By |

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-5829k-9c494f

Tony Campolo writes, “A ritual takes what happened a long time ago and drags it into the present so you can experience it here and now. Rituals keep us from forgetting what must not be forgotten and keep us rooted in a past from which we must not be disconnected.”

In this episode, my friend Karen Johnston and I talk about creating ritual, music that moves us, and fire.

 

Links (refered to in the episode):

article about the Lost Souls Project

Song – Let the Life I Lead

 

Bio: 

Karen G. Johnston is the 7th settled minister at The Unitarian Society, a Unitarian Universalist Congregation in East Brunswick, New Jersey.  A second-career minister, she was ordained in June, 2016 by her then-home congregation, The Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence and her internship congregation, First Parish Church of Groton.  She earned her Master of Divinity degree through a Cooperative program, starting first at Hartford Seminary and finishing up at Andover Newton Theological School. 

Before becoming a professional minister, Karen was a lay leader in her home congregation.  Professionally, she spent over twenty years in the field of clinical social work, having graduated from Smith College School for Social Work in 1995.  Her focus was home visiting, families with children birth to three, and the prevention of child abuse using strengths-based and trauma-informed approaches.  She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Women Studies from Hamilton College – a very formative experience of opposition and resistance, with echoes of today’s need for engaging the patriarchy around normalized and hidden sexual abuse, as well as how to de-center whiteness and build multi-racial/multi-ethnic partnership, especially among women.

Karen is the adoptive mother of two humans who are now young adults, whom she met for the first time when they were two days past two and just shy of four years old.  She identifies as bisexual, white, able-bodied, cisgender female.  She’s currently married to a man about whom she is not ambivalent, though the legal marriage thing is still something that causes confusion.  She lives a life more financially solid than how she was raised and what she thinks will happen for her children.  Because she believes we have passed the tipping point when it comes to climate chaos, and is deeply troubled by the rise of fascism, she wonders how it might be possible to learn some of the skills of survivalists but to infuse and saturate them with Unitarian Universalist values to create “islands of sanity.”

 Before becoming a minister, Karen spent time as part of a grassroots poetry group in her hometown and sometimes dabbled in performance poetry.  She’s looking forward to taking her first improv class this January.

By |

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-vfbrq-9b763f

My guest this week is the Rev. Dr. Michael Tino – my friend and mentor. In this inaugural episode, we talk about hymns, aesthetics, writing – and not writing – sermons, old, aching bodies, and fire. 

 

Bio:

Michael serves the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Westchester in Mt. Kisco, NY. He is a graduate of the Meadville/Lombard Theological School. Prior to coming to UUFNW, Michael served six years as the Director of Young Adult and Campus Ministry at the Unitarian Universalist Association, the national headquarters of our faith movement.

He is the author of several Unitarian Universalist Association publications, including the curriculum Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Young Adults, co-written with the Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh and Laura Stuart and published in early 2008. This curriculum is the latest part of the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education series.

 

By |

Starting on September 27th, I’ll be hosting a podcast, cleverly titled The Worship Whisperer!

During each episode, I’ll be having a conversation with a Unitarian Universalist religious professional – we’ll talk about things that engage them in worship, what they’re curious about, and things they’ve done that I find intriguing. Plus, you’ll learn a bit more about them (and me) in our free-form, sometimes funny, usually insightful conversation.

You can find the podcast here, or wherever you find your podcasts.

By |

(As delivered on May 6, 2018, at the UU Fellowship of Bennington, VT)

 Reading

 “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 

Sermon

I’m about to make a bold statement: We need to stop writing covenants.

Now hear me out… I know we’re a covenantal faith, which means that we make an agreement to come together to engage in mutual promises with Mystery, other people, and communities. But tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

  • Someone breaks the covenant, but everyone excuses the breach as “oh, that’s just Bob.”
  • New people are asked to sign a congregation’s covenant before they know what is in the covenant or even what a covenant is.
  • The members in power use breaches in the behavioral covenant to punish, not reconcile.
  • Significant donors demand to have things done their way or they’ll resign their membership or withdraw their pledge.
  • A congregation brings concerns about a minister’s conduct to a regional or denominational body, but there is no reconciliation or resolution.
  • A regional or denominational body asks congregations to take up a major justice initiative but provides no support for it, thus creating what we call in government an ‘unfunded  mandate.’
  • We affirm and promote the seven principles, but only as far as we’re comfortable, often excluding people for their skin color, gender, sexuality, class, ability, or religious belief.

And these are just a few examples.

What is a covenant for, if we aren’t going to actually use them as they are meant to be used, to hold one another in relationship? No wonder our circus can’t find the park.

 

I wonder why this is – why we regularly break the covenants we create – and while we’ll get to the courage part in a bit, I think we need to start with this simple fact: people want to fit in to a new group, and often we figure we will learn the jargon and the meaning of things through assimilation. We hear the words “covenant” and “chalice” and “principles” and figure eventually we’ll understand what they actually mean if we hang around long enough. I remember going through nearly an entire year of high school chemistry before I had the guts to ask the teacher what a mole was and what Avogadro’s number had to do with it. When, in May, I think, I finally asked, and he explained it, the clouds parted and the angels sang and I finally understood.

