Selected Sermons

Elements of Life: Gaia: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented February 17, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Green Man's Dreams: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented February 3, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Poetry Program: various Fellowship members
First presented January 20, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word]

The Deinstitutionalization of Religion: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented November 18, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Ships at Sea: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented September 30, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Doubt: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented October 15, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Forgiveness: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented September 24, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Faith: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented September 17, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Whole-Hearted Spirituality: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented August 14, 2005 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Listening to the Wind: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented November 28, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Swinging David's Sling: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented on November 7, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

A Faith of Hands and Heart: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented October 17, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Dig Where You Stand: Ethics of Place: Rev. Brian Eslinger
First presented October 10, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames
[MS Word] [PDF].

Dig Where You Stand: Ethics of Place

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented October 10, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

I spent a lot of my life wearing an ill fitting suit. I don’t know that it started out that way, but as I grew the religion of my youth didn’t seem to fit me any more. Eventually I felt like the person in our story, twisting my life to try and fit a suit that didn’t fit me. Since that time I’ve been continually reshaping my religious garment so that it helps me to live the way I want to in the world. I’ve had many tailors who’ve helped me to refashion this theological suit so that it matches how I believe I should be in the world. Today I want to share the insights from three of these tailors.

The dialogues that follow are fictitious conversations. They’ve occurred in my head for the past eight years with the people who’ve shaped my thinking. I’ve only met one of these authors, yet each has shaped me as profoundly as any teacher I’ve known. The dialogues are real, honest discussions between me and the ideas I encountered.

It begins in 1997. I’m sitting in my new office in the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames reading the latest issue of the Humanist. Then a sentence in the essay of the Humanist of the year jumps out at me. “In day to day life, I worship the Earth as God”. What? The earth as god? In a humanist magazine? Alice Walker nods her head slowly and gives me a smile. “More and more,” she says to me, “people are decolonizing their spirits. Their not allowing the religion of the past that isn’t about them to keep them afraid and separated. This is an act that might return our reverence to the earth, thereby saving it.”

Decolonizing their spirits? What does that mean? “Simply put people are trying to come out from under the assumptions that the male-dominated western religious dogma they grew up with is the only god available. All people deserve a god who worships them. It’s fatal to love a god who doesn’t love you; the religion of my ancestors connected us to all creation. Never will mother earth find anything wrong with your natural way. Everyone deserves a god who adores our freedom. Nature would never advise us to do anything but be ourselves. So I say I am pagan, worshiping the earth.” I thought about ancestors, realizing that we all have them, those ancestors who worried about the change of the season more than the state of their eternal souls. Those ancestors who prayed that the fire would light so they could be warm and praised the rain so that they could eat. In the course of human history we don’t have to look that far back to find our pagan ancestors who knew what it was like to worship the Earth as God in their day to day lives.

I recalled what I’d read in Emily Town’s book about how love is the center of womanist theology. “Womanist” is a word coined by Walker to indicate the difference of African American women’s quest for justice. Womanist she had written is from the statement “you’re acting womish. Usually referring to outrageous, courageous or willful behavior. Womanists are committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” This quest begins with finding one’s own humanity, finding love for ones self, then allowing oneself to risk loving another.

Envisioning this expanding circle of love: beginning with self, leading to nature, I could see that circle, or maybe it’s really a double spiral. As we reach out to it we sense the loving embrace of nature holding and supporting our lives and then empowered by our contact, it radiates out from us.

Walker nods her head slowly, in agreement with my line of thinking. I continue, Women and African people became nothing more than property and the religion of the masters told them it was so. There is a strong link between racism and sexism, both look at human beings as things and these human beings, these women begin to believe they are things. Walker adds, “The earth, mother nature didn’t make us this way. We human beings lost our way and made ourselves slaves some slaves of the body others slaves of the soul but all losing out of that perfect love which nature intends for us. It’s been a long road to find the ability to love ourselves. When we find ourselves nestled in the acceptance embrace of Mother Nature, who loves us for who we are, then we can find the strength to fight for others.”

I consider she and I, a black woman writer and poet who’s profoundly influenced the world I inhabit, and me descendant of the race that enslaved her fore parents and brought them here. Each of us captive of our history and trying to break free. Male, female; Black white, but all part of the humanity. Walker says, “Womanist thinking is Universalist like the child who says, “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow and our cousins are white, beige and black?” Answer, “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden with every color flower represented.”

That universality leads to a desire for justice for each flower in the garden. Against the gardeners who would cut them down. But it seems there are more scythes than ever trying to cuts us to ribbons. Seeing the resignation in my eyes Walker says, “I do realize it’s pretty messy all around. Lots of suffering, lots of pain. And I have just decided that there are places where I feel I am uniquely suited to be, and causes that just fit, where I feel I can actually do this without being insulting or ignorant or unhelpful. And that’s it. I give to the extent that I can, and then I sit back and I eat tomatoes. And I enjoy them, and I look out at the landscape and I love it, and I walk and I go swimming and I love being alive. And then when I get my strength back, I go out again. You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts. I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count. But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger. The thing about love that I’ve discovered in my life is that one love leads to another. It just gets bigger and bigger. You can start with a flower, but if you sincerely see it and if you sincerely love it, then it’s like the key. The flower is like a key to a big, big, big storeroom. Then everything becomes something that is lovable.”

Even through the pain of growing up in a racist, sexist world, you’re able to let your heart be broken so that you can love? How can you do that?” I ask, “Open your heart and take those kinds of risks?” “It takes practice.” She gives me a wry smile and begins to walk boldly back into my imagination. “Practice? What do you mean?” And as she disappears into bright recesses of my mind another figure steps out from the east. I find myself sitting, in the middle of this room, sun light streams in through the windows as we face the bright tapestries in the half lotus position, knees too sore for a full lotus. As I settle into my position I feel my legs and body begin to melt, slowly dissolving into the floor and soil below me all being absorbed into all. A distant voice says, “Master they will see you now.” I open my eyes to find myself in a forest path, before me sits Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. He points down the path and we begin to walk. A leaf falls to the ground before us, Thich Nhat Hanh watches with a smile. “Ah leaf,” he says, “you are pretending to die yet I can see how you are becoming one with all the elements of life, merging with the moist soil and preparing to appear on the tree in the spring in another form.” He looks at me as we walk, “Everything is pretending to die and be born, all is really part of the ultimate dimension. When we can realize this it can transform the spot you are standing on, when you realize that this spot is part of the entire universe.”

I look at the trees surrounding me and try to see the ultimate dimension in each leaf, instead I get dizzy. Realizing my befuddlement, Thich Nhat Hanh smiles and then a look of deep compassion comes over his face. I can sense as he looks at the trees that he is remembering the time when this realization became clear to him. It was after he arrived in France, exiled from his home in Viet Nam. He was painfully home sick, missing the plants and birds of his home. He sat in meditation, dwelling in the present moment and began to see in each tree in France the same beauty that he found in those of his home, in each child’s smile he saw the same beauty of the children he’d known in Viet Nam.

“ Our true home,” he says, “Is the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. Once we learn to touch this peace we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith it is a matter of practice.”

As we walk I begin to feel the ground in a new way, as though the soles of my shoes have melted away and I am actually touching the soil. This soil that’s bubbling up between my toes has nurtured generations of plants and animals. Parts of it have come to this place from all over the world. This simple practice of walking mindfully on the earth has helped me to touch it in an entirely new way. Practice, little moments when we intentionally remember why we are, that we are, when the simple act of breathing binds us back to the reality that we’re part of something greater than ourselves. From this practice comes acceptance, gratitude and liberation. Liberation from the striving to be something else, to be richer, or more beautiful, perfect in what ever way, what ever causes us to destroy who we are – as Mother Nature intended, beautiful as we are. Instead, we can be rooted in the present moment seeking to create. He breaks into my musings saying,” Such a change allows us to transform the ignorance that brought about wrong actions of speech, body and mind and helps you cultivate your mind of love. Shame and guilt disappear and you experience the joy of being alive.”

I begin to understand that the question is spiritual; it is at the deepest connections, the fibers that animate our lives. I’ve read many an article about the species lost and the rain forest destroyed, many books of the atrocities committed and the wages of poverty. Yet it’s too easy to intellectualize them all as happening to other people, not me. Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to go deeper than our minds, deeper than our hearts to the very core of our existence. There we realize the animating force the breath of our lives intimately connects us to all that is. The practice, I see through my teacher’s example can be as simple as walking, sitting, eating a piece of fruit. But it becomes as difficult as consciously deciding “Will I drive or will I walk? Do I really need to buy that new car? What will my decisions mean for the world?” Acting in such a way we seek harmony with nature and the people around us. People, community, I think. Then I ask, “I’ve learned of the importance of love in transforming oppression, of mindfulness in transforming ourselves, but what about communities?” Thich Nhat Hanh smiles, “the Buddha says, ‘When the student is ready the teacher appears.”

From the forest I find we’ve walked to the top of a heather covered hill. The ocean before us is whipped by waves and great stone pillars arranged in a circle surround us. A fiery voice to my left distracts me and I turn to see a bearded man reciting in more of a yell than a voice something like a poem. When I turn back, Thich Nhat Hanh is gone. I turn back to the voice, knowing immediately it’s Alastair MacIntosh.

Ohhh ... friends we call across the seas to you from echo chamber of the soul
we call now stirred by rhythm that you drum
We call upon the triple billion year old songlines of world’s oldest rock
“ I lift a stone; it is the meaning of life I clasp” - says the bard MacDiarmid
So let us honour stone. Let us call afresh the foundational litany:
The Cairngorm Mountains and sparkling Aberdeenshire granite
The Old Red Sandstone
The Durness limestone
The idle pebbles …
tossed to and fro, round and round, inwards outwards
dark moon full moon vortexing on today’s high tide at noon
Ohhh ... the rocks the rocks the rocks
we call on you ...
Rise up from sleep sunk strata beds!
Giant women, wizened men, totemic creatures once laid down to be our hills
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up and waulk this Earth in us!
... bring back the land within the people’s care
... bring back the care to touch from hand to land

As he pauses, I remember his work to stop strip mining Mount Roineabhal on South Harris and the community buy-out that returned the land of the Isle of Eigg to the people. When he’d appealed for their help, the rocks had listened. “Alastair,” I begin, “When you call the rocks for aid, how do we know they’ll listen?”

“First, we have to be on their side don’t we? We have to be indigenous people to know the rock we call upon for strength.” Puzzled I ask, “Most of us are immigrants, how can we be indigenous?” He looks at me with those steely eyes and says, “To be indigenous doesn’t mean you can count the generations that have lived in a place. It means you advocate for the land. We must see ourselves a part of the land, not apart from it, part of the ecosystem not the lords of it all. This is Celtic ecology.” Celtic ecology, as Alastair describes it, is a learned way of being in harmony with nature. By understanding that poisons dumped into the water poison your very blood. They understand nature as having its own soul and we are part of that soul as well. When the soul of nature is abused and misused, when the land is destroyed and left fallow it is a spiritual as well as physical assault. It’s this spiritual understanding that helps us fully appreciate the necessity of our material connection to world.

Such a spiritual understanding helps sustain a desire for change. Alastair says, “If activism is not grounded in spirituality it cannot be sustained in the long run: we either burn out or sell out as the oil of life runs low. We need replenishment from the wellheads of life itself, and no matter what religious tradition we may or may not be coming from, this re-sourcing is ultimately a question of spirituality. Spiritual justice may be understood as the avoidance of spiritual delusion. Spiritual justice means seeing life reverentially, seeing with eyes that accord with God’s love and not with eyes set upon some lesser “god” such as money, status, or a human leader. As social and ecological justice follows on from spiritual justice, and as community and therefore peace arise at the confluence of all three faces of justice, it follows, as the prophets repeatedly saw, that the most fundamental barrier to creating a peaceful world is idolatry.

Seems that it would be difficult to do such work surrounded by the tumultuous, seductive times in which we live. He smiles saying, “A gentle Buddhist monk from Thailand [who had been persecuted] for organising controversial social justice activities in his home country . . . came one day and silently left a beautiful rice paper brush and ink drawing on the floor of our simple abode in the forest. It was of a rampant tiger with the caption, “The best place for meditation is in the tiger’s mouth.”

“ If we want to create change in the world we must constantly strive to strengthen community – first by making community with the soil, working with rather than against nature’s providence.” Second is making human community, sharing wealth, putting children and elderly first (their needs ahead of tax cuts and corporate bail outs). And third (but not last) we need a community of the soul. Alastair says that what ever your religion – or lack of one – we need spaces to rest, compose and compost our inner stuff. (Walking with Thich Nhat Hanh, eating Tomatoes with Alice Walker) By keeping an eye to the ground and the stars we can be more deeply present in our universe, and our lives. Then we can touch that mystery, that miracle which too often eludes us when we strive for it. Alistair adds, "We need to remember that when we let loose our wildness in creatively it is God the Goddess – or call it Christ, or Allah or Krishna or the Tao – that pours forth. It does so from within, as a never-ending stream.” Where can we start? “Test any course of action with the touchstone of service. Ask: does it help the poor? Does it restore the broken nature? Does it bring music to the soul? In short is it concerned with the blossoms?”

I remember Alice Walkers’ description of all humanity as a garden and it all makes sense.

Suddenly that ill-fitting suit of clothing I’ve been wearing for most of my life began to fit. I remembered reading about something called ‘the forest of your heart’. This place, deep inside each of us, is an echo of the primordial forest, the first forest. But this echo is different for each of us. It reflects where we are nurtured, where the love of mother earth touches our hearts and fills us with a sense of belonging. Each of my teachers asks us to seek that place in ourselves. Whether their languages came from the womanist tradition, Buddhism or Celtic Christianity, each one found their centre in loving the earth.

From my journey through my imagination, I’m here again. The forest of my heart gradually awakening. Now, it’s up to me to nurture it, help it to grow and seek the wisdom that abides there. For the most important lesson I’ve learned from these three teachers is that they can do nothing more than point the way, it’s up to me to walk the path.

A Faith of Hands and Heart

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented October 17, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

"I am not religious," says my neighbor, as he hoes the rows between his beans and corn.

"Oh yes you are," I say to myself.

To plant a seed is an act of faith. To collect compost is a response of gratitude to the creator.
To water, fertilize and mulch the ground is an expression of religious responsibility.
To kneel down and pull weeds is a prayer.
To harvest is to participate in the fullness and grace of the spirit.
To protect and replenish creation is to love God.

"I am not religious, says my neighbor.

Yes, you are, say I.

The Growing Season, Sara Moores Campbell

Back in August, when I was asked to speak at our partner congregation in Transylvania I admit that I was rather intimidated by the task. I didn't even know that I'd have to mount a high pulpit and wear a great black robe - otherwise I would have really been nervous. Instead my fears revolved around what could I say to build a bridge from their land to ours? What about our share Unitarian faith would supports such a bridge? Then I remembered when our son, Thomas, who is now a teenager, was a little boy he and a friend were going to dig a tunnel. He asked me where they should make the entrance to their tunnel - I quickly suggested the sand box in the back yard. As he headed to the shed for a shovel I asked where they were planning to dig to? Australia came the reply.

As happens with young boys, their ideas were bigger than their muscles and they soon abandoned the shovels for other pursuits. As odd as the idea of digging to Australia sounds, it is probably true that if we dug straight through from Iowa we'd end up in Australia. It gave me pause to remember that the soil that so nurtures my soul here in Iowa is really part of a great garden that stretches from here to Australia and is beneath to Transylvania as well.

This earthly home of ours is a precious place. Yes, there are scars upon the earth, created by wars and drought and the careless destructive greed. Yet my faith tells me that those scars can be healed; that we human beings have the responsibility and possibility of joining together and stop the wars, aiding those in need and challenging the greed of our race to allow all to experience the beauty of creation. These two constants of our faith responsibility and possibility became the trusses for my bridge.

These ideas can be expressed through two strains of thought that have developed through our faith's story. The first Unitarian belief in unity. This could be understood to embrace the oneness of God or unity of this world which we share, an interdependent web of which we are all part. This understanding of unity and humanity's place in this natural order gives us a special responsibility. The Ancient Greeks had a maxim that is often misunderstood. On the oracle of Delphi is inscribed "Know they Self". This inscription was not meant to be some kind of pop psychology statement of being self-aware or in touch with whom you are. It meant understand your place in the universe. We are human beings - not gods. As the Greek myths tell us, when we forget our place in the natural world and think we're gods, disaster ensues. "Know they self" was a warning; know your place in the natural order of things.

Native American cultures often expressed this sentiment by the name various tribes and nations gave to themselves. For instance the Navajo refer to themselves as the Dini - the people. This did not mean they are the people and everyone else is something less - but that for the place they lived the Navajo's role is to be the people in that ecosystem. Whether it's the formulas of science, the fancy of fairies, we find metaphors and stories to help us understand the foundational unity of creation; this unity is expressed in our understanding of an interdependent web of life.

So our expression of interdependence is a reinterpretation of ancient wisdom. This has often been a counter voice to one that seeks to extol us over nature, over history itself, as anointed ones for whom the natural world is be an oyster for our consumption. In the United States our credo of Manifest Destiny lead us to commit atrocities against the native peoples and the native lands. We committed the Greek sin of Huberous - we forgot that we were not gods and acted as those we were. This misunderstanding of our proper role in the world - the whole world not just the human world - continues.

Instead, we seek to understand our unity with creation. Like the character in our readings, many times we have trouble expressing this value as 'religious" - almost as though we're religious in spite of ourselves. The creative act is one so filled with hope, with a fulfilling of a sense of responsibility. Being creative is the ultimate religious ritual for we are reenacting the quest of every human being who's come before us.

It is with our own hearts and hands that we shape this world in which we live. We face difficulties brought about by events out of our control. Yet there is still the laughter in a child's voice, the love in a friend's glance, the beauty in the sun's rise and peace of a moon's glow that remind us of the wondrous world in which we live. Much is not in our power to control or change, yet much of how we are in this world is in our own hands. Using these hands to help rather than harm, to create music or shake the hand of a friend rather than to form a fist and strike. These are choices we make that will affect our lives as well as those of all we meet. These choices e an expression of our responsibly, to ourselves and our world.

