To Litigate is Human; To Mediate is Divine

Richard Jamborsky
June 28, 2009 Summer Service

readings

Good morning:

I feel very privileged to have this opportunity to talk with you this morning on a topic about which I care deeply.  I’m grateful to our Worship Committee for giving me this occasion, to Jackie Oliveri for help in this first time endeavor for me and to Joan Stanton and our Choir.

I would like to share with you a transformative moment that I experienced as a judge in the early 70's.  I was trying a nasty contested custody case involving a nine year old girl.  The attorneys asked that I interview the child in Chambers without parents or attorneys present.

The child came into my office wearing a very old fashioned Laura Ashley type dress which looked two sizes too large for her petite frame.  She wore black patent leather shoes and carried a tiny, black patent leather purse.  Her small face was framed by long, flowing blond hair and her bright blue eyes were red from obvious tears. Her small brow was furrowed and she was pulling on her fingers and alternately wringing her hands.  She was clearly agitated and upset, as would most children placed in her position by their parents.  It was my practice to ask questions relating to the child’s favorite story books, interests, school activities, all of which could assist me in learning about her level of development and her adjustment or lack thereof to what her parents were putting her through. I would never ask her to pick  one parent over the other though that’s what the parents expected me to do!  As gently as I could, I asked one of my standard questions: “Mary, do you like your school?”  And in a tone reminiscent of the little girl  from the old stage play and movie, “The Bad Seed”, she responded sharply and harshly and tearfully: Judge, I absolutely hate school but I’d rather be there than here with you.!” That moment was the transformative  moment for me.  Her response, distress and anger crystallized my view that subjecting children to a contested custody dispute was  institutionalized, legally sanctioned child abuse!.  I concluded from that incident that there had to be a better way to resolve family breakups  than in an adversary system of justice - a fancy name for a contest fought out on the battlefield of a court proceeding where the parents and attorneys were warriors and children were weapons and  innocent casualties.  This led to my discovery of Mediation and its potential for resolving all sorts of contested cases - not just family disputes.  I began to be more aware and more sensitive to the  casualties resulting from litigation  in all kinds of   cases.  I tried a another  divorce case, involving issues of support, custody and visitation in which the parties were warriors for three years, and at the conclusion we determined that their combined attorneys’ fees were more than the costs of sending both children to Harvard Medical and Law Schools.  All they had to show for the battle were two very unhappy, emotionally disturbed children who had to be in counseling as they entered highschool.

In a medical malpractice case, I saw parties who lost a loved one, allegedly caused by the negligence of a physician and hospital.  After several years of anguish and reliving on a daily basis their loved one’s pain and suffering in the hospital, to say nothing of their own pain, and after spending over $100,000 in costs for Court reporters, expert witnesses, and transcripts, a jury awarded  them nothing!

 

“Close your eyes and open your hearts.  We have faith and hope that the modern mediation movement is about something greater than we truly understand today.  We have faith and hope that we will teach our children peacemaking and that they as parents will teach their children.  We have faith and hope that as peacemakers we are casting stones in the water of Peace Lake creating ripples that will flow into the mighty currents of peace, and flow somewhere good.  Somewhere where every child is safe.  Somewhere where all people are respected.  Somewhere where our differences are our collective strengths.  Somewhere where mistakes are acknowledged as human and forgiveness is always granted.”

So, I leave us this morning with this thought.  Let us be transformed starting this very moment.  Let’s put aside the traditional, the rigid, the hateful, the self righteous process for resolving conflict on battlefields - be they real or metaphorical battlefields..  Let’s be transformed from warriors  into peace makers.  Let’s hold  in our consciousness our own Peace Lake with it ripples going ever outward to somewhere good and beautiful and peaceful.  Amen

---

Summer 6/28/09 Service
given by Richard Jamborsky

Readings: Ripples from Peace Lake, by Eric R. Galton, Lawyer, Pioneer Mediator, Teacher; Trafford Publishing, Canada,  2004, page 11

“The violence and conflicts which rage in our world are horrifying to all people of good heart.  But, I think the escalating cycle of conflict has to be especially appalling to mediators and peacemakers.  When I begin my law school mediation class, I always tell my students that we have no shortage of warriors in this world and that I am recruiting them to the order of peacemakers.  At no time in modern history are peacemakers more needed.  We need to broaden our professional view and begin to see ourselves as part of the solution to a violent world and a world in conflict.  What skills we have acquired and what we have learned may have an even higher calling.  We may not rest until we live in a world which respects nonviolence and diversity and which values peacemaking more than the terrible tools of war.”

And excerpts from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, The Bible, King James Version and The Living Bible, paraphrased, Matthew, Chapters 5 and 7.

Blessed, (happy) are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.

Come to terms quickly with your enemy before it is too late and he drags you into court . .

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

If you are ordered to court, and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat too.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor,, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you . . .

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?  Do not even the publicans the same?

Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them:

Mud Season

Sermon delivered by Allison Gammons, Director of Religious Education, June 7, 2009

Growing up in suburbia, in the Pacific Northwest I experienced seasons a bit differently than they are here.  I, intellectually, knew that there were four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall.
I experienced them, however, as: Cold Rain; Lots of Rain; Sun Breaks; and Increasing Rain. 
The puddle at the base of the driveway grew and shrank, accumulating leaves and muck, depending on the season.  
The clay of our backyard got easier or harder to dig in, depending on the season.

It wasn’t until late into my Freshman year of college that I discovered a whole season I hadn’t known of before. 
Trapped between Winter and Spring came Mud Season. 
It wasn’t Spring, with its promise of sunlight and growing plants.  It was a season all its own.  A time when the unpaved roads and paths that made up my campus on a hill — turned to slippery pits of mud that promised to permanently cover your boots, and sprinkle your pants with reminders of the road.  Ruts formed that made driving difficult, and walking tricky. 
This was Mud Season — and I find it a fitting symbol of the process of change and transition.

Mud season comes at a time when the environment is changing.  Cold, long winters that have frozen the ground solid are necessary for the season.  The heavy rains that bring spring are just as necessary.  We are moving, in that time, from Winter to Summer — both seasons with things about them that I adore, and things about them that I dislike. 
Mud Season is the transition.  From cold nights and beautiful snow, excuses to stay bundled over a good book and a cup of cocoa — into sun and blue skies, chances to play outside and enjoy the fresh air.  It is a time of change… a transition.
And like many transitions, it is not all smooth and easy.  I wonder if I might have been able to think of transitions differently if I’d thought of them in terms of Mud Season.

So, I’m sure many of you are wondering “Uh.. exactly how are transitions like mud season?”  Some of you may have answers, Mine can be explained around a few key words.

First:

Messy.  Mud Season can be very messy if you don’t enter into it prepared, or even if you do.  Change is just the same.  You can prepare for it, expect it, and it might be a little less messy, but it still will perhaps get a little messy.

Resistance.  Mud season becomes messy because the lower levels of the ground have not yet thawed, so the upper levels turn to mud, because the rain has nowhere to drain.  Changes in any venue are likely to face resistance, and things can pile up, hitting against this wall of resistance, this refusal to change from their earlier state, and things can get messy.  It’s not always a bad thing, but, there it is.

Fun.  Okay, so many might disagree with me on this.  But I, for one, find Mud Season to be fun.  I was always one of those kids that liked to play in the puddle.  I found that Mud Season brought out that kid in myself and my friends.   I got an excuse to “play” in the mud.  I had a friend who would trace paths with her foot, in order to help the water move through an intricate pattern all around campus, in the mud. 
We got dirty in walking from the dorm, to the dining hall, to class, so why not revel in the muck a bit. 
Similarly, I find transitions to be exciting and fun.  This is of course true when a change is something that I want.  But even when it’s something I disagree with.  For example — when I was in high school we were allowed, for the first three years, to eat wherever, and whenever, we wanted.  Unless a teacher has a room-specific rule, you could eat your breakfast in class when you really started to wake up around 9am, instead of when you had to drag yourself to the bus stop at 6:30am.  Senior Year, a new principle decided that we were only allowed to eat in the cafeteria — a part of the building that some of us had only been in for school assemblies in the past.  This is not a change I was happy about, and I became part of that earlier mentioned – resistance.  But the fun that we had in the transition period, protesting the change, meeting with teachers and administration and parents to try to fight the change, organizing an “eat-out”… that was a lot of fun.

Patience.  You have to wait it out.  Eventually, the ground will melt, the rains will stop, and things will start to clear up again.  The ground will harden with the new way of things… until the seasons shift again.  For good, or bad, changes happen.. and will keep happening, which leads to the next one:

Cyclical.  “The only thing constant is change”, we are never stuck forever in winter, or forever in summer – and personally I think it would get dull if we were! 
There are winters that I wish would just end — where it’s nothing but cold and stormy, and I don’t enjoy it at all. 
There are summers that seem endless, where it’s too hot, too muggy, and I just want winter again. 
On the other hand, there are winters that are perfect, mild, with just enough snow for me to play in and summers where the temperatures are warm enough to enjoy, but not so hot to make me melt. 
All are here for a while, to enjoy or slog through, and then they will change.  The “constant” is the change, I can depend that it will happen.  Hope that it will happen.

Difficult  Even changes that we are looking forward to or agree with can be difficult.  I couldn’t wait to get to Vermont to go to college.  But it wasn’t easy to go to a school 3,000 miles away from all I knew, and I wasn’t prepared for the loneliness I would feel in that first year, making new friends after having the same ones for six years.   I was SO excited to be moving back to Maine just about a year ago, but it wasn’t easy to adjust to my new apartment, to finding work here, to re-learning my way around and reacclimating to the climate.    Mud season, no matter how prepared you are, is difficult.  You will get muddy, cars will get stuck.  It’s inevitable.

Conditional  Mud season doesn’t happen everywhere, and it isn’t the same everywhere.  Certain conditions are needed for it, and some years it’s more mild than others.  Sometimes transitions are perfectly smooth, with barely a “blip”, other times they are huge, ridiculous, messes. It all just depends.

This is a time of transitions for many people.  Seniors are graduating, kids are moving up a year in school, First Parish is looking at major transitions in the coming year.  I wonder if we can all help make things a little smoother in all these transitions by looking at them as Mud Season.  

You can prepare, you can do your best to not be the frozen dirt, firm and unflinching in the face of change.   You can enter with as much knowledge as you can gather as to the changes that are coming your way.  You can learn the name of your teacher and who is going to be in your classes. 

You can contact your future roommate, see if you have things in common, register for classes, locate connections in the area. 

You can enter with an open mind, an open heart, and a willingness to listen to ideas.  You can get a solid pair of boots, prepare for the muck…. But you can’t be sure what it will be like until it is here.  The teacher might not be as strict as everyone says, a new student might be in your class that you have tons in common with.  Your roommate and you might not get along as well as it seems you should, you could meet someone at orientation that you just “click” with.  You could find that some of the ideas are just so out there that you can’t agree to them, or you could find that some suggestions spark something in your mind that you hadn’t even thought before. 

You may find that the mud is mild, and your boots are unnecessary, or your car may get stuck and need five people to dig it out.

You can rush through the transition with a thought to the goal, you can hurry through mud season knowing that summer is going to come.  Or you can stop and enjoy it.  Learn to find something in the uncertainty, to see the wonder of creation that comes in times of transition. Be like my friend, who would stop in the middle of her path from place to place, to take the time and trace those paths for the pools of forming water.  Be like the kids I played with, on those particularly sunny days where we went out barefoot in the mud, feeling that indescribable feeling of the mud eeking through our toes.  Embrace it.  Not necessarily the change, but the very act of transformation.  The butterfly comes from a caterpillar, but the most amazing parts, the subtle beauty, and all the hard work, come in the time of transition.  Embrace it.  Play with it.  Work within it.  Honor it.

World Peace—a Wealthy Western Idea?

Sermon delivered by The Reverend Charles Grindle
February 22, 2009

Kiss the Earth
By Thich Nhat Hanh

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Bring the Earth your love and happiness.
The Earth will be safe
when we feel safe in ourselves.