Now the experience I had at age 16 is the same many of us have as we become a part of Unitarian Universalist congregations. We don’t often know what the words really mean, or where they come from, and we’re often too shy or too deep into it to ask.

So let’s talk about what covenant is, and where it comes from.

The idea is as old as well, some of the oldest writings in the Hebrew scriptures, really, beginning in Genesis, with a guy called Noah.

Now the God Noah is talking to is angry with humanity, and God wants to hit the reset button. But God’s got a soft spot for Noah, apparently, and tells him to gather his family and a bunch of animals into a big boat – that went pretty well, I suppose, although I’m still not sure why Noah saved the mosquitos. And like God said, a huge flood comes, wipes out pretty much everything but the ark and its contents. Now you can imagine Noah and his family were pretty freaked out, especially when it seemed like it Went. On. For. Ever. But then, God shows up, right on cue, so God and Noah make a covenant, which seems more like authoritarian rule – as long as the people stay in line, there will be no more floods.

And then there’s Abraham, from whom God also demands fealty, so much so that after making Abraham the father of many nations, he exacts proof in the form of human sacrifice – namely, his son Isaac, which gets a puzzling, last minute reprieve. Again, it’s called a covenant, but it’s more like quid pro quo.

Fast forward a bit into the book of Exodus, and we have Moses, whom God taps to lead the Israelites out of slavery, and in exchange for keeping them safe gives them a set of rules – commandments – that they must follow. And of course, like many humans do, they bristle against the rules, and as soon as Moses is out of sight, break the second commandment, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” By the time Moses is on the mountain chatting with God again, God’s seen the people melting down metals to fashion a golden calf idol. And God is angry. So angry. Soooo angry that he threatens another flood.

But what’s different in this moment is that Moses speaks truth to power and says “remember your covenant, how you swore to them by your own self – do you want to be as bad as those who enslaved us?” And – as the scripture tells us, “the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

So we learn something here in the early stories from Hebrew scripture – that a covenant is not just about rules and how those in power hold sway over those under them – but it’s about how those in weaker positions can hold those in power accountable.

But that’s not all of it – remember that about a thousand years after the Egyptian exile, a man we call Jesus came around, and he said “all of these rules you have about beards and shellfish aren’t important. You’re cool if you treat each other right, seek forgiveness when you blow it, remember what I taught you about caring for the sick and poor, and maybe talk about me over a nice glass of merlot now and then.” It was a new covenant – one that’s the model for how we understand covenant today. Especially the merlot part.

Jesus understood – as we come to understand – that what covenant is not about is authority or demands. Covenant should not be a set of hard and fast rules that carry a punishment. Rather, it is about how we treat one another and how we forgive one another. It’s the often forgotten line in the familiar Rumi poem, “come come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving: Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times, come yet again, come.”

It’s not about taking our toys – or our pledges – and going home. It’s not about ghosting or cutting folks off when we’ve messed up. Though we’ve broken our vows a thousand times, covenant asks us to come back to the table.

That takes courage.

It takes courage to create covenant; and that creation has to be driven by everyone. It can’t be driven by the people in power, whether that’s positional power like boards and religious professionals, or systemic power like the white people or the top donors. The process has to be courageous enough to include all voices of those who have agreed to freely come together in the process of creating and living it out.

It takes courage to write a covenant that actually treats everyone like a person, with inherent worth and dignity.

It takes courage to see covenant not as “yes or no” but as “yes-and.” In a world where you must choose between false binaries like this or that, yes or no, good or evil, friend or enemy, black or white, covenant suggests that there are multiple choices that may all be true. Covenant asks us to look for possibility, to say yes, and… this too.

It takes courage to covenant, especially when covenant is broken. Covenant audaciously says “come back anyway, trust anyway, make room anyway.”

 

Friends, we have to get this right if we’re going to covenant at all. We have to pay close attention to how we create and live out covenants in our congregations. We have to have the courage to get it right in our congregations, or we have no chance of getting it right in our denomination.

Because as a faith movement, we regularly mess this up. We struggle with the fairly recent understanding that gender is not a binary state, with many outright refusing to call a person by the names and pronouns they identify with. We struggle – or in one case, outright refuse – to make our spaces fully accessible; one congregation refused to put a ramp in because it ‘interfered with their aesthetics.’ We struggle to make full membership and participation available to those with lower economic resources. We struggle with misogyny and sexism, not only among members but also in hiring practices. And we struggle – as our history tells us – with racism.

Truth be told, I don’t even know where to begin to share this history with you without going way over my time, and getting the board to bring in lunch and maybe dinner.

