. I mean, a lot snarkier than any of you have seen. Once, in my twenties, I flew at the woman who was then my wife, and tackled her. Peace defined my ideas, my philosophy. Reactivity defined my life.

I still speak with an angry impatience sometimes, but now, it’s almost always at my computer, not at people. Even so, I have further work to do. And I do it. Three or four times a year, I go on a retreat of 5 to 7 days to practice the cultivation of peace in heart and bones and the habits of the amygdala and the limbic system – the emotional channels that short-circuit my better self. From those experiences – from putting the time in, being still and silent and watching the thoughts and feelings that arise, I have been gradually teaching not only my thoughts but my reactive nature that there is nothing that separates us.

Illusions of separation continually arise – they always will – yet we can grow more adept at seeing through them. It is a brain training that takes time. I can tell you how to serve a tennis ball exactly like Venus Williams, and, I can’t but maybe Ruth could, describe how to play a Bach cantata. But only hours and hours in can train you to be able to do it. I can tell you that you and I are one, but only with training can that be more than a moment’s passing thought. My training allows me to speak to you from experience about what it takes to build peace in our hearts, not just in our heads, what it takes to recognize that we are not separate.

I tend not to talk about it much, because talking about this training that I’ve had, if you haven’t had it, seems to throw up a separation – and the whole learning is about grasping that there is no separation. One spiritual teacher was asked by a brand new student: "What really is the difference between you and me?" And the teacher said: "There is no difference -- only, I know that." Yet this, too, is dangerous to say. The difference between people who know there’s no difference and people who don’t know there’s no difference is still a difference. That notion of difference, too, must be wiped away. So it’s hard to talk about at all.

In silence, watching my thoughts arise, and setting them aside one by one – sometimes sooner, and sometimes later after allowing them to carry me away for a while – I see through them. I see that my thoughts are not me, as they love to pretend they are. They are collections of reactive impulses stapled to a calculating machine. There is a true me, which is the same as you. Seeing that guy, hanging out with him for awhile, equips me to come and tell you some things that you, too, know – but which it is so easy to forget in midst of the hustle and bustle – and in the midst of fears. Fear has been such a prevalent mood in the country for the last ten years.

It equips me to coach you in the ways of peace – in accordance with the peace-making statement that this congregation adopted last January, in accordance with our stated slogan that this place be a place to nurture your spirit, and help heal our world – starting with ourselves. It’s from that experience that I offer you little pointers like: it’s not the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. You are not a part of the interdependent web of existence. You are the whole thing. All of it is right there, manifested as you.

Thich Nhat Hanh has been through many more hours and years of that training than I, and he expresses well what he has seen in the stillness and silence. I, too, have plunged deeply into the truth of these words about nonseparation, which I offer to you on the this anniversary of the September 11 attacks. This is the truth that we need, if we are to find peace and begin again in the capacity for love that peace makes possible.

"Rest in Peace," by Thich Nhat Hahn

I am a World Trade Center tower, standing tall in the clear blue sky,
feeling a violent blow in my side, and I am a towering inferno of pain and suffering imploding upon myself and collapsing to the ground.
May I rest in peace.
I am a terrified passenger on a hijacked airplane not knowing where we are going or that I am riding on fuel tanks that will be instruments of death, and I am a worker arriving at my office not knowing that in just a moment my future will be obliterated.
May I rest in peace.
I am a pigeon in the plaza between the two towers eating crumbs from¶someone's breakfast when fire rains down on me from the skies, and I am a bed of flowers admired daily by thousands of tourists now buried under five stories of rubble.
May I rest in peace.
I am a firefighter sent into dark corridors of smoke and debris on a mission of mercy only to have it collapse around me, and I am a rescue worker risking my life to save lives who is very aware that I may not make it out alive.
May I rest in peace.
I am a family member who has just learned that someone I love has died, and I am a pastor who must comfort someone who has suffered a heartbreaking loss.
May I know peace.
I am a loyal American who feels violated and vows to stand behind any military action it takes to wipe terrorists off the face of the earth, and I am a loyal American who feels violated and worries that people who look and sound like me are all going to be blamed for this tragedy.
May I know peace.
I am a boy in New Jersey waiting for a father who will never come home, and I am a boy in a faraway country rejoicing in the streets of my village because someone has hurt the hated Americans.
May I know peace.
I am a general talking into the microphone/s about how we must stop the terrorist cowards who have perpetrated this heinous crime, and I am an intelligence officer trying to discern how such a thing could have happened on American soil, and I am a city official trying to find¶ways to alleviate the suffering of my people.
May I know peace.
I am a terrorist whose hatred for America knows no limit and I am willing to die to prove it, and I am a terrorist sympathizer standing with all the enemies of American capitalism and imperialism, and I am a master strategist for a terrorist group who planned this abomination. My heart is not yet capable of openness, tolerance, and loving.
May I know peace.
I am a citizen of the world glued to my television set, fighting back my¶rage and despair at these horrible events, and I am a person of faith struggling to forgive the unforgivable, praying for the consolation of those who have lost loved ones, calling upon the merciful beneficence of God/Yahweh/Allah/Spirit/Higher Power.
May I know peace.
I am a child of God who believes that we are all children of God and we are all part of each other.
May we all know peace.

May we all know peace.
Amen.

Compassion and the Faith Instinct

2011-08-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

Unitarian Universalism is a branch of the Abrahamic tradition. We derive from Abraham, who is a founding figure for the Jews and Moslems; for the Christians, who arose out of Judaism; for the Protestants, who split off from the Catholics; and for us UUs, who split off from the Protestants. What this means is not that some historical figure, Abraham, laid down a foundation of thought or practice that influenced each of the branches of the "Abrahamic tradition." It does mean, however, that through the centuries each of these branches has told and passed on and learned from some of the same stories.

I am inspired by the lesson of hospitality in the Abraham story. I am also inspired by what we now know of how the story itself originated.