When you think of world peace what comes to your mind’s eye? Is everyone in the world holding hands and singing? Are they all well-dressed, clean, healthy and well-fed? How often did you hear this commercial (choir sings ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’)?  If that is your first mental vision, as I’m sure it is for many people, it’s time to adjust your set. Wouldn’t that be an amazing world, full of happiness and joy? But does everyone in the world have the same set of ‘happiness requirements’? I think we have projected our values onto the world’s picture of what makes for happiness. We assume that everyone is chomping at the bit to have peace, but how can people think about waging peace when for some, staying alive is their first daily necessity and a constant struggle? Let’s take a moment or three to find out what the reality is for the majority of the world’s people:

“It’s the specter of a food, fuel and water crisis” says Lars Thunell Executive Vice President of International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank group. “With the world’s population growing from 6 billion to 9 billion, 60% living in mega-cities, we can expect even greater demands on fresh water.  According to UN estimates, just under a billion people worldwide still don’t have access to clean drinking water, while over 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation. The world will not have enough water to feed itself in 40 years time”.
“Over 33 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. Women comprise over 50% of the total cases. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, followed by the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Asia. Only a little over 31% of the people needing drugs are receiving them. Current spending falls far short of what is needed to respond to the crisis”.

Think about the villages in Africa that are populated by children whose parents have died of AIDS and whose grandparents, if living, don’t have the energy or skills to take care of them and get the life-saving drugs that the children may need. Remember the people in Eastern Europe and Central and South America whose family members, perhaps their whole families, have just disappeared in past regimes. Staying alive from day to day is your only thought; world peace is a distant and unclear vision. 

Do these facts skew your vision a bit? I remember reading somewhere that the next world war won’t be about oil, it will be about water. We have people in our own country who are not getting water because they cannot pay the ‘water company’ what it demands for providing a necessity of life. I don’t think we need a Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but we need to make the means of a worthwhile life available to all. If we can do this for ourselves, then perhaps we could do it for other countries. Once everyone has food, water, shelter, health care, and work, perhaps then we can talk about solving our differences peaceably. Not that there will ever be total peace and agreement, but to agree to disagree and not go to war but finding a way to share the world.

When these basics are available for everyone, the acquiring factor is eliminated, and true dialogue can begin. We need to be active listeners when discussing how peace may be attained: we can make no assumptions about how the picture should look. When no one is worried about staying alive, the discussion can be about how we will live our lives as separate, not always equal, but agreeable nations. We cannot determine the social order, the religious life, or the governmental style by which others choose to live. Our way is not everyone’s way. Would living be as interesting if all countries had the same businesses, governments, and societal structure? I think of the ‘United States of Europe’ and I become melancholy for the days when each country had a style and way of living all its own. Globalization in all fields is being re-shaped as we expand our world more and more. Hans Kung, in his book A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics warns that “while globalization is inevitable, with a new economic and distribution of power, there is often a destruction of the agricultural economy which is focused on self-sufficiency.” With more people wanting to live in cities, what will happen to our food supply? Perhaps we have gone too far in extolling the virtues of urban living. If everyone is striving for that level of existence, who will be happy tending the fields, and milking cows? Although some people in this country have started some small swing back to valuing agriculture as a way of life, our mega-farms and genetically modified seeds may be doing more eventual harm than good. Yet because of our size, financial resources, and global influence, we are seen as the pinnacle of life styles.   

Are these perceived values that are world-accepted and the wished-for affluence actually what we need to preserve the human race? How can we change, and, do we want to, some country’s outlooks on freedoms and needs while not pushing our criteria on the world? When I say ‘we’, I am thinking of the major world power players, in the fields of technology, commerce, and knowledge. Our influence should be gentle and truly helpful, not merely large and strong. We need to be more aware of the natural knowledge that developing nations have in regards to their needs and cultures, which while very different from ours, are no less valid and desirable. If globalization is inevitable, as Kung says, how are we to shape future goals and ethics? What can we do to assure that world development can lead to a betterment of life, and peace on this fragile planet? Gerald A. Larue writing for the Humanist Institute offers the following humanistic values for this century:

Our values need to be secular, democratic, and pluralistic; they must be global; they must be based on a familial ethic; they must embrace a survival ethic; they require that we treat one another as members of a family, which means we must look out for and care about one another’s welfare; express concern for the health and well-being of all members of the human family; demand familial responsibility as we face the problem of population control.

These surely sound like values we could embrace and comprehend, but what about the rest of the world? I realized after I had begun writing that I was looking at this problem from the point of view of a white western striving to be middle class male. When I was pondering why other countries might not want or be ready for peace, I was evaluating the governmental stance and militaristic posturing, and assuming that the citizens would naturally support their leaders. But there are so many places in the world that have a leadership of power and fear, not of representation and concern. Such leaders become rich from war, are unmindful of their citizen’s needs, and have no desire to engage in dialogue with other nations. We always seem more willing to exchange with countries that are closer to ours in beliefs and needs. It’s easier for us to consider talks with Germany or Norway than to spend time visiting and dialoging with Somalia or Indonesia. Going outside of our comfort zones can allow some expansion of our world vision, but too often we let the chance pass us by. I know some of us have been to countries that are very different from ours, and perhaps have found that the romance of ‘the foreign’ pales after not finding things we have come to think of necessities available, or find the freedom of movement that we enjoy restricted. Should we assume our basic values are what the world should accept if they want to enjoy the life we do? Is that what they want? Our sureness that we know the best way, that we have the best means, that we are living the good life surely must gall countries that are much older and experienced than the US. As a people, we must welcome and embrace the differences in the world, learn other culture’s ways, listen to the knowledge of other societies.

With a world military budget of over $1 trillion dollars, it doesn’t seem to me that people or countries are ready for, or working toward peace. The US will spend over $711billion, 48% of the total cost. The UN spends less than 2% of the budget figure. If the countries that owe the UN arrears, we owe 94% of that total, perhaps the peace keeping by the UN could be more effective. Corrupt governments, power-hungry dictators, and ethnic cleansing might be dealt with in a more supportive, world-community fashion.
What can we do? Stay informed, write letters urging more support for the UN, work with overseas agencies like Heifer International and other groups that work for clean water, adequate food supplies, and social justice, get an overseas pen-pal. If we could do here in the US what other sources are doing overseas to raise standards of living, then we could offer help and solutions from a place of sufficiency. We must not be afraid of speaking out, of saying ’No, that’s wrong’. As Robert Kennedy said in the ‘70s:

It is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from. We dissent from the monstrous absurdity of a world where nations stand poised to destroy one another, and men must kill their fellow men. We dissent from the sight of most of mankind living in poverty, stricken by disease, threatened by hunger, and doomed to an early death after a life of unremitting labor.

We need to wage peace, not war, with forgiveness and love leading the way. I pray we can find the will and the ways to succeed and create a peaceful world.     

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS

a homily delivered by
The Rev Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish in Portland, Maine
Christmas Eve, December 24th, 2008

...and having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road....

We’re all familiar with the story, we’ve heard it many times; in fact, we just heard it again only a moment ago. But unfortunately, the story doesn’t actually end there, does it?

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what was said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” [Hosea 11:1]

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.” [Jeremiah 31:15]

The First Christmas begins with the birth of an innocent child: a child of humble origins, but with magnificent future potential. But it doesn’t end there; it continues with the slaughter of dozens (and perhaps hundreds or even thousands) of innocent children, because a tyrant feels threatened by a dream. From a child’s contagious laughter to the inconsolable weeping of the mothers of murdered infants...such is the REAL story of the First Christmas, so many centuries ago.

Speaking strictly as an historian, the Truth is that we actually know very little about the details of the birth of Jesus, other than that it probably wasn’t anything like the story the way it has been handed down by Scripture. And even there, we have two very different versions, which are easily harmonized since they don’t really overlap one another at all. Some of the small contradictory details -- for example, that the shepherds find the baby sleeping in a stable, but by the time the Magi arrive (traditionally, twelve days later) the family has apparently moved into a house -- can simply be ignored or rationalized away -- why would anyone remain in a stable any longer than they had to, once a house became available? But other historical discrepancies are not so easily overlooked.

Take something so basic as the actual date of this miraculous event. Luke records that Jesus was born during the census of Quirinius, which we know from external Roman sources took place in the Year 6 of the Common Era. But Matthew’s Magi are said to have spoken with Herod the Great, who we also know from independent sources died a decade earlier, in the year 4 BCE. Knowing that the Magi have traditionally been thought of as astrologers, some scholars have attempted to clarify these discrepancies by linking the birth of Jesus to an appropriately significant astrological event, such as the conjunction between Saturn and a retrograde Jupiter in the sign of Pisces in the 7th year Before the Common Era, or approximately three years prior to Herod’s death. And this would be where most contemporary scholars would date the event as well, the assumption being that Luke was simply mistaken in his information, and therefore dated things incorrectly himself. But we will never really know for certain, which simply adds to the mystery of this already mysterious, miraculous story.

When we begin to look at the events recorded in the Gospels under the cold light of modern historical scholarship, an entirely new set of issues emerge. The question is not so much “what do we know and what will we never know;” rather, the REAL question becomes: Why were these stories written the way they were, and what “Truths” were they intended to preserve?

Personally, I’ve always been particularly interested in the story of the Magi, which has actually evolved considerably from the few simple sentences recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. All Matthew tells us is that they were indeed Magi (whatever that means) and that they came from the East, that they saw a star in the sky, and brought with them precious gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. He doesn’t tell us how many there were, although because there were three gifts it was generally assumed there were (at least) three Magi as well. He doesn’t tell us their names either, although they quickly acquired some: Melchior, Balthasar, and Gasper (who is sometimes also known as Casper or even Jasper). Their promotion from Magi to Kings also takes place sometime during the first four centuries of the Common Era. According to one tradition, the Three Kings are also brothers: Gaspar is the King of Arabia, Melchior the King of Persia, and Balthasar the King of India. According to other traditions, they represent the three continents and the three ages of Humanity. Casper, the youngest king, represents Europe, and his gift of Gold represents worldly wealth and power. Balthasar, the oldest king, is the ruler of Ethiopia and represents Africa; his gift of Frankincense (a resinous perfume that can also be burned as incense) represents the priestly function, and is symbolic of prayer and also of sacrifice. Melchior is the middle-aged king and represents Asia -- perhaps Persia, perhaps India, perhaps even China according to at least one tradition. His gift of Myrrh is the most precious gift of all: an unctuous oil worth its weight in Gold (and six times more expensive than Frankincense), it is symbolic of death and the last rites, when we are anointed with oil and wrapped in a clean shroud of cloth, in preparation for at last meeting our Creator face-to-face.

It’s from the symbolism of the three gifts that all these other details have been extrapolated and made part of the tradition. None of it is historical, strictly-speaking; it is simply the elaboration of a story over time, a story which becomes more interesting with each retelling. The shepherds bring their gifts as well, but they are simple gifts appropriate to shepherds, and are intended to emphasize the humble aspects of Jesus’s origins. Born in a stable, he is destined to rule the world in fulfillment of prophecy. But he will not rule the world in the usual way, through violence and domination, like the Romans. Rather, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Reign of God, represents a very different view of the world, a world in which:

The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together... [Sibylline Oracles, 2.319-24]

Here we have a very different vision of World Peace: a peace unlike the Pax Romana, which was the product of Roman Imperial domination, kept in place for two hundred years by military power, economic exploitation and political hegemony, along with the underlying threat of violence which accompanies these realities. Rather, it is a vision which is grounded in a different kind of ideology, and inspired by ideals of Justice and Compassion. It represents a different kind of relationship to politics and the economy, as well as a society where the swords have been beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks. These are the prophecies pointed to in the Gospel narratives of the birth of Jesus. And though they may seem naive in the dangerous and sophisticated world in which we live today, they form the context of the Christmas story as we have come to know it: the final (and as yet unwritten) chapter following the Slaughter of the Innocents.

In their book The First Christmas: what the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, New Testament Scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan write:

One final point. It is not accurate to distinguish the imperial kingdom of Rome from the eschatological kingdom of God by claiming one is earthly the other heavenly, one is evil the other holy, or one is demonic the other sublime. That is simply name-calling. Both come to us with divine credentials for the good of humanity. They are two alternative transcendental visions. Empire promises peace through violent force. Eschaton promises peace through nonviolent justice. Each requires programs and processes, strategies and tactics, wisdom and patience. If you consider that peace through victory has been a highly successful vision across recorded history, why would you abandon it now? But whether you think it has been successful or not, you should at least know there has always been present an alternative options -- peace through justice.

“That clash of visionary programs for our earth,” Borg and Crossan continue, “is the content and matrix for those Christmas stories, and they proclaim God’s peace through justice over against Rome’s peace through victory...” But from where we sit today, two-thousand-some years after these events probably never took place, the challenges which confront us remain remarkably unchanged. Having now seen the star, having heard the angels sing on high, to which of these competing visions will we now bring our treasured gifts, be they simple (like those of the peasant shepherds), or Royal, like the gifts of the Magi?...