What I need you to know is that we white UUs have been regularly making toothless covenants for a very long time. I beg forgiveness here for my incomplete bullet points:

  • In 1965, while some of our Unitarian Universalist ministers, seminarians, and lay people answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to march in Selma, far too many stayed home – not because they didn’t agree in principle, but because they were not connected to enough people of color to see the need to put covenant into practice.
  • When the UUA attempted to address the uprisings in the late 1960s and put our money where our mouth is, white UUs were too disconnected from people of color to actually live up to the financial promise. White UUs broke their covenant, and our movement lost over a thousand members of color.
  • At the 1993 General Assembly in Charlotte, coordinators suggested a “Thomas Jefferson Ball” inviting 18th century period costumes; ministers of color protested, asking “shall we come in chains?” White UUs broke their covenant by ignoring the reality of every person who might attend.
  • At the 2005 General Assembly in Fort Worth, there were multiple incidents of confrontations between white participants and youth of color, harassment by Fort Worth police, culminating in a confrontation between three youth of color and a white minister at the assembly’s closing ceremony. White UUs broke their covenant by treating those not like them as suspicious.
  • In 2017, less than a year after the UUA committed $5 million to Black Lives of UU, the hiring of a white man over a woman of color opened white eyes to what our fellow UUs of color have known all along: that the culture of white supremacy that allows racism to thrive under the surface permeates our denomination too. The resulting turnover of leaders at the highest levels has led us to focus on better hiring practices and a denomination-wide series of teach-ins and fundraising so that we might meet that five million dollar goal.

This has not been without consequence: just two months ago at Thomas Jefferson Memorial UU in Charlottesville, a religious educator of color, Christina Rivera, came to work to find a note from a congregant that attacked her based on her skin color, meant to intimidate her and encourage the ministers to stop preaching about racial justice, take down their Black Lives Matter signs, and get back to comfortable whiteness. This not an isolated incident, as many religious professionals of color have faced intimidation and distrust, and then cowardice from white UUs unwilling to call others back into covenant.

Now in Rivera’s case, senior minister Reverend Erik Wikstrom had the courage to covenant;  instead of a large anniversary celebration, Wikstrom changed the program to address this horrific act and call everyone back into covenant, to reexamine what it means to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, to voice concerns in healthy ways, to seek forgiveness and reconciliation and strengthen the covenant.

But this isn’t happening everywhere, because the courage to covenant is in short supply among white Unitarian Universalists. There is amazing courage among UUs of color who come back time and time again, knowing they are entering white spaces yet knowing that there is hope and freedom in the things we affirm and promote. These courageous people of color are asking us white people to be brave with them, to make sure that they aren’t the only ones having to be brave, to come back into covenant and reaffirm our commitments to justice because they believe we can do better if we too are courageous enough. We who are white need to see and meet this courage.

We must be courageous enough to not forsake our own covenant with our principles. As Stafford’s poem says, if we stop holding each other’s tails, we wander – even when we know that it’s happening. “It’s important that awake people be awake” he writes… we must be awake to the fears and anxieties that keeps from forming real, strong, accountable covenants with one another.

Covenant – whether in a small group, a congregation, a denomination, or the larger beloved community – requires us to be accountable and responsible, to negotiate and compromise, even as the covenant remains in place. That’s okay – it isn’t a sign of the covenant’s weakness but rather its strength that it can bend and not break. We should always be reexamining our covenants to embrace the reality, not just the idea, of every person, making room for the reality, not just the idea, of every person’s color, sexuality, gender, ability, and economic status. But ultimately, when we approach covenant with respect, shared awe, and openheartedness, covenanting together means we are greater than the sum of our parts, and strong together even when something breaks down – because it inevitably will.

So – maybe I’m wrong about my original proposal. If there are no objections, I’d like to retract and revise my original statement… My bold statement is this:

We must have the courage to actually get close enough to know one another, so that covenant means something, even if we covenant with people who don’t look like us or act like us or love like us. We must have the courage commit to one another, to trust one another, to be deeply connected to other souls, to consciously covenant in healing, helpful ways, to come again, come, though we’ve broken our vows a thousand times. We may be wanderers, worshippers, and lovers of leaving, but instead, we must courageously say come yet again – come.

 

By |

Click to listen here (as delivered in Nantucket on March 18, 2018)

Let us pray.

Now… some of you instantly bowed your head a bit, maybe you closed your eyes. Perhaps you took in a deep breath as you waited to hear how I started the prayer and to whom I addressed it.

Others of you did that, but you also groaned a little inside, because you don’t pray, you don’t like the word pray, and wait…. didn’t we just pray?

Others still didn’t close eyes or bow heads – either because you thought, rightly, that I wasn’t about to actually pray. But others of you didn’t do any of that because the idea of prayer actually runs counter to how you understand your theology. And while you know I’m not going to intentionally exclude anyone in my prayers, you also have lots of experiences with so-called interfaith or ecumenical prayers that are directed to a particular understanding of a particular “Whom” to which the prayer is directed.

Prayer as a construct across the world’s religions and cultures is… fraught. Pray wrong and you’re a heretic. Pray too overtly and you’re a fanatic. Pray in a style that’s outside your community’s norms and you’re a pariah.

Sometimes prayer is so central to a religion’s lived practice it becomes almost a curiosity. Such is the case with our understanding of the five daily prayers of Muslims.

While it might seem strange to us, praying five times a day makes perfect sense to Muslims, who understand their god as one who seeks devotion in order to help us let go of the things of man, the things that would keep us from the deep compassionate love of God. Praying at prescribed times rather than praying when it’s convenient further enforces the idea that we must do things in God’s time, not in ours. The prayers have a distinct form and include words that have been spoken for a millennium, along with physical movements to involve the whole self in prayer.