Exile Begat Abraham

The setting of the Abraham stories (Genesis 11 to 25) is somewhere around the 18th century BCE. Those stories were created, according to a growing consensus of scholars, in the 6th century BCE, during the period of exile known as the Babylonian Captivity. The Babylonians conquered Judah, and the Israelites were enslaved and taken far away to Babylon. The 70-year period of Babylonian exile, until Babylon in turn fell to Persia and some, at least, of the Hebrews returned to their land, was a period of deep reflection on the meaning of who they were and why their God had abandoned them.

During the exile, the stories about King David that are in the Biblical books of Samuel and Kings were compiled, incorporating earlier fragments. Some kind of David probably really existed and lived around 1000 BCE. Some scholars think the story in Samuel and Kings is roughly historically accurate. Extensive archaeological excavations, however, show that the City of David -- the original urban core of Jerusalem where the Bible says David and Solomon ruled -- was not a significant population center in the 10th century BCE. Parts of Samuel characterize David as a charismatic leader of a band of outlaws who captured Jerusalem and made it their capital. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman argue that this is the oldest, most reliable part of Samuel, and the rest of the David story is without historical basis.

Baruch Halpern argues that David was a vassal of Achish, the king of the Philistine city-state, Gath, and David never ruled an independent kingdom. For Steven McKenzie, David came from wealthy family and was an ambitious and ruthless tyrant who murdered his opponents, including his own sons. Bandit leader, vassal, or wealthy tyrannical murderer -- whichever he really was, most of the Biblical account of David appears to be the creation of an exiled people's deep yearning for a story of past glory.

In the process of constructing that story, a detailed ancestry for David was concocted, going back to Abraham eight or nine centuries before David. While David was, it seems, a real person, albeit not much like the Biblical depiction, Abraham was entirely made up. The creation and telling of these stories gave hope to the Hebrew people in a time of despair and suffering and defeat. The stories told them of a past time of glory and also called them to hospitality rather than to bitterness.

The glory and the hope represented by David needed a foundation -- so fragments of other mythic tales were woven together and expanded into a story of exodus and Moses and covenant, set four hundred years before David. The exodus story established a context that showed that David didn't just happen. David was the long-coming slow fruition of Moses' covenant four centuries earlier. But Moses didn't just happen either. The promise on Mt. Sinai was the long-coming slow fruition of the foundation laid by Abraham in a narrative arc set another 4 or 5 centuries before Moses. And that foundation was hospitality.

The stories of Abraham, Moses, and David reassured the Israelites that they had a history. Their history, fictional or not, was their basis for hope for a better time to come -- for it told them God had promised to make the descendants of Abraham a great nation. It told them that the path of the fulfillment of that promise was a winding one that had taken them into captivity before, in Egypt. They had emerged from past captivity into a time of freedom and prosperity, and so could again. Without that story composed in oppression and exile, the Israelites are one more Ancient Near East tribe – along with the Jebusites, Ammonites, Aramites, Midianites, Moabites, Edomites, Huttites, Etceterites. But with that story, the Hebrews coalesced around it into the religion recognizable as Judaism.

Some of the writings of the Babylonian captivity do express deep bitterness, anger, violent hatred of the Babylonian captors. Here, for instance, is Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon -- there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

That's a deeply vicious Psalm, and if the bitterness of their oppression didn't make the bitterness of their hearts understandable, I would be tempted to call it unredeemable. In the midst of that bitterness, some of the Hebrew story-tellers had the wisdom and the courage to perceive another way.

Giving vent to pain does not heal the wound; it only expresses the pain. So these story-tellers brought forth from the imaginations of their better selves another sort of story, a salve for smoldering hatred -- a story that called the people not to pay back violence and death, but to pay forward compassion -- a story not of pain that makes more pain, but a story of hospitality that engenders healing and wholeness. That's the story the Israelites in their captivity put into the foundation of the narrative that defines the Jewish people, hence the Christians and Moslems, hence us.

Hospitality: The Call to Compassion Outside Ourselves, Our Family, Our Tribe

We Unitarian Universalists, too, are the inheritors of the Abraham story: it comes down to us in a line that forks but is unbroken. And the story tells us, too, about how to be connected, and how to encounter what is holy. Here’s the pivotal episode of that story, Genesis 18:

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.”

Now Abraham doesn’t recognize who these visitors are – his use of “my lord,” is a general term of respect. His running out to meet them and bowing down are the same generous hospitality he might show any human visitor. Abraham continues:

"Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refesh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.”

It was a patriarchal culture, so when Abraham decides to have guests, Sarah has to get to work – though Abraham is busy, too:

And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the heard, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

(For Rev. Kaaren Anderson's General Assembly Worship sermon which inspired me to delve into this Abraham story, click here.)

In ancient times, a stranger often represented a threat. Yet Abraham rushes out to show kindness. He sets out his best offering. What he finds out, is that he is serving God. Abraham's act of practical compassion leads to a holy encounter.

There.

That’s it.

As I read that story, it’s not that reaching out to needs greater than our own causes a magical being to reward us for it – though I understand why a group might describe it that way. It certainly feels magical. Reaching out and connecting is the holy encounter. We touch the divine when we contact in compassion the other, the stranger. Whoever it is, that’s God.

A man I know who has worked for three years to help the homeless here in Gainesville spoke to me one day of how in the preceding couple months, something switched in him. He was not a man who thought about or believed God – words like holy, sacred, divine, transcendent were not in his vocabulary.Yet all of a sudden, as he was downtown distributing toiletries and socks, he began to have a new sensation. He didn’t know what word to use for it except “holy or something.” In the homeless men and women he saw shining beings, whose light made him shining too.

Connecting in compassion is the holy encounter.

Now, if you are thinking about Abraham, you might also be remembering another Abraham story. Old Abraham doesn’t seem very compassionate a few years later as he prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac.

What do you make of that episode? If a man today said that God told him to kill his son, and he was preparing to do it, we’d call protective services, no question.

