What You Want, What You Need

"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you find
You get what you need."

–Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

This week I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. Just yesterday in class I sang a Bob Dylan song, a capella. Today I’m quoting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Who knows what tomorrow might bring.

And that’s what I want to talk about this evening: Not knowing what tomorrow brings.

Our world is in bad shape right now. Well, depending on where you are, our world is in really bad shape. The people of Haiti are on our minds frequently these days, and as well they should be. They are in real trouble there. And there are the folks in New Orleans, who still haven’t had ample chance to recover from their disaster. There are many people who are suffering because of humanity’s inability to interface well with Nature. Places where Nature has just not conformed to our will. And where we have failed to subdue Nature, sometimes we suffer.

You can’t always get what you want.

But if you try sometimes, you find you get what you need.

Notice the lyric does not say “And if you try sometime, you find you get what you want.” Nope, you get what you need.

Who among us can say that they, at all times, know what they need?

I am not prepared to stand here and count myself among them. Oftentimes I’m not even sure what I want.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess to you that I’ve never heard the Rolling Stones version of that song I quoted earlier. I know only the version from the television show, Glee. Also, I’ve never heard Bob Dylan sing “I Believe in You,” the song I used in class just yesterday. I know only Sinead O’Connor’s version. I’ve never had a lot of exposure to either the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan, just enough to know that it isn’t really the sort of music I enjoy, and yet here I am this week, betraying my Motown roots. I’m sure Diana Ross is furious. And yet, both songs express something that I deeply needed this week. Not what I wanted, but what I needed.

As part of my own spiritual journey and practice, I have been working very diligently at remaining open to Possibility. And by that I mean the capital P possibility. I’ve been working very hard to embrace the things that Life, also with a capital letter, has to offer. Largely I blame my dear friend and colleague Pam Rumancik for this, as she spent our first two years in seminary saying to me “It’ll be what it needs to be, Joe.” At first I used to grumble under my breath, because I needed to know what it needed to be. I didn’t want to wait for it, whatever it was, to be. I had a deep-seeded need to help it become whatever it was going to become.

Eventually, like water over a stone, Pam wore me down and I began to embrace the wisdom of what she offered me. It was hard at first, and like all new skills, I was very clumsy at first, and often impatient for results.

What I’ve cultivated now, instead of my impatience, is an awareness to the Universe around me. From Luang Por Sumedho:

Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, or material change,
and emotional change:

Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible.

It’s not something that changes.

It’s a refuge you can trust in.

This refuge is not something you can create.

It is not a creation. It’s not an ideal.

It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or not noticed.

When you’re mindful,
you’re beginning to notice,
it’s like this.

If you concentrate only on what you think you want, you may be missing what it is that you really need.

We live in a world where our desires are constantly manipulated by corporations whose very existence depends on our deciding that we need or deserve the product they’re selling. And often, and perhaps not surprisingly, things are not really what they seem.

We’ve all seen a cute little car commercial with a zippy little car, or a grand dame of luxury, right? They’re not really selling you that car. They’re tying to sell you happiness.

Just like when you were a kid, they tried to sell you happiness in the form of a Slinky that walked down stairs, alone or in pairs.

The slinky and the car are really only the means by which you get the opportunity to gain or achieve this happiness.

Except, of course, that’s a lie.

Happiness can’t be bought, and since it can’t be bought, they can’t charge you interest on it, or raise the market share. So they fool us into thinking that we want that Bose stereo system with the iPod dock for our study. Because music brings joy, joy brings happiness. See how easy the formula is?

Except, of course, happiness can’t be bought.

The accessories to happiness, however, might be a different matter.

But as nice as the Bose system might sound and look, I don’t need it. I just want it.

So, what does one need? That of course, is a highly individualized answer. What does one really need? Can you search within yourself and identify that which you really need, and not just desire?

Those people in Haiti? They need shelter, they need food.

None of us needs an iPod system. Though, obviously, some of us want one very much.

I’m not advocating a life with a stark, monastic quality without comforts. What I’m suggesting is a little more attention be paid to what we need, and not what we want.

And what we need is not often the material items that we’re pressed into buying.

Spend some time this week thinking about what you absolutely need. Listen for the answer that comes from within. Sit with yourself, and with integrity ask yourself if this is what you need. If you don’t spend time with yourself examining your values, you may never know the difference between what you need and what you want.

There is no guarantee that you’ll get what you need, according to Mick and Keith, but sometimes you just might.

And the rest of the time, you’ll have to figure out how to make do.

Now making do isn’t always fun. I’m not blind to that. It means stretching what you have, doing, as my parents used to say, “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” But there is something to be gained in this experience of not having everything that you need. If you take to heart what my friend Pam says, “It’ll be what it needs to be,” you just might find that what you thought you needed, you didn’t.

And that, friends, is a form of spiritual growth.

The Reverend Kate Braestrup, Chaplain for the State of Maine's Warden Service is a minister who came to her own ministry largely through grieving her late husband who was a State Trooper and seminarian. She tells this beginning of a story in her memoir;

Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephone rings.

"Your Holiness!" Lieutenant Trisdale roars: "We've got a situation up here by Masquinogy Pond we could use your help with."