Powerful responsibility we hold in our hands, yet it's rooted in the great possibility we share. This optimistic faith in our own power to better our world rises from the Unitarian belief in the significance of Jesus' humanity. Reggie's song touched on the different approaches to what mattered in the example of Jesus, was it a divine sacrifice on the cross or a loving example of his life? In the creed that I recited growing up Jesus was born by Immaculate Conception in the first line and suffering crucifixion in the next - as though he'd never lived at all! Within Jesus' life we see the potential of that spark of hope enflamed by the belief we can create the Kingdom of God for every person here on earth. That divine spark is not to be relegated to the pages of the past, but available to each one of us, here and now. Even with all of our faults and imperfections, we have that divine spark within us.

William Ellery Channing, one of the founders of Unitarianism in the United States, believed we have the power to develop this divine spark within, but we too often don't begin to realize our possibilities. As Channing wrote, "Of all the discoveries that people need to make, the most important is that of the self-forming power treasured up in ourselves. There is more of the divinity in it than in the force, which impels the outward universe." Here is our faith in possibilities. When we recognize the divine spark in ourselves we realize the possibilities before us. We also recognize that spark in others and begin to understand what it means to see every man as our brother, every woman as our sister, and every child as our own. In such moments of recognition we begin to realize we are all part of the great human family. Then the doors of our heart are opened, opened in compassion for those around us, opened with love for all of creation. With our hearts so exposed we can take the risk to care. It means we risk trusting others when that can be so difficult to do. Yet through such risks we grow that divine spark within into a flame. Our hearts guides our hands and that little light becomes a beacon to tell the world of the strength of our faith, our confidence that with our open hearts and willing hands we make a difference in this world.

Our faith offers us many ways to make that difference. For instance we may pray unceasingly, some with hands folded, some using those hands to write letters, others to hold signs of protest, all pray for an end to war. And a hope that some day soon all people will understand the unity of our human family and in that understanding seeks justice for everyone and study war no more. We pray that the hopelessness that drives the terrorist and the fear that drives our response will end. But that day is not today. Where in our faith do we find hope?

Unitarian minister Rev. A. Powell Davies wrote: "When someone asks where now is thy God, we can answer that the sacred is where it always was: in the struggle. In the pain of our hearts, in the growing clearness of our minds, in the sharpening edge of our conscience, in the welling of courage, in the purpose we cannot forsake and never shall." A leading advocate for civil rights in the United States, Davies knew what it meant to struggle. He saw the effects of injustice and what a lack of mercy could do to people. Humbly, he brought his community together to change all that. Knowing deep down that black or white, the color of ones skin had no bearing on the right to have a job, a home, or simply justice. Davies' Unitarian faith in possibilities of humanity created a Church that was force for change, the courage to look injustice in the eye and say no more. That power resides in each of our hands. I know what you're thinking in my hands? What power do they have? Join hands; Feel the touch of another human being, the pulse of their heart, the sweat of their work, the tension of their hopes and fears.

Release your hands. Close your eyes and think of your weaknesses -short comings that worry you when hear the challenge of changing the world. Take a look in your left hand - there, in your palm are those weaknesses. Now, close your eyes again, think of your strengths, we all have them, what are the gifts you bring to this world, those qualities about you that shine through. Look at your right hand, three they are in your palm. Now hold hands again. Notice that your weaknesses fit right into your neighbor's strengths? In this circle of hands we form a community of support, a community strengthened by the hands joined. This lesson for our group is central to the gospel of Unitarian Universalism, everyone person has strengths, very person has weaknesses. When we join our hands together we are made stronger and when we realize this interdependence we have the power to change the world. This is where I find hope. Those hands have the power to make a meal to feed someone whose hungry, to lift a sign in protest or support, to mark a ballot on Election Day. Each of these acts expresses hope, especially when joined with all the other hands in this room.

I thought about this power last Thursday when I led the noon devotions at the Habitat blitz build over in Nevada. And I told the young people there this American folk tale that I'd like to share with you. It's the story of a farmer named Joe who had lived on the same farm his whole life, right next to a farmer named Jack. They'd been neighbors their entire lives, married, raised their children together, and buried their wives side by side. Yet one day a calf waded through the creek that separated their lands and ended up in Joe's pasture. Joe was angry that Jack hadn't kept a better eye on his stock and when Jack came to get it Joe said, "What calf? It looks like one of mine." Jack stomped away and the two didn't speak for more than a month.

Then one day a stranger happened along carrying a carpenter's tool box. He knocked on Joe's door and explained that he was traveling from place to place doing any odd jobs that people might have. "I've got a job for you," said Joe. "I want you to build a fence all along the creek there so I won't have to look at my neighbor's house. " He pointed to a pile of boards and said, "There should be plenty of boards there to build it nice and tall." As the stranger began to move the boards down by the creek Joe told him that he had to go to town for some supplies and would be back by night fall. As Joe rode away in his wagon he could hear the sound of the hammer falling in the distance and smiled a rather angry smile. Later that day Joe returned from town looking forward to seeing that fence blocking out the view of Jack's farm. Imagine his surprise when he crested the last hill and instead of a fence saw a beautiful bridge stretching across the creek.

Joe angrily jumped off his wagon and began to stomp over toward the stranger who was putting away his tools. But before he could begin to say how mad he was, here came Jack walking across that bridge, with his hand extended saying, "Joe, I don't know how we ever let that calf ruin our friendship. I should have kept it penned in, you keep it." Surprised, Joe met Jack at the edge of the creek saying, "No, I was being petty, it's your calf." The two shook hands and clasped each other's shoulders the anger of the past month melting away. They both looked over at the stranger, who was just picking up his tool box and Joe said, "Thank you young man, I've got a couple other projects if you could stay around for a while." To which the stranger replied, "I'd like to Joe, but I've got a lot of bridges yet to build."

With our hearts and hands we're building such bridges. They may not bring angry farmers together, but might help people understand the importance of our relationships to each other. By helping us understand our responsibilities to the world and our possibilities to make a difference in it, Unitarian Universalism provides us the tools to be such bridge builders, crossing oceans, crossing the boundaries of different beliefs and finding a common ground in the divine spark that resides in every person, on the holy ground which is where ever we stand.

Swinging David’s Sling

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented on November 7, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

I can imagine how the Hebrew people of David’s time felt when they were surrounded by those giant philistines like Goliath and everything looked really grim. Giants have long served as a metaphor for obstacles that seem insurmountable. The giant of Jack and the beanstalk could easily represent Jack and his mother’s poverty, the giant Goliath represents the seemingly impossible task of this little band of people surviving in their new hostile homeland.

We have our giants today as well. Not that many of them were talked about in any real depth during the last election. We heard a lot about national security, but I think that’s really missing the point of the real giant, the injustices that exist in the world that we really need to try to defeat. When he had President Bush’s ear soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners, said to him, “Mr. President if we don’t devote our energies, our focus, our resources and our time on overcoming global poverty and desperation we will lose not only the war on poverty but we’ll lose the war on terrorism. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we’ll never defeat the threat of terrorism.” Indecently, that was the last time the president asked Mr. Wallis for his advice.

It seems that unlike in the old stories we have more trouble recognizing our giants. Maybe we’re more like those soldiers who bustled around camp, too scared to really look the giant in the eye and take him on; instead we divert ourselves toward easier foes, ones we know we can defeat. We are in need of real heroes who are willing to seek the giants that really threaten our society.

The heroes in giant stories are also very similar. They’re the little guys, in more ways than metaphors. In the story of David and Goliath there is a lot of background that happens before we get to the great battle scene. David is a shepherd, not one of the nobility or a great trained warrior. He’s the youngest son – which in the society he lived meant he was little better than a slave, he certainly wasn’t going to be inheriting any wealth or prestige, much less any of his father’s favor. In fact he’s the one who has to tend to the sheep while his older brothers are off seeking glory at Saul’s side. Poor old David is stuck out in the fields. Then to add insult to injury he has to take food up to his brothers like a common servant. When he does so, he overhears the challenge from the giant, Goliath, who’s scared the Israelites out of their wits. They’ve run before him for the past 40 days and nights as he’s issued his challenge to single combat.

David happens to hear this challenge and says I’ll take him. What’s interesting from here is how David’s difference is accentuated. He tries on Saul’s armor and it doesn’t fit – he relies on his tool that he’s learned how to use fighting lions and bears. David is not a helpless boy who faces the giant, he’s been tested by living in the world, the harsh world of the fields where he’s faced lions and bear. Instead to the sword of the king, David reaches down and picks up five smooth stones from the valley floor.

We’ll get back to these five stones in just a minute.

When he goes before the great warrior Goliath, Goliath laughs at him – he’s down right insulted that these up start Hebrews have sent a boy, a boy to fight him, the mighty Goliath. And this boy’s weapons, how can they prevail? No, Goliath says to David “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the fields.” What Goliath doesn’t know is that David is on intimate terms with those birds and wild animals; he knows them far better than does this arrogant giant. So relying on his crude weapons and his faith, David prevails, knocking Goliath out with one stone and cutting off his head with Goliath’s own sword.

Battle stories are often hard ones for me to come to grips with. As we hear the casualty count grow in Iraq and know that we’re not hearing a tenth of the suffering of the Iraqi people, I can’t rejoice even at the triumph of a mythic warrior. This story is an old folk tale that’s been borrowed to give David, the future king, a great entrance into his people’s narrative. It’s such a familiar tale that it’s part of our culture, but the underlying metaphor is a potent one for our times.

I don’t want us to think of the giants that challenge us as other people. No one is a giant that deserves our physical assault. That’s the point of giants; they are bigger than any person, seemingly insurmountable obstacles that require us to use our wits, our faith, and our strength to overcome. Singer song writer Peter Mayer expressed this brilliantly in his song, Rosa Parks, as the chorus says, “Rosa Parks sat down sending great Goliath to the ground from a will of stone that struck his crown the Giant came down.” Here it’s little Rosa Parks taking a seat on a bus and in so doing smashing the goliath of racism in the head. Rosa Parks is one of those heroes who was willing to look the giant in the eye.

These giant stories all tell us that we have to be the heroes. This story of David and Goliath is one of the earliest incidents of an Israelite succeeding without God’s direct intervention. Yes, David relies on his faith, but God does not intervene to insure his success. While this could indicate that the story originated in another source (such as a folktale) or that it does have some historical value that’s been preserved, I think it’s also instructive has to how we call upon our faith in times of trouble.

It was David’s faith that gave him the courage to face goliath, which gave him that same will of stone as Rosa Parks. But he drew the strength needed to defeat the giant from the world in which he lived. His strength came from years spent protecting his sheep from the dangers of the world. When he reached for a weapon to face Goliath the text is very plain in saying he reached down and picked up these five smooth stones from the valley floor. This valley was a special place, a home to the people who’d been without one for so long. And it was from this place that David drew his strength.

That strength needed faith to put it in action. Faith is needed to summon the will to look the giant in the eye. When I hear people talking about changing positions on issues in order to win elections I think of David trying to put on Saul’s armor, he couldn’t even walk in it because he didn’t have faith in that armor. Loosing faith in our beliefs will not win elections, but turn us into those who feed the giants of injustice. Those positions on issues are statements of faith that people’s lives matter, that justice has a chance in the world. I will not stop advocating for a living wage, I will not stop advocating for civil rights for gays and lesbians; I will not turn my back on the environment I will not stop protesting against war in order to win an election. For these are the issues that express my faith and to abandon them would be to loose my faith.

We don’t express our faith in God the way that David did in this ancient story, so on what is our faith based? It’s liberal religion that calls us together. It’s our history and common tradition. The sentiment regarding liberalism expressed in by James Luther Adams could have been written on the morning of November 3, 2004 instead of 1939. I would not go so far as to say we are facing the threat of a Nazi-like take over that Germany did. I would not go that far. That said, the restriction of civil liberties, the increased secrecy of our government, the demonization of the poor and other people, the centralization of media, as well as the climate of fear are all creating a form of government that is not what I believe our great nation should stand for. In that way we are staring down a giant.

As in the time Adam’s was writing, it’s not been easy to be a liberal during the past decade. In 1939 when this teacher and theologian found himself facing down a giant, like David, Adams reached for five smooth stones and his faith to help him in his fight. What five smooth stones did Adams pick up from the valley’s floor? He calls them the “five smooth stones of liberal religion”. The first is the principle that revelation is continuous. This means that our symbols, our rituals and words themselves are only referents to reality and can’t encapsulate it. Our experiences and discoveries will help deepen the meaning of those referents and our understanding of the world. Living this principle means that we can actually learn from history and apply those lessons to contemporary situations. Adams describes this continuous revelation as “god being in the process of self-fulfillment in nature”. Acknowledging the complexity in using the referent God, he described God as the inescapable commanding reality that sustains and transforms all meaningful existence”. Not exactly the same definition that David might have given nor the one I learned in Sunday school. For Adams god provides the structure or process through which meaningful achievement is possible, the working reality in which all of us are destined to live. So we are free and limited in this idea of God. Reality is then no human contrivance, and it’s only in this reality that human good can be realized and understood. Here Adams adds is where liberal theist and religious humanist can find common ground. The first stone that we reach for in the age of injustice is “We put our faith in a creative reality that is re-creative. Revelation is continuous."

Adams second major principle is that relations between humans ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not coercion. There are times when coercion is needed wrote Adams. For instance he says that state compulsory education is one time when we recognize the need for certain restrictions on personal freedoms for the greater good. But free choice must be a central principle, for this allows us to engage in free inquiry to help each of us most full realize truth and justice. When such freedom is present our faith, our inquires, will lead us to fully acknowledge human worth and dignity. Jim Wallace described faith as cutting in many ways, saying “when it’s not triumphal it can move us to repentance and accountability leading us to reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it’s designed to certify our righteousness that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There’s no reflection.” Wallace goes on to say that real faith leads us to deeper reflection and not – not ever – to the thing we humans most want – easy certainty.”

The third stone in Adam’s bag is the affirmation of the moral obligation to direct our efforts toward the establishment of a just and loving community. He asserts that a faith not bound to justice will lead us to grief, thwarting creativity and divine possibility, robbing us of our birthright of freedom and robbing our community of the spiritual riches latent in its members. Creating a just community means that we ask ourselves how our community treats those among us who are in need, real need of food, shelter and medical care. My partner Lisa and I were talking after the election as we watched the stack market climb realizing that more tax cuts will probably be on the way. One of us commented that for us financially this was a good election – but we have never based our politics on what was best for us financially. Creating the just community is something we must strive to do here, in our own homes, on our own street, in our own town. Many religious people call out Jesus’ name while pointing to the sins of others, sins that Jesus never named. Yet they will ignore his obvious and recurrent cries to care for the poor by creating a justice community – a kingdom of God which is always at hand if we will lift our hands to create it.

Adam’s fourth principle states that virtue and good are social incarnations – only realized through the institutions we create. Our faith must be expressed through our religious communities, our schools, the social and political organizations we create. Without them freedom and justice are impossible. Freedom, justice, good don’t exist anywhere independently of human creations. Only we can bring these ideals into being. We all have power; we don’t always see it and often feel like we’re powerless cogs in some great machine. But we create these machines and we have the power to influence the values they express. Too many of our institutions are created for personal gain – or for the few to exclude others. We can stop basing what we create on values of selfishness and greed – instead basing our institutions on love and compassion. We need to refine our language so the world understands the religious values from which this impulse rises. Don’t give up your power because it feels like it doesn’t matter. Each one of us through this congregation, through our schools through the many social service agencies that we can join can express our faith in our deeds.

These deeds relate to Adam’s fifth and final smooth stone of liberal religion. This is an attitude of ultimate optimism that the resources are available for the achievement of meaningful change. We recognize the tragic qualities of human existence yet choose to live in a dynamic sense of hope. I was dismayed to see all of the initiatives banning gay marriage on ballots across the country. Yet, ten years ago this wouldn’t have even been a question for people to vote on. How long did it take for the slaves to be freed? How long did it take for women to gain the right to vote? Justice does not move quickly but it is like a slow growing root that forces its way through the seemingly impermeable bedrock of hate and fear to crack those rocks open and allow the light of freedom to bring new life where once there was only darkness. Even today, such justice my friends is growing deep roots in dark places.

Such optimism gives us the strength to seek solutions. There are hungry people in our community, let us join together and feed them. There are families without a roof over their heads, let us join together and build them shelter. While we minister to the needs of many let us also be ready to look the giants in the eye and when ever possible hurl a rock its direction for one day the giant will fall. As we wait for that day, let us always be ready to lift our voices together, at all times. Sometimes it may feel like all we have is our voice, but never doubt that when we lift that voice in song there is power in it.

Listening to the Wind

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented November 28, 2004 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

A couple of weeks ago while preparing for a presentation at our district ministers' retreat I was leafing through a lot of old memorabilia. Along with the report cards and class pictures was a newspaper clipping from when I was in Indian Guides. I must have been about seven years old, kneeling in the front row of a group photo bedecked in my vest and headband with one feather sticking into the air. My blonde crew cut was a cultural contrast to the headband and feather.

I remember those Indian Guides meetings, making crafts and sitting cross-legged in circles. And these memories came flooding back when I encountered the book by Philip Deloria called Playing Indians. Deloria's central thesis is that when Europeans came to what they called the 'New World' they wanted to distinguish themselves from the old by trying to become indigenous, by playing like the people who already lived here. While they should be referred to by their tribal or nation's name, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have also had many collective names through history, Indians, Native Americans, First Nation's people. Usually they haven't part of that naming process. So when I refer to them as a group I'll name them as Deloria does - as Indians (except when I slip and call them something else). This process of naming is an example of the issues that we face as we try to be honest about our history, the legacy of Euro-Americans toward the native populations, and the extreme power differential in this process as the Indian people themselves fought to maintain their place as the people of the land while Euro-Americans sought to supplant them.

Playing Indian began very early in our nation's story. We all remember the Boston Tea party. Pictures in my elementary history books showed the feather-bonneted colonists tossing casks of tea over the side of a ship. I always imagined those little barrels as holding great quantities of iced tea and maybe even some slices of lemon, my only experience with tea had been instant from a jar. Along with my ignorance about the state of the tea, I didn't realize that the perpetrators of this celebrated act of civil disobedience were part of a group seeking to legitimate European's Americanness by adopting native costumes and creating their own Indian legends. Called the Tammany Society, this group embodied their claim of sovereignty in America by mimicking characteristics of indigenous people.