Let me ask you to hold that image of aged Abraham, his sacrificing blade poised over Isaac. We’ll come back to that.

Let me now add a different story – for in the liberal church the canon of sacred stories is never closed.

For this story we go much farther back: one hundred thousand years.

The Inhospitable Early Humans: The Roots of Religion in the Needs of War

When our ancestors were hunter-gathers, as hominids have been for the vast majority of their history, war was small-scale and frequent. Bands of males attacked other bands of males – as chimpanzees do today. Nicholas Wade writes:

Chimpanzees in fact occupy territories that are patrolled and defended by bands of males. Through raids and ambushes, they try to pick off the males of a neighboring group one by one until they are able to annex the group’s territory and females. (Wade 48)

Among early humans,

About 75 percent [of pre-state societies] went to war at least once every 2 years . . . whereas the modern nation state goes to war about once a generation.

Enslavement was not practiced, and prisoners were not taken:

Captured warriors were killed on the spot. Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley estimates that a typical tribal society lost about 0.5 of its population in combat each year, far more than the toll suffered by most modern states. (Wade 49)

Another study estimates that 13-15 percent of all deaths among foragers were due to warfare. Compare that to

the percentage of deaths due to warfare in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century, the epoch of two world wars: less than 1 percent of male deaths. (Samuel Bowles cited by Wade 72)

Why do we do this? Why have humans and pre-humans been fighting and killing each other for millions of years?

It seems to be what social animals do. A group that is able to work together enhances the spread of its genes by working together to conquer neighbors. Ants, for example,

are territorial and will fight pitched battles at their borders with neighboring groups.

Human groups face a constant tension: commitment and sacrifice may be good for the group, but bad for individuals. A situation in which every one else was courageous and took risks to protect the group, while I could stay back, avoid the risks of fighting while reaping the benefits of keeping rival groups at bay, would be ideal for my genes. But if everyone follows that strategy, the group will be undefended -- and short-lived. So human groups put a lot of energy into keeping freeloading low and group commitment high: we monitor, condemn, and punish those who don’t do their part. Survival depended on it.

Small groups used gossip to keep people in line, but once a group gets past about 150 people, there are too many for gossip to keep up with. We needed another strategy.

Rituals and shared music, dancing and drumming, helped our ancestors rev up certain neuropeptides and hormones and neural pathways of group connectedness. We felt much more connected to the group. Public ritual and ceremony also allowed monitoring who wasn’t participating -- and therefore who wasn’t so reliably connected to the group.

Moreover, our sociable brains, highly attuned to other people – who to approve and disapprove of, and who is approving and disapproving of us – are primed to see the same thing in the natural world: that the sky and earth, too, are monitoring us with approval and disapproval. We used shared story-telling to reinforce the sense of person-like monitors, judges – and sometimes guides – in earth, sky, sun, moon, rivers, mountains, animals.

Religion, which comes from the latin, religare, meaning to bind together, really does bind us together – in the sharing of rituals, ceremonies, music, dance, and sacred stories. Religion exists in every human culture because it is so good as a functional adaptation to bind our group together so we can compete successfully against other groups.

Religion Transcends Its Origins

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Religion started getting out of control. Not that it was ever exactly in anybody’s control. I mean the faith instinct started spreading beyond its purpose. Slowly, slowly, the connection we had to our tribe also connected us to people outside our tribe, even to our enemies. For several millennia, there were only isolated outbreaks of compassion for the stranger. In a recognition of shared pain our circuitry of connection is sometimes sparked – if we let it be.

Homer’s Iliad, for instance, tells how the Trojan Hector killed the Greek, Patroclus, Achilles’ dearest friend. Achilles, mad with rage, finds a way to isolate Hector in battle, kills him, mutilates the body, refuses to give it to the family for burial, which means Hector’s soul will never know rest. What happened next, Karen Armstrong, in a lecture I heard her give at General Assembly last month, described this way:

But then one night Hector's father, old King Priam of Troy, comes into enemy territory into the Greek camp in disguise, and he makes his way to Achilles' tent, and he takes off his disguise and everybody, of course, is shocked. The old, old man comes forward and pulls at Achilles feet to plead for the body of his son. He embraces Achilles' knees and he weeps.
At this point, Homer calls Achilles manslaughtering Achilles. Achilles has killed not only Hector, but many other of Priam's sons. Achilles looks at the old man and he thinks of his own father and he, too, begins to weep. The two men weep together out of their private pain, but creating a bond, that bond between people. Priam weeps for all of his sons. Achilles weeps, Homer says, now for his father, now for Petroclus. Then the weeping stops, and Achilles goes for Hector's body. He carries it and lays it very gently and tenderly in the arms of the old man, afraid that this will be too much for the old man to bear. The two men look at each other and each recognizes the other as divine. It's when we can go beyond the hatred, the enmity that knocks us into so much grief and pain and violence, it's then that we become god like. That is the end of the religious quest.

(See the video and transcript of Karen Armstrong's Ware Lecture: click here)

Tomorrow they will be trying to kill each other again. For a moment, the recognition of shared pain creates compassion – literally with-feeling – com with, passion feeling. In feeling with each other, they have a moment of that experience of connection, the kind of connection we were made for, the kind in which we become god-like because everything that the word God was ever supposed to mean – all the depth of sincerest devotion and the awe of infinite mystery and love – is right there.

Our early ancestors needed a way to draw out of each other the last full measure of devotion on behalf of the tribe. They needed something that would provide:

a sense of powerful entities watching and judging, and
a sense of overflowing love, a joy in the life shared with tribe-mates.

Religion got wired into us because the tribes that couldn’t do that were overwhelmed by those who did have that deep connection.

Failure of the capacity for spiritual connection meant death. And today, it means that still – only now, the “tribe” at stake is the planet. In any species, individuals that care adequately for their young, their genes survive. Social apes like us, had also to build in an intense care for our group. We had to even be willing sometimes to set aside our interest in our selves and our own offspring for the sake of something bigger. The groups that did that, they survived.