What Kate wanted to be was a minister's wife. She wanted her husband to finish seminary, and to continue her own writing career.

This, of course, isn't what happened. And while searching for what she needed to grieve her husband, Kate discovered her own call to ministry.

You may think that you need one thing, and maybe you’re wrong. Instead of a new romance, you may need to deepen your friendship with someone close to you already. Instead of needing a night on the town, perhaps you need an evening in, a pot luck with friends.

Open yourself up to the possibilities the Universe can offer you. Spend some time with your soul and ask questions. Make room for the Grace of the Spirit of Life. This’ll take some work, of course, and sometimes when you’re scrabbling around to make sense of your life you might not feel like investing your energy in this.

This is important spiritual work, friends, but your life will be the richer for it.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.

Blessings for your journey.

Amen.

Be Gentle With Heroes

A hero, according to Daniel Webster, is defined as:

1 a : a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability b : an illustrious warrior c : a person admired for his or her achievements and noble qualities d : one that shows great courage.

Hero is a word that gets used a lot. Certainly there are many who show great courage, and there are many people who could be admired for their achievements and noble qualities, but so few of us are endowed with great strength and abilities due to our grandparents who live on Mount Olympus.

If we tried, collectively we could come up with a long list of both archetypal and personal heroes.

Recently President Barack Obama made a trip to China. It was all over the news. And President Obama’s trip is what got me thinking about this idea of being a hero.

It must be very hard work to be a hero.

Today is the 314^th day of the presidency of Barack Obama. Think back, all the way back, to January 20^th, Inauguration Day. Where were you? I know where I was. I was at school. The entire Meadville Lombard community came together and watched the Inauguration on a big screen. There was a lot of weeping for joy, and we were probably not alone in that.

But it has been an embattled 314 days, hasn’t it?

Just think back over the summer and all of the town meetings held about health care reform. Part of me was very happy that so many people turned out for discussions about the political process, and seemed to be interested in the democratic process (our 5^th Principle!), but I was very disheartened by the way people chose to express themselves. There was an utter lack of not only respect, but of what I would call common decency in the way people chose to express themselves.

Please understand that I am not making a political statement here, nor am I endorsing the policies of any one party over those of another. This is not about politics. This is about the difficult job of being a hero.

Before the President went to China, he did not have a meeting with the Dali Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. And people were plenty upset about that, too. But really, the President was in a difficult situation.

He was about to go to meet with President Hu Jintao, the leader of China, one of our biggest trading partners, a growing industrial power, and potentially the world’s next superpower.

President Obama knows about the Dali Lama, and he knows about the human rights abuses. But he also knows that we are in a trade deficit, that we have our own human rights abuses to deal with.

And yet there Obama was, caught between our country’s need for trade for economic growth, and our citizens' needs to recognize a difficult situation regarding Tibet and the Dali Lama.

Before this turns into an apology for and apologetic of Obama’s 314 days in office, let me point out to you why I used his story as an illustration.

When there are two seemingly diametrically opposed sets of needs, it’s hard to create a win-win situation.

A very close friend and mentor of mine and I were talking about Obama’s presidency recently. She is a life long liberal, and introduced me to the term “red diaper baby,” meaning that her parents were extreme leftists from her childhood. She’s worked for decades in the political system of her home city. She told me “When Obama was first elected, I felt like I was walking with him. I celebrated, I cried, I was elated. But as this year has gone on, and decisions have been made or delayed by political processes, I feel like we’re no longer walking side by side. Sometimes I bump into him, or he bumps in to me, or he walks so far ahead that I can’t see him around the corner.”

This is how our heroes get tarnished. We begin to see that they are human beings. We bump into their reality.

Sure, it’s easy to hero-worship superheroes or fictional heroes, or human heroes who are no longer alive, whose short-comings have been erased by time. One can easily admire the poetry of Walt Whitman for example, and think about his genius. And that’s much easier when you don’t have to watch him get food caught in his moustache as he eats. Abraham Lincoln’s words are to this day inspiring and carry great weight, but when delivered with a high reedy voice, which he is reported to have had, some of their gravitas might be lost.

I’m here suggesting that we be gentler with our heroes.

With the exception of Wonder Woman, the personal heroes I have in my life are just people. They have bad hair days, and sometimes they don’t feel like being heroic. Worse yet, sometimes they make mistakes of judgment.

When this happens, you can either abandon them as your hero, you can shun them, or you can reach out to them. One of my classmates at Meadville Lombard Theological School is a Buddhist minister in Rissho Kosei-Kai. I thank the Universe almost daily for bringing him into my life. I have learned so much from him.

One lesson I have learned from him is that we are all Bodhisattvas. A Bodhisattva is a teacher.

When your hero, or teacher, or Bodhisattva, stumbles and shows their human frailty, you can become the bodhisattva of the moment, and teach the importance of compassion by showing compassion.

You can step up and let your highest self be gentle with your hero. This will be good for both you and your hero. Your hero will be shown love and caring. Living heroically in this world takes a lot of energy and effort, and it is good to offer some in return to those living heroically. It will be good for you, because you will begin to realize your own bodhisattva nature, the hero within you.