Yet while the Bostonians were dressing up in buckskins the Pennsylvanian frontier was awash in warfare, creating the conflicting image of the Indians as both savage and saint. The savage/saint dichotomy began nearly from the time the Pilgrim's landed at Plymouth Rock. James Wilson, in writing the Earth Shall Weep, tells how the pilgrims (whose feast we celebrated this past week) immediately found themselves in a conflicted relationship with their Wampanoag neighbors. Upon their first arrival the pilgrims and those who came with them survived on the corn found by foraging. This found corn was foraged in deserted native villages that surrounded their settlement. Indian populations suffered greatly from European disease such as small pox and chicken pox. Squanto, a central figure in many pilgrim stories, was the sole survivor of his village's encounter with small pox. 75 to 90 percent of many village populations were wiped out. After four months it became apparent that this found grain would not sustain the colonists. Squanto, who was living with the Wampanoags encouraged their leader Massasoit to form an alliance with the new comers at Plymouth. The different understanding of the meaning of this alliance shows the seeds of discord due to differing views of how the world works.

The Wampanoags believed this treaty joined them with the pilgrims in a mutually dependant relationship, one that valued reciprocity. They sought to cement neighborliness by stopping by to visit, assuming they'd be extended the hospitality they showed their visitors. Instead the settlers sent word to those with whom they'd negotiated the treaty with that visits were not welcome. (This leads me to wonder about those thanksgiving paintings showing the happy colonists and Indians sitting together) Unlike the Wampanoag who believed that courtesy and trade were ritual acts demonstrating the mutual dependence necessary for survival, the Pilgrims sought isolation from these new neighbors.

And within the minds of the European settlers a conflicting understanding of what the indigenous people represented must have been dawning. Without the Indian's food, which some settlements relied on for decades, the Europeans would never have established their foothold. Yet without removing their saviors from the land they could never possess it. How could they admit that they owed their survival to people they believed where their cultural, religious inferiors, and how could they take possession of the land without finding a reasonable excuse for removing them? Thus began the image of the savage, who didn't properly use the land. The whole idea of the savage is not a historically credible one. The Indians were called savages in spite of the reality. In war fare their European allies derided them for not being violent enough; their religion was ridiculed as pagan and simplistic (often given as sufficient reason for persecution). To be historically fair, the Indians were called savages as a pretext for their elimination, not for any other reason.

It wasn't until the mid to late 1700s that the European colonists began to think of themselves as having a non-European identity - even then many did not. But this is where Philip Deloria picks up the trail. The primary image used by political cartoonists to represent the colonies in America was that of an Indian maiden. In a widely circulated image she's shown being abused by the wigged and top-coated men, characters of England. Tammany Societies fostered a sense of Indianness in their members. Both became potent images of rebellion.

Once securely free from their European masters, settlers continued to violently push native peoples off their land and eulogize them as saints at the same time. Throughout the 18th and 19th century Red Man societies sprang up through out the colonies. While battles still raged in the south and west, these societies searched for real Indians to help guide their role plays. In modern times that same extinct Indian of the past is a central image of our national identify. The dominant one is that of the plains Indians.

The image of the Plains people is so strong in our national consciousness that if we close our eyes and visualize "Indian" many of us would see the feather bonneted warrior portrayed in Hollywood movies. I remembered sitting in a theater in Waterloo as the lights came up after the movie Dances with Wolves. My father in law (a part Lakota who spent part of his childhood near Pine Ridge) turned to me and said, "Look what your people did to my people." It was on the plains that one of the last chapters of our history with native people was written - the final military conflict, stuff of movies and legends. Wilson calls it "the most potent symbol of the triumph of manifest destiny".

This theological conviction, "Manifest Destiny" became very potent as our nation expanded west. When I attended elementary school in California the concept of Manifest Destiny was an important feature of our history curriculum. It was this that brought people to the West, God's goal for colonization of America. Treaties signed by different tribes were broken by settlers who believed it was their right to take the land. At issue was what it meant to use the land as "God had intended". At the time of colonists the proper use of the land was to put it under the plow, clear it and cultivate it. Anyone not using the land is this way should be displaced. Lest we forget that it was the Indians who taught those colonists how to grow crops here and they did cultivate a great deal of land. Some was lying fallow intentional and some was cleared, but gone to seed due to the effects of disease mentioned earlier. Yet on the plains they were nomadic hunter - because this (as many a failed farmer found) was the most productive way to live on the land.

A quick aside or maybe a confession. I always grew up with the subtle bias nagging in my brain that said, you know we did defeat the Indians after all - so whatever we give them they should be grateful for. Yet this isn't true (beyond the fact that a nation should feel obligated to fulfill its promises to others-the United States has signed more than 370 treaties with Indians and everyone of them has been broken by US citizens) not every treaty was written after the Euro-Americans defeated a tribe or nation. For instance, the black hills were deemed to be the property of the Sioux after years of warfare resulted in a standstill at best. President Grant's Secretary of the Interior estimated that it was costing almost $1 million per Indian killed and the government conceded defeat in 1868.

But it really didn't matter what native peoples did or won. When the government signed a treaty they did little to enforce it and the conflicts based on culture, religion and world view meant that the tension of having this other in the midst of a holy enterprise could not continue. At the time of the 19th century there were two completing views toward the Indian question. One was for totally eradicating the native peoples, the other was to try and integrate them into Euro society as quickly as possible. Both of these positions denigrated Indian culture and ignored their world view. Both allowed for the types of atrocities such as the trail of tears and Wounded Knee.

The ultimate bureaucratic expression of this world view conflict came with the Dawes act. Senator Henry Dawes, its author, formed his answer to the Indian question after a visit to the Cherokee nation. He reported that each family had its own home. There was not a pauper in the nation and the nation did not owe a dollar. They'd built their own capitol, schools and hospital. Yet he found a defect in their system that would keep them from becoming "civilized," they owned their land in common. He said, "There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens... they will not make much progress."

Greed, therefore, needed to be forced into their world view so that the Cherokee would become civilized. The result of the Dawes act was to break up tribal land holdings and attempt to destroy native customs and traditions that reinforced their belief in a reciprocal world view. But it was precisely this selfishness that was antithetical to their traditions. It was precisely this selfishness that prevented Euro-Americans from joining them as the people of the land.

Dressing up in Indian style, as the members of the Boston Tea party, the Redman's Societies, Indian Guides all miss the mark of what was central to being indigenous, what's central to what made the native people the people of the land. Even much later when Euro-Americans sought to embrace the spirituality of the Indians, we missed the centrality of the world view that these traditions represent. As our highly individualistic society practiced the rituals of the sweat lodge or attempted vision quests we individualized the message rather than understanding that its goal was to help not our individual souls but deepen our commitment to, and find our gifts for, our community. A friend of mine in seminary, Renee Whiterabbit told me of a sacred tree of her people. When whites learned of it, they stripped pieces of bark from it, one little piece at a time until they killed the tree. These people went to the tree for their individual glorification, thinking that by owning a piece of it they were special. This living tree had represented a communal connection to the earth for Renee's people.

While there are definite differences between tribes and nations, there are similar characteristics. These include that sense of reciprocity. From the Europeans first encounter with native people there was conflict over the idea of mutual dependence, on each other and on the natural world. Vine Deloria Jr. (Philip's father) in God is Red describes the difference as expressed through sacred space versus sacred history. For the Indian peoples space, place is what is held in reverence. All is an embodiment of a divine energy or creator and human beings have their particular role in that creation, never over and above it but totally within creation. Balance is the ultimate aim and that balance is achieved in this world, as a sense of harmony maintained through ritual acts which reinforce the interconnection and human dependence on the natural world.

Sacred history believes that we are part of a plan being acted out in time, Good versus evil or the divine road map. The world is merely the stage for this action. The Euro-American vision of sacred history was and too often is expressed as a divine right, to conquer lands and the native people there. The earliest settlers believed they were sent by God to create a new Eden, everything here serving as fodder for that creation. This idea of creation morphed into Manifest Destiny. The protestant work ethic reinforced the idea that a person's wealth was a measure of holiness, of favor with God.

While the sacred stories of the Euro-Americans were about conquest and a unique righteousness, Wilson says the sacred stories of the Indians were about the holiness of place and how to live in harmony with the environment. Author activist Carol Lee Sanchez defines the difference saying, "Euro-American people waste their resources and destroy the environment in the Americas because they are not spiritually connected to this land base, because they have no ancient or legendary origins rooted to this land." She describes how tribal culture restored damaged ecosystems and imbedded mistakes into their stories so they could remember what happened and not repeat their mistakes.

In order for us to begin to heal, we need to follow this example. Allow our history to reflect what's really happened so that we might learn from these mistakes and not make them again. This means being honest about how the country came to be as it is, the lives lost in the conquest. Beyond this honest reassessment, we must attempt to become people of the land, whose stories seek harmony with creation, whose sense of hospitality extends to every living creature, whose understanding of interdependence does not seek to own land, but protect it.

When we begin to live in this way, we may be able to heal the deep wounds that still exist with the Indian people with whom we still share this country. Guilt, remorse or continued fictionalizing of our history won't help us to heal. Give them what is rightfully theirs, land, respect and an apology for many wrongs done. But for all our sake, let us not stop there Let's stop trying to take on the surface characteristics and learn from their indigenous worldview, awakening in ourselves a realization of what it means to be indigenous people, a people who know their home is with this land and only by seeking harmony with all will we ever find peace within.

Sources:

Philip Deloria. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Vine Deloria Jr. God is Red. Golden Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994.
Carol Lee Sanchez. "New Tribal Communities" in Weaving the Vision. Edited by Judith Plaskow. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1998.
James Wilson. The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. New York: Grove, 1998.

Whole-Hearted Spirituality

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented August 18, 2005 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

While traveling with our youth on their Boston Heritage trip last week I had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. There I looked on the same body of water that inspired Thoreau to write the prophetic words Mark just shared with us. The walk to the site is one of simple beauty. The trail meandered from the sheltering woods to the edge of the pond and past boggy wetlands where the mists still lingered at midday. We were surrounded by stands of white pines, then emerged to look across the waters that inspired a generation. The day was clear and warm. A brilliant blue sky peaking through the deep green boughs. The path approaching the cabin is well-worn. We were lucky enough to arrive when no other visitors were present would disturb our moment of silence, as we looked on the outline of the simple hut that had served as Thoreau’s home for his two-year two-month sojourn. There he lived simply. From there he went out to change the world. His spirituality encompassed his whole heart, nurturing it as well as setting it aflame when he saw injustice.

This idea of the heart enflamed in the peaceful woods set me to thinking about spirituality, its purpose in our lives and our in our religious tradition. It leads me to reflect that we too need a whole-hearted spiritually. Our hearts have four chambers, two atria that draw our blood in and infuse it with oxygen and two ventricles to pump that blood back into our bodies in service of our lives. We need all four chambers of our hearts – just as we need all four elements of spirituality. Spirituality in its earliest definitions meant to breath. Spiritual practices help our lives to have breath, bringing vitality and purpose to our existence. The four elements I’ll describe are my classifications you’re welcome to create you own. My four elements include silence, study, creating community and serving the world. A whole-hearted spirituality embraces all four of these elements, seeking to create a balance in our lives. This balance is needed so that, just as our blood needs the oxygen to feed our bodies, our souls have the sustenance to help us be creative in the world.

Let’s begin with the sustenance side. Just as blood comes into the atria to be infused with oxygen we need practices that infuse our lives with that deep something, as important and invisible as oxygen. For instance, even a raging extrovert like me needs time for silence. My primary practice of silence is walking. Each morning I begin my day at 6 AM with a half hour walk. I am accompanied by my dogs, who are able companions in my silent ritual. I’d never thought of these walks as a spiritual practice, until last winter. On those cold dark mornings I took to carrying a walkman so I could listen to music or the news of the day. After a few mornings I noticed that I was out of sorts as the day began, finding it harder to focus. I was more restless and even angry. I realized that I’d sacrificed my time of silence, the time when I’d notice the state of the trees, the quality of the air and the feeling of the earth beneath my feet. I needed that time because it was then that my being would remember its connection to all those elements. I ditched the walkman and found peace returning.

I think we’re often afraid of silence, afraid of where our own insights might take us, unwilling to turn off the noise so that we can experience our simple connections to the world. It was in his silent sitting by the pond that Thoreau realized he was partly leaves and vegetable mould himself. Such connections are the source of beauty and joy. Sure they challenge me each day – but the challenge is one of love not guilt. It is a challenge whose rewards are beyond measure.

How to begin a practice of silence? One of the simple practices that I might do when I’m on a bus with 22 youth somewhere between here and Boston and we’re lost again -- (or some other situation that might give rise to anxiety) is meditating on my own heart beat. I would like to invite you to join me for a few moments of this practice. As thoughts come into your mind, let them go and feel you heart beating in your chest, feel that rhythm. – practice --

That beating is like a rhythm of the universe. It’s always with me and easy to focus on. This is my practice; it may or may not be yours. In Hinduism they have a belief that each person follows their own path, developing the practice that suits their needs. For you this time of silence may be one of prayer or sitting mediation or something I’ve not even thought of. What that Hindu belief stresses is that we seek a path.

Our other atria of spiritual practice are study. Again what you choose to study is up to you. But I know that study is central to my well being. My primary spiritual practice of study is music. While practicing music everything I’m immersed in something that allows everything else to disappear and my being to focus on this art. While I enjoy playing tunes I already know, I find that learning a new tune, challenging myself to grow, is when I am most engaged. I also know that at times only in music can I find connections. When I find the gist of a rhythm and understand what the writer intended it’s a moment of revelation and joy. The music fills me when I’m empty and reveals beauty when I’m open to it. Just as the plucking of the harp strings spoken of a goodness universal to Thoreau, so too each time I take up my pipes it is a learning experience.

Study is a very broad term. Many traditions encourage us to study sacred texts. What makes a text sacred is the way it affects us. Poetry of all sorts is a favorite sacred text of mine. On the advice of a colleague, I’m trying my hand at memorizing poems. By knowing something so thoroughly it becomes part of us. Then it can be available to us as reminder of what’s sacred or important. I’ve begun to memorize my second poem, Sunflowers by Mary Oliver:

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines

creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and so many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugar of the sun.

Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy

but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young -
the important weather,
the wandering crows.

Don't be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds -
each one a new life! –

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garment of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.

The images of this poem could be studied a life time and still filled with richness. The rows of seeds remind me of my place in the universe. Their lonely celebration, my intimate connection to all that surrounds me. And the words themselves echo the beauty that is, even amid the pain of our constantly changing world. As is obvious by my need of notes, I don’t have it memorized, yet.

The one poem I do have memorized is Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Night”. When I first heard of the value of memorizing poetry as a spiritual discipline, I realized that at moments of struggle I’ve said those last lines from Frost’s poem “Miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep.” These words, uttered in silence to no ears but mine, remind me that this moment is but part of a longer journey. At times, those simple lines help me to keep going.

If you don’t have a favorite poem to begin to memorize I’d encourage you to look in the back of the hymnal. There are many wonderful selections there, and during the slower parts of the service this could give you a chance to occupy your thoughts with something productive. This type of spiritual study is similar to the lecto divino of the Catholic tradition or Jnana Yoga in Hinduism or even koans in Buddhism, seeks to engage our being in depth questions. It’s not just our minds at work, but as they roll from our tongues and vibrate across our bodies they involve our entire self. Through this avenue we pave a deeper understanding of why we believe what we do, beyond a conscious understanding to the very core of our being.

Liberal theology has been accused of not having moral values, as if freedom, compassion and acceptance weren’t moral. Instead I think we haven’t always had the spiritual practices that help us to root and express those values. Yet by infusing our beings through silence and study with this deep knowledge our actions in the world take on that humble certainty, a knowledge that we are acting from our best and deepest selves. This is a sense of value that is born out of our feelings of connection – our inescapable sense of responsibility to the beauty that surrounds us and the desire for all to have the opportunity to experience such a joy. For me this is a powerful basis of knowing to sustain our lives and not allow us to be swept up in the latest fad or swept away by the despair of the times needs. This knowing for me is the sense of eternal connection to the forces of life that infuses all which surrounds me. It’s that connection known through silence and study that gives me the will and strength to act in the world.

Action, acting in the world is where the next two chambers of our whole hearted spirituality take us. As our prophet of the morning Thoreau wrote, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.” So as we replenished our blood with these internal practices; it needs to be sent into the world. Spirituality that does not lead us to creative participation in the world is self-indulgent and bankrupt. Like the right ventricle beating in our chests, the third chamber of our spiritual heart leads us to create community around us. Here, today, we are engaged in that creative act. Coming to Fellowship on Sunday morning is a spiritual discipline. When we don’t use the newsletter like a TV guide (selecting only those programs that look appealing) but instead seek to part of a community so we can engage ourselves in the search for what matters then we have a spiritual practice. Creating community isn’t easy – it means taking risks. At a recent meeting we were discussing coffee hour. A number of the folks expressed their discomfort with this time of ritual fellowship, not knowing what to say, afraid of saying the wrong thing. One feared foe pa that comes up frequently, (which occurs because with two services we don’t know everyone) is people mistakenly ask someone if they are new whose been attending for years. My solutions is to ask how long someone’s been coming, rather than if they are new. Or better yet, ask “What brings you to the fellowship?” Then you’ve created an opportunity to learn about what matters. Knowing what matters to each other is how we connect. Connections create compassion and caring and eventually community.

This is why I believe our milestones are a spiritual practice. Here we seek to share what’s important in our stories and incorporate them into the larger narrative of this community. The act of telling and sharing is a sacred act, it’s how we understand life on a deeper level – our own and those with whom we share this space and time.—milestones

Part of the common story of this fellowship is its role of caring for the larger community. Here we discern how to be present in the world. This is the second ventricle, the final chamber of our whole-hearted spirituality, engaging the world in which we live. This may occur through larger groups like our own social action projects such as the Industrial Areas Foundation. It may be through other national or international organizations, it may be through peace marches or (as in Thoreau’s case) civil disobedience in the face of injustice. It is the means of exercising our values in the face of injustice. There are times when standing in a sea of people gives us heart, confidence in the power of untied action. Then there are times when it feels like we are uttering a whisper trying to shout down the ocean. At such moments, when despair might lead us to give up, we need to heed the words of Martin Luther King when he said he had little faith in decades but great hope in centuries. This isn’t a call to complacency but an admonition to never give up. It’s a reminder that we need the depth of our connections to sustain us and remind us of the beauty for which we strive to create. It’s also a reminder that the communities we create are prophetic beacons of what we believe to be possible.