Abraham and Isaac: Other means Other

Now let’s go back to the Israelite slave story-tellers in Babylon in 550 BCE, and the powerful image of their story: Abraham, with his knife poised above his son, Isaac.

The story-tellers somehow perceived that there is a meaning and a joy in a connection that isn’t just about you and your interests and your family.

The call of the divine is the call to hospitality outside the usual circle of loyalty, compassion to the stranger, a connection that stretches us. That’s where we encounter the holy. The story-tellers illustrated that point by telling us about Abraham meeting God by being hospitable to three strangers. They then drove home the point by telling us about the binding of Isaac. They were saying: if you think that just taking care of your own is where it’s at, you’ve missed it. Other means really other. Abraham’s willingness to cut off his own line, his greatest interest, represents in parable the dethroning of himself from the center of the world – a giving himself over to something bigger than himself – a connectedness beyond his own interests.

Modern listeners can't help but think about Isaac's interests. But remember that for the tribal peoples of the Ancient Near East, children had no interests of their own -- they were solely a part of their father's interests. Thus, the crucial part of the story is Abraham's willingness to give up himself. Isaac represents Abraham's last chance at the sort of immortality that progeny provide, for Ishmael had been sent away. Abraham stands ready to die, without any "living on" in a son, to die utterly. For it is not Self that life is for; it is Other, represented here by God, the Holy Wholly Other.

Every religion still has tribal forms – forms that celebrate “us” through demonizing “them.” And all the major world religions also have universal forms -- forms that recognize that “us” means all beings. We see all around us the playing out of this tension.

The Abrahamic tradition has not had any easy go of it. Jews, Christians, and Moslems, are still fighting – though modern warfare kills a smaller percent of us than early human warfare did. Religion’s ancient use for war runs deep and is not easily replaced by its new use for peace across tribal lines.

Sometimes people do harmful things in the name of religion – harm their children, harm themselves, blow things up, go to war. That’s because religion hasn’t finished outgrowing and transcending its original tribal function. But it’s getting there.

The Israelite story-tellers, in the midst of their captivity, homelessness, and pain, found a way to remember others’ pain, too, to move from pain toward compassion, to care for the stranger. What they illustrated in story, they codified in principle, for Deuteronomy was also substantially created in Babylonian captivity:

You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deut 10:19)

Swords Into Plowshares

Their stories don’t end the violence that oppresses our planet. They simply show us what is possible. The violence can be ended.

Our spiritual hardware is built into us. It's what we have and what we are. It was made as a sword. It's up to us to beat that sword into a plowshare, cultivate fields of care, and sew the nourishing knowledge that we are one. It is up to us to find the ways to connect, to cultivate compassion for enemies, to train ourselves in nonviolence, to recognize that violence is any thought, word, or deed that treats a being like an object or diminishes a being’s sense of value or security.

Thus we stand in the Abrahamic tradition of hope and possibility, stand with the radical vision of some captive Israelite story-tellers.

What they dreamed be ours to do.
Hope their hopes and seal them true.

- - - - - - - - -

Revised version of sermon preached at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, 2011 July 17. For list of all blog posts derived from sermons, click here for Sermon Index.
Audio Podcast of the original sermon: click here.

poem: prayer to the rabbit god

2011-08-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

the night is dark and this I know:
the rabbit god herself made the foxes.

she put bunnies all over
gave them a green planet to eat
made them love to hump
like rabbits
and love their babies.
bunnies make bunnies faster than plants grow, she noticed.
so the rabbit god made foxes.

predation is kinder than starvation, she said.
and foxes will give my lovelies
sharp ears
beautiful speed
a touch of cleverness.
let them be grateful for the red fur death
and the fear that makes them bright alert.

thus the rabbit god became the fox god too.
bodies are made of nutrients,
there being no other way to make them,
how could there not be carnivores?

dear god of hunter and of hunted
I, too, a body of walking food, pray
to be eaten rather than starve
to love
the beauty of this fear.

Reverence for Life: Toward Beloved Multispecies Community

2011-08-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry (UUAM) has developed the Reverence for Life program to assist UUs interested in exploring human relationships to other animals. (For info, click here.) Rev. LoraKim Joyner, a UU community minister and my spouse, heads up that program. Herewith, some reflections (see also my "On Being Animal," click here).

Reverence for Life

Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life. (The Earth Charter, 2002)

The Earth Charter’s use of “reverence for life” reflects its indebtedness to Albert Schweitzer (1875 –1965), the doctor, theologian, humanitarian, and Unitarian. Schweitzer did not invent the concept: it is a central teaching of Jainism and Buddhism, which Schweitzer studied. Schweitzer did, however, adopt the phrase, reverence for life, as the summation of his life and work, substantially develop the idea within the Western tradition, and bring it widely to the attention of Europeans and Americans.

In The Philosophy of Civilization (1923), Schweitzer set forth his most detailed and philosophical exploration of reverence for life. His premise:

I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.

From this premise, Schweitzer arrived at his ethical stance.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Helping life and avoiding harm benefits other beings and brings wholeness to our spirits:

Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.

Today an increasing number of people are heeding the call to reverence for life. It is a call to open our hearts to, commit our talents and resources to, and dedicate our lives to compassion to all living things – for the sake of the planet, for the sake of all beings, and for the sake of finding peace. Compassion is called for in each of the ways that humans use and relate to nonhuman animals. This list, neither exhaustive nor exclusive, includes the main areas of animal concern:

· Wildlife threatened by loss of habitat: Habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change have accelerated species extinction rates.
· Wildlife poached or hunted for profit: Trade in elephant ivory, rhinoceros horns, birds, reptiles, fish, though often illegal, continues.
· Animals humans breed for food: Industrial meat production subjects billions of cows, pigs, and chickens to painful conditions.
· Animals humans companion: There is abuse and abandonment of dogs, cats, and birds and other animals kept as companions.
· Animals humans use in research: Painful experiments, procedures, and housing conditions are inflicted on millions of laboratory mice, rats, rabbits and numerous other species every year.
· Animals whose fur or skin humans wear: The fur industry inflicts pain and death.
· Animals used in sports and entertainment: Horse racing and equine-using sports, dog racing, dog- and cock-fighting, animals in circuses and various animal shows, recreational hunting and fishing, are all issues.