We’ve just entered the 6 week-long sprint in America called “the holidays.” What’s that line from that Christmas Carol? “There’ll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing..." and on and on and on. That’s a lot of pressure.

There are presents to buy, which can be stressful. At my house we’re having a cookie party, where everyone is supposed to be bringing a batch of homemade cookies. There are parties to attend, a lot of red and green to wear, and on top of all that there is the emotional baggage of Christmases long, long ago. Hap-happiest season of all? Maybe.

I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment. Place your feet on the ground and relax. When you hear the sound of a bell, you may re-open your eyes.

Call to mind a favorite holiday moment from the past.

Who is there with you?

Are there any particular smells, like cookies or pine?

What makes this moment special for you?

(ring bell twice.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the moment you picked was not the moment you were driving around the mall parking lot, searching for a spot.

We’re all under a lot of pressure for the next six weeks to make as many amazing, life-long memories as we can. Probably we’re under pressure to make more of those memories than are humanly possible.

Cookies to make.

Presents to buy.

Homes to decorate.

People to please.

Parties to attend.

And all that on top of our already busy schedules.

One would have to be a superhero to do it all, and do it flawlessly.

And you’re only a regular hero.

So be gentle with yourself. Take care of yourself during this busy time. Take time for a cup of tea, or coffee. Have a moment where you just stop and look around your home and allow the gratitude for the imperfections and good things in your life to flow over you.

Try this at least once a week.

Try this year-round.

Be kind to yourself, especially in times of stress. It’s often hard to remember that, but try.

Because you are a hero, to someone, be gentle with yourself.

Many blessings on your journey.

Re-Creation

A Story for All Ages

A Cherokee Legend

Here is the story: It is called "Grandfather Tells" and is also known as "The Wolves Within."

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice,

"Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

"But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.

"Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."

(http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TwoWolves-Cherokee.html)

Few of us in this church this morning believe unconditionally what the Bible says about the beginnings of the world. With varying degrees of generosity, we might speak about the Creation story of Genesis and its allegorical meaning. With less charity, we might even congratulate ourselves, because we “know better” than to read the Bible as literal truth.

One of the things we Unitarian Universalists pride ourselves on is our ability to go beyond mere tolerance to celebration and integration of people unlike ourselves. Yet I have observed that when it comes to being generous about the churches we’ve left, we tend to be edgier and less gentle.

Many, but not all, of us are known by some as “come-inners;” meaning that we come-in from somewhere else. We came from that other place because we didn’t agree on something there. So not only do we have the emotional baggage of what we didn’t believe in, sometimes the very act of leaving our faith of origin leaves its own wounds.

There are also the people here who grew up as Unitarians, or Universalists, or Unitarian Universalists. They may have their own confusion about the creation story of the Hebrew Bible.

Whatever our past individual relationships with the Hebrew Bible and its stories about the origin of the world, these tales are a formidable force in our culture. We can’t ignore them, because to do so would be shortsighted. So, how do we do this?

We begin at the beginning.

What if we re-imagined Creation? The Biblical Creation, I mean. What might it mean if we took the creation story that we all think we know, and really took a good look at it? How much do you know about the Creation story in Genesis?

Did you know there is actually more than one story there? There is Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In this story, God creates everything in six days and rests on the seventh, which is why the Jewish people observe the Sabbath. Even though this is currently the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, there is much scholarship that suggests it is not the first creation story, but a second, later story, put in front of the original creation story.

Current Biblical scholarship suggests that the Hebrew Bible bears the footprint of four major schools of editorship. They are called J, E, D and P. J is for Yahwist, J being the first letter in the German spelling of YHWH, as German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen was the man who brought this idea fully to light. E is for “Eloist.” E’s distinction is based partly on the use of the word Elohim as a reference to God, and not Yahweh. D comes mostly into play in Deuteronomy, and was probably active during the 7th century BCE or Before the Common Era, a term used instead of BC-Before Christ. P is the Priestly editorship, which reflects the concerns of the priestly class, most active while Israel was in exile in Babylon, or shortly thereafter in about the 6th or 5th century “BCE.”

This morning we are interested in the Yahwist and Priestly editorship of the two separate creation stories in Genesis. If you’ll open up your Bibles to…… I’m kidding. I bet you’d thought you’d never hear that phrase in a Unitarian Universalist church!

The second story in Genesis starts in chapter 2, verse 4. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

It could be very easy to now get lost in a whirlwind of discussions about language, translations, ancient documents that seem to demonstrate the age and relative dates of these Biblical texts, but we’re not going to do that today. What’s important for us is that there are two distinct stories, and that they are written by two different groups of ancient Hebrews.

Why is that important to us? Because it affords us the opportunity to ask the following questions: What did they think they were doing? What motivated them? What was their goal in adding a second, and often contradictory story, and placing it in a position that creates, because of its position in the written text, primacy over an older story?

And what can all this mean for us?