By One Elastic Thread to Thin Twigs—The Reverend Karen Lewis Foley

November 30, 2008

The Readings:

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A person will worship something…. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”Paul Tillich: “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness…. when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual…. when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign in us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted.

The Sermon:

The first Sunday of Advent. Advent, the “coming-to,” the season of waiting. If you’re Christian, you await the birth of the Christ child. If not an avowed Christian but a Unitarian Universalist person of faith, you might await—as I do—the opening of love and hope embodied in the birth of a child, shining forth from candles and lighted faces on Christmas Eve in our congregations all over this continent. A thorough-going secularist probably doesn’t make much of Advent, but still, this time of year, might be waiting—for the gathering of family and friends, the feast and the lights and the loving exchange of gifts. Whatever a person’s theology, in our culture this tends to be a time of waiting for something to come to us, and for ourselves to come toward the light, toward hope, toward love. It is a season of faith.

The word “faith” is uncomfortable for some people. Some people have told me they don’t have faith. They equate having faith with being required to assent to a certain set of beliefs which they find impossible. In some cases they’ve been wounded by a doctrine’s impossible demands, or its denial of their worth as human beings. For some it’s simply not credible because it doesn’t jibe with reality. Faith in the justice system evaporates in a trial gone awry. Faith in a God who is both kindly and all-powerful can become untenable when a child dies.

But I also find that people often talk about approaching life in a way that informs their work and relationships, that gets them through each day. When they talk about what they hold dearest, where they place their deepest trust, it turns out they do live from faith. Not from intellectual assent to beliefs. But experiential, sometimes even gut faith.

I like a version of the Psalms by Nan Merrill—she writes in contemporary language about her understanding of the divine as creative Love. Psalm 140 begins like this: “Deliver me, O Giver of Breath and Life, from the fears that beset me; help me confront the inner shadows/ That hold me in bondage, like a prisoner who knows not freedom.” How different from King James! And doesn’t this describe how we often experience our own lives? Psalm 140 ends: “I know that You stand beside those who suffer, and You are the Light of those imprisoned in darkness./ Surely You will guide us into the new dawn, that we may live as co-creators with You!”

While not all of us think of what holds and guides us as a personal “You”, these words seem to capture the kind of faith that comes not from intellectual beliefs but from hope, from the heart, from human experience. This seems to me what Paul Tillich is talking about when he says that in those terrible times when we struggle with our lives and ourselves, Something may break through to us, as if we are being told: “You are accepted.”

I’ve become very curious and respectful about what people have faith in, and about how we live it in our daily lives. It shows in simple daily encounters, and in what gets us through our darkest, longest nights. I won’t know a person’s faith by what he professes to believe. I’ll know it by how he speaks to a child or responds to being cut off in traffic. I’ll know it by how she does her job and how she spends her money. Do I live what I say I believe, or do I live from something more constricted, fear-driven, need-driven? I confess, in the darkest hours of the night it is sometimes the latter—as I imagine it is for many of us.

Our deepest faith isn’t always rational. In fact I suspect it usually isn’t. Once, at the end of a nursing home worship service I invited the residents to choose a favorite hymn. You know what they chose? “Jesus Loves Me!” Grown-ups singing “Jesus Loves Me”? Oh no, I thought, I’ll feel silly singing that old thing. But I saw bodies and faces come alive. Some half asleep while I was talking sang with shining, wide-open eyes. Their voices swelled like a little river and carried me with them, almost in tears. A faith had carried these people through a lot of years that somehow found its voice in this simple childhood song. I have never again disparaged such simple expressions of a person’s faith.

I once held a group discussion for people in various occupations to talk about how their faith informed their work. All spoke of their desire to do something worthy and decent, to embody integrity and foster human connection. An optician, for instance, instructed by management to talk customers into more expensive eyewear than they needed, refused to do so—a small but conscious act of faithful subversion.

Emerson says that we become what we worship, so we’d better watch what we worship. Our faith will out. It shows in how we act in the world. Essential trust in the goodness of life will make us act differently, than will fear and lack of trust. The world is full of people—we know them (sometimes we are them)—who talk a good faith game, but act from fear, greed, or lust for power. In Charmaine Craig’s novel, The Good Men, about the inquisition against the Cathars in medieval France, some characters believe they act from high and holy ideals but use them to meet their needs or accrue power.

The images we create of the ultimate are powerful. They can sustain; they can crush. They can inspire us to good; they can lure us to evil. But usually our attraction to evil comes through a misplaced faith—in something other than what we claim to hold holy. Like the Inquisitor of the novel, who thought he worshipped God and the teachings of Jesus, but really worshipped his own power and feared his own lust. If he really followed the teachings of Jesus he could not have killed people in his name.

As far as we know we are the only earthly creatures to develop a sense of transcendence, and maybe knowledge of our own mortality—though some animal behavior indicates that our non-human friends may know more about death than we realize. I wonder if we might be earth’s only creatures with a capacity for faith. I wonder if we are evolving toward faith in greater breadth and depth. Maybe some day faith in something more than physical survival, and getting our psychological, emotional, and spiritual way, will lead us to respect the many forms that healthy faith can take. And maybe some day we can even create world community.

There may be scientific support for this evolutionary view of faith. Connection between spirituality and health has been established and studied. Studies show that people who believe their physical conditions will improve tend to experience improvement—or to accept peacefully their decline and even death. Dean Hamer, a behavioral geneticist,* suggests that spirituality may have a genetic basis. And after all, genes evolve—so why not our spirituality? [This is my own conclusion.] Hamer cautions that science shouldn’t try to figure out whether God exists, but it can and should look at how people’s faith and beliefs affect their well-being.

But now I need to say something hard. I need to say that faith does not sustain everyone, all the time. I cringe whenever someone says, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” Years ago in a congregation I served, a much-beloved single woman in her thirties, who seemed to have everything going for her, but was profoundly affected by personal matters, killed herself. She was missing for several days before her body was found. Family, friends, and congregation were traumatized by her sudden, inexplicable suicide.

I was scheduled to preach about faith that Sunday. In the days before we knew her fate, I wondered: how could I say anything meaningful about faith to a congregation who by Sunday could be facing the question of whether or why a member had thrown away her life? If she sill hadn’t been found? If she had killed herself, what did it say about her faith, and how might it inform our faith in the goodness and meaning of her life?

That Friday before I went to sit with the family waiting for news, I went for a walk and thought about the unwritten sermon. I knew I wouldn’t write it until we learned Jolene’s fate, or, if we didn’t, until Saturday night. It was early December. From a tree branch overhanging the road swung an oriole’s abandoned nest, held by those amazing thin but tough threads that orioles weave to keep a home aloft for their chicks. The nest was getting tattered, blowing in the cold wind. I knew that eventually it would be torn away; but I marveled at how it hung on. I knew what I needed to say on Sunday.

Sometimes the twig is too thin. Sometimes the thread is not elastic enough. Sooner or later a nest is ripped from the branch by the wind. But usually it does hold until the oriole chicks don’t need it any more. Somehow the oriole nest spoke to me of how it feels to hang on with faith in the face of the terrible, and how, sometimes, in ways we might not understand, faith gets ripped away from a person. Most of the time, the thread holds to the twig. Maybe it is your faith that what you do in life makes a difference. Maybe it’s that your children or those you mentor will carry forward your essential values and lessons. Maybe it’s that whatever happens is part of a great plan. Or that whatever happens is just what happens and we must endure it. Or that whatever happens, the people in your life will hold you up with a web of love. Or that there is a greater loving presence that goes through it with us.

I’ve seen people die believing they will join their loved ones. I’ve seen people die comfortable with their faith that they will cease to exist except as memories in those who love them, or in their deeds. One woman, dying of cancer, showed me the world map on her wall, marked with all the places she and her husband had traveled. She said, “I’m looking forward to this last, great adventure!” I never cease to be amazed at the strength of faith—in never-ending varieties—that people bring to their living and their dying. And I want to have enough faith to sit in the stark, empty places with those whose faith is not strong enough to hold them, and witness to their struggle to make sense of their living and dying.

The great question is: what do you do with the reality that sometimes faith fails to sustain us? It simply isn’t true that “God never gives us more than we can handle.” No, God doesn’t do that! But it’s obvious that sometimes people get more than they can handle. Sometimes, their faith in whatever it is that holds it all together doesn’t hold it all together for them. The answer we each find to that dilemma bespeaks the faith that girds and shapes our life.

If anyone seemed to live an active and grounded faith, it could be Mother Teresa of Calcutta. But Mother Teresa has left us a chilling—or deeply inspiring, depending on how we see it—account of the absence in her life of the God she believed in. In being called to live her life among the poor and minister to them, she felt God through Jesus immediately present with her. She did exactly what God called her to do. And then she never again experienced God’s presence. For the rest of her life. God seems to have disappeared. She wrote, “I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer. The darkness is so dark and I am alone.” She even wrote of “terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

Mother Teresa, whose faith seemed so pure and true, toiling for years in poverty and painful work, exemplifying the love of God in action, felt abandoned by God. She even doubted that the God who called her and gave her work meaning existed. How could any of us do such difficult work for our whole lives, barely able to believe that what makes our work worthwhile is present for us, matters, or even exists? How would you do it? How you would do it embodies your faith.

The poet Jane Kenyon, who had bipolar disorder and cancer and died of leukemia, said that faith was how she lived through all of it. She transmuted her experiences into poems that ring with simple truth and deep faith in life. In her final illness she wrote of an ordinary day. Of each small event in it—breakfast, a walk, time with her husband—she says the words: “It might have been otherwise.” She finishes with the observation that some day it will be otherwise. Jane Kenyon’s faith, says her biographer, “isn’t passive, merely trusting that things will have a hopeful outcome, but it is active, pursuing the presence of God in a world rent by suffering.”

This is faith, it seems to me—whatever you call what is of deepest value and meaning in your life—that living is a wonder in the midst of the certainty that it will end. I want to end with part of a poem by Denise Levertov, called “Psalm Fragments.” It lifts up the difference between trying to believe in the kind of literal God that fails us finally, and experiencing faith in what I’ve finally come to call the great mystery at the heart of life:

This clinging to a God
for whom one does
nothing.

A loyalty
without deeds.

Tyrant God.

Cruel God.

Heartless God.

God who permits
the endless outrage we call
History.

Deaf God.

Blind God.

Idiot God.

Scapegoat god. Finally
running out of accusations
we deny Your existence.

I curl in Thy grey
gossamer hammock
that swings by one
elastic thread to thin
twigs that could, that should
break but don’t.

I do nothing. I give You
nothing. Yet You hold me
minute by minute
from falling.

The hammock may be as tough and fragile as an oriole’s nest. We are held there by one elastic thread. The twigs to which it holds us are thin; they ought to break. As long as they don’t, we are held—only minute by minute—from falling. It is for us to notice that we are held. It is for us to realize that we do not fall. It is for us to look up into the void and say, even to what we can’t be sure is there to hear or care or acknowledge: “Thank you, thank you. I’ll keep on keeping on. And for now I’ll rest here in this hammock, a little while.”* Dean Hamer is a behavioral geneticist at the National Institutes of Health and Cancer Research.

Theme: The Burning Bush as discussed in Rev. Stephen Shick’s Meditation, Please Turn

Bob Greenlaw, August 10, 2008

As the meditation I read from Reverend Shick’s book “Consider the Lilies” states we all have to turn and look at the flames sometime. Unwilling or willing we take up the cause and march on. Is this the divine? Or is it just our nature to help?

We step up and usher when asked. We give the right of way at the four corner intersection. I have not always practiced what I am preaching but I have learned a great deal about what it means to face the metaphoric burning bush.

When I was first asked to usher here at church some 11 years ago I was terrified of walking down the isle and collecting the offering from the congregation. I thought that I would forget a pew or drop the collection box.

I stood there handing out orders of service worrying and smiling. The people coming through the door were smiling and happy. They took there seats and the service started. When it was time to collect the offering I walked down the center isle and collected the offering without dropping the box. This was a big step in my life. I made it through that morning and have repeated that task more times than I can remember.

When I began writing this homily I was going talk about Moses and facing challenges in life.

What I discovered when I started researching the man was a view of Moses I had never heard or thought of, as stated in the back of one my Bibles “Moses the meekest man on earth” The meekest man on earth? This is a man who killed an Egyptian for beating a Jew. This is a man who talked to God, this is man who led his people out of slavery to their home land. How could he be the meekest man on earth?

The story of the burning bush has always interested me. As a child I watched Charlton Heston portray Moses in the epic film, Ten Commandments, that follows Moses through his life. He faces many choices in the story.