This is a religion – one of the Abrahamic religions – that takes seriously the idea that In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. Islam is a recited religion, and to even read the Koran or speak the words of prayers is an act of worship and devotion. And while television has demonized the chant “God is Great” – “Allahu Akbar”, as though it is the secret code to unimaginable terrorism and violence – it is not that far off from the start of the Hebrew prayers, “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha`olam…” or “Blessed are You, LORD our God, King of the universe…”

It’s true that we who are by and large descended from Christian faiths, this kind of prayer seems foreign, the demands unreasonable. Yet even our Roman Catholic friends are taught to pray the rosary and instructed to do so at certain times and places.

Prayer is a significant practice in many religions, in ways many of us don’t understand and sometimes distrust.

Yeah. Prayer is fraught.

And yet.

Prayer is found around the world, in every religious tradition, whether it’s called prayer or not.

Now prayer should not be confused with meditation. Meditation is a practice or technique for promoting relaxation, building internal energy, and developing a sense of compassion in a floaty, non-attached sort of way. And don’t get me wrong – meditation and mindfulness practices are important and good and valuable. But prayer is different. Prayer  doesn’t expect you to watch your thoughts pass by or disengage. Prayer doesn’t expect you to be free of the monkey mind as a prerequisite; rather, that is prayer’s result. Being restless, dubious, and distracted is a perfect trifecta of emotion for entering a time of prayer.

So we decide to pray. What is it?

There are many ideas about what prayers should be, but I like the simple classification found in Erik Walker Wikstrom’s book Simply Pray, from which the title of this sermon is drawn. In the book, he talks about four basic types of prayer:

The first is Naming. This is a prayer of gratitude, for naming all the ways we encounter the sacred. It might appear in a grace said or sung before a meal:

Let us give thanks for the food that we share
Let us give thanks for people who care
Food fills our bodies, and love makes us whole
Let us give thanks deep down in our soul.

It might be the laundry list of names for god – whether the 99 names of God in Islam, or the myriad ways Unitarian Universalists name the sacred, starting with Spirit of Life and occasionally including ‘to whom it may concern.’

Or we may simply name all we are thankful for, and begin naming the mystery that prayer helps us approach.

The second type of prayer is Knowing. This is the prayer of confession, the prayer of “well, here’s all the crap.” It’s Job’s complaint to God in his eponymous old testament book. It is the third verse of For All That is Our Life:

For sorrow we must bear, for failures, pain, and loss,
for each new thing we learn, for fearful hours that pass:
we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.

It is this Muslim prayer, also found in our hymnal:

Save us, our compassionate Lord,
from our folly, by your wisdom,
from our arrogance, by your forgiving love,
from our greed by your infinite bounty,
and from our insecurity by your healing power.

Knowing prayer invite us to journey into the shadow without judgment in order to see ourselves more clearly.

The third type of prayer is Listening. This is the prayer of holding space open. Listening prayer, as Wikstrom writes, “is predicated on the notion that God is already speaking to us and that the reason we don’t know this is that our heads are so full of static.” We want God to hear our prayers, but are we hearing our prayers?

There’s a scene in the film The Hunt for Red October, where our hero, Jack Ryan, is on an American aircraft carrier, tracking Soviet ships that are looking for a renegade Soviet sub; the captain notes that the Soviets are “pinging away with their active sonar like they’re looking for something, but nobody’s listening.” When Ryan asks what he means, the captain replies that the Soviets are moving really fast. “At that speed,” he says, “they could run right over my daughter’s stereo and not hear it.” Sometimes there’s so much static that we forget to listen. As the Talmud says: “The Good Lord gave us each two ears and one mouth, showing we should listen and speak in the same proportion.” Our hymn Voice Still and Small calls us to listen –

Voice still and small, deep inside all, I hear you call, singing.
In storm and rain, sorrow and pain, still we’ll remain singing.
Calming my fears, quenching my tears,
through all the years, singing.

Thoreau’s piece “I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” invokes the same kind of prayerful listening.

The fourth type of prayer is Loving. This is where prayers of petition and intercession come in. It is about asking for the things to make our lives and the lives of others better – showing our love and asking for love, mercy, and compassion in return. What’s important to remember in Loving prayers is that we do not pray so that GOD knows about people’s needs; we pray to make sure WE know. Spirit of Life is a Loving prayer, reminding us of who we want to be at our best…sing with me:

Spirit of life, come unto me,
sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea,
move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close, wings set me free,
Spirit of life, come to me, come to me.

Our opening hymn, May Nothing Evil Cross This Door, and our closing hymn, Thanks Be for These, are also Loving prayers.

Now of course you can do all this in the name of God, Jesus, Allah, Krishna, Vishnu, Odin, Gaia, or in the name of the Spirit of Life, the Creator, the Infinite All, Mother Father Spirit, or any other name you can come up with. The who, really, doesn’t matter. And even if you don’t believe there is a who at all, praying takes us outside of ourselves, reminding ourselves that there are forces at work in the world – nature, physics, metaphysics – that are larger than us, remind us that we aren’t the center of the universe.