Now, I don’t plan to stand up here and deliver a lecture on Biblical scholarship. It’s a topic I never thought I’d find very intriguing, but in truth, it has captured some of my interest. I will, however, take the chance on suggesting it as a possible topic of thought for you. The Bible is not, from the accepted academic point of view (and I mean no offense to those who disagree), written by one hand. It does not have one author or even one editor. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were assembled by human beings. Inspired by God or no, humans put these books together.

And even humans inspired by God have an agenda. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their agenda is nefarious; in fact, my own belief in the genuine goodness of humanity allows me to say that I think each person who worked on the Bible from the time of its original assemblage probably did so with the best of intentions.

So these Priestly folk who placed their account of Creation in front of the Yahwist account... What were they thinking? Simply stated, I’m suggesting that they thought they were doing a good thing. I can’t guess, as a 21st century person, their exact motivations. Given my own theological standpoint that people are basically good, I’m going to say that I believe that the Priestly folk placed their story in front of the older story because they understood it as a more accurate account.

Adding material to a sacred text is serious business. This is about God. This is not about adding to a state’s constitution to take away the rights of American citizens. Think how upset some of us got when the citizens of California voted to strip gay and lesbian people of their right to marriage. And that’s just a law; a law can be overturned. And, hopefully, it will be.

Imagine for a minute what the responsibility would feel like to change the covenant of your people with your God.

Naturally, this is just the sort of thing that we do, isn’t it? We re-imagine our relationship with that which is Holy. It is part of our own spiritual practice. All of us accept and reject bits and pieces of the belief systems of others. What if we were really bold and re-imagined Creation?

Now, I’m not talking about the Big Bang, or as I’ve also heard it referenced, “The Big Birth.” And I’m not talking about Quantum Physics either. The whole idea that all matter is mostly empty space is interesting, but not the point this morning.

We’re here. We had an origin. What is the tale we’ll tell about our beginnings? What will our tale mean to us and to our children?

Gordon Kaufman, in his book In the Beginning…Creativity, writes “I had come to the conclusion that all theological ideas—including the idea of God—could best be understood as products of the human imagination, when employed by men and women seeking to orient themselves in life.”

So, let us be about the business of orienting.

In her book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller highlights, among other things, the very question of creation. Is it creatio ex nihilo or is it ex nihlio nihil fit? Is the reality of the story of the beginning creation out of nothing, or from nothing comes nothing? Ms. Keller writes that in order to truly examine much of the way we think about the world we have to dislodge the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. We are so entrenched is this doctrine that one would be hard pressed to think about the beginning of everything and not have this doctrine pop up in our heads. Think about the beginning. And by this I mean THE BEGINNING, with a capital T and a capital B. What was there before The Beginning? And if something was there, what was it? And if something was there, then have we really identified THE BEGINNING? Unfortunately, I don’t think I know that answer.

Another image that Keller invokes in her book is that of a 100 year old translation from Gunkel that God engaged in this act of creation by “vibrating over the face of the waters.” She goes further to say that this vibrating creates a butterfly effect.

I find the image of God vibrating over the deep of the unknown waters to be especially powerful, and though I’ve spent a couple of months thinking about it, I can’t really say why. Perhaps it’s because vibration indicates energy, and that energy is being employed to create WITH something other than God. Ex hihlio nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing. There has to be something there, right? So where did God come from? Where did the deep waters that God vibrated over come from?

These are not answers we can ever really know. None of us can go back in a time machine to the moment of the Big Birth with a video-cam and record it for the rest of us.

But we can still tell a tale of beginnings, and in that tale, we can give primacy to those things we think are important.

A surprising number of different Hebrew verbs are used in the Hebraic Bible to reference creation, with God as subject: bara, to create; pa’al, make; yasar, form; anahl, build; yalad, to bring forth. I bring this up not as a way to criticize the ancient Hebrews for their lack of consistency, but to praise their poetic sensibilities.

How do we begin our tale? What a difficult task it would be to write the story of the beginning of everything!

As Unitarian Universalists it seems unlikely that we might ever agree on a written single story that tells the origin of the universe, but we might agree on many themes. What are some of our shared values today? They should be in any tale that we tell about the origins of our common experience.

Of our seven principles, the first and seventh principles seem to me to be the ones we should really look at in any discussion about ultimacy. Our first principle declares that we Affirm and Promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Our seventh principle adds that we are all part of an interdependent web of existence. These are core values to us.

Every person has worth, and we are connected to all that is around us.

So as we tell this tale of the origin of everything, keeping in mind that there are those who don’t believe in a driving force behind creation, but also feeling a certain pull toward story telling, let’s re-caste the creation story in Genesis.

In the beginning of our tale, one possible of many, there was community. Actually, it was more of a proto-community. The gathering of people became a community after an awakening.

One morning, a young woman died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby. The eldest woman in the group saw the baby and was moved by the new, small and helpless animal. She encouraged a young woman who was nursing her own child, to also feed the orphaned baby. This child had no name, its mother likewise died nameless. The old woman also had no name; it was a time before names were needed, because no one thought of themselves as belonging to anything. We give names to our young to show that they have a place.

Until this old woman named the helpless child, no one ever needed a name.