The Liberal Faith Context: Challenge, Resource, Possibility

Challenge. For a number of years now, LoraKim and I have witnessed the confusion and misunderstandings in liberal congregations when animal issues arise. We have seen repeatedly how individuals and congregations struggle with questions about our relationship with nonhuman animals. We have been at congregational potluck dinners that have evoked anger, irritation, sadness, and disappointment among participants. We have seen members seethe and sometimes resign from the congregation because their hopes for more humane potluck dishes went unrequited. Others have seethed and sometimes resigned when they felt their preferences for food that included animal body parts was not respected. We have seen the puzzled looks when we say “multispecies community.” (One congregation member wondered whether dogs would be running board meetings. She then added, “Probably not such a bad idea.” But, of course, having a dog chair a meeting amounts to not having a meeting. And we will need to continue having meetings -- discussing, sharing wisdom, and planning actions -- to do the work before us.)

From witnessing these tensions and disconnects through the years of our respective ministries, it has for some time now seemed to us that animal concerns are the most significant area of need for spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth in liberal religion. It’s an area of needed growth in mainstream and conservative religion as well, to be sure, yet here we address the liberal religion we know best.

If our liberal religious movement were to turn its attention and commitment to reverence for life in all its forms, it would not be because we have ended the oppression, suffering, injustice, and violence humans inflict on each other. Indeed, the world of human-human relations seems as far from global peace and justice as ever. Nor can we say with any certainty that caring about species other than our own empirically correlates with caring about human conditions other than our own. Studies are inconclusive, and some suggest that people can compartmentalize their compassion: attitudes about the appropriate regard for the beings in the various categories through which humans relate to other animals (as companions, as food, for research, as wildlife, etc.) do not always correlate with attitudes about social justice, human rights, or peace movements. Rather, if people of liberal faith commit to revere life, it will be because of an inner urging toward wholeness. We will have heard an internal whispering that reverence for any life is incomplete without reverence for all life, and that our own fullest flourishing lies in a life of uncompartmentalized compassion.

Resource. Unitarian Universalists and others of liberal faith who seek to respond wholeheartedly and effectively to the call for reverence for life have a context of empowering meaning in our liberal religious tradition. Our worship practice and experience, our way of being together in free and covenantal faith community, give us solid footing from which to move forward to meet Schweitzer’s challenge to bring fuller and wider justice and peace to our world. Liberal religion for centuries has centered on a set of related values: freedom, acceptance, fairness. Unitarians and Universalists have expressed those core values with various words through the epochs of our history: the earlier words and understandings paved the way for the language and understanding now current among us. Of particular value for understanding and caring about animal concerns, there is the enduring legacy of the 19th-century Unitarian Transcendentalists who limned the sacred depths of nature, and many of whose words, included still in our current hymnal, continue to inspire.

Since the mid-1980s, we have had the Seven Principles in our association’s by-laws:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote . . . inherent worth and dignity . . . justice, equity, and compassion . . . respect for the interdependent web of existence. . .”

The practice of liberal faith community creates a steady deepening of the meanings of these values in our lives, and has lead us to live into them more fully. Our living tradition, in other words, has through the centuries gradually clarified what we may call “faith skills.” As we have sought to live the meaning of our values, we have developed among us resources of skill in articulating and practicing those values. Those skills will help us now move forward to find new ways for our principles to guide us to more compassionate and effective action, and more profound and loving reverence for life.

Moreover, we have applied and sharpened our faith skills in social action through the centuries. Unitarians and Universalists, joined by liberal Quakers, Mennonites, other Protestants, Jews, and sometimes Catholics have faced many challenges in our overlapping histories. People of liberal faith were together at the forefront of the movements for universal education, abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, improvement of worker conditions, birth control availability, desegregation, civil rights, women’s equality, ending the Viet Nam war, reproductive rights, acceptance of GLBT folk, and recognition of same-sex marriage. Each of those challenges called on us to change ourselves and change our world. Each of them was a step in our growing reverence for life, articulated in word, manifested in deed, and rewarded in deepened joy of connection and widened circle of community.

Finally, the liberal religious tradition of openness to new revelation and discovery has made us comfortable drawing from new work in the academy. Unhindered by suspicion of threat from new research, our worship, theology, and discussions, reference academic findings with a natural ease. This comfort will serve us well as we look to incorporate into our faith lives the substantial academic contributions in the last two decades. Works of philosophy, religion, social science, literature, and ethics departments offer new ways of thinking about nonhuman animals. Studies in biology, ecology, and physiology have shed new light on animal well-being and the science of human-nonhuman bonding.

Possibility. The academy alone, however, will not produce large numbers of humans motivated to act from care for the flourishing of all animals. There is a role for faith institutions to play in this world transformation, and liberal religion has not yet seized that role. Until we explicitly hold all beings to have inherent worth and dignity, we are only “light green.” In Dark Green Religion, Bron Taylor calls for a sensible religion, which includes the tenet that every being has inherent worth and a sacred spark, and which:

“is rationally defensible as well as socially powerful enough to save us from our least-sensible selves." (Bron Taylor)

We believe that millions now yearn for such a religion, fostering communities of life where every species and every individual belongs.