Prayer, in other words, keeps us right-sized.

Because prayer isn’t about who you pray to, and know that you can pray to no one. Praying is about OUR attention. Prayer is a conversation with Mystery. Prayer keeps us humble – it is a way for us to acknowledge what we don’t know, and get us in touch with what we desire, what we need, what we fear. Prayer focuses our attention on what calls to us and what drives us. Prayer clarifies our priorities – noticing the things that strike terror, the things that make us weep, the things that call us to swell with hope.

And despite the fact that we all have probably uttered the “God, get me out of this and I will…” prayer in a time of crisis, or bad mistake, or bad hangover… prayer isn’t a bargain. Prayer isn’t about doing one thing to receive another. Prayer is simply a moment where we give attention. It creates space to notice all the bad stuff – our fears, our doubts, our anger, our sorrows – without guilt or judgment.

And just naming things in prayer – Divine one, protect my neighbor as he heads to surgery next week – or Mother of All, hold my family as they struggle with this loss – just naming things in prayer matters. You see, when things go unnamed, they tend to grow exponentially into big hairy monsters lurking around the corner. But when we take time to name all the bad stuff – and all the good stuff too – we draw our attention to those things so they seem more manageable.

Prayer also helps us see what we have to do. We might pray for help, but our prayers are answered when we see how that might happen. There’s the story of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town, and that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’

The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, ‘Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’

A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, ‘Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety.

Well… the man drowned.

And standing at the gates of heaven, he demanded an audience with God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?’

God said, ‘I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?’

When we pray, we get clarity. We get perspective. We get right-sized, and so do our needs, our wants, our joys, and our sorrows. And when we pray, we create, for a moment, a bit of a pause for our bodies, minds, and souls to catch up to the moment.

I think this is one reason I kind of admire the Muslim practice of prayer. Five times a day, for a few minutes, prayer takes center stage. And while these are not free form, we know that ritual and rote chant can actually help open our minds to what we might consider religious experiences.

In the late 1990s, neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili conducted an experiment with a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic nuns – they hooked these willing participants up to all kinds of brain scanning gadgets and asked them to pray or meditate as usual. Rosaries were said, deep humming chants were intoned, and at the end, the scientists analyzed the data. They found that at the moment these practitioners indicated they were “in the zone” with a spiritual connection to the Mystery, the frontal lobe activity increased significantly, suggesting that something happens when we occupy one part of our brain.

This experiment was repeated in the early 2010s with Muslims, and they found that when the prayers got most intense, the religious experience, as felt in the frontal lobe, increased. It’s thought that by distracting the analytical brain with a repeated prayer or chant, it allows other parts of the brain to get busy. And there is a thought that this kind of activity is healthy for our brains; just as doing crossword puzzles keeps those synapses firing, prayer activates parts of our brain that don’t always get a work out.

The conclusion I draw from all of this – the cognitive, the emotional, and the spiritual benefits – is that we should pray. A lot. Whether we really know how to or not.

Because while there are books and proscribed rituals for prayer, ultimately prayer is simply a moment of commitment, of diving in, of just going for it in order to experience it. To simply pray. Wikstrom has the perfect metaphor: just as you cannot know what prayer is until you do it, “you cannot find out what ‘wet’ feels like unless you get into the water. There’s simply no way to talk about it. There’s no explaining it. There’s no understanding it, even. There is only getting wet.”

So… let us pray.

 

By |

Click to listen here (as delivered in Nantucket on February 18, 2018).

I first learned the word “transmogrified” from Calvin and Hobbes.

You may remember the comic strip by Bill Waterston, which ran from 1985 to 1995. Calvin, aged 6, was part Christopher Robin and part Dennis the Menace, and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, regularly came to life in Calvin’s active – and sometimes too mischievous for his own good – imagination. Together, Calvin and Hobbes went on adventures around the universe and considered the big philosophical questions of the day. And occasionally annoyed the crap out of his neighbors and his exasperated parents.

One day, Calvin built a transmogrifier. To us, it was just an upside-down cardboard box with a dial drawn on the side. But to Calvin and Hobbes, it was a machine that could turn them into whatever they wished to become – eel, baboon, bug, dinosaur, tiger, toad, and even worm. While everyone else still saw a little boy and his stuffed tiger, Calvin and Hobbes saw themselves – transmogrified – transformed in a surprising manner.

I think sometimes we forget that we can transmogrify things – especially in religious communities. We often joke – because otherwise we would cry – about the seven deadly words of the church: “But we’ve always done it this way.” That can be about everything from how the coffee is made to how the hymns are sung to how we understand the principles and ethics of our faith.

In fact, let’s look at our principles for a moment. Do me a favor and turn to the page of principles in the hymnal – in STLT it’s about 8 pages in, in STJ, it’s about 11 pages in. There they are, our principles. Our organizing statements of who we are and what we believe. Nicely laid out, in a list. We even tend to number them, and quote them by number – our fifth principle calls me to fight for responsible gun control legislation, I’m doing third principle work in learning about Hinduism, I’m a seventh principle guy so I invest in renewable energy.