She named the child Adam. And she named the woman who fed Adam (who in turn named the old woman) Eve, because she was the mother of a new way of life. A life in which people belonged. They formed a community.

This wasn’t a perfect community. It’s not that kind of a tale. It took the community a couple of thousand years to figure things out like farming, and building houses. Even after thousands of years of doing both, they still hadn’t perfected either process, and turned from eating what they planted to producing surplus to sell. From building the houses they needed in order to survive the elements, to attempting to transform the natural world into a world that was about comfort and status, they developed agri-business and real-estate booms and busts.

The community, as you can well imagine, has made a few mistakes along the way. We’ve forgotten that we’re all connected. That the person who died last week in the Gaza strip was killed by a cousin, no matter how distant.

We’ve forgotten that we are related to all things, if you go back far enough.

In his book Zooagraphies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, Matthew Calarco speaks about not the personality of animals, but their animalities. My own Mom violates this very rule all the time by remarking that her dog, Sassy, is a people person. Sassy is a dog, she doesn’t have a personality. She, if anything, has a doginality. The very concept of us having a personality goes against what Eve and Adam knew. They had animalities; an animal nature that connected them with the rest of nature. Calarco’s argument is more about the valuing of the non-human, our non-human cousins, than about devaluing humans. Just like the two people involved in the Gaza tragedy I just spoke about, so we are cousins, however distant, to the animals in the field, in the jungle and in the slaughterhouse.

Our Creation story isn’t over.

Part of being a practicing Unitarian Universalist is engaging in liberal theology, or the re-examination of your belief system. We are not the only church practicing liberal theology, nor does liberal theology guarantee a politically liberal identity.

As we continue to think about our place in relation to that which is sacred, part of that consideration must be about our place in the physical realm as well. Our own James Luther Adams once wrote, “The unexamined faith is not worth having.” I invite you today to think about your own place in creation and the story that we’re weaving everyday as we live.

Earlier, during the story time for all ages, before the kids went to their classes, I told the story of the two wolves that are inside each of us. Which wolf are you feeding? And how are you defining those wolves?

Adulthood is complicated. Given an absolutely limitless income, many of us would give money to charities we believe in, we would drive that hybrid we want to, we’d have energy efficient houses. We would be all that we could be.

But this is not our reality. Instead, we cut corners on our better selves. We choose to balance our checkbook, and make that rent or mortgage payment, and we keep driving that car whose gas mileage is not what we’d like.

We feed and clothe our children rather than build a new home that’s LEED certified.

And for some of us, it means not eating organically, locally-grown food, because we frankly just can’t afford it.

Part of what was so compelling to me when I first read the tale of the Grandfather, Grandson and the two wolves was the liberal theology aspect of it.

Dr. Mike Hogue, a professor of mine, and I had a talk about just what IS theology anyway? Mike is a recent Templeton award winner, which is given for excellence in theological development. When I asked Mike for a portable answer to the question What Is Theology, he told me “Theology is the way in which we engage with what we call the divine.” Action, actual verb-creation is the way that Mike Hogue sees theology. Doing is theology.

When deciding which wolf to feed, you are engaging in theology. What does your theology call you to do? Going back for a moment to Keller’s idea of God vibrating above the primordial waters, it is clear that we are in fact the co-creators of existence. God (by this I mean whatever force there is in this universe, not necessary the white bearded God of the middle ages) is still creating. We co-create right alongside.

And we’ve made some serious errors. Look at agri-business, factory farming, nuclear bombs, the exploitation of workers, twenty-first century slavery, holocausts….the list can go on. But also, we’ve done some things very well.

Each day, maybe even each moment, we are choosing which wolf to feed. This gives each of us innumerable times each day to start afresh. We continually have the opportunity to be our best selves!

Do we go beyond good and evil and move toward the responsible and away from the shortsighted? In our daily lives can we do what Eve did? Can we free ourselves from our past systems of behavior, governance and limitations by an act of compassion?

I say we can.

After all, Creation, like Revelation, is a never closing book.

A Million Things To Say

Have you ever found yourself with about a million things to say, and about 15 minutes in which to say them? I can now tell you from first hand experience what that feels like.

Today I am delivering my final address to you, this lovely congregation at the top of a hill. Behind us lay six weeks of laughter and growth. While I cannot speak for the lot of you, I can tell you that I have grown in ministry. And for that I thank you from the deepest, most sacred place in my heart.

On the first Sunday that I stood before you, I spoke about Journeys; traveling far from home, being nervous about being here and how wondrous it all was. The next Sunday was Father’s Day and I shared with you the story of my friendship with Wallace Rusterholtz, and the importance of nurturing the world around us. On Sunday number three I wrote about doubt and it’s role in faith development. Next came Flower Sunday where the youth of our congregation presented the theme “Diversity in flowers and people,” which I thought was a brilliant theme.

And now we’ve come to this, the final address.

You might notice that I’m standing up here in the high pulpit. Something I never thought I would never do, I assure you, even though it was requested and joked about. I’m a little nervous about heights, you see…. but more importantly, when I practiced preaching from up here in my first week, it felt too distant from the pews.
Since my arrival six short weeks ago I have been asking you gently (or at least I hope I asked gently) to look at the way things are done here in Old Chapel. And you put up with my questions quite nicely. You moved to the front of the church, something that every person I spoke to couldn’t believe. The kids and I brought in a computer, a projector, and a screen and provided a multimedia service for the congregation. This was also a radically new idea.