The treatment of the slaves, his background and his final role in the bible story made the story of Moses one of my favorites.

At the time of the burning bush portion of the story Moses had what seems to me an enviable life. His wife and children lived in the mountains of Midian, tending sheep and living off the land. His days were filled with work, love and laughter.

As the bible tells the story he arrives at a well, finds a wife and inherits a family. As years go by be climbs a mountain and finds God. The bible story is kind of boring.

In the movie he keeps looking at the Mountain Horeb, hearing a call to go up. His wife, played by Yvonne Decarlo, tends the sheep, cooks the meals and looks after Moses. He keeps hearing a voice. He is told not to go to the sacred mountain but cannot stop himself. He climbs and climbs and finally reaches the spot where he encounters the burning bush.

He does not dare to look upon the burning bush. God tells him to take off his shoes as he is on Holy ground. Moses feels unworthy.

We know the story of his conversation with God, his doubting and pleading.

God says he can assist Moses but he still doubts his ability to do God’s work.

It is quoted in Exodus 4:10

“But Moses said to the Lord “Oh my Lord, I am not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou hast spoken to the servant; but I am slow of speech and of tongue,” Then the Lord said to him “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak,” But he said, “Oh my Lord, send, I pray, some other person.”

This is where my homily took a turn; I decided to do more research as I was not impressed with the limited story of the Bible. After all I had viewed the official Cecil B. DeMille version.

As we know the web has many views and opinions; I felt I could find different versions of the story... a website on disability said that Moses was the most famous disabled person to date. I wondered what they meant by that, to me Moses was Charlton Heston acting in the famous movie.

I discovered that Moses was nearly 80 years old when he talked to God on the mountain. Now I have heard of many 80 year old people climbing mountains but this was just the beginning for Moses.

As the story says he begs God to let someone else take his place.

Many of have us have had times in our lives we have to face a dilemma or challenge. We tell ourselves we cannot do it and try to find a way to talk ourselves out of it; we may even ask friends in not so obvious ways to tell us what we want to hear.

Do we listen to that voice in our head or do we turn back to what is familiar and comfortable.

I doubt any of us will converse directly with God, learn magic tricks and lead our people out of slavery. But, I believe many of us will receive that push we need.

I have talked here before on my quitting drugs over 20 years ago with a simple prayer.

“God, please help me make it through tonight, if I do, I won’t touch drugs again”

That was a hill I did not want to climb and never thought I would, but that night I found a way through the night.

I really feel deep in my heart that a divine spirit guided me that night. If I was Moses or some other bible character I would have turned to a life of piety and prayer immediately. Unfortunately, like most mortals I did not see my talk with God immediately for what it was.

In the years that followed I fell in and out of thinking about the divine the way I do today.

Sometimes I would get into a discussion with a friend about God, or is there a heaven. I feel my UCC and Mormon upbringing prepared me for these talks but I am convinced I was always a UU without knowing it.

I would explain that as I believe that I have seen ghosts there must be another world. I would also theorize that we humans have electricity that keeps us going, when the light goes out the human becomes a body. There is something that keeps us going. But, I always said and thought that it was up to us to find the answer. I was never going to take someone’s word or believe the bible unquestionably. I have always been eager to learn but not easy to convince.

I sure wish just once, God would say to me as he supposedly did to Moses,

“Bob, Bob! Here am I.”

Luckily, I found the First Parish nearly 11 years ago. I found myself learning more about myself and the way I thought about my theology. I found myself praying every day and found myself receiving guidance. From the different Ministers here, in classes I attended and more importantly from fellow parishioners.

This church was my journey across the desert, this church was my well.

I have mentioned before that when I find myself faced with a difficult situation I give a prayer of thanks. I give thanks that I have a car to drive when I want to scream when I am sitting in traffic.

I give thanks that I can purchase food when I am stuck in the grocery line when the person in front of me realizes he forgot something and runs to get it.

These are the times I think to myself I am on the holy ground God told Moses about at the burning bush. As Rev. Shick wrote in his meditation, if we keep turning towards the burning bush much will be expected of us. But, is this a bad thing? Moses had a life long plan laid out for him; can we expect the same by turning towards that which calls us?

I feel many of us can sit back and see that our lives are much like the story of Moses or can be.

We start out being taken care of by people we view as kings and queens, or pharaohs. We grow up to point in our lives where we find out or parents aren’t the rich and powerful people we thought they were but are really almost slaves to the lives they lead and the lives they built.

We begin to hang out with our friends more and more, much like Moses traveling across the desert and finding a band of sheep herders, who like to drink and dance a lot.

We hopefully hear a call before we are eighty years old to make something our life’s work and if we are lucky we find something we enjoy and make a difference in other people’s lives.

Was this what the writers of the bible were trying to tell us? Even though I feel most of the story is true, I cannot help but feel there is always a parable somewhere in the story.

Moses was lucky when God became angry with him.

Think of what God could have done with Moses. Cease his existence, Turn him to pillar of salt or try him with some horrific task. Moses was lucky that day. He climbed the mountain and received what he was seeking, a clear answer in retrospect. Most of us will never be that lucky. God told me to? A few serial killers use that from time to time, but it usually does not work.

With most of us, we might take some time and pray. We may receive an answer but not see it for awhile. We may experience a life changing event and think all is lost only to find that it was change for the better in retrospect.

In thinking this story over and over this past week I feel the moral I get out of Moses’ story is this:

Each of us on earth, no matter what our backgrounds, circumstance, age, or disability, has the power to change the world.

It does not matter if you are eighty years old and slow of speech and tongue or a baby in a reed basket. You have the ability to make a difference everyday.

By listening to your inner voice, taking time to slow down and think situations over and maybe praying or meditating for a moment, your “God” may speak to you. He or She may give you the guidance to simply smile when you would like to frown or step up and rescue someone from the bonds of slavery.

Like Moses, I never know when I may be asked to turn and face the fire.

To simply keep in mind that you are on hallowed ground every time you are asked to turn and face the proverbial burning, you might find easier to think you just might make a difference in one person’s life or the whole world.

Janet Puistonen, July 20, 2008

A few weeks ago, my son graduated from high school. His godfather, Jeff, came up for the weekend, bringing with him five bags stuffed with books of poetry owned by his late partner, my best friend and my son’s other godfather, Martin. In preparation for this service, I started going through those bags, looking for something off the beaten path to use as a reading today. As I sifted through the stacks of yellowing paperbacks and occasional hard cover, I found books that I already had copies of, books that Martin and I had studied together in graduate school. When we met, on the C bench at the University of Chicago in 1977, I was years away from being a mother, much less the mother of a high school graduate, and Martin wasn’t out yet. His hair loss, to his chagrin eventually almost complete, was limited to a little tonsure-like area on the top of his head. The AIDS epidemic that would eventually sweep across the world and contribute to his death was brewing, but none of us had heard of it yet. I admit that I was mightily disappointed when I eventually realized that we would always be “just friends,” although that friendship grew to be one of the greatest treasures of my life.

One of the books in the pile was Five Temperaments, by David Kalstone. The jacket flap marked the section on James Merrill, a mutual favorite of ours. I wrote my senior honors thesis on James Merrill. Holding the book in my hands, I remembered Martin’s memorial service, and I remembered him telling me in one of our many long phone conversations between New Jersey and Maine that Merrill’s great poem Lost in Translation would be too long to read at his memorial service if he died before I did. When that day came, I read this poem by Yeats instead:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I put the jacket flap back in the book where his hands had placed it, marking the section on James Merrill, and put it back on the stack. Somewhere in our house, already replete with books, I will have to find shelf room for these.

There is no one in my life now who shared that experience of graduate school with me. Both of my closest friends from that era, Martin and Kate, died in their early forties. Like the Ancient Mariner, I alone survive to tell the tale. I can’t return I can only look, around from where I came, and go round and round and round in the circle game.

Soon, I will be what nowadays they call an empty-nester. Back in the 70s, when I graduated from high school, Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” was very popular. The almost cultlike status accorded to him always made me uneasy, as did his mystic aura and I tended to take him less seriously that some others I knew. But thinking about that time led me to revisit his words. Gibran wrote,

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I recall these particular verses being read at my high school baccalaureate, when I was the age my son is today. At that rite of passage, I think my fellow graduates and I understood them mostly as an unusually eloquent plea for our parents to get off our backs.

To one now teetering on a different brink, it resonates more deeply. The imagery offered by Gibran is certainly more positive and more inspiring than the negative space of the empty nest and investment company ads, usually featuring handsome grey-haired men with suspiciously young-looking wives.

At around that same time, Joni Mitchell’s album Ladies of the Canyon was released, and on that album was “The Circle Game.” Something about it struck me to the core even then. Although I was not yet of the age to drag my feet to slow the circles down, somehow I knew I would be, sooner than I might imagine.

This summer, the summer of my son’s graduation from high school, my mind and heart are flooded with these memories and images. I remember Chipper Hayden, whom I had known since first grade, when we girls used to love to chase him on the playground, and kiss him if we could catch him, playing the guitar and singing Sweet Baby James at that baccalaureate. Nowadays Sweet Baby James Taylor himself has grown children that perform with their mother, and he has for years been quite bald. Nowadays we would probably be disciplined for sexual harassment for our pursuit of poor Chipper!

So why am I talking about this today, with you?

The reason is that we are a church. Churches and temples are all about rites of passage. They have official ceremonies to mark the birth and naming of children, the entrance into adulthood, marriage, death. During the liturgical year they mark the eternal round of the seasons with Spring festivals, harvest home, the winter solstice, and the new year by whatever name, and there are many. As UUs, we’ve added some new rituals to the year: Flower Communion celebrates life as we transition into summer, Water Communion our ingathering as autumn approaches, the Burning Ceremony our determination to start afresh in the new year. We celebrate and mark these passages together as a congregation every year and that is good.

But there are many passages that we have no ritual to mark, and these are passages that we all have or may experience. Our hymn book contains readings and hymns for all sorts of categories: Change, The City, Compassion, Goodness, Gratitude, and the somewhat mysterious These Things Shall Be. (One of the hymns in that category is Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which we sang this morning to help bring ourselves into that state that we UUs call “worship.”) But one finds no mention of such passages as separation, divorce, unemployment, illness, and homelessness. Or more joyful ones: becoming a grandparent, moving into a new phase of one’s education or career, fulfilling a lifelong dream to travel, moving into a new home, reuniting and re-establishing relationships. Or, for that matter, becoming the parent of a Dartmouth freshman.

We have created a ritual way to share these passages in our lives in our weekly Joys and Concerns, although many go unspoken. Since adding the silent candles to our services, we on the Worship Committee have been astounded by the number of people who choose to light a silent candle every week. Clearly, there is a lot happening in our lives that we bring to church on Sunday mornings, things that we hope to find the strength and inspiration to deal with positively, or perhaps the strength simply to bear.

Why do YOU go to church? Do you need help finding the spiritual strength to keep moving forward with positive energy? Sometimes you might need help just finding a reason to get up in the morning. Your life needs a purpose and a meaning beyond eating sleeping and consuming in the modern manner. Perhaps you need a moral and an ethical dimension structured into your life. That is why *I* first came to a UU church, when I was pregnant with that very child whose graduation into early adulthood we have just celebrated. Perhaps you need something to put a positive spin on existence. Some people have faith in a resurrection and an afterlife. Some of us aren’t so sure. But we all need wings to fly, and a nest, empty or not, to fly from. The lesson of the circle game is this: We are ALL someone’s children, dwelling in the house of tomorrow. We are ALL arrows launched from the bow, our parents, and their parents, and all of the generations before us. And somehow when that vision is shared in a beloved community like this one, it seems easier to have faith that we can make that arrow’s flight.

To quote another song that isn’t afraid to be sentimental, to lay its heart bare, and has provided inspiration to many, “I can fly higher than an eagle, ’cause you are the wind beneath my wings.” YOU are the wind beneath my wings.

Blessed be.

Reading: Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art" may be seen at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15212

Beth Marshall, June 29, 2008

When people ask me if I enjoy working by myself…for myself…I always say, “Yes, it’s terrific.” Working with one client at a time over several weeks or months, worrying a problem and shrugging a solution into place graphically and technically. Sure, I love it. At the Rhode Island School of Design, I solved four years of impossible design problems before graduation (said the White Queen to Alice).

But I don’t really work alone. For some months now, my constant companions…perched on the stand of my computer monitor…have been a Nicaraguan chocoyo, an urraca, a gallina, a guardabarranco, and a tucan, their gaily painted little birdie bodies…expressive faces peering toward me faithfully…remind me not to take myself too seriously (a task I had once invested in my Mickey Mouse watch). It’s nice having company while I code.