Henry David Thoreau walked those same paths upon which I trod; he found solace and revelation in the waters of the pond, on the wings of the hawks and the mists of the morning. In his cabin he sat by the light of a candle and wrote his reflections and studied his teachers. Then, he engaged his community and sought to change the world. His life went on to influence people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, two other prophets who understood the connection between our internal spiritual lives and our impact on society. Prophets are everywhere, one is sitting right next to you and one lives in your very soul. Each morning the sun rises and hangs a signal, its message is that life begins again, as the sunflowers turn their heads in acknowledgement of that message they invite us to their celebration. As Mary Oliver reminds me each time I try again to commit that verse to memory, it’s not easy. But let those up burning faces set our hearts flame, inspiring us to nurture that prophetic voice with silence and study, and then let it sing in our community and the world. May it be so.

Faith

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented September 17, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton

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

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

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

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

In her poem, Welcome Morning, Anne Sexton reflects how I'd really feel about each morning—if I paused to give it much thought. Instead, I let it go unspoken, not recognizing the joy that is latent in each breakfast I prepare for my family, in each walk I take with our dogs. Yet mingled in that disregard I know that, for me, each morning is a statement of faith. Each day when I put my feet on the floor and greet the day with such casual disregard, I'm committing an act of faith, a faith that continues to develop as I look out on struggle, doubt, and joy through the window of my life.

Why do you decide to get out of bed each morning? We can say that we have to, but we don't. And if you choose to get out of bed each day-and to come here on Sundays—it means you, too, are looking for a window on why you make that choice or are trying to find the words to paint that thank-you on your palm. We're all seeking to understand and solidify the faith that gets us through our days so that the joy we've found doesn't die young. That's an act of faith.

This is not the understanding of faith that I grew up with. Back then, my faith was more like a test. Trust and obey. There was a significant moment when I realized that I just didn't have faith in the teachings I'd grown up with. Eventually, I came to see it wasn't that I didn't have any faith-just that my faith was different, based on something other than what I'd thought it was. Then began the ongoing process of building my faith.

This faith journey hasn't been a linear one. Yet it has led to a firmer foundation built on experiences of and in the world, on words and deeds of those smarter and holier than me, and on a sense of love and acceptance that defies logic. My understanding of this journey gained some structure last summer, when I had the chance to spend the day with Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg. She described the journey of faith as having three interlocking stages: bright faith, verifying faith, and abiding faith.

My bright faith burst forth while practicing Zen and when my partner and I found our first Unitarian Universalist church. In both experiences, I saw possibilities I'd never dreamed of. As I followed the lights that shone for me, I found a path that made sense and experienced a joyous connection that was mind-blowing. These were heady experiences, sitting across from my Zen teacher, thinking, "Man, this guy has got it together! If only I could be so wise." There were moments in our Wayzata church when I'd think, "Why can't the whole world be like this?" But If I'd stopped there, the faith wouldn't have sustained me. As events soon showed, faith had to rest on something deeper than just a teacher or even a community.

At the church by the lake in Minnesota, I experienced board meetings that dragged until midnight, infighting, and pettiness that I'd never thought would emerge in a faith community. I discovered that people are always people, that sometimes the passion of faith causes emotions to run higher and arguments to become more personal. But I knew that the church community was still struggling to find how best to live this faith, and it and I were both bound to make mistakes. I also learned that those mistakes didn't cause them or me to abandon one another.

Bright faith is an exciting time, and it can also be a dangerous time. It's the pitfalls of bright faith that lead so many of us to develop negative attitudes toward faith. Too often during that rush of excitement, while that openness to this heady emotion is paired with vulnerability and innocence, people are taken advantage of. My Zen teacher, this person whom I greatly respected, who really taught me the meaning of the Buddhist practice that's been central to my faith, took advantage of his position with a student. He initially denied accusations of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of the Buddhist community. When confronted, he finally admitted his wrongdoing and resigned from his position as teacher. His actions had great ramifications in his own life and within his family, as well as in the faith community that he had founded.

Many people, disillusioned with the actions of their teacher, left the sangha; many may have left Buddhism altogether. That can happen when faith is rooted in a teacher or scripture rather than in the practice itself. The Buddha understood this issue. That's why he said, "Don't cling to what I say; see whether it works in your life. If its does, then follow those teachings; if it doesn't, then throw it out." I think the Buddha would be dismayed to see how many followers have made him into a god.

Some of the stories told of Sufi teacher Nasrudin help us realize that teachers aren't meant to be put on pedestals. One such story tells of a student who saw Nasrudin dropping bread crumbs around his garden. He asked his teacher why he was doing that, and Nasrudin replied, "to keep away the tigers." "But master, there aren't any tigers within a hundred miles of here." Nasrudin replied, "Effective, isn't it?"

Bright faith can become blind faith when we are too attached and don't question. When the teacher or book or experience runs into a moment in reality that it hadn't anticipated or prepared us for, then the attachment is either dogmatically reasserted (ignoring reality and bowing to authority), or it is destroyed. When the attachment is destroyed, the bright light of faith is extinguished, and that faith is gone. Authority is an important component of faith. But all sources of authority are fallible and open to abuse. None deserves absolute, unquestioning, unfailing loyalty; if a source demands it, then it's really time to ask questions.

This is why Salzberg encourages the continuation along the path of faith to her second stage, verifying faith. Verifying faith is the practice of deepening faith. We engage our brains and our own experiences as faith moves from out there to inside us, as authority moves from something external to something inside. Part of this practice is defining and refining what our faith means. At this stage, everything is open for questions. The teacher, the text, the experience are all subject to reflection and deeper discernment. Faith is less an experience and more a practice, an effort to enlarge our understanding and deepen our personal connections.

Salzberg likens faith to looking at the world through a straw. During the bright faith stage, we peer through a narrow straw. When events in the world happen outside of our little straw, we don't know how to deal with them. As we test our faith during the verifying stage, we're forced to enlarge that straw, allowing more of the world in. This means being willing to let other views into our worldviews and being willing to listen and learn. We grow our faith through questioning what we're told and exploring what we don't know. My Hebrew Bible teacher in seminary, Carolyn Pressler, said knowledge is like the air inside a balloon: The more you know, the bigger the balloon gets. But the air outside the balloon is all the things we don't know. So as our balloon gets bigger and touches more of that air, we begin to understand how little we really know. During this process of verifying, we gain a sense of humility.

If an article of faith can't stand up to reason, then doubt needs to guide us to deeper inspection of that belief. Does our faith help us deal with real suffering in the world? Does it help us in such a way that we aren't externalizing or demonizing or ignoring most of the world in order to make sense of how things are? Does it help us to, if not understand, at least come to some peace with our own mortality and the death of those we love? From sitting at the bedside of those who were dying, I know there are many paths to finding acceptance with death.

Life after death, rebirth/reincarnation, even death as the final stage-all can provide comfort in the face of the unknown, as well as an imperative to act ethically in this life. Whether my rebirth is affected by my current actions or whether my current acts must stand on their own merits, there remains an imperative to take seriously what we do in the here and now. My personal theology rests most comfortably with the belief that, upon my death, my animating energy and material reality will merge back into the cosmos from which I came, to be recycled by the planet that gave my molecules birth millions of years ago. For me, that's enough. In this faith, I feel the certainty of my connection to something greater. This is a part of faith verified for me; I don't claim it is reality, but I claim it as my faith.

During the verification stage, we discover experiences that have deeply affected our faith, even if we weren't aware of that impact. For instance, sometimes our own suffering connects us to others. During my work as a chaplain at St. Joseph's hospital in St. Paul, my supervisor noted that I seemed to relate very well to patients dealing with long-term illnesses. He asked where that ability came from. I had no idea; I told him I'd never had any traumatic incidents in my life. He leveled his piercing stare, his unmoving eyes that seemed to look deep inside me. After wracking my brain for some answer that would deflect his gaze to another direction, I came up with something. "Well," I began tentatively, "I did have mono for six months in college. I had to drop out because of it-twice when I had a relapse." Diverting his gaze hadn't worked; he looked at me even more intensely. "You don't think that was traumatic? It sounds pretty traumatic to me." I realized that the compassion at the center of my faith had its roots in my life.

Just as those meditation experiences and times in my church in Wayzata didn't really have meaning until I'd explored the depths of the connections they created, neither did this until I could really understand that my way of being in the world is faithful because of these experiences. When we grow, through verification, to trust our own experiences, then we understand abiding faith.

In abiding faith, Salzberg says, we orient our lives around what Paul Tillich calls our "ultimate concern." It's our touchstone, our place of meaning, the force that gets us out of bed in the morning. Naming it may be difficult; it may be easier to relate those experiences of knowing we're in alignment with it. What we do in our daily lives becomes an expression of this growing awareness of our interconnections and deepening compassion. Abiding faith is born out of our lives; we can trust it because it's ours. We don't rely on borrowed concepts but the bone-deep knowledge of our lived understanding as embodied. A passage Salzberg wrote about seeing a rainbow after her teacher died was an experience of breaking though the pain to a deeper sense of faith, a deeper connection to all of her teachers, and the knowledge that she was now her own Buddha. Salzberg says our suffering doesn't occur for our edification, but it happens nonetheless, and we can react by deepening our faith or sinking into despair.

Despair is the opposite of faith. It's despair that can keep us from getting out of bed in the morning. Her pain wasn't gone; it was transformed. The loss of her teacher wasn't diminished. But, by letting go of her attachment to him, her compassion replaced despair as the depth of her faith connected her to joy in the ephemeral qualities of life and the beauty that that rainbow represented. Abiding faith, Salzberg says, is when we trust in ourselves that we have a faith strong enough to hold the joy and sorrow of the entire world in our hearts and survive.

Salzberg's favorite example of abiding faith is the Dalai Lama. She notes how unaffected he is by fame and prestige, how utterly compassionate he is in a room full of people and how able to accept people where they are. People who appear to me to strongly embody their faith are comfortable with doubt and ambiguity.

In a recent Newsweek interview, evangelical preacher Billy Graham described how his suffering as he's aged has changed his faith. He said some of the certainty he once held is no longer important to him, adding, "There are many things that I don't understand." He doesn't believe Christians must take every verse of the Bible literally, saying instead that it's OK to disagree about details of scripture and theology.

He says, "As time went on, I began to realize the love of God was for everybody, all over the world." Graham's sense that God's love is for everyone, not just those who share his faith, shows an embodiment of compassion. His foundational beliefs in God and Jesus Christ haven't changed, yet his process of verification borne out in his own suffering has led him to a faith in love for all and a greater tolerance for ambiguity.

Who would have thought that I'd seat Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Sharon Salzberg and Anne Sexton all around the same breakfast table? It shows me that faith isn't the problem in our world today. Living a blind, shallow faith is. Such faith exists in every religion and philosophy, as do testaments to abiding faith. Unverified, disembodied, shallow faith allows despots to rule through fear and promises based on fantasies. It allows nations to wage war, calling all doubt disloyalty. Faith isn't the issue; the problem is blind faith being manipulated by people with power. We need a deep, abiding faith to get us out of bed in the morning and to live compassionate, connected lives so that we can lead the blind not to our truth but to their own. "Faith," said Mahatma Gandhi, "is not something to grasp; it is a state to grow into." May we allow bright faith to seduce us but not trap us, verified faith to encourage our doubt but not fuel our cynicism. And may we arrive at an abiding faith that brings comfort to our lives, compassion to our actions, and justice in our hearts.

Forgiveness

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented September 24, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

Choosing a Place, a Yom Kippur sermon
by Karla Goldman, historian in residence at the Jewish Women’s Archive

If we are able to remember every day that we are shaping our world, shaping those around us, and shaping the future, then it may turn out that even the everyday, seemingly mundane periods of our lives matter much more than we may have thought. And we should realize that, if we take our responsibilities seriously, if we appreciate the impact of what we do as Jews or as human beings, then we will realize that, although we cannot always turn frustrating situations to our liking, if we cannot find a way to effectively help a friend or challenge an institution or find a mode of worship that meets our needs or even do something to address the pain that is currently afflicting Israel, we still need to remember that our efforts matter, that they will not be lost on those around us.

We define ourselves by our choices and our commitment. And even when we are bound to fail, those to whom we offer support will not forget, and others will learn from our passion. Our stories may focus on the extraordinary, symbolic moments in our lives as individuals or as a people, but how we define ourselves in those moments is built upon whom we've chosen to be everyday.

Conclusion of the African folktale The Blind Man and the Hunter

The hunter and his blind brother-in-law returned the next day to the spot where they had set their traps. The hunter found a little, gray bird in his trap but discovered a bird with beautiful green, crimson, and gold plumage in the blind man's trap. He thought, "He'll never know the difference; he can't see them!" and handed the little, gray bird to the blind man, saying, "Here's the bird that was in your trap." They began to walk back toward their village.

Soon he asked, "If you're so clever and you see with your ears, then answer me this: Why is there so much anger and hatred and warfare in this world?" And the blind man answered: "Because the world is full of so many people like you, who take what is not theirs." And suddenly the hunter was filled with bitter shame. He took the little, gray bird out of the blind man's hand and gave him the beautiful green, crimson, and gold one instead. "I'm sorry," he said.

And they walked and they walked, and then the hunter said, "If you're so clever and see with your ears, then answer me this: Why is there so much love and kindness and gentleness in this world?" And the blind man answered: "Because the world is full of so many people like you, who learn by their mistakes."

And they walked and they walked until they arrived home at their village. And from that day onward, if the hunter heard anyone ask, "Blind man, how is it that you are so wise?" he would put his arm around the blind man's shoulders and say, "because he sees with his ears-and hears with his heart."

As we drove with the Teton mountain range in our rearview mirror, we marveled at the continued beauty as we passed in and out of river valleys. Then, passing through the western Black Hills, we watched the landscape change, becoming more barren. We saw a sign noting that we'd entered the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. We'd taken this southern route home to visit the Wounded Knee massacre site. My partner, Lisa, had family involved at the massacre and, by genetic memory, so does our son, Thomas. So we thought it would be good for Thomas to see some of the land and learn more of the history of his family. As we neared the site, a Lakota man waved us over to a small, dusty parking area on the south side of the road. After we got out of the car, he met us and shared some of the history. He also described the struggles of reservation life-90 percent unemployment, no jobs, and no prospects. He invited us to take our time and walk around the site. The hill where most of the Lakota people were killed is now a cemetery. We walked up to see the mass grave from 1891 and many more contemporary graves. Thomas noticed the mixture of Christian and Native American symbolism on the markers. We also noticed how many veterans and teenagers occupied the hilltop cemetery.

After we walked back to our car, the man stepped over to my window. I lowered it and, after a few words, he said that his water heater was out and he had no money to fix it, and he asked whether we could help. He added that he and his wife could manage, but his kids needed hot water to bathe and have clean clothes. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the loose bills, handing them to the man, who put them into his pocket and stepped away with a thank-you. As we turned onto a narrow country road driving into the Badlands, I confronted how incredibly uncomfortable I felt about what had happened. It wasn't being hit up for money-I'm used to that. It took me a long time to figure out what bothered me so profoundly about this interaction. I realized the incredible feeling of guilt I had, driving home from our vacation and happening onto a glimpse of the life of a family whose daily struggles are rooted in injustices that I can't begin to fix-yet I still feel responsible. I felt guilty and helpless at the same time.

As I thought back on this experience, my longing for forgiveness for this continuing offense, I also thought, "Doggone it, I have enough things for which I need forgiveness in my daily life. Do I have to add the sins of the nation to my list?" The Jewish High Holy Days served to help me understand that my dilemma is not unique. The answer that I found isn't easy or totally satisfactory, but it does help me to see the importance of this multilayered necessity of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a complex human need. The days beginning with Rosh Hashanah, which started at sundown Sept. 22, and extending through Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown Oct. 1, remind our Jewish friends and neighbors that forgiveness begins within ourselves, extends to our neighbors, and encompasses our land. Wrongs committed against another person need to be rectified with that person. Those committed against God go to God. This year, the Jewish High Holy Days coincide with the autumnal equinox, reminding me how the balance of the universe is entwined with the balance in our lives. And forgiveness is a necessary component for us to reach and sustain that balance.

The process starts with being able to forgive ourselves. I'm one of those people who lie awake at night remembering wrongs I've done, even those I've been forgiven for. Misspoken words that hurt unintentionally or ill-spoken words that were meant to have barbs; not visiting when I should have or intruding when I meant to help-those sins of commission and omission. Karla Goldman's sermon reminds us that we need to take our responsibilities seriously but shouldn't be paralyzed by what we can't do. Sometimes we have to begin by forgiving ourselves so that we can let go of the past and be open to who we are without that baggage. Forgiveness is a moment of change, necessary if we truly want to grow. This poem by Emily Dickinson reminds me to take advantage of that possibility while I still have the chance:

All but Death, can be Adjusted-
Dynasties repaired-
Systems-settled in their Sockets-
Citadels-dissolved-

Wastes of Lives-resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs-
Death-unto itself-Exception-
Is exempt from Change-

A portion of the Torah that will be read during this season says, "I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity." "Choose life," the Torah instructs, choose life. We choose life when we understand the importance of forgiveness, as well as of our responsibility not only to ourselves and those around us, but equally to those who will come after us. If we have the ability to forgive ourselves, we can extend forgiveness to those around us and seek it when we have wronged.

Forgiving ourselves and others requires letting go, but avoiding a buildup up resentments may take us even further. This was a lesson taught by a Taoist sage who gave a disciple an empty sack and a basket of potatoes:

"Think of the people who have done or said something against you in the recent past. Carve each name on a potato, and put it in the sack." The disciple came up with quite a few names, and soon his sack was heavy with potatoes. "Carry the sack with you wherever you go for a week," said the sage. At first, the sack wasn't so heavy. But soon it became a burden, and after a few days, the potatoes gave off a ripe odor. Finally, the week was over. The sage summoned the disciple. "Any thoughts about all this?" he asked.

"Yes, master," the disciple replied. "When we are unable to forgive others, we carry negative feelings with us, much like these potatoes. It becomes a burden and, after a while, festers."

The master said, "That is what happens when one holds a grudge. So, how can we lighten the load?"

His student answered, "We must strive to forgive."

The master nodded, "Forgiving someone is the equivalent of removing a potato from the sack. How many of your transgressors are you able to forgive?"

"I have decided to forgive all of them."