By standing here in this pulpit, I hope to demonstrate several things.

The first is that while the minister is the spiritual leader of a congregation, that is not the only job of a minister. Ministers and congregations must work together in concert to deepen the connectivity within the congregation, between the members who are already here; also, they work to show the world outside our walls what an example of a deeply caring community can look like. On the sign out front, you have boldly placed a quote by Francis David: “We need not all think alike to love alike.” And together you demonstrate this admirably.

A minister must also follow their congregation. We cannot charge ahead, sure that we alone know what’s best for the congregation, or without regard to the congregation’s concerns and place in the world.

We can however, agitate and try to massage the congregation into a position that we, with our academic training and preparation, might think is best.

No relationship, of course, is perfect.

And so, today, I’m up here because people in the congregation thought it would be good for my growth as a minister to preach from this position. I’m here because I thought the congregation was most likely right. Although I’m still a little nervous about being locked in up here.

Another reason that I chose to preach from here is out of my profound respect for this congregation and its history. It has been an honor to be here with you since 6 June of this year. I will never forget this experience.

The third reason I chose to come up here was to demonstrate my belief that we are all capable of evolving as beings until our very last breath. Earlier this afternoon I led a short worship service to begin Fun Day. It contained the Native American story of the Two Wolves. What’s important to me about that story is that each moment, we are given chances to choose to do the more correct thing; that even if we’ve made a string of mistakes and bad decisions, still, just around the corner is the chance to make a good decision.

Around every corner lies a chance to make a better life.

Also, there is the lesson that even if you’ve made 1 million good decisions in a row, you can’t rest on your laurels. You must be ever-aware of how your choices affect the people around you and the people you’ll never meet.

Obviously, mistakes will be made along the way, as no one is perfect, and it seems the more sophisticated our understanding of the world becomes, the less clear the line between right and wrong becomes. This evolution of the individual also applies to the evolution of organizations, and yes, congregations. I was speaking with a member of this congregation about change a few weeks ago, and she spoke about a resistance to change and a loss of comfort. I am aware of the comfort of some routines and rituals. I have my own. But what came out in our conversation was the idea that change is constant. Even if we dig our heels in and promise to fight the good fight to keep things the way they have been for as long as we can remember, or for as long as it’s been the way WE like it, change comes.

It comes in the form of the death of a beloved member of your church. It comes with a parliamentary vote in which few could’ve predicted the outcome. It comes in the form of a minster in training from a far-off former colony.

What matters is not change itself, for we cannot stop change; it is a force of the universe. And really, if we didn’t change, on some level, we’d still be in the stone age. What matters is how we engage change.

Anatoloe France tells us: All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Change can be very exciting for some, and for those who like change, we must remember that others will mourn. If we are to be our best selves, we must do more than tolerate their mourning, we must make time and space for them. We must lovingly walk with those mourners of the old ways, even as inside our hearts are leaping ahead.

I’ll be leaving behind a document for the congregation to read about my experiences and observations here in Old Chapel. I hope that when it’s widely read, those aching for change and those who aren’t will walk together in the loving way that I have seen you doing since I arrived here.

The time for our walking together is almost complete.

As I look from here into the faces of the people I have come to have genuine affection for, I offer a silent prayer of gratitude to the Spirit of Life, the God of Love, unnameable and wholly unknowable.

Our lives are not complete. Here are the words of John Dewey, American Unitarian and educator: “Where everything is complete, there is no fulfillment.” Individually, it is my hope that each day you will carry the story of the little boy, his grandfather and the two wolves with you. That you remember from the tiniest child to the eldest sage, you have agency in your life. Your life can be and will be affected by the choices you make, from stealing a cookie to reaching out for help.

As a congregation it is my greatest hope that you will find the strength, courage, and mutual affection to boldly step into your future. A future where you show Dukinfield, Tameside and the world the human miracle of a loving community. Our world needs your example. Blessed be.

Please join me in this, what will become our final prayer together:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sunshine warm upon your face,
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Journeys (A Sermon)

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Saint Denis of Paris was said to have walked and preached two miles, all the while holding his head in his hand. Reflecting on this tale at seminary, an observer said “It’s really the first step that’s impressive.”

I took my first step toward Dukinfield nine days ago when my Mom and I drove to the airport in Detroit, Michigan, my plane ticket in my hand. I guess it could be argued that perhaps my first step toward Dukinfield was taken when I met the Reverend Doctor Ann Peart, Principal of the Unitarian College of Manchester, while she visited my seminary.

Or maybe my journey began when I entered seminary, or even further back than that. Perhaps my entire life has been in preparation for this very moment.

Earlier this week, I had the distinct pleasure of attending some events at the Unitarian College of Manchester. I’d like to share a moment of one of those events with you. There is a tradition when the Past and Present Students of the College toast and respond with each other. I was honored to be asked to take part in the event.