The Unitarian Universalist delegates at the 2011 General Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, took an important step toward a mission of reverence for life when they approved a Statement of Conscience titled “Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice.” The Statement addresses environmental and worker justice issues in the food industry and includes also these passages about our relation with nonhuman animals:

Aware of our interdependence, we acknowledge that eating ethically requires us to be mindful of the miracle of life we share with all beings. . .
The mass production of food . . . has resulted in . . . mistreatment of animals and workers. . . .
We acknowledge that aggressive action needs to be taken to . . . end the inhumane treatment of animals. . . .
Unitarian Universalists aspire to radical hospitality and developing the beloved community. Therefore, we affirm that the natural world exists not for the sole benefit of one nation, one race, one gender, one religion, or even one species, but for all. Working in the defense of mutual interests, Unitarian Universalists acknowledge and accept the challenge of enlarging our circle of moral concern to include all living creatures. . . .
Concerns about the Humane Treatment of Animals include intensive confinement and abuse in CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations], and inhumane conditions during production, transport, and slaughter. . . .
We aspire to buy, raise, and consume food for ourselves and our families that . . . minimizes the pain and suffering of animals. . . .
We advocate for the benefit of animals, plants, food workers, the environment and humanity by . . . pressing food sellers to require that their suppliers certify the humane treatment of animals; . . .
With gratitude and reverence for all life, we savor food mindful of all that has contributed to it. We commit ourselves to a more equitable sharing of the earth's bounty. (To read the full text of the Statement, click here.)

In recognizing that ethics is not limited to human-human relations, this Statement of Conscience is a milestone in liberal religion’s ethical development and on the path toward the peace which, as Dr. Schweitzer told us, humanity will not find “until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things.”

Multispecies Community: Relations of Care . . . and Uncertainty

The path of peace, of reverence for life – and, indeed, the path of joy and fulfillment – leads, we believe, to multispecies community, – a term which remains unfamiliar to many. A grant to UUAM (the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry) is supporting development of a book to be titled, Reverence for Life: Toward Beloved Multispecies Community. Yet the grant almost did not happen because some on the grant panel found “multispecies community” baffling and bizarre. Perhaps you did too when you saw the title. If so, I hope you'll read the book when it comes out, and that by the time you're done, “multispecies community” will seem to you not only obvious and implicit, but also the urgent need of our time, our faith, and our planet.

The concept of right relation which liberal religious congregations have been seeking to understand and apply can help us in imaging a more whole relation to nonhuman life around us. The ways to be in right relation with the blue jays outside your church, with the cat and dog companions of your church members, with the South American jaguars affected by your church’s coffee-buying policies, with the cows whose flesh might or might not be destined for a dish at your next church potluck, are all different – and all of those relations matter, to us and to them.

In one important sense, multispecies community is unavoidable. It is and always has been a fact of life. There is no way for humans, or any species, not to be in relationship and interaction with many (or most, or all) other species. We are inescapably part of the interdependent web of existence, as the Unitarian Universalist seventh principle recognizes. In another sense, true community, built upon right relation, is the unrealized possibility before us. Reverence for life calls for us to be increasingly conscious of, increasingly intentional about, and increasingly compassionate in, the ways we participate in multispecies community. Through such reverence, our multispecies community becomes beloved multispecies community.

Right relation with animals, human or otherwise, requires our careful attention to the signals. Extinction rates and drastically diminished populations of wildlife speak quite clearly that something is not working for those animals. Extinctions may be “natural” in the sense that the shifting ecologies of the planet over the last 2 billion years of life have brought about the extinctions of most of the species that have ever been. However, where human activity is the cause, or where extinction and endangerment rates are way above “natural” levels and we have the power to lower them, then reverence for life calls us to action to preserve life.

Other signals are more subtle. Is a given animal displaying a troublesome lethargy, or is it just being a healthy sloth? What are the physiological and behavioral markers of well-being in each of the estimated 10 million species on earth, or even of the 62,000 currently known vertebrate species? Certainly, there is much more to learn. At the same time, we already know a lot about the physiology of vertebrate pain, how to identify normal and high levels of stress in birds and mammals, and what behaviors are neurotic in various species. We can’t all become veterinarians or zoologists, but we do make rough assessments of the health of animals in our lives, and we can educate ourselves to be better attuned to the signs of well-being in domesticated companions, animal raised for food, and in wildlife around us. We can learn actions that engender better health and flourishing of the animals in our world. Fundamentally, right relation is a relation of care.

Against the forces of complacency and relativism stands beauty: the splendor of every being and this earth we inhabit together. This beauty calls us toward greater understanding, compassion, and awareness of interdependence, calls us to constantly re-imagine how to be the change we wish to be in the world, for our sakes, and for our neighbor's sake. And who is our neighbor, those whom Jesus urged us to love as ourselves? If, as we believe, our neighbors are all living beings, then our human lot is cast with the underdog -- and underchicken, undercow, and down-under marsupials.

Yet there is no one right way to think about and care for nonhuman animals. We are all involved in a messy interdependent web of existence in which we are, willy-nilly, prey and predator, and eater and eaten. Each of us makes tragic choices that result in harm to others. LoraKim and I struggle with this. We ate meat for much of our lives, for instance – and still do, occasionally, eat dairy products. The goal is not purity. Rather, the goal is to engage in life to the fullest by being aware of the lives around us. This means that we do no rest upon what we have accomplished, but seek ever to grow, to change, and often as a result, to have our heart’s break open so the world can fall in and fill it up.

Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: You are not alone. (Wayne Arnason)

The way is indeed not clear. Who most needs our care and attention right now? Is it the wildlife losing habit, or being poached or hunted? Is it the factory farm conditions of cows, pigs, and chickens? Is it abused or abandoned dogs and cats? And what is the best way to manifest our compassion? How does faith in the inherent worth and dignity of all beings grow and deepen? How can we better apprehend the mutual dependence of our well-being and the well-being of other beings? How can we act with greater compassion – and greater power? Life is so much more complex than any one stance or argument can convey. Fortunately, we aren’t alone. We have each other to turn to: to other humans on the path of reverence for life, and to such guidance as we can glean from the animals themselves.

Beyond the Veil: Women and Islam

2011-08-07T04:00:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Renee Zenaida, member, UU Fellowship of Gainesville
Sermon preached 2011 July 24
All art by Ameena Khan

As much as I love the big stories, it’s the little ones I count on to explain things.