"We can remove all the potatoes." The sage then said, "Were there people who transgressed against you this last week?"

There were. The disciple panicked when he realized his empty sack was about to get filled up again. "Master," he asked, "won't there always be potatoes in the sack?"

"Yes, as long as people speak or act against you in some way, you will always have potatoes."

"But, we can't control what others do. So what good is the Tao in this case?"

"You can figure it out. If the potatoes are negative feelings, then what is the sack?"

"The sack is that which allows me to hold on to the negativity. It is something within that makes us dwell on feeling offended. Ah, it is my inflated sense of self-importance.""And what will happen if you let go of it?"

"Then the things that people do or say against me no longer seem like such a major issue."

"In that case, you won't have any names to inscribe on potatoes. That means no more weight to carry around and no more bad smells. The Tao of forgiveness is the decision to not just to remove some potatoes, but to let go of the sack."

What causes us to take offense? How do we react when it happens? This story of the Tao asks us to see how often offense is taken because it tarnishes our self-image, an illusion. A story from Africa provides another image of seeking forgiveness by showing how a person is not living up to who they could be. Rather than damning a person, the villagers remind them of the story of who they really are. They re-craft the narrative of that person's life so they are part of that flow that connects them to the community. This is a forgiveness that seeks reintegration rather than retribution.

There may well be times when that reintegration, as ideal as it may be, might seem impossible. Ethicist Lewis Smedes understood this when he wrote:

I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse. ... People who have been wronged badly and wounded deeply should give themselves time and space before they forgive. ... There is a right moment to forgive. We cannot predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives. ... Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long. ... If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls.

One former prisoner of war asked another whether he'd ever forgiven their captors. "No, never," was the reply. "Well then, they still have you in prison." Offering forgiveness can be a step toward freedom.

Granted, there are many painful wrongs in the world. But sometimes a bit of perspective helps us to see them in a different light. Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield tells this story of a woman who approached Roberto de Vicenzo, a famous Argentinean golfer, in a parking lot after he'd won a tournament. She congratulated him on his victory and then told him that her child was deathly ill. Touched by her story, he endorsed his winning check over to her and said, "Make some good days for your baby." The next week at a country-club luncheon, a golfing official approached him and said the woman was a phony. "She fleeced you, my friend," he said. De Vicenzo replied, "You mean there was no dying baby?" The official nodded. "That's the best news I've heard all week!"

De Vicenzo's response was an expression of what was ultimately important to him. Asking for forgiveness from God, for me, means seeking to understand where we've deviated from living in alignment with our source of ultimacy and seeking to realign our lives. I resonate with the traditional Jewish idea that my deeds need to be oriented toward creating heaven in this life. The covenant I hold sacred is with a creative force of possibility in the here and now. When I ask forgiveness, it is when I've come up short in my covenant to take seriously my responsibility to shape my world, to live my commitments to peace and harmony. When I can ask this forgiveness with honesty, then the creative energy opens up new possibilities As Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams wrote, this divine love emanating from our ultimacy always has the characteristic of loving "in spite of" or of "forgiveness." Each day is a succeeding spring.

This is where the actions we take as individuals intersect most strongly with those of our nation. We have been asked to witness attempts at forgiveness by our nation-but what were the results? Forgiveness is different than an apology. An apology is just words. It can be part of asking for forgiveness, but it's not all that's needed. Forgiveness requires a change of action. It may be letting go of our sack of potatoes, or seeking to bring someone back into the village, or re-establishing our covenant with that which matters most to us.

This is especially important on a national scale. Here's an example: When confronted with irrefutable evidence of the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq by U.S. forces, these are the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issuing an apology: "To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of the U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was inconsistent with the values of our nation. It was inconsistent with the teachings of the military to the men and women of the armed forces. And it was certainly fundamentally un-American." These words acknowledged that the actions were outside of what our nation understands itself to be. But what action have we seen since then? The same administration that issued the apology is promoting legislation to allow actions that are considered by many to be torture.

Too often, we use apologies like scapegoats in the temple rituals of ancient Israel. The sins of the nation were transferred by a priest onto a goat, who was then sacrificed to alleviate the nation of its wrongs. If such a sacrifice is accompanied by a change of heart, which is the intention of the ritual, then it allows the people to move on and not dwell in the past. If, however, it is just an apology rather than a genuine search for forgiveness, the nation will continue to drift from the source of ultimacy of its people. Harmony is not possible for such a nation; peace will be an illusive dream. That's the disquiet I felt driving away from Wounded Knee that day. Our nation, built on the genocide of the native people and the labor of an enslaved people, needs to seek genuine forgiveness.

My struggle with our national guilt is how I can own it but not be overwhelmed by it. Knowing that the experiences of Wounded Knee have never been forgiven, how can I go about my daily life? We can continue to search our hearts and root out the racism that still lives there. We can choose to shape our actions to create more justice in our own lives, in our own communities, in our own families. By doing this, we are seeking forgiveness in the place that it matters-in our lives.

Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned and watched his people bleed and die as they fought for their freedom in South Africa, offers us hope for forgiveness from these wrongs. He said, "When I think about the past, the types of things they did, I feel angry. But then again, that is my feeling. The brain always dominates, says, as I have pointed out, 'You have a limited time to stay on earth. You must try and use that period to transform your country into what you desire it to be.' " Mandela's words demonstrate the interrelationship of being able to forgive on a personal level to forgiving on a national scale. He undoubtedly could have had a lot of potatoes in his sack. Yet he chose to let it go to build on his ultimate value of peace for his people.

Let's go back to the circle in that African village. To seek and offer forgiveness are acts of acknowledgement that we are all interdependent beyond our own egos, as people, as villages, as nations. Catholic monk Thomas Merton wrote, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved in one another." The ultimate way to achieve and sustain balance and harmony-in our lives, in our villages, in our nations-is to know this fact in our hearts and to fulfill its calling in our lives. This calling echoes through our hearts to awaken compassion and love for all that is, just as that love is an expression of our ultimate concern.

I invite you to open a hymnal to page 637, where Rob Eller-Isaacs' words summarize what I've been trying to impart. Each time we forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love, we are acknowledging our connections and affirming the ability of love to heal, to bridge, and to reintegrate us. As we share these words, let us pause after each stanza and silently hold in our hearts the points of intersection of this statement and each of our lives. Then, let us offer forgiveness and let it go.

How will we begin again in love? Let us reach out in kindness, and by so doing let that kindness seep into our own bones so that we may be healed as we seek to heal.

Doubt

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented October 15, 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

When I was a child, my family never engaged in theological discussions around the dinner table. This was one of those areas that you just didn't ask about. I recall the first time I hazarded to ask a question of theological significance. I was 8 years old and, having recently suffered the loss of our family dog, had questions about heaven for dogs. Unfortunately, I chose to ask those questions at 2 in the morning, and my parents quite reasonably told me to go back to bed. The next time I recall daring to venture into questions of a religious nature didn't arrive until I was in college. My parents and I had been to Minneapolis, visiting my brother, who was there doing an internship. During the car ride home, we somehow started discussing the Bible. I expressed my doubts as to the inerrancy of the scripture, to which my parents could readily agree. I went on to say that I doubted the historical reality of some stories; again they agreed. Then I said I had some doubt as to how useful the Bible was in today's world-that was too far. The red mist set in, and I was told that that was not an acceptable area to question. It was the way in which they shut off the conversation that let me know I'd crossed a line.

I found similar resistance in later years regarding questions about the afterlife, the existence of God, and the humanity of Jesus. Each time there was a line beyond which no doubt was allowed. I've struggled with this line of doubt a lot over the years, first feeling that my doubt was a sign of failure, then letting my doubt lead me to a kind of nihilism. Now I see doubt as an integral part of my faith, a way of being in the world that isn't dismissive but engaging.

Doubt can be a tool that will lead us to deeper places, deeper understandings, deeper insights into how we can live in the world in the midst of life's uncertainty. But doubt doesn't always function this way. There's a story of the Buddha's enlightenment that tells of his sitting under the bodhi tree doing battle with Mara, Lord of Illusions, who tried to distract him. After reaching enlightenment, he spent seven more days offering his thanks to the tree for sheltering him. Then, as he stepped away from the tree and onto a nearby path, he met a man in the road. The man, seeing this odd look on the Buddha's face, asked him, "Are you a god?" to which the Buddha replied, "No, I'm awake." That's as far as I'd ever heard the story, but I recently learned that there is more. After hearing the Buddha's reply, the man said, "Huh, we'll see"-and walked away. So the first person the Buddha met was a doubter.

But this doubter of the Buddha represents a particular aspect of doubt that we now call cynicism. His doubt didn't lead him to ask the Buddha any questions: "Whattya mean, 'awake'?" Instead, his turning away represents a refusal to engage with his doubt. Doubt can be a tool or a road block. Doubt can be an excuse to keep us from digging deeper, learning more, engaging with the multiple ways of being in the world. Doubt can be a wall-or it can be a candle. It can either block us from learning or light our way into unseen places.

From its beginning, doubt has challenged those who purported to know the world through both religion and science. Doubters questioned the ability of both divine revelation and human observation to really know what was true. But during the earliest stages of human history, doubt wasn't a very big threat to society or to the lives of the doubters. For instance, many schools of doubt existed in ancient Rome and Greece, giving us many great doubters whose names and works would surface in the future to renew doubt's influence. Theological consistency wasn't demanded, but adherence to authority was. Doubters weren't persecuted for their questioning, except when they went afoul of the civil authorities. While accused of atheism, Socrates was really executed for being disruptive of the social order. Socrates used questions to illuminate the truth, believing that doubt, rather than certainty, was the better path. The lesson of Socrates' trial is that doubt can challenge established social order.

Many of these ancient doubters resolved how to live with doubt in what are called graceful-life philosophies. These philosophies center on living lives of moderation but enjoying life, as well. Writing his meditations two centuries before the common era, Marcus Aurelius resolved his doubt with a tentative conclusion that seems very modern. He wrote, "Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms or nature is a system, let this first be established: that I am a part of the whole, which is governed by nature; next, I am in manner intimately related to the parts, which are of the same kind with myself." His doubt led to convictions that we humans, regardless of the actual state of reality, are here for one another. These graceful-life philosophies, usually the alternative to the religion of the state, offered doubters the ability to continue to question and live creatively within the tension of their uncertainty. Uncertainty was accepted, even valued, as part of a philosophical life.

Official attitudes toward doubt changed with Christianity's rise to power. In her weighty book, Doubt: A History, philosopher and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht describes the difference Christianity introduced into the realm of doubt. While still having some wonderfully ambiguous books in its canon, such as Ecclesiastes (which reads like a treatise on living with uncertainty), Judaism of the second century B.C.E. increasingly adopted certainty of faith as a criterion for God's grace. This, combined with the dualism of Zoroastrianism and the Neoplatonic ideals of a transcended God, mixed Jewish and Greek religious and philosophical ideas, creating the backdrop for Christianity.

In Christianity, not doubting became a central tenet of faith. Doubt was a sign of weakness and a threat to salvation. Acceptable doubt was expressed as one's inability to fulfill the human side of the God-human relationship. Augustine's Confessions eloquently speaks to this struggle. Once he settled on the truth of the Christian faith that his mother had called him to, he didn't doubt God's existence or Jesus' salvific powers; instead, he doubted his ability to live up to those expectations. In this new milieu of doubt, the stakes were high. When Christianity became the official church of the sprawling Roman Empire in the fourth century, the new definition of acceptable doubt changed the range of persecution. Hypatia of Alexandria exemplifies this change. A teacher and philosopher in the early fifth century, she caught the attention of the local bishop, Cyril. To Cyril, Hypatia's philosophy and understanding of doubt was a threat. After he had her murdered, teachers and philosophers left Alexandria, and the graceful-life philosophies were banished from Europe.

The great works of doubt from the past were burned or became Latin grammar tutors in the monasteries. There, they were not to be studied-but copied for calligraphy practice. In the Western world, the tradition of doubt was not lost, but severely stifled. To doubt any component of the churches' teaching or theology was seen as doubting it all. While Christians at that time had been persecuted not for their beliefs but for failing to render unto Caesar, persecution now focused on their doubt. Christianity is not unique in this tradition. In varying degrees, most religions have engaged in persecution of those who doubt and those who threaten civil order. To demand loyalty or to enforce patriotism with the jaws of a lion are signs of a despotic state. Also, to kill out of a fear that a person's doubt could be infectious is equally unjustifiable.

As the power of the church became the only thread holding together the old empire, doubt changed again. A variety of factors-the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, and the rise of nation-states-led to a new phase of doubt. People such as Luther and Calvin had doubted the integrity of the church of their time. Now it was the institutional church and some of the practices it required that were in doubt. So these doubters formed new conclusions and then started their own religions. Once formed, their doubt was sated, and they built walls.

Many times, doubters are those who question the prevalent worldview of their societies, which is why doubt differs in different parts of the world. Many of these doubters assert alternative views with equal certainty. They may have begun with doubt, but they often ended with certainty and became as dogmatic as those whose views they rejected. This has even been true within Unitarian Universalism. When William Ellery Channing and his contemporaries in the early 19th century were faced with the next generation of doubters, often led by transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, they reacted with a fundamentalism that would surprise us today. Reformers who doubt the truths of those they seek to reform often become equally unyielding when they establish the new truth.

If we explore the impact Eastern thought had on doubt in America, we're drawn back to the controversy between the first and second generations of Unitarians. During the fourth century, when certainty was becoming a pillar of religion in the West, Zen was making a religion of doubt in the East. Centuries later, the influx of Hindu and Buddhist texts brought about a changing understanding of what religion meant. The earliest transcriptions of those texts were in the hands of those Transcendentalists, leading to their doubt of the God of their fathers.

Shunryu Suzuki brought the Soto Zen tradition further into mainstream America. The tradition he taught is a religious affirmation of doubt, doubt as a spiritual practice, and doubt as a way of being. This way of being isn't cynical, but open. Doubt in this form challenges us to let go of our preconceptions, all of them. Released from these preconceptions, engagement with what is becomes possible. In these teachings about doubt, we hear the wisdom of the reading by Robert Weston that appears in our hymnal (No. 650). Cherish your doubts. Instead of seeing them as an enemy to our faith, welcome the creative opportunity. This is why there are stories of the Buddha and his nemesis, Mara, in which the Buddha welcomes Mara as a dear friend. In these stories, there is the attempt to help people see that that which challenges us is not to be feared, but embraced, as a friend who can help us to deepen our faith

Sufi poet and mystic Rumi tells a story that echoes the difficulty we have with such a task. He tells of a man who caught a bird in a cage. The bird spoke to the man, saying, "Listen, with all the cows and sheep you've eaten in your life and you are still hungry, how is the little amount of meat on my bones going to offer you any satisfaction? If you let me go, I will give you three pieces of wisdom. One I will say standing on your hand, the second from the rooftop, and the third from the branch on that tree." The man was interested, so he took the bird from the cage and placed it on his hand. Once there, the bird said, "Don't believe an absurdity, no matter who says it." Then the bird flew to the rooftop. Once there, it said, "Do not grieve what is past; it's over. Don't regret what has happened. By the way, in my body is a pearl the size of 10 gold coins. It was to be the inheritance for your children, and now you've lost it." The man began to wail and cry. The bird said, "Didn't I just say not to grieve for the past? And also not to believe an absurdity? My entire body doesn't weigh as much as two coins; how could it hold a pearl that heavy?" "All right," said the man, "Tell me number three." "Yes, you've made such good use of the first two!" the bird said as it flew away.

In the Western tradition, one philosopher who unflinchingly followed his doubt was David Hume. During the 18th century, Hume called to question the growing confidence of all other philosophies. He didn't deny the existence of an outside world but pointed out the fallacies in others' certainties about how to describe it. Reason and religion both fell to Hume's doubt. Using his doubt to purge his mind of misconceptions, Hume sought to create an ethics based on how human beings really acted, as social animals whose interests are best served by working together. His impact on modern doubt is significant as he challenged the validity of understanding reason without emotion and our own bias in our perceptions. These teachers want us to see that doubt can lead us somewhere, can be that candle. Many times, doubters' questions have led them to see injustice, especially in the roles of women and treatment of our fellow human beings. Now we are seeing questions about humanity's perception of being at the top of the evolutionary chain, leading us to seek environmental justice.

How we doubt matters. This was evident in the difference between two 10th-century Islamic doubters, Ibn al-Rawandi and Abu Bakr al-Razi. They both questioned Mohammad's exclusive prophecy and the concepts of how Allah could be omniscient and just, among other details of Islam. But the difference lay in how they channeled their doubt. Ibn al-Rawandi was hated for his sarcasm and chose the role of the outsider. Abu Bakr al-Razi, on the other hand, chose to create a better world. He was known for his kindness and generosity and was called one of the "most creative geniuses of medieval medicine." Just as Abu Bakr al-Razi's questions led him to seek a better world within his doubt, so, too, these questions have influenced Unitarians. Our questioning of salvation for the few and our belief in the inherent worth of people led to our engagement in the women's suffrage movement, in making conditions better for the mentally ill, in education for children, and in abolition movements.

Today, I continue to seek a balance between certainty enough to act and doubt enough to continue learning. As UU theologian Paul Rasor writes, "Religious liberalism often involves a willingness to affirm faith without certainty. This is not the same thing as faith without conviction. It does mean that religious liberals tend to hold faith claims with a certain tentativeness. This is partly a result of a mindset that is always testing and second-guessing itself and reflects a commitment to open-ended inquiry and the realization that truth is not given once and for all." My faith convictions tell me with certainty that how we act in the world can make a difference. My doubt reminds me that truth has at least three forms: what I think, what you think, and what actually is. This means we must follow the candle of doubt, not allowing our skepticism to wall us off, but following the illumination our questions provide.

It's hard to think for ourselves; it's hard to follow the questions in our own lives. That's why Augustine was so torn, wanting security rather than doubt. That's why people kept returning to a Hasidic rabbi who had told them to think for themselves. He grew so tired of their going to him for answers that he wrote a sign: "Any two questions answered for $100." One of his richest followers had two questions that he just had to get the answers to, so he went to the rabbi. As he handed over the $100, he said, "Hundred dollars-isn't that a bit steep?" "Yes," said the Rabbi, "and your second question?"