I was most impressed by the eloquence of the ministers gathered there. So much so that upon completion of the ceremony, I asked several members for a copy of their remarks.

Here are some of the words of the Reverend David Shaw, delivered under the topic of Civil and Religious Liberty:

“How easy it is to raise a glass to Civil and Religious Liberty in a comfortable setting such as this, and how uncomfortable it is to spare a thought to those of the past who struggled and suffered and to those of the present who are struggling today.

"There are people today—upon our doorstep—locked into a system of uncompromising religion that holds them fast in fear…

"It is a hard world in which Civil and Religious liberties are hard won. In a moment I shall ask you to rise with me and give a toast to Civil and Religious Freedom the world over, and as you do I ask you to bear in mind that we not only raise our glasses to aspirations embedded in history, but to so much of the very real world around us today.

"It is more—more much than raising of a glass—it is a thank you, for what has been achieved, a recognition of the much that still needs to be achieved, and a commitment that we will—however we can—in whatever way we can—however small—be part of striving for the achievements yet to be.”

Here the Reverend Shaw speaks of a journey, too. It is the journey of a people of faith. A journey, if we are truthful with ourselves, that is far from complete.

And it is a journey that includes others of us. In America there are close to a million Unitarian Universalists who are walking this journey, too.

And there is me, just one man who flew across the Atlantic Ocean because of your generous offer of a summer placement.

I stand here before you a man on a journey.

A few words from the well-known author and philosopher, Unknown:

“A person’s journey through life is somewhat like a long walk through a forest on a dark night. Part of the way a companion carries a lantern, but then the path divides and one must go alone. If one carries his own lantern—an inner light of faith—he need not fear the darkness.”

My Unitarian Universalist faith, my faith in God, and my faith in the core of goodness in humanity is my lantern.

Possibly never before have I been more confused by my surroundings. People I meet tell me that they live in Bolton or Stalybridge or just up the road in some town. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve just arrived this week. It took me until Friday to venture by train to Manchester!

Oh, and the words we use that have different meanings! I was taught in school that we all spoke English, but clearly hundreds of years of separation have taken their toll on our shared mother tongue!

On a bit more serious note, my time in the UK has brought an even deeper sympathy for the immigrants in our world. Until yesterday, I didn’t know how to ring the police. But, sadly, yesterday I had to learn. While having breakfast in a café down the hill there, someone stole my rucksack. I lost a pair of books in it and nothing more, thankfully. But still I lost a book lent to me and the personal journal I’ve been keeping for this journey.

And yet I have never been more sure that I am on my correct journey. My lantern, though sometimes it feels a fragile light, is helping guide my way.

My theology professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School is Dr. Michael S. Hogue. Last year, he was named a Templeton scholar, an honor focusing on young, rising academic theologians. Mike holds a theology lab each week at the school for no credit for us and no pay for him. It’s just his way of giving the students a chance to work out ideas. My first class with Mike Hogue was Liberal Theology, and I wasn’t sure I was going to live through it! In a ten week quarter we read 14 full books and dozens of articles about liberal theology. In my second year of seminary, I asked Mike in theology lab, what did theology really mean? We’d studied Schlieirmacher and Kant and Derrida and Heidegger, but really, beyond tracing the back and forth arguments of these academics, what does it mean?

Dr. Hogue told me that the meaning of theology could be better answered through the question, “How does your belief system influence the way in which you engage with the world?”

And I’ll ask you a similar question: “How do your values and belief system influence the way in which you engage with the world?”

On the journey that is your life, what does your theology do for you and for others? For Reverend Shaw, clearly it means taking into account the privileges he enjoys and using them as a strength as he challenges the systems of oppression he sees in the world around him; “a recognition of the much that still needs to be achieved, and a commitment that we will—however we can—in whatever way we can—however small—be part of striving for the achievements yet to be.”

My theology, my relationship with what is ultimate and divine, calls me to be my best self. This, in part, means that I must strive to grow as a human being and as a minister. Even if this means that I wind up in a town called Dukinfield in the United Kingdom for a good part of a summer, far from home, far from my loved ones and my family.

These weeks are a big challenge to me. I enjoy knowing where I’m going. I enjoy being able to speak the version of English where I know what all the words mean, and I enjoy walking along next to the street on a sidewalk--sorry, "pavement"--knowing that the cars are going along on the correct side of the road.

Naturally, I’m teasing a little here. But all kidding aside, for me it was a daunting idea to come here, to meet a whole new group of people. To practice a version of Unitarianism that is related to, but not wholly, my own.

But I took a leap of faith, because that is what my best self wanted to do. It is what my theology called me to do.

And look what’s happened! I have met dozens of lovely people! I have seen the world’s oldest railroad station.

I have eaten fish and chips.

I got my rucksack stolen.

You take the bad with the good, right? From the reading that Claire shared earlier: “Today, this hour, this minute is the day, the hour the minute for each of us to sense the fact that life is good, with all of its trials and troubles, and perhaps more interesting because of them.”

I took what felt to me like a big chance in accepting your most gracious invitation. Change is difficult for me. Perhaps it is also difficult for you. But change we must, or we’ve stopped our journey.