So I guess it is only fair that as I rooted through the rest of my mother’s boxes this week, I came across evidence that I am not the first in the family to live with miniatures.

But we’ll get to that.

SPIRIT OF LIFE, COME UNTO ME

I’ve always been from away. Mom and Dad moved to Western New York after Dad graduated from MIT. I grew up believing that distance enhanced relationships…it was normal for your grandparents to live 400 miles away, and odd to live in the same town as aunts and uncles. Cousins were a once-a-year treat.

These are illusions, and pretty good barriers to getting to know your own family better. I marveled at high school classmates who STILL live in the town we grew up in, though I find it hard to call it my “Home” town. I didn’t know what I was missing, but I thought I knew what THEY were missing.

As I drive the New York Thruway and the Massachusetts Turnpike, the high cliffs of the Mohawk and the rolling farmland of central New York change like a slow-motion, time-lapse movie—a wonder surpassed only by seeing tiny houses and towns from the air on a cloudless day. I love Google Earth. Something about being in the picture and seeing the big picture…

I also love travel…new experiences, exploration, local accents, humor, food. I learned from visiting my sister Margaret, who lived in Brazil and Argentina, and our daughter Jenn, who studied a year in France and now lives in Nicaragua.

Leaping from the trampoline of a plane trip to land in a new place, sometimes it’s nice to find a familiar restaurant—the first place I ate in Managua was TGI Friday’s. But the overall effect of those chains is a kind of sameness-making of local flavors, and La Cocina de Dona Haydee’s traditional food is a perfect antidote to International blandness.

SING IN MY HEART ALL THE STIRRINGS OF COMPASSION

I used to brag about the number of places I had lived (8) …places I worked (8) …places I sang (8) …schools I attended (7) [Click here for a complete account]. Throw in Girl Scout camps and family vacation campgrounds, and there’s a lot of scenery and living collected in my psyche.

Lists and litanies, cataloging and categorizing—seeing connections and relationships between the parts of life—measuring and sizing up. An artist is an inveterate “looker-at-everything.” Every place is well-loved…Girl Scout camp, Rhode Island School of Design, Second Wave Magazine and Female Liberation, Serif & Sans, Inc., First Parish.

BLOW IN THE WIND, RISE IN THE SEA

Lately, I’ve been developing skills for creating things that end up on that higher plane, the Internet, skills that can travel, that I can use anywhere with a connection. Joy blooms in the process of helping someone to ’get themselves on the web:’ Partly satisfaction with the final product, yes, but the true fun is in the process.

So I empathized at a fundamental level as I leafed through carton after carton of Mom’s computer printouts this week…notes, first drafts, IBM cards, mockups, and component parts of her 1977 MIT Master of Science Thesis, “Developing Independence in the LOGO Student.”

(“There are at least two notions of independence to be considered in LOGO: first in importance is independence in pursuing ideas and in thus gaining insight into and some control over one’s own learning experience. First in chronology is independence in using LOGO and in controlling the direction of one’s own projects.”)

Mom tested her hypothesis on a six-year-old, a thirteen-year-old, and a number of adults.

What is LOGO? The Logo Foundation says: The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its features — interactivity, modularity, extensibility, flexibility of data types — follow from this goal.

Her joy was her work and her research; her colleagues got the brainy side of her all those years. They also got at least as much zaniness as we kids did. She once recalled being deemed—or deeming herself—the “Chief Hanger-Upper,” when as a computer science student at the U of R, she efficiently (she thought) made the lines of her computer programs few…but made each line so long that the mainframe froze up trying to parse them.

Mom’s voice is clear in her letter to a department store executive, encouraging him to consider installing moving sidewalks and putting islands in the store parking area to make the lot safer for pedestrians making their way between car and store.

(“I do not sell the equipment, and my husband is profitably employed…” she wrote.)

I can’t put her back together from these printouts and carbon copies, or discern her thought processes, her vision. So we kept the letters and one copy of the final Thesis, and consigned the rest to the recycler. I had a momentary urge to forward one to each of my brothers, Ren and Charles, and a final urge to save them both from their decision to toss the papers out when *they* downsize in a few years.

MOVE IN THE HAND, GIVING LIFE THE SHAPE OF JUSTICE

I recycled many years of Technology Review (even the alumni issues with Mom’s and Dad’s class notes), and a mother-lode of National Geographics… In the lingo of a person ’about-to-hire-a-mover-who-charges-by-the-pound,’ National Geographium is the heaviest element known to man or woman. I’ve mined 5 years of issues of This Old House for the handy pullout features. I’m not doing a perfect job of thinning and tossing, no matter what the fine folks at Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore see of the “goods” that I’ve shuffled off to them. As Jenn says, “You can’t get rid of everything;” some of it makes you who you are, or at least helps to *remind* you.

ROOTS, HOLD ME CLOSE; WINGS SET ME FREE

In the last carton that I trolled through this week, I found a flat, dusty Jordan Marsh box—the kind that might have once held a dozen hankies or a gently-folded silk scarf interleaved with tissue paper.

When I was small, Mom let me play with her “china dolls,” small painted figures made of white clay, that she kept in a “Best’s” box. Both Jordan Marsh and Best’s are the preferred shopping places of past lives, having gone out of business in one way or another. Now, even the boxes are evocative.

The Jordan’s box was filled with small bundles, some wrapped in waxed paper, a few in crumpled shreds of a 1951 Clinton, Massachusetts, newspaper

(“Enjoy a Delicious Thanksgiving Dinner Served in the Friendly and Pleasant Atmosphere of Our Skylight Dining Room…Roast Turkey or Roast Duck $2.50…Children $1.50”).

The only calamities are a plaster girl in a tiered dress (who lost her head) and a shell penguin whose glue dried out. Surviving are a little dog with a top hat and cane sitting on a chair, a couple of Scottie dogs on a celluloid seesaw, a bunch of little cats on a celluloid playground slide, a number of monkeys of various sizes and styles, a really long-horned bull, a pink lamb carved of coral, two different donkeys, a couple of polar bears, a painted lead Indian, and a cast-metal couple sitting on a park bench.

I don’t know their stories, but they are ’cunnin’.

Grammy Carter grew up in Clinton. Why were these things wrapped up in 1951—I’m sure she had not lived there since the 1920s—whose were they?

They are my Mother’s or my Grandmother’s “You can’t get rid of everything” things.

I’m forcing myself to recycle first drafts of my own projects, after I recycle Mom’s. My friend Fran will help me wade through Margaret’s book drafts…

My next great adventure, after getting my Certificate of Web Design from Portland Adult Ed, is to move to The Woodlands, north of Houston—far from Portland, but much closer to Nicaragua.

My roots are part of me and make me who I am, and those little guys are going with me to the new house.

First, I have some cataloging and categorizing and packing to do. But do stop by sometime before we go…we’ve had the house painted and the barn fixed, and pretty soon the house will look the way we have imagined it looking all these years. When vision and reality coincide, maybe it’s time to move on…We’ll flutter free and put down new roots.

SPIRIT OF LIFE, COME TO ME, COME TO ME.

Rev. Karen Lewis Foley, June 8, 2008

“The Rabbi’s Gift”—a story. A once-thriving abbey had fallen on hard times. Brothers had been leaving, novices were not joining, there was no longer quite enough food, and morale had deteriorated badly. The Abbot, deeply worried, went off into the woods to consult the Rabbi, locally known as a wise man who often retreated to his woodland hut to meditate and reflect. The Rabbi welcomed him warmly and invited him to have a meal with him. Over the meal and some tea they talked at length about their abbey and synagogue. The Abbot confided his deep concern over the state of the abbey. The Rabbi listened respectfully. Finally he said, “My dear friend, I do not know what to tell you you should do. I wish I had wiser words for you. But I have no advice at all to offer. I am so sorry.” The Abbot said, well, never mind, he had enjoyed their visit as always and he would just go back to the abbey and continue to make the best of it he could. As he got up to leave, the Rabbi said, “Oh, there is just one thing I can tell you. One among you in the abbey is the Messiah.”Upon the Abbot’s return the monks all gathered round and asked him, well, what did the Rabbi say? The Abbot shook his head. “He couldn’t make any suggestions or give any advice. He just said one thing, and it was, I must tell you, extremely odd.” He paused for a moment. “The Rabbi said that one of us, here in the abbey, is the Messiah.”The monks were astonished. They all went off to think this one over. One of them the Messiah? Rabbis do know about messiahs, so they had to take this seriously. Each monk began to run through the list of possible candidates for messiah. The obvious choice, the Abbot? Well, maybe, but he really did have his faults…. Brother John, always willing to serve? But so foolish at times…. Brilliant Brother Thomas? But he was a bit short-tempered, surely the Messiah wouldn’t be short-tempered…. Me? Oh, God knows it couldn’t be me! Could it…? And so on…. None of them had any idea who among them could possibly be the Messiah.

But a change came over the abbey. The brothers began to smile at each other more often, to listen more carefully to each other, to treat each other with more respect than before. After all, any one of them could be the Messiah, and you wanted to be sure you treated the Messiah well! Then something else began to happen too. People who visited the abbey noticed a difference in the atmosphere, and more of them began to show up at services. Over time, new brothers joined the community. Women began to ask to join as well, and with their arrival a new way developed of relating to each other with a greater sense of wholeness about the place. Within a few years the abbey was a thriving place with plenty of food and supplies, but most of all a spirit of mutual respect and goodwill among the sisters and brothers. It had become a real community.

This story is told by William Houff in Infinity in Your Hand. I retell it in my words and add the women coming to join the abbey.

The Sermon:

Remember Julie in our story, whose friend’s doll got broken and she stayed to “help her cry?” We all know that sometimes something in our life is too broken to be fixed. We need someone not to try to fix it, but to stand with us in our pain, as helpless as us but unafraid to be with us. It’s one of the most important things ministers are called to do—but not only ministers. We are all called upon, sooner or later, to really be with someone, and we all need someone, sooner or later, to really be with us.

Com-passion means simply, feeling with. Julie felt with her friend because she could imagine what it would feel like if her own doll broke. Suffering understands that it isn’t about fixing, but about being fully present in the unfixable. Buddhism is grounded in the knowledge that experiencing our common bond of suffering with others allows us to grow in compassion. Lama Surya Das has said,

…it’s important to understand that spiritual rebirth in Buddhism is not a mystical encounter with God. Enlightenment is not about becoming divine…. it’s about becoming more fully human…. we are talking about walking a compassionate path of enlightened living. The Zen master Dogen said, ’To be enlightened is to be one with all things.”“Being one with all things” is easy to accept. But there is another knowing, a feeling and experiencing, in our bones and hearts and souls. Not as in “oh I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand.” But as in “Humanity is the people I can’t stand and I know I’m one of them.” It’s being fully with those you meet each day at work, in your car, your home. Thich Nhat Hanh says that in order to have compassion, you have to be able to look deeply at another person. This means you have to let that person’s experience into yourself.

Most of us don’t really want to let in someone’s suffering—because suffering hurts. That is why, when someone has a terrible loss, some say things like, “It’s for the best.” “At least your loss isn’t as bad as my sister’s was.” They mean to make the other person feel better, but the other feels worse, because those words deny the hideous weight of the loss and the person is left to carry it alone.

The ability to feel with another carries us beyond suffering and expands our relationships because it lets us see people as they are in themselves. When we can imagine the experience of someone else, we begin to see ourselves differently. Under similar circumstances, we ourselves might even be like someone we don’t like! We can understand our profound connectedness with others.

But isn’t it wrong not to hold people accountable for their wrong behavior? I believe we do need to discern right from wrong, to recognize and name evil as it occurs. But to focus on the evil in others as if it defines them is to separate ourselves from them, and to ignore the potential for evil in ourselves. Nancy Napier says, when she began doing a loving kindness meditation, a Buddhist practice:

Initially, I resisted it. While it wasn’t so hard to wish myself happiness, to do so with people with whom I was angry felt like letting them off the hook. It was as if I were overlooking what they had done…. With practice, I discovered something that surprised me. Wishing myself and others well-being reduced the distress and tension.…it gave me someplace new to go with my upset, an internal state of openness instead of constriction, of letting go instead of becoming mired in irritation or frustration…. wishing [people] freedom from suffering even when we disagree with them or don’t like them expands our sense of who they are as whole people.