Our questions are beyond price. They do not negate our convictions to live lives of meaning but encourage our connection to what is and our striving to reach for what is possible. Let us cherish our doubts by following the prophetic light they provide, allowing that light to lead us toward a deeper sense of faith in what is possible, as well as stronger conviction to make it so.

Ships at Sea

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented September 30, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

Red Brocade, by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he�s come from,
where he�s headed.
That way, he�ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you�ll be
such good friends
you don�t care.

Let�s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That�s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.1

Two weeks ago, my partner, Lisa, and I visited the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of La Crosse, Wisconsin. They�d invited me to do a Sunday program with them, so we made a weekend of it, following the curve of the Iowa border, cruising along the Mississippi River to Wisconsin. The group up there was all abuzz. This was only the members� second meeting in that new space, their first with religious education. The renovation of the building was still in process, with rough-hewn boards and electrical wires showing. Plaster gaps made it evident that a wall had once bisected their meeting room, although I don�t think anyone would have guessed that this building�s past life had been that of a funeral home.

It was a wonderful morning. The highest praise I received was from the person who�d invited me, when she explained that, before that day, many of them had become so caught up in the building project that they�d lost track of why they were doing all this. Sunday, she said, helped them reconnect to the meaning of their community. I�m not sure whether it was that idea of reconnecting, or the time when our proximity to the river made it feel as if we were floating, or bridging the distance between these two Unitarian Universalist fellowships, one in Ames and the other there in La Crosse, but I began thinking about our congregations as ships at sea, the moving vessels of hope that we create and crew to carry ourselves in life�s waters.

This spiritual metaphor of the vessel carrying us across uncertain waters has its roots in India, where crossing the mighty Ganges serves as a metaphor for a spiritual awakening. In Buddhism, followers speak of the lesser vehicle, those practices and teachings that help a single person reach enlightenment, and the greater vehicle, the boat aimed at carrying every living being across the river. This led me to ask, “What kind of boat is it that we are making here?” Our Universalist tradition indicates that ours should be a big ship, capable of holding all souls. This would be a sturdy ship, made of many woods and stronger for its variety.

Who�s on board? How do we poise our lookouts to watch for lifeboats of people wanting to come on board? How are those who come on board welcomed into the crew, helped to understand that their journeys are important and that their lives matter? Part of the answer is the environment we create here, how welcoming we are to those who enter our doors the first time and every time. Part is how we define ourselves as a community, how we are intentional about creating a theology where hospitality is front and center.

I recall visiting two Unitarian congregations in Great Britain. At the first, in London, we entered the building to find a stack of hymnals by a sign with an arrow pointing us into the meeting room. No one said “hello” or invited us to coffee hour; this group felt cold and closed. The only people who introduced themselves were other visitors who�d huddled in the back of the room after the service, most of them making their way to the exit as quickly as possible. On the other hand, when we visited the congregation in Edinburgh, Scotland, we were greeted on the sidewalk, and, as we entered the building, a smiling face handed us an order of service and hymnal. When we sat down, heads turned to smile and welcome us. After the service ended, several people introduced themselves and led us to coffee — not so much inviting us but walking with us. I don�t remember the content of either service, but I know where I felt welcomed, where I felt valued.

I�d guess every congregation has words in its mission statement about being welcoming, but words that come from our heads don�t mean a thing if the actions of our hearts aren�t in them. The Dalai Lama tells a story of a monk who keeps promising his student that he will take him on a picnic but is always too busy to do so. One day they see a procession carrying a corpse. “Where is he going?” the monk asks his student. The student replies, “On a picnic.” No doubt the teacher was allowing his business to keep him from doing the work of his heart, caring for his student.

This idea of creating community as a work of the heart, combined with my metaphor of ships at sea, resulted in a very odd connection. If you�ll just stick with me, you�ll see that it works. It�s from the summer blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: At World�s End. In this movie, we learn that Davy Jones had pledged to guide the souls of the dead across the great waters to their final resting place. In a jealous rage, he abandons his calling and begins destroying life, claiming souls for his own purposes. In the end, our heroes defeat Jones, and one of them takes over the role of shepherding the souls. Now the interesting sidebar to this adventure is that, in order to captain the ship, the captain gives up his heart. I know it�s a reach, but I found that poignant, this idea that the shepherd of souls gives up his heart to do the task.

Here, too, we do the work of the heart. But the souls we shepherd are of the living. This giving of our hearts means being open to all who enter — not closing ourselves from the story of another person, not shielding our hearts from the suffering of the world, but instead inviting it into our lives, knowing that each person here has also suffered. It means opening our hearts to let the pain out, finding a place where we can be honest about our own humanity, honest about our own experiences, in touch with our place in the universe.

Davy Jones put himself, his selfish desires for revenge, before the souls he was called to serve. As a result, his ship became a place of fear. It inflicted pain and terror into the lives of those who crewed it; it was a place of horror in the seas it sailed. Unfortunately, this analogy could be made for the way religion often functions in our world. Some religious communities are built on narrow claims of truth often accompanied with promises of wealth or eternal rewards, where travelers are first asked to state their beliefs before they are welcomed to the table. If their answer is not in accord with those deciding, they are expelled or dammed. The opposite approach is what I like about the poem Red Brocade. I imagine an oasis in the sea of the desert. There the ship might be a camel, and the traveler seeking to find a place of refuge is greeted not by the question of “What do you believe?” but instead welcomed to a meal, welcomed to a place of comfort, and known as another human being first.

The reading gives us a description of another way of being welcoming, one that puts the needs of the person before tests of truth. This act of hospitality is rooted in the Qur�an, which says, “Be kind to parents, and the near kinsman, and to orphans, and to the needy, and to the neighbor who is of kin, and to the neighbor who is a stranger, and to the companion at your side, and to the traveler ... . Surely God loves not the proud and boastful such as are miserly, and bid other men to be miserly, and themselves conceal the bounty that God has given them.”

The Qur�an is not alone in saying hospitality is a religious ideal. Jesus made a place at the table for those no one else would want to be seen with, and the Buddha redefined what it meant to be a community. Benedictine monk Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt hear a call to hospitality because “you can�t ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.”2 All these reflect attempts to create a big boat for all humanity. If this is true in so many religions, why is it so hard? There is a real tension within us to associate with those who are like us. In such groups is comfort and confirmation. But, in the end, will there be real enlightenment, real salvation for our humanity and for our world, if our spirits are not moved to grow by those who are different?

Yet to be such a community does require boundaries. We need to understand what we are and what we aren�t. We are a religious community. We exist to help each one of us understand who we are in the world and how to live most fully with that understanding. We exist to provide comfort and challenge so that we find the strength in ourselves to seek that path of harmony and, in so doing, create a better world around us. What we are not is a family; we aren�t a political party or a social club. These groups all define themselves narrowly, by specific categories and connections to limit membership. Certainly we overlap with these groups. We seek to provide the support that we hope families offer, advocacy that political parties engage in (when at their best), and friendly connections made in social organizations — yet there is a difference. When we forget these differences and expect the Fellowship to replace our family, which then means people not like us will be excluded, or expect it to be our political party, meaning those with different ideologies will be viewed as wrong, or expect it to be a social club just for those who like to dance the way we do, then we do ourselves and our community a disservice. We create walls that limit voices we need to hear. We stifle our possibility for growth, our opportunities to connect with other views of the world.

When we engage in the world, we do so from a place of deep connection, not dogmatic assertion of beliefs. These connections lead us to seek justice for every person. I can�t help but think of the brave Buddhist monks in Myanmar, formerly Burma, in recent weeks. They left the safety of their monasteries to lend their considerable moral authority to those protesting a brutally oppressive government. Their spiritual calling was to stand in solidarity, regardless of the cost that they are now suffering.

Watching these monks, who are so different than I am, I learn something more about what it means to be human. To truly understand what it means to be human, we must be continually open to the other, the stranger. While we advocate for human rights, this can�t become a political agenda, it must continue to be rooted in human experience, not abstract ideologies. These human experiences are made all the more rich when we learn the story of another, when we sit around a table and share a meal, or work around living plants beautifying our surroundings, or teach a group of children. All of these opportunities give us the experience of getting to know another as a human being, not a set of categories. As Parker Palmer writes, “If the church is to serve as a school of the spirit and as a bridge between the private and the public realms, it must find ways of extending hospitality to the stranger. I do not mean coffee hours designed to recruit new members for the church, for these are often aimed at making the stranger ‘one of us.’ The essence of hospitality — and of public life — is that we let our differences, out mutual strangeness, be as they are, while still acknowledging the unity that lies beneath them.”

Being open to those who are different may be the source of wisdom that allows us to grow into being more fully human, that may save our lives. There once was a learned professor who had to cross a wide, rapid-flowing river. He boarded a boat, and the boatman began to row him across the river. About halfway across, the professor became bored, so he thought he�d engage the boatman in a conversation. He looked at the common man rowing (without much hope of a good conversation) and said, “I say, have you studied linguistics and philosophy?” to which the boatman replied, “No I have not.” “What a shame,” said the learned professor, “for half of life is the study of such subjects.” Just then the boat struck a rock and began to take on water. The boatman asked the professor, “Have you learned how to swim?” to which the professor replied, “With all my studying, I�ve not had time to learn to swim.” “That�s too bad, for learning to swim would have been all your life, for our boat is about to sink.”

That little story not only reveals that we need to know more than we think to understand the world, but it also shows how difficult it is to create a community of human beings when we are all so different. As Homan and Pratt write, “You can be accepting with people without trying to make everyone your best friend.”3 We human beings need community. It keeps us healthy and keeps us sane. And if we feel a calling to grow, in our spirits and in helping the world, we need community to keep us inspired and honest. The struggle of working with our differences is worth the effort. In an essay titled Reflections on Working Toward Peace, Alice Walker echoes the sentiments about the necessity and challenge of working in community as she writes about the things she�s learned, saying, “One is the futility of expecting anyone, including oneself, to be perfect. People who go about seeking to change the world, to diminish suffering, to demonstrate any kind of enlightenment, are often as flawed as anybody else. Sometimes more so. But it is the awareness of having faults, I think, and the knowledge that this links us to everyone on Earth, that opens us to courage and compassion. It occurs to me often that many of those I deeply love are flawed. They might actually have said or done some of the mean things I�ve felt, heard, read about, or feared. But it is their struggle with the flaw, surprisingly endearing, and the going on anyhow, that is part of what I cherish in them.”4

Here, in these walls made holy by our presence, we, too, bring our flaws, our differences, our stories, and we strive to be our most compassionate, most joyful, and most just. Here we strive to open our hearts to each other, to humanity, to the fragile earth that is our home. When we are able to create a ship that can cross the sea, one that is crewed by all who care, regardless of their station or beliefs, then we will sight the other side, where we transcend creed and focus on the deeds; where we respond to life, not shrinking from the joy or the sadness; where we respond to life with an innate hospitality, saying, “Welcome, welcome.”

1Naomi Shahib Nye, “Red Brocade” in 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2002).
2Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality: Benedict�s Way of Love (Brewster, Mass: Paraclete Press, 2002), p. 10.
3Homan and Pratt, 2002, p. 49.
4Alice Walker, Reflections on Working Toward Peace, part of the Architects of Peace Project, through the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, http://scu.edu/ethics/architects-of-peace/.

The Deinstitutionalization of Religion

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented November 18, 2007, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

From Dreaming the Dark, by Starhawk

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been – a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community.

Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.

Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.1

I Call That Church Free, by James Luther Adams

I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority. This covenant is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship in the face of death, as well as life.

I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom, that yearns to belong to the church universal. It is open to insight and conscience from every source; it bursts through rigid tradition, giving rise to new and living language, to new and broader fellowship. It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit.

The goal is the prophethood and priesthood of all believers, the one for the liberty of prophesying, the other for the ministry of healing. It aims to find unity in diversity under the promptings of the spirit “that bloweth where it listeth ... and maketh all things new.”2

I’ve probably mentioned how growing up as an Iowa farm boy meant spending my summers walking bean fields, cutting out corn and pulling button weeds. My favorite days were those when I walked our fields by myself, just me and 40 acres of wide-open spaces. I could walk under the great big open sky, wielding my hoe with deadly accuracy, and dream. My thoughts were as unlimited as the sky. Everything seemed possible, and the only limitation was my own imagination — and I�ve got a pretty good imagination. I was free.

These experiences are at the core of my sense of what it means to be spiritual, to connect with the dirt through my dreams, intimately part of this universe. Those times of walking in that freedom, my mind going where it would, my experiences mine to interpret and to live, relate to James Luther Adams’ thoughts expressed in I Call That Church Free. Adams, the leading Unitarian theologian of the 20^th century, sought to describe another way of being “church” than might have been considered orthodox. Influenced by his participation with the German people of the Confessing Church as they resisted the Nazis, Adams saw an important role for the church in leading people toward liberation, as individuals and as societies.

Adams uses the word church as 1950s shorthand for a religious community. This community he describes is organized around practicing a way of being in the world rather than believing there is a correct doctrine or belief. It’s a community based on the covenant that we have with Adams’ unnamed and unnamable ultimate source of existence. We use metaphors such as God, Brahman or nature, Gaia or interbeing, the interconnected web of existence — all to try to capture this awareness that we are part of something that’s more than us. Adams saw a role for communities in tapping into that sustaining and transforming power that we experience in those moments and harnessing that power to make the world a place of freedom and caring.

But too often the development from experience to religious community does something to that transforming power. When it becomes the foundation of absolute truth, that power serves not to protect us from idolatry but instead becomes the basis for it. Instead of fostering freedom and caring, it creates fear and domination. What happens on the way from that experience of the ultimate source of existence to the creation of communities that seek to harness its power? It’s in seeking to understand this that I have come to realize a fundamental distinction between the institutions that are formed and the experiences themselves.

I have to admit that, for most of my life, I never really understood when someone would say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” For me, the terms were synonymous. My religious identity was just an expression of my spiritual connections. But recent encounters with institutional religion, both in academic study and in the “real world,” have led me to an appreciation of the difference and a deeper understanding of the type of religion people are referring to. I know that, for others, the word spiritual is totally foreign — they can’t imagine having a spiritual experience of any kind. I hope you will all stick with me as I try to describe what I mean and why this matters.

Christian mystic Diarmuid Ó Murchú helped me to better understand this distinction between religion and spirituality and why it’s important at this moment in our universe. He asserts that the spiritual is not just a subset of religion, but foundational.3 Spirituality is the experience of, the personal connection to, that something more than. It’s highly personal and difficult to describe, kind of like love. Well, a lot like love. Those experiences are the bases for what become religions. Prophetic people tried to relate those experiences to others in hopes of harnessing that power to reshape society, creating more justice, peace, and harmony — the feelings they encountered in those spiritual connections.

Looking at the stories of many of those prophets, we learn what happens on the way from experience to religion. Take, for example, Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. When he reached enlightenment, he debated for a long time whether he should try to describe it to anyone. The result of his decision to teach personal liberation and societal equality achieved just those things for millions, yet his dharma (or teachings) also spawned movements that fought over what he really said, including movements supporting oppressive governments and those engaged in religious warfare with other faiths. We see both now in Sri Lanka, where hard-line Buddhist monks have formed their own political party, representing the extreme of ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, and have joined the government as it battles a mostly Hindu and Christian minority.4 Even peaceful Buddhism has had its transformative power harnessed in the service of violence.

The Buddha foresaw the potential for such conflict arising and, in his dying breath, told his followers not to become an institution but to follow their own paths. He didn’t leave a written record or hierarchy of followers, hoping instead that his spiritual experience could stand on its own as a path to enlightenment. This story is not unique; it’s no wonder Jesus didn’t write anything down, either! What we’ve see happen repeatedly is the ideals of an experience becoming encoded into a religious system and an institution forming around them. It’s in this institutionalization of religion that the vitality of the experience not only is lost but is often perverted, becoming a tool of oppression instead of liberation.

We can argue over the words religion, spirituality, church, and religious community — but the power this energy has in human lives both to harm and to heal is irrefutable; the power it has to shape societies is equally undeniable. This spiritual energy was at the heart of two extremely different events in human history. The first occurred on Aug. 28, 1963, when more than 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to rally for jobs and freedom. With the statue of the Great Emancipator as a backdrop, Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most memorable speeches in America’s history, referred to as his I Have a Dream speech. Dr. King appealed both to the ideals expressed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and to the values of the Holy Bible. In combining an appeal to national idealism with the prophetic voice of biblical prophets, he unified his audience around a common faith that they could change history: “With this faith,” he declared, “we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”5 From accounts of that day, the energy created by King and those present changed the course of a nation.

Another moment, similar in intensity and power but with vastly different motives and outcomes, transpired in 1927. The National Socialist Party in Germany staged a rally in the image-rich, medieval capital of Nuremburg. Symbolically, Nuremberg was linked to the height of German culture and power in the world. One participant spoke of this rally as the moment when Adolf Hitler united the German people under his spiritual leadership. Hitler also had a dream, a dream rooted in his perception of the character of the German people. In articulating that dream, he, too, created a religious atmosphere and spoke to the hearts of the people. He spoke of their power coming from their inner strength and of that strength being renewed as they realized the purity of their blood. He became the “redeemer” of the German Christian citizens.6 Journalist and author William Shirer described how Hitler placed himself as the culminating figure in German history, one whose rule would “unify a chosen people … . He would make them lords of the earth.”7

Drawing a correlation between these two events, on the face of it, seems ludicrous. To even mention King’s speech and Hitler’s rally in conjunction with one another is offensive. I do so precisely because of the radically different ways in which we perceive them. The historical legacy of the two moments could not be more different. King’s speech is part of the march toward racial justice; Hitler’s led down the genocidal path to the Holocaust. Yet both events harnessed that spiritual energy, tapping into people’s ultimate sources of existence to motivate them. This is more than mob rule, it’s knowing that people have a need to connect and understanding the power. But do we use that power to build oppressive institutions or create human freedom?

Ó Murchú describes five shadows of religion that move us toward those oppressive institutions, away from freedom. First, fear. Religious institutions often use the revelations of Gods described as perfect and powerful; when we don’t live up to expectations, we can expect punishment in this life or the next. Fear leads to vehement adherence to an institutionalized version of truth and justification for persecution of nonbelievers. Second is escapism. The Marxist conception of religion being the opiate of the people describes religions used by those in power to pacify those they’re oppressing, allowing them to either rationalize the suffering in the world around them or wait for God to solve their problems. Three, moralism, and four, domination and control, are closely related. The claim to higher wisdom too often leads to a belief in the right to legislate and dictate acceptable behaviors. Ó Murchú points out that the hierarchal nature of most religions means that the laws don’t liberate people but set norms for individual behaviors.