Ameena Khan, left, and Renee Zenaida

Although, there are always more stories, more stories needed to fill in new gaps. Still, I felt well-prepared to weigh in when Islam was a suddenly the topic in Gainesville. I’d read Huston Smith, of course, but I had even known Muslims.

Years ago now, I married a lapsed Muslim from Lebanon. It was a marriage not made in heaven -— a lapsed, somewhat angry Muslim and a lapsed, somewhat angry Catholic. Rather than an interfaith marriage, it was more of a counterfaith union.

So when people, non-Muslims, try to tell me some deep dark secret about Islam, I smile because I have heard it all before. Any negative thing about being a Muslim that could be said, I heard from someone raised in the faith.

It’s just that it didn’t wash. Little stories. I never met my mother-in-law, except through stories. She was a devout Muslim, Hanoum. She came from a very traditional family. Her father had two wives and each gave him six children: one woman had six boys and Hanoum’s mother, she had six girls.

Hanoum was a bit of a fashion fan and was able to copy patterns of Chanel designs in Vogue magazine and then sew runway-quality copies. She taught at a little school in Beirut when her boys were small. In the school, she covered out of respect. She did not otherwise.

One day she ran into the principal at the market, the principal admonished her for not being covered in public. Hanoum went in the following day and quit.

Little stories. I got to know a number of students from the Middle East, many of them Muslims. It was pretty amazing how some of them accepted me, and some didn’t, just like everyone else.

It was my Western friends who took on a unified front. Even the most liberal of friends whined, “well, you know…” It was inevitable. I was going to end up forced to wear a veil and/or, if we had any children, “well, you know…” Everyone asked me if I’d read Not Without My Daughter. I was perplexed, anxious about the singular character of this, well, bigotry.

At the heart of it was fear of the unknown. Historians have yet to weave the contributions of the Muslim world into our books of Unitarian and Universalist history -— but I think I have a new project for Ken Burns.

But locally as well, the Muslim American community hasn’t drawn a lot of attention to itself, even the community’s charity work seems to go relatively unnoticed except by those on the receiving end. Until the subject came up, everyone was just getting along fine.

The custom that many have us have adopted, of not discussing religion or politics in social settings leaves the question of one’s faith, unasked and unanswered. Unless you’re a woman, a hijabi -— a woman who chooses to cover, to wear the hijab. Then everyone knows.

Back in the late eighties, the media was just getting started framing the Islamic World. But already the PR tide was turning; but I wanted to look at what my friends were telling me from more than one viewpoint. I thought about their concerns for a long time. I wanted to have an answer to give them. I only came up with a question.

They tell their daughters they are too beautiful. We tell our daughters they are not beautiful enough.

If I had a daughter, which should I prefer she believe?

Even now, the information we do get, often the only information we get, is directed by the very narrow lens of the media, or worse, Hollywood. And people living out their everyday lives in harmony, well that just doesn’t “make a story.”

Still, the three great Abrahamic religions do all seem to have a problem with women. Yes, ladies, we’re a problem. Women are thrust into an either-or frame. Good or bad. Temptress or Goddess. Saint or Sinner. I think we might be able to trace it back to the Greek love of dichotomy, but surely the writers and thinkers who’ve followed through on the big stories never really got to know a woman. When have you ever known a woman who was either-or?

We all do it. We fit everything, everyone we meet into frames, grouping like with like, to get as quick a picture of the situation as possible. That’s biology. We need to assess new situations, determine if there’s any danger, and act accordingly. There isn’t time to look at things from every angle, at least not at first.

Either “Muslim Artist” or “who”? I had expectations. [When I first went to see Ameena Khan's art,] I was expecting it to be a lot more serious.

The opposite of vilifying someone for his or her beliefs, opposite but equally devastating, is romanticizing someone for his or her beliefs. I expected a Muslim artist; I met a Muslim, a wife, a daughter, a wonderful mother, an incredible artist, an environmental engineer, a friend -— and the kind of selfless compassion that is all too rare I this world.

Compassion. If you’re looking for something that is held in common among Muslims, among any group really, experience the culture. Every community builds a culture up out of itself. So if you want to understand something -— a country, a religion -— get to know the people. Immerse yourself in the culture, and oh…eat the food…better…experience the meals. (Always a great antidote to the 11 o’clock news.)

The culture I encounter among the Muslims I know and have known is one of benevolent compassion. There’s a sense of community and shared plight.

When you talk about the United States, you can argue from here to next Thursday about the intentions of the Founding Fathers. United States culture is overwhelmingly Christian. When most of us were growing up, we never gave it a second thought when a City Hall had a nativity set on its lawn. It just was. We may not agree with reintroducing the Ten Commandments into civic settings -— but most if not all of us know them, base our morals on them. There’s a national flavor to US culture -— a not-so-subtle worship of the individual.

Yes, ours is a culture that will protest school uniforms with the fervor other cultures reserve for McDonald’s trying to move in. It may seem trite, but it’s serious business. That’s how deeply ingrained the reliance on the individual is in American society: no one is going to tell us what to wear.

Of course, we end up mostly wearing the same thing as our peers. To wear anything different is to “stand out.” People who dress outside the norm are often treated as just that -— outsiders. I imagine there is similar peer pressure in countries and regions that are predominately Muslim. Resisting would be difficult—in a place where covering is the law, impossible.

But imagine wearing hijab here. Or in any Western country? Instead of disappearing into a sea of veils or an ocean of hairstyles, you stand right out. And it’s not like wearing Orange and Blue in Gainesville, you’re not on the home team.

When news of an Arab spring began to filter in, I was excited. Having let go some of my romantic notions about what being a devoted Muslim looks like, I headed off to a protest on the corner of University and 13th. There were quite a few women there. I was the only one not wearing a headscarf.

Oh my goodness. I held my sign, chanted along (we were awful at the chants, we’re doing much better with our chants for peace this morning), but I stood out.