A nice, handy, step by step list. Heck, you could even do a seven step program, isolating each principle and focusing on them one at a time. Many congregations – maybe this one too – have experienced seven principles worship series.

There they are. Nice. Neat. Ordered. Isolated. Each principle, an individual.

But that was bugging my colleague, the Reverend Ian Riddell. Ian wrote “I’m in a bad mood that our principles are in a list. So I transmogrified them.”

And this is what he devised.

Instead of an ordered list, we have a wheel…no numbered principles, but rather a different pattern of organization. A surprising way to see them.

As you can see, I hope, the center – the axle – is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It’s where we start, where everything else moves from. Then encompassing it, as the rim, is the interdependent web of which we are all a part. And the spokes are the other principles, the ways we understand ourselves in the world, the ways we act in the world because of who we are and where we are.

So what does this mean? How would we approach our faith, our work, our connection to other human beings, our sense of the divine, if we were willing to transmogrify how we think of them?

Let start with this section – the spoke calling for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Alone, it sounds pretty good; it’s the cornerstone of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and of every social justice action we take, both within and outside Unitarian Universalism.

We take this call on faith, surely. Those things all sound good, are all preached by the major religions, and who doesn’t want justice, equity, and compassion? As a bullet on the principles list, it’s positive and a bit of an ‘of course’.

But there’s something missing.

Unitarian Universalists are so good at questioning things, but often we forget to question what’s underneath our own principles. They’re written on the page – literally – and so they are there, set in stone as it were. Often we ask “What” – what do they mean, or “How” – how do we affirm and promote them. But rarely do we ask “Why” – why are they important for us to affirm and promote. When we change how we see them, we suddenly have a way to question the ‘why’ of our principles, to interrogate the deeper meanings, to see the connection between the individual and the world.

Why is justice, equity, and compassion so important? Because if I as an individual am inherently worthy of dignity, then so must every other individual. And if we are all connected, how can I be like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm and say some animals are more equal than others? How can I not see that the compassion I hope you’ll show me might be worth showing to someone – everyone – else? This principle calls us to be in that state of becoming just, equitable, compassionate – we are never JUST just, but if we remember who we are and where we come from, we are BECOMING just. The justice, equity, and compassion we get from the world and see in the world helps us become more just – to others, but also to ourselves.

Now I will admit something here – a bit of my own theological struggle. I don’t always believe that the things I know are true also apply to me. In other words, sometimes it is easier to declare that the inherent worth and dignity of every person in this interdependent web of all existence means that there must be justice, equity, and compassion for other people… but it’s hard to accept for myself that I am part of that web and am as inherently worthy so that justice, equity, and compassion should also be for me. For you, absolutely. For everyone in the world who faces injustice, oppression, and hatred, absolutely. For me, eh…

And when the principles are in a tidy little list, it’s easy to dismiss myself as not really part of it. It’s easy to apply these things to the people I love, the congregations I serve, the larger community.

But this wheel…Ian’s pesky new way of looking at things… well, it’s not letting us off the hook. Instead, it is reminding me of what David Bumbaugh wrote: “In this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole, that ultimately we all spring from the same source and all journey to the same ultimate destiny.” In other words, y’all can’t grow into harmony with the Divine without me, nor I without you, nor all of us without each other.

We aren’t isolated – while Paul Simon’s line “I am a rock, I am an island” is more singable, John Donne’s poetic “no man is an island” is actually much more accurate. We are not islands. We are all part of what James Luther Adams called the brotherhood of man, but which I prefer to call the family of humanity. (It’s usually at this phrase that I start singing the disco tune “we are family…I got all my sisters with me…” but I’ll resist…oh wait.)

It is this kind of questioning – asking the Why of our principles, and seeing this deep human connection –led our organization Standing on the Side of Love to realize that the words of its name actually did not show compassion to every person – especially the person who cannot stand and finds it difficult to be included in the activities of an organization that insists on the metaphor of standing. Thus, the organization changed its name to Side with Love. And while they were making a shift, so too did composer Jason Shelton, who has officially changed the name and lyric of his song, #1014 in our teal hymnal, to Answering the Call of Love. And in changing those lyrics, the song becomes more active, more engaged in the work of the second principle.

It is this connection– from the individual to the collective and back again – that helps answer why. Why do we affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations? Because it’s about me and it’s about you, neither of which can stand alone, so it becomes about us. As Frederick Buechner famously said, “It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

I think you can see how this begins to work together.

Now if we interrogate the goal of world community, it has a similar sense of connection – how can we have a world community without all the individuals? As Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley writes, “if in recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our own salvation… if we join spirits… the pain of our aloneness will be lessened, and that does matter.”

I think about the table blessing that calls us to be thankful for the many hands make a meal possible – the farmers who grew it, the workers who picked it and packed it, the truckers who transported it, the grocers and stock boys and cashiers who sold it, the cooks who prepared it, the waiters who served it. Our food comes from all over the country, all over the world. We cannot know for sure where the orange I have in my hands has been, who has handled it. So how can I not want to affirm and promote a world community, when that world community feeds me?