And last, idolatry. The more strongly a conviction is held, the more idolatrous it becomes, Ó Murchú says. The conviction or belief becomes more important than what it stands for. And because the institution is the guardian of those beliefs, maintaining the religious institution becomes more important than the spiritual experience that led to its formation. Buddha, Jesus, Guru Nanak (who started Sikhism), and Mohammad all used their prophetic visions to begin new communities where equality improved, where justice was enlarged, and where they strived for peace. Yet, in each case, the bureaucracy of creating a religious institution over took the prophecy of the vision of peace and equality to become idolatrous distraction. That’s the meaning of the Buddhist saying, “Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.” The finger merely points at the moon; it isn�t the moon. Teachings, stories, and traditions are guides to help us understand what the prophets experienced; they are not the truth itself. When we forget the distinction is when the institution of religion supplants the spiritual experience of connection.

Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether sees a direct comparison between the idolatry in religion in the early years of the Nazi rise to power and what’s happening in the United States today. She wrote in a recent article, “Religious language is always double-edged. It is properly used as prophetic critique that calls for repentance. But it can be twisted into a self-sacralizing rhetoric that associates God with human projects of power.” This is the definition of idolatry. She goes on to say, “The United States has often fallen into this temptation to use religious language as idolatrous messianic nationalism. When this happens, it is the duty of the churches to challenge such language and reveal its opposition to the authentic good news of the gospel. In 1934 the German theologians of the Confessing Church disassociated themselves from a German Christianity that identified Christianity with Aryan nationalism. I believe the American churches must make a similar critique of American messianic nationalism today.”8 Her call is one to be heeded by all religious communities who value freedom over the institution. Deinstitutionalizing religion, as we see, has global import but begins inside each one of us as we seek another way of being — with ourselves, with each other, and in our world.

How do we deinstitutionalize religion? Our Irish friend says, “Only by the destruction and death of formal religion can we hope to reclaim spirituality where it truly belongs.”9 This call to get rid of religion is a common answer to this dilemma. However, when we look at historical movements that did away with religion, something else stepped in to replace it. People have a need to develop relationships to something more; when we eliminate the possibility of religion meeting that need, the results are often worse. Communist countries that enforced atheism elevated the state to the role of unquestionable power and leaders to the position of deities, resulting in abuses on par with any experienced in religion. Ó Murchú isn’t calling for the destruction of all religion but its deinstitutionalization, out of the hands of patriarchal, hierarchal systems and into the hands of the people who can live it once again.

We need to ask how we form religious communities, including this one. Starhawk’s vision of community from the reading offers a guide. Instead of a hierarchy, we have a circle, connected by the meeting of eyes and hands and the sharing of stories. We can form communities that keep spiritual experiences alive and encourage our encounters with reality. Instead of seeking to over-imbue those encounters with some pre-ordained truth, we can, as a community, ask each other to infuse the experiences of our lives with meaning.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to those summer fields I walked as a boy. While I was walking beneath the wide-open skies of the bean fields, next to them were stalks of corn. By midsummer, the gravel roads on which we traveled to and from town became closed tunnels as that tall corn blocked our views. Right next to the wide-open skies where I felt such freedom, we were forced to traverse roads with such limited vision that we became more and more cautious, for good reason. People heading down the intersecting road couldn’t see us, either. The institutionalization of religion is like the perils of that growing corn. Emerging from the wide-open experience of connection are the dogmas and exclusive truths that grow up to narrow the path until freedom is lost. We grow cautious and separated from one another.

But now is the fall, and it’s time to knock those corn stalks down. Clearing out those corn stalks, which are the rigid convictions of religious certainty, allows each of us to again experience the world without feeling blocked by what others have told us to be true.

As is true with all such projects, this work must begin within each one of us. How do we respond to the world, and how do we participate in community? As we create communities that seek to deinstitutionalize religion, what aspects inhibit freedom, and what’s the basis of power in the community? Is our community based on rules or relationships? Is its power structure focused on hierarchy or a circular form of collegiality? By basing our community on relationships rather than rules, we’re able to learn from each unique experience. I’m not a big fan of rules; I like to explore each opportunity based on its own merits and decide at that moment in time, considering what’s best for those involved instead of trying to judge the present based on the past or to project into the future.

I don’t have faith in the rule of precedent. No event is ever repeated, and when we create an analogy we create injustice for the current situation. We become rooted in fear. Fear is why we don’t have on-street parking; city officials are afraid of creating a precedent. I’d have made a lousy lawyer, so it’s a really good thing that I kept on driving the day I was supposed to visit law school 25 years ago. If I were a judge, my cases would take forever to try, so it’�s a good thing I’m not. But in our spiritual lives, we have time. We don’t have to live by precedent; we instead need freedom to know that our lives have their own value.

Living in such a relational community means that we treat one another as equals, as colleagues, not in the hierarchal fashion to which we are accustomed. When this is true and we want to accomplish something, we are driven not to promote a solution as the right answer but instead to engage in connecting with the collective wisdom of the greater congregation.

I was on the phone recently talking with a department head at the Unitarian Universalist Association about a disagreement over procedure in one of its committees. The person on the other end said that one of this committee’s jobs was to “protect the institution.” That set off fireworks in my brain. Institutions don’t exist. They are illusions that we create and give power to. And, as we’ve seen, that power too often becomes used for no other means than maintaining the institutions, causing the loss of human freedom and innovation, causing the rise of oppression, fear, and idolatry. Whenever I hear people wanting to define who we are based on beliefs, I hear an institutional call to exclusion.

Instead of defending the institution, defend freedom. Defend it in your life by not allowing the shackles of your past to cast shadows over your future. Defend it in our religions community by being colleagues to one another and seeking relationships instead of rules. Defend freedom in our nation by challenging the idolatrous misuse of religion in our nation’s politics, both at home and abroad. I call this religious community free, for together we form a covenant with our ultimate sources of existence, we seek to harness that power to transform our lives and our communities. Together let us find the unity in our diversity to become a caring, trusting Fellowship, knocking down any corn stalks that might block our view of that spacious, blue sky where our imaginations lead us on.

1Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, 15^th anniversary edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 92.
2 James Luther Adams, “I Call That Church Free,” as printed in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), No. 591.
3 Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Reclaiming Spirituality (Crossroad, 1998).
4 Somini Singupta, “Sri Lankan Government Finds Support from Buddhist Monks,” New York Times, 27 February 2007.
5 Drew Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation (HarperCollines, 2003), p. 139.
6 Klaus P. Fischer, Nazi Germany: A New History (New York: Continuum, 1995).
7 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, 30^th anniversary edition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 90.
8 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Christians Must Challenge American Messianic Nationalism: A Call to the Churches (March 2004), as printed on the Pacific School of Religion Web site.
9 Ó Murchú, p.105.

Poetry Program

Various Fellowship Members

First presented January 20, 2008, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

Welcome: (Board member)

Announcements and introduce visitors – Facilitator (Linda Barnes/Sam Wormley)

Opening words: “Ars Poetica” (Archibald MacLeish) Linda Barnes/Sam Wormley

Chalice lighting: (Linda/Sam)

Poetry begins in delight and ends in wonder. Poetry performs the miracle of transforming ideas into a creative form like music, painting, dancing, that can be captured on the written page. Poetry opens the mind to direct contact with emotion—rather like exposure of skin to burning sun or numbing ice without clothing’s protective intervention. Unafraid of burning or of numbing, let us open our minds to the transforming energy of poetry: We light our chalice this morning for the gifts of poetry.

Milestones (Linda/Sam)

Moment of Silence

Special Music – “Woyayah” – Kitty Fisher & Christine Wilkinson

Presentation:

(Mary) To begin with, an acknowledgment: This program grew out of and idea suggested by and worked on three or four years ago with Annette Rowley.

The title of this program is “Spirituality of Poetry.” What on earth does that mean? Well, to be honest, I don’t really remember how this title came to be, but after it got put into the program line-up, it turned out to be a wonderful organizing premise for poems that have touched me in some way and that I want to share with others—with you.

In my view, spirituality is the characteristic that humans developed because we “ate of the tree of knowledge” as the Genesis myth so quaintly puts it. As consciousness evolved, so too did appreciation of beauty, awareness and dread of mortality, the ability to look both forward and backward expressed in anticipation and memory, a range of human emotions, and feelings of awe and wonder and powerlessness before the forces of nature.

We invented spirituality to give the human experience meaning and purpose, and we invented poetry to give voice to that experience. This morning we will listen to some of those voices. Let me inject here a small disclaimer. The types and varieties of poems are endless. Those chosen for this program tend to be short and accessible on first hearing. This was necessary since you don’t have the chance to go back and read them again. But when on your own, don’t avoid longer and more opaque poetry. Reading something several times, and worrying at it a bit, can yield wonderful new insights not available at first perusal.

Let us begin with a cautionary poem about what we can expect when we either completely embrace or completely reject spirituality:

“Lifedance” (Charles Bukowski)

And now you get in on the act by singing a poem that expresses some of that awareness that comes with human consciousness, # 17, a setting of words by William Blake. Stand if you like and are able.

Hymn # 17 “Every Night and Every Morn” – William Blake

Poetry is a marvelous invention used in countless ways. For example, we employ it to get rid of anger or resentment as Ogden Nash and Devon DeSalva demonstrate:

                 Hearts of Gold, or, A Good Excuse Is Worse Than None (Ogden Nash)
                 Snip Your Hair (Devon DeSalva)

Poetry is sometimes the only way we can express the inexpressible, such as deep, overwhelming love:

                 I do not love you… (Pablo Neruda)
                 Sonnet #29 (William Shakespeare)

Poetry allows us to express inexpressible grief:

                  Martha – (Mary Richards)
                  Visitation – (Jeffrey Harrison)

Poetry allows us to face the irremediable – the regret expressed in this poem by Robert Hayden:

                  Those Winter Sundays – (Robert Hayden)

Poetry helps us confront the unthinkable as these two poems do—the first directly, the second by implication:

                Dreamers -- (Siegfried Sassoon – 1919)
                War – (Grace Paley)

Poetry has been recruited to the cause of glorifying and justifying war as well, as we see in a bit of doggerel that each of us knows by heart

               The Star Spangled Banner   Francis Scott Key

And we see that same fervor in the sentiment found in hymn #119,

Hymn: # 119 – “Once to Every Soul and Nation” - James Russell Lowell

Poetry can also inspire the patriotic fervor of the reformer’s zeal:

                 Jerusalem – (William Blake)

Certainly the spirituality of poetry helps us in coming to terms with mortality, as in these three very different poems

                The Second Half -- (Ric Masten)
                 Forgetfulness – (Billy Collins)
                When Death Comes – (Mary Oliver)

Poetry creates new views of everyday existence that make us see things in a new light:

                 The Honeymoon is Over – (Judity Viorst)
                  Her First Week – (Sharon Olds)
                  Follower – (Seamus Heaney)

Poems at their most spiritual express our admiration and awe before the grand spectacle of the physical universe, from the common and unremarkable pieces of everyday experience to the endless reaches of space:

                 The Varieties of Insect Speech – (Bill Holm)
                 Beans – (Mary Oliver)
                 By Morning – (May Swenson)
                 Sleep – (Todd Davis)
                 Sunset -- (Rainer Maria Rilke)
                 Earth – (?) --

And poetry enables us to contemplate the human condition with hope and to celebrate human accomplishment:

                 De profundis – Christina Rossetti
                 This Heavy Craft – P.K. Page
                  I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great – Stephen Spender

#288 – “All Are Architects of Fate” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Closing Poem – “The Peace of Wild Things” – Wendell Berry (MER)

Closing words: Mary Oliver tells us: “Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in a historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it—indeed, the world’s need of it—these never pass.” Let us leave this place prepared to receive the river of poetry into our lives, so that it may sustain us until we meet again.

Green Man's Dreams

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented February 3, 2008, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

As the trail dipped down into a familiar valley of a wandering stream, I thought, “It’s been a while.” This formerly frequent haunt had become a luxury location, one to which I retreated when I needed respite. Here I could settle into the solitude of just being, feel the sense of connection to the trees and the ground, and let my mind wander away from e-mail messages and meetings and schedules. Here I could have those encounters with deep magic that flowed through the branches of the trees as it did through my own limbs.

The January day was calm, cool yet sunny. Snow crunching underfoot provided the rhythm for my steps. As I tried to let my thoughts be present with the dog at the end of his leash and the feeling of the air on my cheek, I felt a whisper of wind cross my face and seemingly circle around behind me. The self-possessed breeze gathered up refuse strewn across the path—dried leaves and twigs, bits of shells and acorns. Then I had that familiar feeling that I wasn’t alone. Seamus, my trusty Gordon Setter, gave a friendly whimper and a quick wag of his tail then returned his nose the ground for more-interesting quarry. There next to me walked a mass of twigs and dried leaves, and, even though he was mostly brown this time of year, I knew it was my old friend the Green Man. This leafy apparition seems to know when I need his—well, maybe ear isn’t the best word, but his sage presence.

The green being settled in beside me, step for step, as though we’d been walking together for hours. I wondered whether he was waiting for me to break the silence, when he spoke in a low, melodious voice. “Welcome back.” “Thanks,” I said. Last time we’d met, it had been in the summer, and he was resplendent in bright and deep shades of green. Today, I marveled at the change, as what I thought of as winter’s groundcover walked beside me. As we stepped in silence, I noticed something else about my old icon that I’d not paid attention to before. Not only had the seasonal transformation taken place, but, as he strode along the narrow path, his seemingly solid body was constantly shifting, leaves and twigs moving forward to take the brunt of the step as his foot landed. A swirl of vines moved like sinew and muscle, shifting with each swing of his arms. For the first time, I experienced the impermanence of his form, the constant shifting of material.

“It’s all life,” he said, seeming to read my thoughts. “Just as brown and green are different phases in the process, each part is constantly recreated, reorganized to fulfill the movement toward life, each bit doing its part to further the identity of the whole.” I was stunned by the idea that what seemed so solid, so permanent, was changing in an apparently random fashion every second. Sensing my stare, his acorn eyes gave me that glimmer he shared when he detected that I’d learned something new. Knowing he was waiting for me to give voice to this realization, I said, “You’re not really all there, are you?” I was left inarticulate by the gravity of the revelation. In response, his frame seemed to chuckle, and he said, “If by ‘there’ you mean a solid form, a singularity of permanence, no, I’m not. But neither are you.” I looked down at my hands, which looked just as they did the last time I looked at them. “Yes, your hands seem the same. But each moment, skin cells are being shrugged off; your entire skeleton is reformed every so many years. That sense of permanence provides order, which is a myth you’ve created for comfort. I’m happy to know that new growth occurs, that the forms will shift into position as they are needed.” After a moment’s pause, I said, “It all sounds pretty chaotic.” “That it is, creative chaos. Remember your Greek Gods of creation, Chaos and Gaia? Chaos provided the energy, imagination, and drive, while Gaia provided the vision and the resources to make it real. Just like in the old story, the organization to create me occurs as needed. My form, such as it is, needs no motivating speech or organizational chart to meet its purpose. This is the way of creativity in nature, each part responding to the other to create a whole more beautiful than could exist alone.”

We walked in silence again. I was trying to decipher this idea of chaotic harmony, an organization that occurred in the flow of time, arising from the energy of chaos with structures created as needed. As his words and images flowed into my thoughts, I remembered Margaret Wheatley, an organizational theorist who seems to have a bit of the Taoist about her. She wrote, “Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (now the methods most used in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Leaders use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already-feeble controls, rather than engaging people’s best capacities to learn and adapt. In doing so, they only create more chaos.” The Green Man was advocating a much more life-affirming means of organizing, one that involved trusting the chaos as able to yield a system that would meet the needs here and now.

I turned my thoughts back to my companion. “So,” I began searching for understanding, “each piece of you operates independently but toward a purpose?” He inclined his moss-topped head, “Each is interdependent with the other and knows that what appears to be chaos is movement toward a new, impermanent order to express our identity, our goal if you will, in a particular environment.” He could see he’d lost me. “Throughout the ages, I’ve adapted my form to help humanity learn. My identity has always been seeking to teach Earth wisdom, the relationship between all things. In ancient times, I was a forest deity, embodying the fertility of the Earth. As the king of the wood, I died in the fall to be reborn in spring, offering hope to all that they, too, could survive the harsh winter’s days. As the forests were cut down and the mystical connection to the trees lost, I became part of the dance, carved into the woodwork as a reminder or a token of ways that were left behind but not forgotten, a little homage to Earth-loving rituals.”

Trying to find a tactful way of broaching the subject and failing, I just said, “But your image hasn’t always been positive.” The shake of his head let a few small leaves scatter on the breeze. “No. During your Middle Ages, some used my image to instill fear of the forest. The vines growing from my face were twisted to represent gluttony or other sins, instead of the fertility of the Earth in my dreams. My identity became the property of others—always a risk when the creativity of chaos is called upon. Like the wise Lao Tzu said, “Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear, and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions, and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.” Now, we dream together again. My image is once more a face of interconnection and creativity, of the chaotic and regenerative power of nature. I take on human guise to remind you you’re part of this process.”

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler echoed this thought, describing how we aren’t really creators of reality but are essential to its coming forth, evoking potential that is present. Evolution is a dynamic process, one in which the component parts can shape the outcome by using the seeming chaos as part of a creative process. But this demands faith in that process, faith in the chaos, faith that without strict rules and hierarchies we will have more freedom to create a new path. Faith in this context is, as Buddhist Sharon Salzberg uses it, a verb. We gain trust in this dynamic process as we engage in it, as we allow ourselves to experience our own creative abilities in helping an organization become, come into being. It can’t be achieved if we stand on the outside. Often we’re skeptical; we want something concrete, a goal or statement of purpose.

I asked my companion, “With your identity of interconnection and creativity, what do you hope to create in the world? What is the purpose, the goal?” My companion answered simply, “Harmony.” I knew what he meant. I’d recently seen a film in which David Suzuki, geneticist and environmentalist, met with a heart specialist who showed how the beat of a healthy heart has a rather-erratic pattern. When this pattern is laid out on a grid, the dots look very chaotic. But when those dots are played as musical notes, they create a beautiful melody. On the other hand, an unhealthy heart has a very flat pattern with very little variation to its beats, resulting in a virtual monotone.