So, when we hang onto anger and resentment we hang onto struggle and pain. When we accept another in his or her wholeness we can also accept our lousy feelings toward that person as a part of ourselves. When we accept those bad feelings as our own, we diminish their power over us and discover a measure of peace. This paradox works for me, over and over, as I continue my own struggle toward greater wholeness. No coincidence that Jesus of Nazareth suggested people pray for their enemies. Jesus and the Buddha are two of the world’s most insightful psychologists.

We cannot have true compassion for others without this willingness to let go into our commonality with others. Sympathy, a sense of “being sorry for”, yes. But that is not the ability to feel with and to see oneself in the other. Genuine compassion arises from both our wholeness and our brokenness. Being whole means knowing our own brokenness. When we do, we will not despise someone else’s brokenness.

The story of the fallen abbey’s resurrection is about a number of things—community, how to treat others, hope, transformation. But today I want to lift up the clue to compassion which the rabbi offered. “One among you is the Messiah.” What was that about? I don’t think he meant the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, or the person of Jesus. Just that every person holds a piece of the human puzzle, a clue, a key to salvation. And when the monks heard this Good News, look at what happened! Everyone in the community began to look deeply at each other, with all their flaws, and appreciate each other as whole beings. And everyone began to look deeply into himself, his wholeness and brokenness. “Oh, no, it couldn’t be me! I’m not worthy! But if it’s one of us—and we’re all flawed—perhaps it could”.

That was the rabbi’s message: there is something saving in each of us. We aren’t really separate. The brothers’ transformed consciousness saved the failing abbey: they drew together their community, and drew in others because people are drawn to connection and compassion. “Church building,” says Thich Nhat Hanh, “does not mean just organizing. [It] means leading your life in such a way that the church becomes more and more tolerant, understanding, and compassionate so that every time the people go to the church they can touch the Holy Spirit.”

And haven’t you here at First Parish been living, this year, this deep knowledge in the heart of this matter? Haven’t you been drawing together with compassion for your individual and communal struggles and losses as you move through this time together? Haven’t you been seeing in each other, from time to time, the faces of messiahs? Haven’t you felt you can touch the Holy Spirit here? Won’t you know, as in a few minutes you take a flower from the children in your annual ritual, that you are holding a fragile reminder of the beauty of every other soul among you?

A woman I know put netting over her new blueberry bushes to keep birds from eating the berries. One morning she found a bird struggling, its feet tangled in the netting. She woke her son, gave him plastic bags, and told him to put them on his hands and hold the bird while she untangled it Between their efforts, off flew a very relieved bird. And her son beamed, “Aw, Mom, doesn’t it feel great to save a life first thing in the morning?” What a way to start a day! I dare say that mother and son that morning sensed their connectedness with that raider of blueberry bushes—she stopped using netting and now shares her blueberries with the birds.

That calling of deep to deep, life to life, brokenness to brokenness, messiah to messiah, is the heart of compassion. It may be our potential human salvation. We can easily despair for humanity and even the earth itself when we look about at the self-concern that ignores the greater need, the hunger for power, even the obviously twisted and evil, so rife among us and in the world. Since our earliest days, we humans are programmed to protect those who share our genes, living quarters, and values, and to view the stranger—a potential threat—with hostility and aggression. This is our human evolutionary heritage.

But it isn’t the whole of it. There is also the instinct that made the mother and son save the bird and the son cry out, doesn’t it feel great to save a life first thing in the morning? The instinct that made Julie help her friend cry over her broken doll. And don’t we have a choice about the instincts we follow?

So I’m thinking maybe we humans are at a juncture in our evolutionary history. I’m imagining we have an opportunity, now, to purify the bile of hostility and nurture the heart of compassion. I’m dreaming we have a chance to shape our own evolution, to grow humanity into the fullness of our being. I’m hoping we go for it. Because the Messiah is among us.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and the Buddha as Brothers

Nancy Napier, “Compassion and Lovingkindness,” a chapter in Sacred Practices for Conscious Living

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao Daily Meditations

Lama Surya Das

Sunday, June 1, 2008 Rebecca Hinds, Director of Religious Education

This morning we have so much to be joyful for. This community, this sacred space, is blessed today with the presence and energy of our children and youth. We have rejoiced in our recognition of the dedication and commitment of our fine RE teachers and volunteers. This is truly a day for celebration.

For those of you who may not have young children or who may be new to First Parish, this business of “RE” probably sounds a bit confusing. You may not be the only one asking yourself, what does RE stand for? Well, today we speak about Religious Education.

Sometimes I feel like the Alphabet Soup of Unitarian Universalism is no where more prevalent than it is in the world of Religious Education. In the last few months as my friends and family have asked me what exactly this new job I have is, it usually takes at least a few minutes to explain precisely what my position as “DRE of a UU church” is all about. When I first began connecting with other local DREs you can imagine my surprise (and delight) upon discovering that not only am I part of a community of DREs, but I am also part of a network of Y.A.D.R.E.s. That is Young Adult Directors of Religious Education. We call ourselves YADREs.

So, what is Religious Education and why does it matter?

It is my belief that everything we do here at First Parish — everything — is Religious Education.

I speak from the perspective of someone who was raised in a UU church.

I speak remembering how difficult it was to explain my religious identity to other children on my block and in my school.

I speak as a former youth group leader and young adult who remained active in her church during the years when most Young Adults drop out of the movement.

And I speak this morning as a DRE who yearns for the kind of education and exploration that will light our spirits on fire.

Throughout this hour together the members of the RE Community and I will be sharing and articulating different visions of Religious Education, allow me to share one with you one that I am particularly fond of. The Rev. Sylvia Stocker once said, “Within a covenantal community, Unitarian Universalist religious education provides tools for individuals of all ages to touch and deepen their inner spirits, to access a sense of awe in the face of mystery and grace beyond human understanding, and to discover and serve the world beyond the church doors. Our goal is to help people grow into their best selves. We learn from direct experience of the world, from world religions, from the stories of wise people, both within our tradition and outside it, and from establishing and living into covenants with one another. ”

Our goal is to help people grow into their best selves.

To that end, RE cannot simply happen during that activity called “Sunday School.” Other denominations may reduce Sunday School and education to book learning and memorization, but as UUs we dare to believe in the radical idea that RE is a lifelong process of growth and a yearning for spiritual depth.

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a UU church. I regularly attended Sunday School as a child. In Jr. High and High School I looked forward to Youth Group every week. I have often reflected on my experiences as a young UUer. What was it about the church that kept me going, even in those later years when my parents decided that going to church was no longer important? Was it an intellectual passion for the UU history we studied? Was it the sense of tradition I encountered? Was it the sense of awe and appreciation I developed for the outdoors as we explored the natural world? Maybe it was merely the fun I had with other, like-minded kids. The strongest case, I used to imagine, was that I loved the feeling of being able to make a difference as my church engaged in social action and justice making activities within the larger community. In my experience, being raised a UU provided me with an understanding of activism and the critical need for a liberal religious voice promoting peace and justice in the world. I wanted to change the world and the church gave me a voice.

All of those truly awesome components of my UU background held me in the movement.

But my point is this. At its most basic level, Religious Education and the programming that kept me and will keep all of our young people involved at First Parish is not the curriculum, the teaching method or even the message itself. RE is about community. It is about finding support in our most vulnerable endeavors, those of the spirit.

In my childhood church I felt profoundly held by a loving community.

I felt safe at church.

I knew that the adults deeply cared about me.

And most importantly, I felt supported during the intense joys and sorrows of adolescents.

Of course I will never forget all of the fun my friends and I had. The camping trips, the music we made, the games we played, the anti-war group we formed at school. All of these playful, joyful aspects of Religious community are essential. But UU communities really thrive when children and adults feel safe enough to fully explore their identities and spiritual, religious beliefs.

Religious Education, therefore is not just about what happens on Sunday morning — in this sanctuary, or upstairs in our RE classrooms. Religious education happens, for all of us, everyday. Everything we do at First Parish and as a community is fertile ground for learning. Religious Education occurs in that liminal space between each of us as we create a safety-net for Religious Exploration.

In her essay Doorway to the Sacred, Makanah Elizabeth Morriss writes, “religious education is all about unlocking people…unlocking doors of creative possibilities, unlocking minds with new ideas and the permission to think for oneself, unlocking hearts that may have been hurt by life’s experiences so that healing may occur and joy and compassion may be experienced more fully.”

On this passage Rev. Stocker responds, “I believe that kind of unlocking can only occur when people feel safe. Perhaps one of our growing edges as a denomination is to learn how to build for adults the kinds of safe havens we expect for our children. Because, after all doesn’t everyone deserve to feel held and nurtured? Doesn’t everyone deserve to become his or her best self? If we learn how to be a community that nurtures its members and helps them to blossom, isn’t that one of the ultimate goals of religious education? If we can harness the nurture and love of our community to grow our souls, isn’t that one of the ultimate goals of religious education?”

In our Religious Education programming for children and youth, our young people grow accustomed to talking about theology. This is what kept me going to church as I young person. I needed a place and a community with whom I could discusses matters of spirit and religion. I welcomed the opportunity to debate deep theological issues.

Here at First Parish, children are likewise encouraged to ask questions — to think about and explore their own personal beliefs and theology. RE class is a safe space for children to play, learn, and grow.

Over the years I’ve noticed that many adult Unitarian Universalists appear uncomfortable and shy away from discussions of theology. To be sure, each adult who has made it through our doors has a story to tell about the spiritual journey that brought them here. Many members have stories of exodus and pain from past religious experiences. To those people, our congregation offers support and love. We offer an ear to listen to your story, and a safe haven to create a new spiritual story.

But where, then, is our common ground? At what point do we stop talking about where we have been and what we are not, and begin a discussion about who we are and what we have in common?

As a child, I distinctly remember explaining to my Catholic and Christian friends that I was a UU because I did not believe in whatever issue it was that they were pressing me on. Of course no child may be able to articulate the complex theology and history of Unitarian Universalism, but to any child or adult out there who struggles with the question “what do UUs believe in?” You can always say this. Unitarian Universalists believe in YOU.

Likewise, this church believes in you. Each one of you. Each and every child and teenager and adult in this sanctuary has a beloved community behind them encouraging them to religious exploration and spiritual depth.

How do we grow into our best selves? We continue learning. We push forward. Our religious identity and experience is constantly evolving. We are on this journey together and when we need it, we have one another.

If Religious Education is all about unlocking people, let’s make that happen at First Parish. Let us engage together in the risky business of opening our hearts and discovering the content of our souls.

In each of our encounters, at all of our committee meetings, music rehearsals, pancake breakfasts, and every other activity, may we be held in beloved community, with permission to ask the tough questions and talk about theology.

May this be a church where children, youth, and adults are supported, minds are inspired and opportunities for growth never cease. May we be cradled in the safety-net of community in our never-ending journey of religious education.

Mother’s Day May 11th, 2008, Love is a Verb, Ashley Lasbury

By nature I am a story teller. A teller of tales. Like my height, some are tall. Some, like my youngest child, are short. Often times, like all of my children, they are funny. But all are real. They are a way for me to speak my truth and find the humor in my everyday life. This morning I would like to share with you the story of how I learned to love. And by love, I do not mean the feeling of being in love. Of our cultures popular definition of love. But my journey to the realization that Love is a Verb. And if a verb, by definition, is an action, then it only makes sense that love is an act of will requiring effort. And a choice.

As with any good story, we must start at the beginning. In this case, that would be the choice that my husband and I made to start a family. You see, I had known since I was a teenager that I did not want to have any children. I am the eldest of 5 daughters and felt that I had already done a life times worth of child care by the time I was a young woman. Yet it’s a woman prerogative to chance her mind and in time our first daughter was born. To this very day I am astounded that they let us take her home from the hospital. We had not a clue how to care for the small human being in our arms. She came with no operating instructions. No warranty. She spoke a language we did not understand. It amazes me that we have managed to keep her alive for almost 16 years.

What I was not prepared for was the love. I had loved the idea of her for many, many months. Yet, when she was placed in my arms and I looked into her eyes, I was lost. I fell in love. At the time I had planned to return to work but soon realized that I did not want to miss a moment of her growing up. I made the choice to become a stay at home mom. A choice I was lucky to have the option to make as many women do not.

Time passed and we decided that if one was fun, two would be even more so. As I carried my second daughter under my heart I did fret. In the middle of the night, when our fears tend to bubble to the surface of our consciousness, I worried. How could I love another child as completely as I loved my first? Would there be room in my heart? Yet, when my green eyed girl was placed, screaming, into my arms, I once again lost my heart. And even though she is a very different person from her sister, I fell as deeply in love that second time as I had the first. And I learned that my heart is not a room of finite space but as big as the whole outdoors. There was infinite room.