My theology called me to risk just about everything, and fly to the Old World from the New to practice ministry. Each of us is on our own individual journey. But happily we walk with comrades.

What does your theology call you to do?

I know so few things for certain, but this I believe to be true: A life lived on the growing edge of being the best one can be is a life well lived.

I invite you to live such a life.

Blessed be.

Flying Across "The Pond"

My flight from Detroit to New York’s JFK airport was uneventful, though a bit crowded. But that’s what you get when you fly coach, I guess.

By the time I arrived at JFK I was not quite hungry, but knew the food places would be closing at 8 p.m., so I grabbed some Burger King. I’d read that the State of New York had passed a law requiring all restaurants to publish, on their menu, the number of calories a given item had. Well, having seen it in action, I can now say that it was a horrifying experience. I had no idea that a Double Whopper with cheese was over a thousand calories.

I think of eating as a sort of budget; a loose budget, it’s true, but a budget nonetheless. I allow myself about 1,500 to 1,700 calories each day. I do this in a very unscientific way. I know the value of some foods; an apple, a piece of bread, about 100 calories. This is part of why I cut down dramatically on my soda intake. But to see even the single Whopper (no cheese) clock in near 750 calories was almost enough to make me not eat dinner. Except that I knew I’d be flying for the next 9 hours, and I needed something in my stomach. And the Sam Adams restaurant around the bend started at about $19 for the cheapest item. So I opted for the Whopper and promised myself at least a week of extra-healthy eating to make up for it. (So far, I’ve done pretty well!)

Once we boarded the plane--only about 30 minutes behind schedule, which I didn’t think was very bad--the seat next to me was empty and the seat next to it was occupied by a young twenty-something woman named Courtney who was on her way to England to play Playstation 3 with an online friend she’d never met before. She had just come from some major gaming convention. She freely admitted that she was traveling from Los Angeles to Manchester “just to play video games on someone else’s couch.” I hoped, silently, that she’d get more out of the experience than that.

The flight was largely uneventful until we started our descent into Manchester. At this point we hit some major turbulence, more than I’d ever experienced in a plane before. I can’t estimate drops and jolts, but it was very similar to riding a roller coaster--except, of course, with no rails beneath us.

And then it happened. Again.

In the middle of the flight, someone asked me to help them. A young-ish mother and her two children were in the row in front of the row I shared with Courtney. She put her right hand on the seat in front of hers, to stabilize herself (I thought), and then she put her left hand behind her into our row. And then she looked me in the eye and said the in the most polite British accent flavored with panic, “Would you mind holding my hand?” I could feel a warm smile come to my face and I took her hand. “Of course I’d be glad to.”

So there I was, holding the hand of this stranger, during a very turbulent descent, and I felt wonderful.

Connectivity is a major theme in my spiritual path. We are each looking for ways to feel connected to each other in our increasingly busy lives. I lead as busy a life as almost anybody, and there are plenty of times when I feel utterly alone, even in the middle of a city of six million people, like Chicago.

Why do we wait until crisis comes to reach out? Is it because at that moment our twin fears of vulnerability and rejection are finally outweighed by our need to know we are not alone?

We are not alone. We are tied, for better or worse, to our families, our neighborhoods, our places of work and study. We need only to find the connections that are healthy, joyful, and growth-inspiring, to make our lives wealthy with living.

Find those people, forge those connections with them, and be filthy-rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Just One Key

When I was in high school, the manager of the restaurant I worked in had a set of keys to the store. Each manager did. The key not only gave them access to the “store” but allowed them to control the cash registers.

Those keys became the symbol of power and authority for me. I saw that set of keys as some sort of affirmation of earned responsibility. Perhaps in the way many people who take up smoking see it as a “grown up” activity, I saw those keys as a trapping of adulthood. And I really wanted a set.

There are a lot of keys I’ve wanted over the years: the key to my first car, my first apartment, the key to a certain man’s heart. And yes, even work keys.

I’ve developed quite a key-ring over the years.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I gave back the keys to my house, my congregation, my friends’ keys for when I would cat-sit (three sets), the keys to my seminary, too. I have one key left--to a seven-year old Honda Civic with 118,563 miles on it.

My life is in transition right now. I believe that everyone’s life is in transition at this very moment, but sometimes it’s more obvious than others. Like when all of your possessions fit into a car because you’ve given up everything else.

There was another time in my life when everything I owned fit into my car, and I had only one key left. It was a far less happy time. For a period of a couple of months, after my brother and I lost our apartment, we were homeless. My car became my shelter, my storage locker, my way of moving from place to place. It was a very scary time for me. With help I was able to recover from it, but it took years and years to repair my credit and has left me scarred for life.

This time, though, is much different.

For the next 24 months I will be in transition. Moving from Chicago to Dukinfield UK and then to Amarillo, Texas and then back to Chicago, with a potential summer 2010 in Germany.

Whereas before I looked at my single key as a symbol of powerlessness, this time my single key is empowering.

I have chosen to have only one key this time. I have leapt full-force into the future, with few guarantees. It’s different this time because I have faith and a goal, and faith in my goal.