We create harmony by embracing change, adding information, developing, responding to our environment. Like the Green Man, we have a sense of purpose, a mission and identity that provide our melody’s starting note. Our response to the world around us adds to the music. Lifting me from my reverie, the Green Man shouted, “Look,” as a flock of birds lifted from a nearby field. As they spiraled into the air, they created a beautiful pattern that flowed and swirled. “See how each bird responds to those around it, each one sensitive to the seemingly random movements and, in their relationship, creating a thing of beauty?” I stood mouth open at the real-life example that flew before us. “You know why one side of the flying V of geese is longer than the other?” asked the Green Man. Expecting another profound lesson, I turned to him and, with wide, expectant eyes, said, “No, why?” “One side has more geese,” he replied. As he turned, I could have sworn he was laughing. “Don’t take it too seriously. Enjoy the process.”

Ultimately, birds in flight and people in community need to find humor, joy, and love to create beauty. It’s this joy in the doing that fuels our dreams with love and roots us in the here and now rather than pining for a hoped-for future. Love is an important fuel for creativity. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into reality.” As the flock of birds melted into the distance and Thoreau’s words sank into my brain, I looked at the twig-and-leaf figure who gave me a long, knowing stare. In the shape, in the motion, in the words of this creative icon, I saw the beauty and potential of our Fellowship, a place that, like the Green Man, has evolved through the years, responding to the needs of our community, inside and outside of these walls. Here, where we seek to be ever-mindful of the ongoing revelation of the universe and attentive to our relationships with one another, our organization often seems chaotic. But out of that chaos arises more than could have been dreamed by a select few.

I’ve referred to us as a disorganized religion. And these new ideas helped me realize those are prophetic words. Disorganized doesn’t mean uncommitted. That’s an important facet of this chaotic creativity—commitment. As Wheatley said of such groups, “There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” To harness that power, we must join together. Commitment is not the same as agreement. We’ve witnessed the stupefying results of equating commitment to agreeing with controlling leaders. People are robbed of their voice, robbed of their dreams, and robbed of their ability to participate in creative possibilities. Commitment means being part of the process, identifying with that process, helping craft not only the identity but the means of expressing it.

Leadership in such organizations takes on a new meaning. Wheatley says that, in self-organizing systems, “a leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs to change and takes the first steps to influence that situation.” People are motivated by their passions. Leadership isn’t motivated by a quest for power or a conservative desire to keep things as they are, but by faith in the dynamic, creative process to move us forward. This type of leadership relies on relationships of the parts to keep it strong. It means we have to reach out to one another, talk to each other, and trust in our best intentions. It’s not easy, especially since we’ve been trained in top-down, hierarchal models of leadership, in which authority is invested by a piece of paper rather than passion. But passion is how the world changes, though it is often met with great resistance from the forces that have assumed leadership to seek power and then relied on those pieces of paper to keep it. This is our dream, to make real another way of relating to each other and to our planet Earth.

In this chaotically creative model, the Fellowship exists only as a series of relationships, me to you, you to the person next to you, each of us to the stories of our past and the identity we create to shape our future. Our building only exists to foster those relationships, the budgets to advance it, the staff we hire to support it. This is why the congregation voted to increase our investment in green projects; part of our fundraising process this month is to make those dreams real. These dreams shape our identity when they become real. They become real when we put our many forms of energy into them.

Our dreams are one form of energy. But to make those dreams real, we also need to bring our humanity. By that, I mean showing up with our passion and our forgiveness. For our passion to create change, it must be expressed in relationships. Those relationships will be all too human, creating energy of excitement and promise, as well as times of frustration. Each one of us is trying to make sense of this life we live. Sometimes we make mistakes. The universe we live in is not a perfect place, and it’s through the trial and error that we evolve toward that next state of harmony, the harmonious clatter of all our voices. These voices join with others outside our walls, voices raised in a quest for peace, in a cry for justice, in a prayer that we realize our interconnectedness to our beautiful planet before it’s too late.

We realize our dreams to create a better community, serving meals at the Emergency Residence Project, helping through Good Neighbor, Mid-Iowa Community Action, and Youth and Shelter Services, as well as through our environmental programs, for both the Fellowship and the community. We seek to nurture people’s spirits with our spirituality and meditation groups and with our religious education for young people that shows them a path of joyful interconnection and teaches respect for ideas, as well as life. And we hope to grow our music program to bring the joyful noise into more hearts, while we dream of making our building a friendlier place in our environment by reducing our ecological footprint however possible.

Each of us has talents that express our passions or the desire to stretch ourselves in new directions. We bring both of them here to live those dreams. We also bring our financial resources to share. My partner, Lisa, and I are in the privileged position to be able to contribute 5 percent of our net income to the Fellowship. Another 5 percent goes to creative ventures in our larger community to support our vision of what the world might be. But here is where we seek to have the greatest impact, with our dollars and our time.

Having imparted his dreams, the Green Man’s time with me was at an end. The breeze first caught his shoulder and began to unravel the creation in a swirling mass of leaves and twigs, bits of shell and acorns creating a pattern as complex and beautiful as the rising birds. Once again, he’d arrived to offer me another glimpse at the world beneath the world. Here in the woods, I had come to learn what I already knew: This earthly home of ours is a place of ever-evolving dreams and beauty. If we let ourselves become part of that process, who knows where our future will lead? As Mark Twain said, “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Selected sources:

Curran, Bob. Walking with the Green Man: Father of the Forest, Spirit of Nature. Franklin Lakes, N.J.: New Page Books, 2007.
Matthews, John. The Green Man: Spirit of Nature. Boston: Red Wheel, 2002.
Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organizations from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1994.

Elements of Life: Gaia

Rev. Brian Eslinger

First presented February 17, 2008, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames

Part One, Sonnet IV, by Ranier Maria Rilke,
as translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

     You, who let yourselves feel, enter the breathing that is more than your own. Let it brush your cheeks, as it divides and rejoins behind you.
     Blessed ones, whole ones, you where the heart begins. You are the bow that shoots the arrows, and you are the target.
     Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the Earth, for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
     The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy; you cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Invocation, by John Seed:

We ask for the presence of the spirit of Gaia and pray that the breath of life continues to caress this planet home.
May we grow into true understanding—a deep understanding that inspires us to protect the tree on which we bloom, and the water, soil, and atmosphere without which we have no existence.
May we turn inwards and stumble upon our true roots in the intertwining biology of this exquisite planet. May nourishment and power pulse through these roots, and fierce determination to continue the billion-year dance.
May love well up and burst forth from our hearts.
May there be a new dispensation of pure and powerful consciousness and the charter to witness and facilitate the healing of the tattered biosphere.
We ask for the presence of the spirit of Gaia to be with us here. To reveal to us all that we need to see, for our own highest good and for the highest good of all.
We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years—do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey.
Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.
Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the well-being and continual unfolding of this Self.
May we speak in all human councils on behalf of the animals and plants and landscapes of the Earth.
May we shine with a pure inner passion that will spread rapidly through these leaden times.
May we all awaken to our true and only nature—none other than the nature of Gaia, this living planet Earth.
We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200-million-year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance and joy. Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief, flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands.
O stars, lend us your burning passion.
O silence, give weight to our voice.
We ask for the presence of the spirit of Gaia.

This invocation, the poem we used to light our chalice, the songs we’ve joined our voices in singing, are all efforts to create a new story. This story seeks to reframe who we are in the universe and how we will walk with our fellow beings, human, animal, and plant. This story is the efforts of many, using many means from science to songs, to help us understand in our hearts the need and the joy that this story holds for us all.

I became aware of the interesting intersections of this new story in an unlikely way, in the controversy surrounding a Hollywood blockbuster. When the release of the science-fiction fantasy film The Golden Compass was greeted by a variety of attacks, I knew that I had to go see it. The film, based on the first of a three-book series by Philip Pullman and assailed as anti-religious, more specifically anti-God, really didn’t live up to the negative hype. After seeing the movie and not getting a satisfactory taste of its originator’s irreligious intent, I went to the source and read the books. I’d tried to read this trilogy several years ago but couldn’t get through it. The idea of parallel universes just didn’t work for me. But, whether a sign of growth in my ability to consider metaphoric writing as conveying deeper truths or just my tenacious desire to be seen reading a book that some people didn’t like, this time I read all three volumes. While they include strong condemnation of the type of institutional church that uses its power to inhibit personal freedom, knowingly teaches falsehoods to maintain order, and uses whatever means necessary to hold onto power, none of that was what captivated me in Pullman’s story.

Instead, it was his vision of what happens to us after death. Pullman creates a netherworld where the dead live in a transparent limbo. The two young heroes release the spirits of the dead, who then, with a look of rapture, become elemental dust that rejoins and energizes the world. For Pullman, this is the best life after death, each of us returning to the elemental beginning, part of the process of life regenerating. Then, as our heroes reach the end of their journey, another subtle curve reframes the usefulness of the metaphor of alternate universes. It seems that traveling back and forth between these alternate possibilities is not good for the human body. Each of us is made for our own universe, our place in the fabric of reality. When the gaps between the universes open, bad things happen; when people travel back and forth, they eventually become ill.

The reason that this really intrigued me had to do with another story I was reading at the same time. This story wasn’t science fiction. It was about what a scientist in this universe learned when he, too, was exploring elemental particles of reality. I have a habit of reading three or four books at once; sometimes they are totally unrelated, other times they feed on each other. It was mealtime with these books. Pullman’s fictional idea resonated with the conclusions reached by James Lovelock.1 Lovelock was also looking for elemental particles, the smallest possible particles.

His quest led him to create an instrument that could detect parts per trillion. With this machine, he detected chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in the atmosphere above Antarctica, leading to the discovery of ozone depletion. Because of his work, he was asked for advice about a lunar surveyor and instruments for detecting life on Mars. This got him thinking about life itself. His explorations of small particles then led him into a mystery worthy of any science-fiction story. After exploring how minerals leach from rocks and create the saltiness of the seas, he wondered why the oceans haven’t become too salty. After learning that our sun’s temperature has increased by 25 percent since it was formed, he wondered why our atmosphere has remained fairly stable. Further observation into these and other such consistencies lead him to conclude that all living things on the Earth operate as a single system, keeping the elements of our planet’s biosphere, its temperature and the saltiness of the oceans, relatively constant. Everything is in collusion to keep a relative balance that sustains life. This scientist, who’d studied the smallest of particles of reality, found that these particles are all intimately interrelated, all creating a self-regulating whole that, in the earliest of times, began to move us toward life.

He decided to call this process the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia, the mother Goddess, the creator of life, object of worship of the Greeks. Greek poet Hesiod said of her in his creation story:

Gaia, the beautiful, rose up, broad-blossomed, she that is the steadfast base of all things. And fair Gaia first bore the starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on all sides and to be a home forever for the blessed Gods.

All those centuries ago, Hesiod realized what had dawned on James Lovelock, the existence of this foundational Gaia, which is all life and supports that life at the same time. In the beginning, Lovelock and others expressed great excitement about taking the elements that make Gaia to another planet and copying Earth, creating another Gaia on, say, Mars. Maybe they were captivated by the fantasy of sci-fi writers who seemed bent on taking us away from our planet, Earth. But while fictional humans survive on other worlds, Lovelock’s explorations led him to conclude that these new worlds wouldn’t be Gaia. He soon came to see that this idea was another escape fantasy that refused to acknowledge the importance of this biosphere, this planet Earth, this reality that we inhabit. Just as in Pullman’s alternative universes, this is the Gaia we have, and it’s here. Maybe that desire to flee our problems on Earth for distant galaxies was part of our evolutionary, teenage desire to leave our mother, while taking all the comforts of home with us. But, just as Pullman’s characters learned about their alternative universes, we can’t leave this Gaia of ours.

That’s where this mother metaphor shows a potential weakness, in assuming that the mother and human beings are somehow separate. Rather than children of the Earth, we are of the Earth itself. We are products of Earth’s gravity and chemical composition. Eventually, most human beings leave their mothers; some return several times over the years, for varying lengths of time. But we never leave the Earth other than to look back on it. At a workshop led by Unitarian Universalist Michael Dowd, who calls himself an evolutionary evangelist, he described the Apollo astronauts as the Earth looking back on itself, Gaia conscious of its own existence. We aren’t just of earth; we are earth. We are interwoven into this complex Gaia that should be self-regulating to maintain and create life. In our adolescent angst, we’ve sought to subdue and control our mother Earth. Now, with this photograph from space, we’ve come to see that this form of control, based on plundering and selfishness, is leading toward her destruction. We’re starting to realize that maybe mom wasn’t in need of our redesign; maybe we should start working with this metaphorical parent. Instead of trying to boldly go where no one has gone before, perhaps we should boldly seek our role in this new story here, caring for the future generations of beings who will live right here in Gaia. It’s not that studying the stars is unimportant. After all, we are equally part of that entire universe, and it is from those stars that we owe our origins. Instead, we might look for a deeper relationship with it all, rather than seeking a new home out there somewhere, as though this Gaia of ours is merely a shell that we, like hermit crabs, can shed for a new one. We are part of the arrow of life, moving toward the target of the next epoch of existence.

Often human beings define ourselves as the peak of evolution, the top of the food chain, the best of the best. But are we really? Instead, what if we begin to see our species as a character in an evolutionary drama, one in which we play a part, but it isn’t just about us. Each character in this drama is essential to the story; without all the other actors, we’ll be without a prompt for our next line. Each character has an equally important role to play, from the smallest plankton to the largest redwood. Then we might ask, what’s our part? What’s our motivation in this scene? Throughout human history, our motivation has changed. In the beginning, it was survival. We were relatively scrawny but smart. And we used those smarts as we created communities to support each other, to acquire food and protection. Then, as we began to thrive and became a species capable of altering the landscape in drastic ways, exploring and conquering our surroundings became our motivations. All human families did not follow the same script, but, as many societies became more mobile, the connection to Earth as nurturing home seemed to deteriorate. It was these mobile actors who wrote the story that dominates our time.

Now science again gives us a metaphor pregnant with meaning, one that reconnects us with the nurturing, sustaining qualities of the Earth and implores us to understand ourselves as part of this complex, life-seeking system. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are matter a whole lot. They help determine how we will relate to one another and to our mother Earth. Albert Einstein understood this as he wrote, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. [Humans] experience [themselves], [their] thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of [their] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desire and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures.2

At this point in our human evolutionary story, we’re called to understand that we can’t survive alone, as individuals, as clans, as nations, as a species. We can’t survive alone. To suppose that we can is our delusion. To suppose that, if another has a different color of skin, she is not my sister; to suppose that, because someone has less material wealth than I do, he is not my equal; to imagine that, because someone subscribes to a different creed than do I, that person is my intellectual inferior; to be separated from any other woman or man, beast or bird, fish or fowl, plant or rock is our delusion. To destroy that delusion and enlarge our compassion is what we are called to do. The differences between all people, all beings, aren’t to be ignored. That would also be a delusion. Instead, they are to be celebrated, as each tells its own story, and each story strengthens the understanding of the whole. Too often we’re taught to fear what is different rather than embrace and celebrate others’ stories. Fear of the other or of the future is too often used as a tool. But, ultimately, fear will not be enough for us to heed this call to connection. On the contrary, fear is much more likely to keep us penned in this prison. Instead, it will take love. This is why, for many, the mother Goddess image is so potent. With this sense of all-embracing love, the symbol of the Goddess becomes a metaphor of unity, all life. Starhawk writes, “People often ask me if I believe in the Goddess. I reply, ‘Do you believe in rocks?’ … In the craft, we do not believe in the Goddess—we connect with Her: through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the Earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.”3 It’s our hearts Starhawk seeks to touch.

Whether it’s the metaphors of a wise woman, the images of a science-fiction writer, the hymn from an ancient poet’s creation story, or the observations of a scientist, each points us toward a change of heart. This change of heart may lead us to relate to Jennifer Welwood’s experience in her poem Unconditional:

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.
Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game.
To play it is purest delight;
To honor its form—true devotion.

This discovery that we are part of all this, that we are another connection in a web of myriad relationships, may be frightening. We may fear losing our sense of being at the top of the heap; we may fear that this means our home is really here and not some other planet; we may fear that we really, really do have to take responsibility for this Gaia of which we are part.

But then there is the chance to turn and face that fear and discover the warrior within, the primordial person we all have who can look upon the world and know it for our home, who can see in the sunrise a new dawn of possibility and in each plant and animal a relative whose life we depend on and who depends on us. Our hearts are called to be warriors who will fight for the lives of each being, each rock, and each stream, knowing that each one is our family. This leads to that transformation, to feel that each of us is a jewel at the intersection of the web of existence; each of us is transformed by and, at the same time, transforms this universe in which we live. “Now,” wrote Gary Snyder, “we must become warrior-lovers in the service of the great goddess Gaia, Mother of the Buddha.”4

Mother of the Buddha, of the Cosmic Christ, of dharma, of science. Every story can be woven into the tale of Gaia. Both Goddess and scientific hypothesis, Gaia transforms not just our individual acts but also the communities we create. Snyder challenges his own Buddhist community to see themselves as part of a larger whole, part of the unfolding drama, part of the retelling of our story, part of Gaia. Individually, we can’t make this story real, but communities give it a voice that will be heard by all living beings.

These communities will find the joy of lifting our voices together in praise and adoration of this planet. We will find genuine contentment in the change of heart that leads us to understand that defining our value in our material wealth is a delusion, one that has corrupted our sense of connection, one that has led us to destroy what is really real—our interconnected lives with each other, with Gaia. This may be our role in this next story of Gaia. The arrow of the preceding generations has pointed us to this target, to become the consciousness of Gaia. We are the first part of this evolving planet to look back upon itself in awe, to see the beauty of this fragile, wonderful world, and to find deep in our very beings love for this mother Earth.

May each step you take be as a prayer, caressing and caressed by the earth. May each breath you take be as a blessing, inhaling love, exhaling peace. May each moment you live be an act of devotion, to yourself as a precious part of the universe and to all of Gaia in gratitude and reverence. May it be so.

1Suzuki, David, and Amanda McConnell. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, pp. 142-145.
2Suzuki and McConnell, p. 26.
3Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Godess, reprint, 10^th anniversary edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979) pp. 91-92.
4Hunt-Badiner, Alan. Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, (Parallax, 1990) p. 1.

last updated: February 7, 2009
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