So, life was good. My daughters were growing. They were easy, biddable children. Not perfect, but real and funny and stubborn and smart. By the time my second was three years old I had grown confident in my mothering skills. I would even go so far as to say arrogant. I knew what I was doing and I loved my life. In those years it dawned on me that mothering; the growing and teaching and guiding of children, was what I was meant to do. It challenged me on so many different levels. Forced me to stretch, search and grow. They were teaching me as much, if not more, than I was teaching them. And, best of all, it was fun. We were all having fun.

So much fun that we decided to have another child. Yes, going from man to man defense to zone was going to be a challenge, but we both liked challenges. And there were no late night fears this time. I knew the capacity of my heart. I had assumed that I would have another daughter. Her name was going to be Isabel. But my personal God, she has a wicked sense of humor. When the midwife placed my new child into my arms and I had wiped the tears of joy away enough to see, the first words out of my mouth were “what is that between her legs?” Much to my wonder and chagrin, I was the mother of a son. And he was perfect in every way. Falling in love with him was as easy and natural as a summer sunset.

I must take a moment to speak of my son. He is a wonder and a joy. But he is also a very challenging soul. I often say to him that God brought us together for a reason. He is meant to teach me patience and wisdom and I am to teach him how to be a great man. If I can keep him alive until then. He often drives me to distraction. He has humbled me as a mother. Early on he knocked me off of my pedestal and has kept me on the ground ever since. Kept me grounded. He has taught me that what I don’t know about parenting far exceeds what I do know. He has forced me to stretch and grow in ways that were often painful. He made me realize that love was not the feeling. Love was something much, much more.

Those years after he was born were difficult. I had been home, full time, for 7 years. The joy I found in mothering was beginning to be tarnished by the day to day drudgery of caring for my family. The constant rounds of laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, errands and basic bodily care of small children, all while living with the inevitable fatigue of night feedings and waking, began to wear me down. I had signed up to be a mother but what I needed was a wife. It was the mindless repetitive nature of the work that dulled my spirit. The routine and the sameness of each day, which is so important to children but can be so hard to live as an adult, was at times mind numbing I was restless and increasing unhappy. The fun was harder to find, the laughter less frequent.

Inspiration, life changing ideas; often come from the most unlikely places. When I needed it most but did not even know I was looking, a new way to live presented itself. It came from a cooking magazine, of all places. Cook’s illustrated to be exact. The editor, Christopher Kimball, starts each issue with a lovely piece of writing. One weekend, while at my Mom’s for a little R & R, I picked up an issue and started to read. He wrote about his love of cooking. For me, cooking had always been just another chore. If I could not get it on the table in 20 minutes, I didn’t cook it. The least amount of time spent in my kitchen, the better. But this man was writing about cooking the love he felt for his family into each and every meal he prepared.

It began to occur to me that if I could cook love into the food I fed my family that maybe; just maybe, this could work for other chores. Could I fold love into the laundry? Wash the dishes with love? Could I rethink how I walked the days of my life by seeing what I did with my hands and my body in this new light? It took time. It also took mindfulness. And, to be honest, it was done in fits and starts. But whenever I feel myself slipping back into the dullness I remind myself that everything that I do for my family I can choose to do with love. Is an act of love. Well, maybe not cleaning the bathrooms. I’m still working on that one.

Once again, I had my feet on the ground. Life became lighter. There was more laughter and more fun. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? You see, someone was still missing. My husband and I talked long and hard about having another child. The reasons not to were all valid. The con list was long. One thing kept coming up, though. Someone was missing. For both or us. For all of us. So we decided to leap into the unknown one more time. Against all of the odds. My age. Our family finances. Our mutual sanity. One more time. One more child.

Our little girl was born 6 years ago. She slid into the world surrounded by her siblings, her three aunts and her father. She arrived in a rush and once she was in my arms and I had kissed her salty brow, I thought to myself, “We are all finally here. Let the party begin.” And of course, as with all of the others, I fell in love. Madly in love.

To be totally honest, the next two years were very challenging. It was hard work. But no one ever promised me that parenting was going to be easy. People often ask me what it is like to have four children and I always give the same answer: Loud. It is just plain loud. There seems to be someone always screaming. Screaming with joy. Or laughter. Pain or anger. Just plain loud.

The only thing that stands out about that time after my last child was born is that those two years passed in a flash. If pressed I would not be able to tell you even one good story from that time. I was too tired and too busy. But then something happened that profoundly changed my life. My husband and I separated. And a year later we were divorced. Please know that my ex husband and the father of my children is a good man, a good father and still my friend. All things that I can say now with truth.

Obviously, divorce was not in the life plan that I had written for myself. We do not always have a choice about the path we are going to walk in this life. Bad things happen. Unfair things. Terrible things. But even though we do not always get to choose the path we walk, we do get to choose HOW we walk the path. That is the true measure of a man or a woman. How we choose to live in the face of the unexpected. Once again, at a time when I was lost but not looking for inspiration, a book fell into my hands. An oldie but a goodie. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. Things happen for a reason and I was meant to read that book at that point in my life.

Not only did it confirm that I had to do the hard work of suffering. That I had to walk in the darkness, for how ever long it took, if I was ever again to truly walk in the light, but it expanded my concept of love. Yes, I knew that I could love with acts of my body and of my hands. But Peck took that to the next logical step. To love with my entire being. My mind. My soul. My spirit. But this loving could not be done without effort and will. Loving, true loving, is work.

It meant that listening became an act of love. Now I know that this isn’t true of any of you listening to me today, but do you realize that we often listen with only a fraction of our true capacity? Maybe 15%. I know that I can drive a car, listen to the news on NPR, write a grocery list in my mind and listen to a child tell me about her day. Yes, I can. But not well. And not with 100% of my being. My children now know that if they really need me to listen that they need to tell me. It oft times has to wait, but when the time is right I can now listen with every cell of my body. This is an act of love and requires enormous effort.

Remembering is also an act of love. Remembering the little things that we are told. The friend that is sad. The child that had a boo-boo yesterday. The parent that had a bad day. One of my sisters recently called me when I was at the end of one of my black days. Yes, they still happen. Just not as frequently and they do not last as long, thank god. But she called and I talked and I wept. And she listened. That was her first act of love towards me. The second was when she called me the next day, in the middle of her busy day, to ask if I was feeling better. The remembering was as important as the listening.

Telling truth is an act of love. It takes effort and can be painful but it is an act of love. And if we expect our children to be truthful we ourselves must speak truth to them.

I think that one of the greatest and hardest acts of love is forgiveness. Not just of others but of ourselves. When we can’t or don’t forgive it is as if we carry around a sack of rocks. We can choose to carry the rocks, certainly. But wouldn’t it be easier, make us lighter, if we could put the sack down? The forgiveness is as much if not more a blessing to us then to the one who has transgressed. Forgiveness can be given weeks, years or decades after the transgression occurred. The person that needs to be forgiven may not even still be with us. But the work needs to be done if we are to act with love.

My children often fight. At times about the silliest things. Yes, it is true. They are not the little angels that they appear to be in church. When the harsh words fly or the fists lash out, feelings and bodies get hurt. When the dust has settled then they all know that there is still work to be done. Introspection is called for. Responsibility needs to be accepted. Apologies offered. And the final step, the hardest step of all. Forgiveness must be asked for. And given. Freely. With love. As an act of love to the other. If I teach my children nothing else in our time together, this is the one most important thing I hope to teach them. How deal with conflict in a healthy manner. A loving manner.

I know exactly what some of my children would be thinking right about now. “But, Mom, you don’t always listen to me. Or remember. As a matter of fact, you forget…a lot!” Yes, my dears, I do. But as I often tell them, I am an imperfect, human woman. And what I have been talking about today is an ideal. An ideal is a bright, shining idea. One we strive to reach. Like that perfect image of the snowman in your mind before you start building it. Or that image of the perfectly round pancake. You may not always achieve your vision, but that doesn’t stop you from trying over and over again. So, no, I may not always listen, remember or even tell truth, but I am always trying. Striving towards the ideal.

Scott Peck writes, “Love is not simply giving, it is the act of judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, criticizing, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word judicious means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more then instinct, it requires thoughtful and often painful decision-making.”Even though I fell in love with all of my children I now know that was but the tip of the iceberg. The instinct. That is what keeps us from chucking the screaming infant out of the window when we are tired. True loving is something else entirely.

So, love is a verb. It is the doing, more then the words “I Love You” that is the proof of our hearts. It is the doing in the face of the mundane, the day to day, the routine of our daily lives. It is the little things we do for the ones we love. It is acting with love even when we do not feel loving. (repeat) We have a choice every moment of every day how we are going to walk the paths of our lives. Loving these children with my mind, soul and body is not always easy. But I never walk my path alone. Good, kind people, family and friends alike, walk next to me. And of course, we do reap what we sow. And so I know that I am deeply and profoundly loved as well.

April 20, 2008, Green Sanctuary, Betsy Whitman

Today we celebrate the earth. There is so much to be said about the state of the earth and about our responsibilities, irresponsibilities for it but we haven’t much time. We haven’t much time….Today after coffee hour, we will meet to move on our task in becoming a green sanctuary certified church.

What lovely words “green sanctuary”. A sacred place where living beings gather and find health, nourishment, renewal — a place where the interdependence of all living beings (the ladybug and the zebra, the daisy and the bumblebee, the polar bear and the camel, the sugar maple and the blue heron, to name a few of our relations), the interdependence of life is acknowledged, honored, protected, kept safe, nourished……

When people first gathered together to celebrate and honor the spirit of life, they gathered in places they felt brought them particularly close to the life of the earth. Remember this….

Our ancestors gathered in groves of trees, growing tall up out of Earth’s body — where the birds wove their songs in with the chants and prayers of the human animals. Remember this…

Our ancestors gathered in caves, where their small human lights flickered against the vast, moist darkness that is inside Earth’s body. Remember this…

Our ancestors gathered on hills and mountains drawing nearer to the stars and the breath of Earth all around them. Remember this…

Our ancestors gathered at springs, and the sources of rivers, where the waters of life seep out of the body of Earth and help make possible for all green things to grow. Remember this…

And all these places were sanctuaries, places where our ancestors met together to make holy their lives, to weave together their living and their experiences — the sorrows and troubles, the joys and happiness of our being.

Our ancestors took parts of these earth sanctuaries and used them to build sanctuaries wherever they roamed, green sanctuaries made out of trees, bricks and granite, even here as we look around our church, the walls, the ceiling, our pews all made out of the body of the earth. Here we still light a flame to honor and awaken the spirit and we still hold ceremonies to honor the waters of life. Look around and see our own green sanctuary here…..

— we build individual sanctuaries, our homes, gathering stone, wood, water, light… each of us striving to make our homes a safe harbor where we can return again and again and be daily renewed.

And our bodies, our very bodies, with their strong standing bones, and our flowing juices coursing around, our hearts beating deep inside the cavern of our chests, our bodies too are green sanctuaries, made up from the earth’s body and inhabited with the sacred spirit of our own individual lives.

And each of these sanctuaries, our earth, our church, our homes, our bodies are all connected, interdependent, The green health of each part depends on the green health of the others, all strands of the greater web of the universe.

When we draw close to that tender sacredness we feel with the earth, we feel also our fears for the earth’s health, our health.

I call on you to join together, to take the small but very important steps in helping to heal our big green and blue earth.

I invite you to come up to the front of the church and plant a seed to that end. Come plant your wishes, your hopes, your desires for the Earth’s green health. Come plant a seed for healing changes, for beginnings as we embark on our journey in becoming a stronger green sanctuary, a place where the earth, our big green and blue sanctuary is honored, protected, renewed.

February 24, 2008, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Conscience and Unenforceable Obligations, Richard S. Gilbert

There is a story of the Maine couple, who after a good night’s sleep, rose early to prepare for a new day. The wife proceeded to the kitchen to make breakfast, and the husband went outdoors to savor the beautiful morning. The sky was clear and blue, and the sun shone brightly. It was Maine weather at its best. Shortly, the husband returned to the kitchen and said to his wife: “Well, Mary, we are really going to have to pay for this.”This story reminds me of the pathetic fallacy in literature, which attributes a kind of moral character to impersonal nature, as if the great natural order balances good and evil in human life, quite apart from our deserving. The apparent price for enjoying a good day was the inevitability that we would be somehow punished. This rather intriguing view of things is a fitting introduction to a consideration of the late Rev. William Sloan Coffin’s provocative words, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Do a good deed daily” was a mantra drummed into me during my Boy Scout days. It was not a bad slogan in a way; we ought to do good deeds. One of the dangers, however, was that I might think if I did one good deed early in the morning, I’d be off the hook for the rest of the day. Or it might suggest that virtue is somehow a matter of accumulating a certain number of good deeds, like merit badges. I recall the story of two Boy Scouts walking down the street, presumably looking for someone to help. One says to the other, “I can think of at least a half-dozen good deeds we could do if we got paid for them.”How, then, should we understand Coffin’s cynical mantra, “No good deed goes unpunished.”¹ What did he mean by that? Is it simply a corollary of the famous epigram: “Nice guys finish last”² ? Is it merely hyperbole? After all, some good deeds are rewarded.