Now, there’s something about being a Unitarian Universalist, I’m not sure why, but you end up carrying a lot of protest signs. I’ve been in the crowd before; but this time at least a dozen people pointed out that they’d seen me for less than a second on the news. I stood out.

Still, I was feeling pretty good about having been there, at least tangentially, cheering on world-changing events, when I went to gather my things. As I was waving goodbye, an elder, a woman, walked near me. She dropped a flag. I picked it up and took it to her. I was expecting an accent. Egyptian perhaps? It was an Egyptian flag. No. The lovely lady turned to me, and, in since the cradle Southern, said “Thank you, Sweetie.”

No matter how far I stretched my frame, it wouldn’t hold a representative grouping of Muslim women. So why not really test the boundaries. I put a note out on Facebook, asking Muslim friends to comment on “the veil,” and to share with their friends.

People sent me articles, videos, and best of all, personal notes. All spoke of hijab as an expression of faith, but each had a unique way of expressing her faith and her relationship to covering.

I sometimes get the impression that in that romanticizing way, some think women wearing hijab are somehow unaware of its implications. Somehow these dear innocents haven’t caught up to us yet.

With the information I’ve received so far, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Muslim communities worldwide are discussing the role of women, the role of hijab -— from lovely songs extolling the virtues of hijabi to a comedian shouting about what is and what is not hijab to internationally published profiles of women who have chosen to not cover, sometimes after many years of wearing the hijab. There are blogs and websites discussing all the possible frames a Muslim woman can fit into. The range is staggering.

Islamic scholars debate whether the instructions on modesty were for all women or only for the Prophet’s wives; argue over how much covering is required. There are radical women and moderate women and conservative women…and men…all interacting from within and from outside the system. Islam is not the monolith some perceive it to be: it’s a vibrant, living faith. Change, if it comes, will come from within the faith.

One of the most touching letters I received was from a woman named Angham. She started covering when she was 21; and it was a hard decision…but she’s forty now…and she has grown into and with her commitment to her faith.

What was more difficult for Angham was moving to the United Kingdom. People stared. She even felt pity. She had been a lecturer in English literature at an Iraqi university, she was in the UK to pursue a higher degree.

She wrote:

“To be honest, when I came to study in the UK last year I was uncomfortable with the way some people were looking at me and I fully understand how most people in the West look at the veil… I don't blame them as long as they are highly attracted to what certain newspapers tell them… I even sometimes feel that they pity me for this!!!! I think it is our job. I mean the veiled Muslim women's job is to try to change the way the West perceives this, not necessarily by words but by deeds… I think when every body around me realizes that this cover is not preventing me from thinking, studying, participating in life in general and breathing like the rest of them and when I show them that the veil wont prevent me from building bridges with them and make friends and behave normally they will eventually change the way they look at it… It is the veiled women's Job and mission…”

Maybe we could meet Angham and her sisters, those wearing the hijab and those not, half way. To embrace religious diversity, to live the words of Francis David -— that we need not think alike to love alike -- we need, perhaps, to turn our attention to discrimination against women who choose to express their faith by wearing the hijab—countries where certain styles of covering are banned, sporting events turned political, attitudes that judge a woman as lacking because she chooses to cover her hair.

Unless we look beyond the frames, beyond the veil, and see each woman individually, we won’t recognize real oppression when we see it.

Oppression. Non-Muslim friends gave me input about Women and Islam too. A number of people asked me if I’d read Infidel. It was the only lens through which they’d gotten a closer look at women and Islam.

Harrowing. But remember, I was raised Catholic. People who live in glass cathedrals… And as a Catholic, I have heard some pretty harrowing tales about losing one’s religion.

One of Karen Armstrong’s first books, Through a Narrow Gate, about joining and leaving a convent, was unsuccessful on many levels. In 2004, Armstrong wrote in her reprise of the journey, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, that it had been too soon -— she had not even begun the process of spiritual healing.

That she chose a path of spiritual healing is admirable, and fortunate for many of us. Armstrong is an extremely popular author and advocate for interfaith communication and…compassion… her topic at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly a few weeks ago.

Are there Muslim women who are oppressed? Yes. But there are non-Muslim women who are oppressed as well. Are Muslim women victims of domestic violence? Yes. But no more so than any other religious group. It’s not either-or. It’s us.

“They tell their daughters they are too beautiful, we tell our daughters they are not beautiful enough.”

It’s not either-or. Either a young woman held back from following her dreams, or a teenager saving up for plastic surgery.

It’s not either-or. It’s us. It’s a woman thing. Women have made amazing strides the world over, but when you look at the numbers, women still get paid less, are harassed more, are educated less. Women are the targets of war efforts, and the pawns in political repartee. They are victims of cruelty and ignorance.

When a group of women in Saudi Arabia rev up their engines to get the right to drive. When groups of women brave bullets to march through the streets of Homs, Syria. Whenever and wherever a woman stands up for her rights, would we refuse to stand alongside because a woman chooses to frame her face and cover her hair?

There’s a dimension to the hijab that is difficult for some of us to get our heads and hearts around—it is an expression of faith.

One dear friend just said it wasn’t her way of expressing her faith, but she is no less faithful. I have gained such respect for Muslim women, those who do not cover despite peer pressure to do so, and those who do despite public pressure.

I’m sure it doesn’t happen every day, at least not after a woman has been wearing the hijab for awhile. In the beginning, it can be consuming… like any life passage. But later, when she has endured days where she just couldn’t get it pinned right, hours outside wishing she could brush the hair and veil up off her neck and let a cool breeze in, stares of curiosity and derision, after that and more… she catches sight of herself in the mirror and knows it is an offering, the good and the bad, the pride and the struggle.

What is our hijab? What reminds us of our connection to something greater than ourselves, to all that is greater than ourselves. Maybe we begin with an embrace, embracing our sisters and brothers, and walking to a place of learning and healing.