And that’s just one example. When we see ourselves as both an individual and part of something bigger, we begin to see others the same way. And that’s not always easy. Sometimes we get too self-focused and see every act, every word, every decision just about ourselves. Or we get too outwardly focused and feel lost and used and burned out. Our transmogrified principles – looking the same on the outside but feeling new and different on the inside – reminds we are both-and.

So we can see how many of these might work. But how might we understand some of the more individualistic principles, like encouragement to spiritual growth? That seems awfully individualistic. And on one hand, it is. My spiritual path is not your spiritual path. As we like to say, we need not think alike to love alike. In this room, I suspect we have Jews and Christians and atheists and pagans and who knows what else? But even this principle – a vital one to be sure – both benefits from the going out and the coming in and strengthens both.

It is your path; but this religious community – this congregation – encourages you to this path. The path you choose is modeled by others out there – those who have gone before, those who are going along it now. Their wisdom informs yours. And here’s a secret: your wisdom informs theirs too.

Why do we affirm and promote this? “Why”, of course, being the question this wheel seems to ask of us over and over. And I think the answer is in the fact that humans have been ritualizing in both solitary and communal ways since humans started doing rituals, and healthy spiritual exploration contains both. I like what Parker Palmer says about this:

“Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people – it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people – it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.”

And so on. Each principle, connecting the self to the interdependent web and back again, in areas of truth, justice, community, connection, process, growth, and compassion. Leading us from the familiar form that says “what” and to the transmogrified form which asks “why.”

Once you see it, it can’t be unseen. Now we can’t think of the principles without thinking about the wheel and the spokes and the interconnectedness. We have transformed our way of thinking about it… we’ve transmogrified our principles, our ethics, and our faith.

And maybe that’s the real message – not that we become something new overnight, but that we – and our world – and how we act in it – is deeply and inexorably interconnected, interdependent. And that’s not just about how we act outside these walls but how we act inside them too – how we are with each other. Some of us can be too inwardly focused, or outwardly focused, and we forget the gifts of both receiving and giving love, compassion, energy, encouragement.

There’s a lovely Buddhist meditation that bring this home; and you may be surprised that it was set to music by the guy who started this all off, Ian Riddell.

Huh. It really is a circle.

By |

I may be wildly speculating here, but I am pretty sure there isn’t a person my age brought up in the United States that wasn’t in some way inspired by/shaped by/comforted by/taught by/entertained by the Muppets. Now this is likely also true for people not in their early 50s, but I know that we who were born in the early to mid 1960s were just the right age for Sesame Street when it came out, and just the right age for The Muppet Show when it debuted.

One of the brilliant things about The Muppet Show was the way they simultaneously humanized celebrities and allowed those celebrities to shine. (A full list of stars can be found here.) There are some great, memorable moments, like Sandy Duncan dancing with Sweetums, Gladys Knight singing “God Bless the Child” with Rowlf, Alice Cooper’s Faustian affect on the cast, and of course Harry Belafonte – perhaps the most memorable appearance of all.

Not only did Belafonte sing the classic “Banana Boat Song”, he helped bring to the screen one of Jim Henson’s best work, on Turn the World Around. As Belafonte recounted in Of Muppets and Men, he and Henson thought that the show ” might provide the occasion to take a look at the lore and history of other worlds, other places.” From there, the designers at The Muppet Workshop researched African masks that would support Belafonte’s story of the song’s inspiration – namely the stories and wisdom of people he met in Guinea. But here’s where the care comes in:  while the masks were patterned on African masks, Henson was very careful about the final choices, because, as Belafonte recalled, “he didn’t want to cause offense by choosing masks that would have some religious or national significance.”

And thus, we have a beautifully crafted piece that doesn’t just use another culture but explains, expresses, and celebrates. Here’s the full clip (the only version I could find):

Transcript of the story:

I discovered that song in Africa. I was in a country called Guinea. I went deep into the interior of the country, and in a little village, I met with a storyteller. That storyteller went way back in African tradition and African mythology and began to tell this story about the fire, the sun, the water, the Earth.

He pointed out the whole of these things put together turns the world around. That all of us are here for a very, very short time. In that time that we’re here, there really isn’t any difference in any of us, if we take time out to understand each other.

The question is: Do I know who you are, or who I am? Do we care about each other? Because if we do, together we can turn the world around.

Wow.

“Do we care about each other? Because if we do, together we can turn the world around.” I’m not sure there’s a clearer statement of our theology than that. And what a gift we have in this song, and in the care both Belafonte and Henson took to bring it to us, beyond a recording on an album. Without that appearance on The Muppet Show, my generation might not ever have known this song, and it might not have come up in the minds of this hymnal’s commission.

I am grateful… and happy to share with you the lyrics as we have them laid out – in what could be seen as a complex arrangement:

We come from the fire, living in the fire,
go back to the fire, turn the world around.

We come from the water, living in the water,
go back to the water, turn the world around.

We come from the mountain, living on the mountain,
go back to the mountain, turn the world around.

Chorus 1:
Whoa, so is life! Ah, so is life!
Whoa, so is life! Ah, so is life!

Chorus 2:
Whoa, so is life! Abateewah, so is life!
Whoa, so is life! Abateewah, so is life!