I think Coffin was doing battle with a biblical dogma that still has much currency in our land – the belief that there is a direct correlation between virtue and reward, vice and punishment. Conventional wisdom assumes that virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. People who work hard will flourish and those who don’t will fail. It is part and parcel of the Protestant work ethic, now simply the work ethic, stripped of religious meaning.

That ethic dates back to the Hebrew biblical tradition. I recall my bible professor’s lecture on the Pentateuch – the first five books of the bible. He summarized a set of ethical laws – the Deuteronomic Code – with the words, “do good and prosper.” This was the message from the religious leaders of the time to keep their followers in line. Prosperity automatically follows goodness. Honesty is the best policy. Why? Because honesty pays.

The “do good and prosper” motto and the “no good deed goes unpunished” slogan constantly do battle in religious thinking. It is hard to imagine Jesus saying: “Take up your cross and follow me — it’ll make you feel good – you’ll be rich and happy.” And yet much of the “pop Christianity” of our time sends exactly this message. Belief in Jesus will enable you to prosper in the marketplace; to win on the football field; to triumph in the election. That theology is called “the prosperity gospel,” a dramatic contrast to the Jesus ethic in which it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. What is it about those words that these preachers and presidents don’t understand?

When the word “sacrifice” is used call us to moral account, the number of altruists drops off precipitously.³ The language of sacrifice drops out of our vocabulary and is replaced by that of success. It won’t cost much to be a Christian – or a Unitarian Universalist. No sacrifices required.⁴ Nothing but blessings. The lessons of Jesus of Nazareth are easily forgotten.

One of the most gripping scenes in literature is the encounter of Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Doestoevski’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Set in the 15th century Spanish Inquisition, Jesus has reappeared, and is outraged at what he observes being said and done in his name. He tells the Grand Inquisitor that he intends to go out among the people and set the record straight. “Not so fast!” warns the Grand Inquisitor. “No way will I let you do that to these well-meaning people. They’ve grown up with their version of Christianity, as their parents and parents’ parents did before them. Their religious convictions provide meaning in their lives. Think how crushed they’d be if you told them that their beliefs were all wrong. . . . It would be like pulling the life jacket from a drowning man. You would deprive them of all hope. How dare you! Their religious beliefs work for them. Leave them alone.”⁵

Dogma and authority are pitted against the hard teachings of a sacrificial ethic. As the story concludes, the Grand Inquisitor condemns Jesus to death as a heretic: “I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if any one has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. Tomorrow I shall burn thee.” As in fiction, so in history. For a lifetime of good deeds Jesus was punished by death on the cross – a sobering rebuke to the Deuteronomic school’s mantra “do good and prosper.” Doestoevski understands the “lesson” of Jesus very well.

A look at history reveal that while many have been martyred for not assenting to the creeds, no one has ever been executed for not following the Golden Rule.⁶

A more contemporary fictional illustration of how good deeds may be punished is found in Peter Sellers’ film, Heavens Above. Sellers plays the Reverend John E. Smallwood, who becomes vicar of a church in a contented English village. “The village enjoys the benevolence of the wealthy Despard family and the success of the pill it manufactures — sedative, pepper-upper and laxative combined, a perfect trinity. The vicar persuades Lady Despard to ’Go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor,’ as the Bible advises, and she freely distributes food, driving butcher, baker and candle-stick maker out of business. And when Smallwood pronounces that the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost is more efficacious than the triple-actioned pill, sales go down, unemployment goes up and mob violence ensues.” The film ends with the good vicar being sent rocketing into outer space where he thinks he will be missionary to whomever might live there.⁷

Smallwood wanted to do good in the worst way, and he did — in the worst way. Without taking account of the risks inherent in his action, he blundered ahead with a literal New Testament morality which evidently doesn’t work in a modern capitalistic society. He innocently produced results that were nearly catastrophic for the very people he sought to help. We learn that it is not easy to apply the high-minded ethics of the first century to the complicated world of today. And we also learn that often, despite our best intentions, we are punished for our good deeds.

Here we have a distinction between an “ethics of conscience” and an “ethics of responsibility.” Smallwood acted out of an ethics of conscience: he affirmed a moral principle and adhered to it at all costs. We admire the Smallwoods of the world, yet despair of the harm they sometimes create. They do the wrong thing for the right reason, failing to take into account a moral analysis of the real world situation – the ethics of responsibility.

Recently I read of an ethical dilemma that is much more real than the amazing and amusing “Heavens Above” fictional drama. Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Carlsbad, California, proudly proclaims on a marquee outside and a banner inside, “All are welcome.” Its website reads: “An Open and Affirming, Inclusive Church with a Progressive Theology and a Commitment to Social Justice.” It is much like our Unitarian Universalist Welcoming Congregation program. But in January of 2007, Mark Pliska, 53, came to church and told the congregation he had just been released from prison for molesting children, but that he sought a place to worship. He requested membership, thus throwing that liberal congregation into an ethical tailspin. Congregants wondered just how welcoming they really were. By accepting this apparently repentant man, were their children safe? The Pilgrim Church conscience would surely accept this man – “all are welcome.” But the Pilgrim Church sense of responsibility must consider the safety of its children. A true dilemma.

Pilgrim’s minister, The Rev. Madison Shockley, said: “I think what we have been through is a loss of innocence. . . . The scariest moment was when I got the feeling in the congregation about whether Mark could attend or not, and we needed more time, yet people were saying ’If he stays, I leave,’ or ’If he leaves, I leave.’”

A mother in the church who attends with her three sons was conflicted. Her oldest son, Sebastian, 9, reminded her, “I’d feel uncomfortable, but we’re supposed to let everybody come.” In the meantime, publicity over his arrival at Pilgrim led to Mr. Pliska’s eviction from his apartment and the loss of his job. He was homeless and unemployed. Yet he said he did not regret being open with the church after spending years hiding who he was. As one Unitarian Universalist minister, whose congregation dealt with two known sex offenders, said, “You can’t be all things to all people.”⁸

How would we handle that dilemma, we the people who “covenant to affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large”? Hopefully, we would struggle with our conscience and share our dreams and doubts with one another. We would experience the tough tension between an ethic of conscience and an ethic of responsibility, and maybe even pray a little.

It is in the utter messiness of the human condition that we discover what our values really are. I won’t presume to resolve the dilemma of Pilgrim Church, and I don’t know how it came out. I merely raise the issue as an example of “no good deed goes unpunished;” to remind us of the strenuous quality of the ethical life. That life is far more complex than simply following any absolutist rules – obeying the Ten Commandments – doing good and automatically prospering.

It is for good reason that we affirm and promote “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” Once more we discover the inherent dialogue of individual and community. The right of conscience enables us to decide matters of importance without external coercion. Our inner integrity cannot be violated. At the same time we are always in relationship with our community, which we help shape and which in turn helps shape us.

I recall one summer evening many years ago when a Roman Catholic visitor, learning I was a minister, asked about my religion. When he learned that I neither feared hell nor sought heaven, but believed in “the importance of being good — for nothing,” he was incredulous. He said that if he didn’t fear eternal punishment or seek eternal reward there would be no telling what he would do.

He was bound to the Great Enforcer, not the moral power of “unenforceable obligations,”⁹ those inner tugs of conscience toward doing what we believe is right no matter what the outcome.

Why do we honor our marriage covenant even when we are at times unhappy? Why do we sacrifice to raise children when that seems hopelessly frustrating? Why do we keep promises even when we could get away with breaking them? Why do we obey the law even when there is little danger of being caught? Why do we involve ourselves in community service and social action when no one seems to notice and we often fail? And why have people done these things for centuries?

No external power is forcing us to meet these obligations; we are truly on our own, not coerced by the “cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example,” in Boris Pasternak’s words. Character is what we are when no one is looking. Character is when we act though it will not do us any particular good. Character is when we respond to our unenforceable obligations to our neighbors. Character is when we struggle with the creative tension between an ethic of conscience and an ethic of responsibility.

What do I conclude from all this? Of course, not every good deed is punished – the phrase is rhetorical to make a point.

Doing good is not about keeping score. I believe our mandate is to do good for its own sake; to learn the importance of being good for nothing. When we are honest with ourselves we know that life is not necessarily fair – there is no eternal law written in the nature of things that renders prosperity for goodness or poverty for evil. This understanding is not really cynicism but simply a frank recognition of the “sheer randomness of our fortunes.”¹⁰

Lest we become discouraged by this hard reality, I think of a man of heroic proportions who illustrates the courage-to-be even knowing that his good deed would be punished – Pastor Martin Niemoeller, a German U-boat commander in World War I who became a pacifist in World War II. He led the Confessing Church in its resistance to Nazism while many of his colleagues collaborated.

His death in 1984 was especially poignant to me since I had spent a treasured few hours with him during my 1978 sabbatical in Germany. To him are attributed these familiar, but disturbing words: “In Germany the Nazis first came for the Communists and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me — by that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.”

Not all of us are called to be heroes or heroines. Many of our decisions to do good are clear – we know what we need to do. But on another level are actions we must take for which we will not be paid. We may be required by conscience to say and do that for which we may very well be punished. It is a hard truth, but one well worth pondering in an age of ethical weakness and easy morality.

In my Building Your Own Theology program I invite participants to write their own Ten Commandments. I do likewise. Here are ten of my considered convictions, or should we say habits to be learned by highly ethical people:

1. Walk gently upon the earth as you would be a good guest in a neighbor’s house. The cosmos does not make junk. Creation is fundamentally good.
2. Be gentle with your neighbor — none of us knows what it is like to be another. People are precious. Walk a mile in their moccasins.
3. Be gentle with yourself — aspire to be more than you are — but accept your finitude. You have a right to be here.
4. Love people, use things. Treat people as ends, not means.
5. Affirm the importance of being good for nothing. Do good for its own sake. Doing good is not about keeping score.
6. Be honest with yourself. Let the inner and the outer person be the same.
7. So act that your behavior speaks louder than your words. Deeds are more important than creeds.
8. Share with your neighbors so that everyone has enough, no one has too much and we share with maximum freedom and minimum coercion. This world is a neighborhood. All people are our neighbors.
9. And to show a little more humor than the Ten Commandments: Always be a little kinder than necessary.¹¹ “Do unto others 20% better than you would have them do unto you — 20% to correct for subjective error.”
10. Be humble and realize that loving your neighbor will require all the strength you have to give. Remember that we are all toddlers in moral as in spiritual matters.

“Love is the doctrine of this church, and service is its prayer.
This is our great covenant: To dwell together in peace;
To seek the truth in freedom, And to help one another.” Amen.

---

1) Quoted by James Wall in The Christian Century, 4/13/83, p. 331 and attributed to William Sloan Coffin. 2) Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. 3) Ibid., p. 105. 4) Ibid., p. 115. 6) Duncan Howlett. 7) See William Mueller, “Heavens Above,” The Christian Century, November 6, 1963. 8) Neela Banerjee. “Sex Offenders Test Churches’’Core Beliefs.” The New York Times. April 10, 2007. 9) Rushworth Kidder. 10) Everyday Ethics, p. 170.

THE LESSON — Author unknown

Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain and gathered them around him.

He taught them, saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven;

Blessed are the meek;

Blessed are they that mourn;

Blessed are the merciful;

Blessed are they who thirst for justice;

Blessed are you when persecuted;

Blessed are you when you suffer;

Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is great in heaven,

And remember what I am telling you.

Then Simon Peter said: “Do we have to write this down?”

And Andrew said: “Are we supposed to know this?”

And James said: “Will we have a test on this?

And Phillip said: “What if we don’t know it?”

And Bartholomew said: “Do we have to turn this in?”

And John said: “The other disciples didn’t have to learn this.”

And Matthew said: “When do we get out of here?”

And Judas said: “What does this have to do with real life?”

And the other disciples likewise.

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus’ lesson plan,
and inquired of Jesus of his terminal objectives in the cognitive domain — And Jesus wept.