Chorus 3:
Whoa, so is life! Abateewah, (ha!) so is life!
Whoa, so is life! Abateewah, (ha!) so is life!

Section 1:
Do you know who I am?
Do I know who you are?
See we one another clearly?
Do we know who we are?

Section 2:
Do you know who I am? Do I know who you are?
See we one another clearly? Do we know who we are?
Do you know who I am? Do I know who you are?
See we one another clearly? Do we know who we are?

Water make the river, river wash the mountain,
Fire make the sunlight, turn the world around.

Heart is of the river, body is the mountain,
Spirit is the sunlight, turn the world around.

We are of the spirit, truly of the spirit,
Only can the spirit turn the world around!

It seems complex when you look at it, but it’s really quite simple – and with some good song leading, you can get a congregation to sing the various parts without freaking out. I think once they get the feel of it, and understand where it goes and what they’re supposed to sing, it becomes a truly joyful, meaningful experience.

—

Well, there it is.

The end of this spiritual practice.

I have some wrap up thoughts, and some thoughts about what’s next, which I’ll share tomorrow.

But for now, well… thanks. Thanks for reading, and thanks for indulging me in the outward expression of my inward spiritual practice. It’s been a pleasure, even on those days when it wasn’t a joy.

Ah, so is life.

 

By |

Use with care, use with care, use with care.

This song is listed as being generally Native American – which is likely all that the STJ commission could find at the time. A link to the source material, Songs for Earthlings, is now dead.

However, I did a search for the lyrics and discovered that one musician/environmental educator, Hawk Hurst, identified this as being from the Hupa tribe of northern California. There are additional verses in the version he’s printed, including two to grandparents,  and planets and animals showing up too.

The Earth is our Mother, we must take care of her;
The Earth is our Mother, we must take care of her.

Chorus:
heyyunga hoyunga, heyyung yung;
heyyunga hoyunga, heyyung yung

Her sacred ground we walk upon with every step we take;
Her sacred ground we walk upon with every step we take;

Chorus

The Earth is our Mother, she will take care of us;
The Earth is our Mother, she will take care of us;

Chorus

The Sky is our Father, we will take care of him;
the Sky is our Father, we will take care of him.

Chorus

The Sea is our Sister, we will take care of her;
the Sea is our Sister, we will take care of her.

Chorus

The Forest is our Brother, we will take care of him;
the Forest is our Brother, we will take care of him.

Chorus

And I say use with care because the last thing we need to do in our congregations is use this without acknowledging the culture from which it comes. I’ve talked several times throughout this practice about cultural appropriation and the use of music from cultures that are not our own; it’s a danger to just use pieces like this as spectacles – something we drag out once a year – just as it’s a danger to use them without acknowledgement or change the meaning or intent. We do a disservice to these rich cultures that have already been badly treated, and we throw mud in the eye of our first principle. So just… use with care.

Musically, I’m neither here nor there with it. I don’t love this piece, nor do I hate it. It honestly just doesn’t speak to me, despite my high pagan days. I think even then I wasn’t attracted to the native American traditions – I leaned toward the Germanic and Celtic (not surprising, since I’m German and English).  It’s easy to learn and can probably be done in sort of a round style, with the chorus being the second part of the round.

A programming note: tomorrow is the last day of Hymn by Hymn.

I know, right? How did that happen? It seems simultaneously like it was just yesterday and a hundred years ago that I started this spiritual practice. We’ll celebrate our last hymn tomorrow, and I’ll have a wrap up on Thursday, with a preview of what’s next.

—-

Image – ubiquitous view of the coastline of northern California.

By |

This is the last in our earth chant quodlibet (yes, since relearning the word last week, I’ve rather enjoyed saying it and typing it, especially since it’s appropriate), and it’s been an … interesting side trip. The melodies of the chants are, intentionally, rather simple, and I imagine the complexity builds as you add other chants – especially if you have a strong song leader and an attentive congregation.

But what’s been especially interesting is the question of appropriation. Over these last few days I’ve wondered about (or been called to wonder about) not so much the inclusion of a song from another culture but rather the use of distinctive phrases or lyrics or styles that come from/are reminiscent of the music and spirituality of American Indigenous cultures. And the truth is that for me, I’m not sure today where the line is between inclusion and misappropriation. And…  we can’t know what the discussions were among the compilers of STJ regarding these things – although by the early 2000s they certainly would have been dealing with some of these question, so I expect they chose with care. And, we know that even 12 years on, some things have shifted even more (such an awareness of binary and ableist language). I do know that I sometimes lean on the side of caution, but I would rather be cautious than careless. So… make of this what you will.

The good news, I suppose, is that this last one is rather neutral. It’s a simple tune that could come from anywhere, with language and metaphors that could come from anywhere.  I vaguely remember it from my high pagan days, and knowing that it comes from Circle of Song, I’m not surprised. (That resource was like a hymnal for one pagan group I was involved with.)

Evening breeze, spirit song,
sings to me when the day is done.
Mother earth awakens me
with the heart beat of the sea.

And… that’s it really. A sweet little chant from a great book published in the 1990s that has helped round out STJ’s collection of Sixth Source songs.

And thus endeth the quodlibet.