Star Light

“Star Light”

A Christmas Eve Homily by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
December 24, 2009

Christmas has always been a magical time for me—not always an easy time, but always a magical time. I’m remembering a December when I was barely old enough to read. My excitement was already stirring as our home filled with the sites and scents of Christmas. Then a story arrived in the mail. Like some holiday surprise, it was all but hidden in one of the magazines to which my parents subscribed. When I spotted a different kind of illustration on the cover, I was curious. I tucked myself into a corner of our sofa, opened it up, and came upon the story of “The Littlest Angel.”

Now the birth stories that I read from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew have nothing to say about a little angel. Perhaps it’s enough that Luke even mentioned angels and Matthew told of wise men and a star. This other story stretched the magic.

It starts off with the sad tale of a small boy who became an angel. Its author, Charles Tazewell, never wrote that the boy had died; he simply began talking about a little angel, who was newly arrived in heaven and not at all happy to be there. He was gloomy and grumpy and completely uncooperative. Throughout heaven, he quickly became known as “The Littlest Angel,” because he arrived there when he was just four and a half years old….way too young for such a place, but there he was.

You would think he would be grateful to be in such a glorious space; but he just stomped around, teary-eyed and making it clear that he was not impressed. Nor was the big angel who stood at the entrance impressed with him, but she had to let him in because Heaven is for everyone. Somehow he had made it through the gates with a favorite toy, a whistle. Once inside, he took it from a secret pocket in a fold of his robe and blew it so hard that all the other angels covered their ears in fright. He didn’t even look like an angel. His tiny halo was tarnished, and when he ran recklessly through the clouds, he barely managed to keep it atop his small cherubic head. When he tried to fly, all the other angels held their breath, for he would shut his eyes tightly and count to a hundred before hurling himself into the clouds. He was simply terrified, so he forgot to move his wings.

Clearly our littlest angel needed some talking to about heavenly behavior. So the Welcoming Angel took his plump little hand in hers and walked him over to the Angel of Understanding. Suddenly he felt a lot more comfortable, and he took a long deep breath, as he tucked his robe in and glanced up to see a smile take shape on the face of the Angel of Understanding. “So you’re the one who’s been causing such mischief!” he said. “Come here; tell me all about it.” With a quick flap of his wings, our Littlest Angel found himself on a soft lap of understanding.

“You don’t know,” he whimpered. “You don’t know how hard it is for a little boy who suddenly becomes an angel. There’s nothing to do here. There aren’t many kids for me to play with. All the swings are this gross gold. There are no ballgames. You just don’t understand!”

But the Understanding Angel did understand. He smiled warmly as he remembered another little boy of long ago. Then, like a heavenly Santa Claus, he asked the Littlest Angel what would make him happy here. The Littlest Angel wrinkled his brow and thought for a long time. Then he whispered into his elder’s ear.

After this visit, everyone wondered at the change that had come over the Littlest Angel. He skipped about. He said “Please” and “Thank you.” He even whistled more like a flute and less like an angry policeman. And he flew with a newfound ease that matched the grace of any angel in Heaven.

_________________________

Years passed, hundreds of years, and it came to the time that another little boy was to be born. The birthplace of this other child was in a town called Bethlehem. The Littlest Angel knew this was a big event, because the finest angelic voices were chosen for the choir that would be sent to sing that night to shepherds on a hillside, telling them about this new little boy. What could he do? What could he give to this newborn child who was so special that he had his very own choir announcing his arrival? His voice hadn’t earned him a place in the choir. He couldn’t even write a carol for them to sing. And he had no fine toys to give to the new baby. What could he possibly do?

Just as Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph in a shabby old barn behind an inn in Bethlehem, a very worried looking little angel showed up with a small box tucked in his hands. It wasn’t a fancy box; in fact it was quite plain, but inside it were all the things that he thought another Child of God might enjoy. It was a box that he treasured from his own few years on earth. When he had received it not so long ago from the Angel of Understanding, it had made him so happy.

Shuffling forward, the littlest angel placed his box next to the manger. Then he backed up, for he saw all the other gifts lying there, gifts of such rare beauty and magnificence that his looked shabby by comparison. “Oh no!” he thought. Maybe there was time to take it back. Maybe there was time to think up something else. But it was too late! The Hand of the Heavenly Host moved across all the gifts gathered at the manger. As it touched upon the gift of the Littlest Angel, it paused. The Littlest Angel was in tears, he was so embarrassed.

As his gift was opened, everyone present saw for themselves what he had chosen for the newborn babe. There was a butterfly with wings that were pure gold, a butterfly that he had caught one day on the hillside above his home. There was a robin’s egg, a sky-blue robin’s egg that had fallen from the nest of a tree he had climbed. And there were two stones that glowed in the moonlight, stones that he and his friends had played with, making up all kinds of games that he had been sure this new child would figure out for himself. Finally, there was a raggedy tooth-marked strap, once worn as a collar by his dog, who had died just as the littlest angel had lived, with utter enthusiasm.

How had he possibly thought his gift was so wonderful? Why had he thought that the baby Jesus would treasure his choices? He cried and cried. Everyone at the manger grew silent, embarrassed for him.

Then suddenly, a voice rose among them and filled the earth and all of heaven, and everyone there heard the words:

“Of all the gifts of all the angels, I find that this small box pleases me most. Its contents are of the earth and of children, and this newborn babe is a child of the earth. These are exactly the things he will come to know and love and cherish. I accept this gift in the name of the Child, Jesus, born this night in Bethlehem!”

Suddenly the shabby old box began to glow. It became a brilliant flame, and the flame rose and grew bright as it soared into the heavens. The Littlest Angel watched with amazement as he saw the flame become a Star. Yet it was only he who saw it rise and watched it take its place, because everyone else was blinded by its brilliance. There it shone in the night sky over the manger of Bethlehem. Its light was so radiant that it was reflected down through the centuries into the hearts of all humankind.

Who knew that the simple gift of the Littlest Angel had turned into the shining star of Bethlehem?


Lest we wonder if this is a story for children only, consider that it was written in 1939 and first heard by children and their parents on a radio show and not even issued as a story in print until 1946. The fathers and mothers of those years knew well the treasure of youth who cherished their childhoods and loved life and left far too soon. Of course, of course they would understand that from the hopeful heart of a child newly arrived in heaven and a child newly arrived on earth springs a common language, a language of butterflies and robin eggs and stones for skipping and dogs for hugging and stars for shining.

May the gifts that we give rise from the child in us. May the gifts that we receive find the child in us on this magical night. Amen.



Sources:

The Gospel According to Matthew and The Gospel According to Luke, in The Bible (Revised Standard Version).

The Littlest Angel Book Review, http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Littlest-Angel-by-Charles-Tazewell-Book-Review.

Tom Longden, “Charles Tazewell: Famous Iowans,” DesMoinesRegister.com,

Charles Tazewell, illustrated by Katherine Evans, The Littlest Angel, Grossett and Dunlap, New York, 1946.

"A Selection Sublimely Natural"

“A Selection Sublimely Natural”
Evolution Sunday
on the occasion of the 150th anniversary on November 24
of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species

Reflections by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 22, 2009

An Amazing Story – I

Just months ago we observed in Sunday morning worship the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809. As a congregation, we participated in Evolution Sunday; and no, it’s not just Unitarian Universalist congregations that celebrate the ties that bind religion and science. We joined with over a thousand congregations of all sorts from every state and 15 countries. Today we’re an early bird congregation in celebrating these ties. Most participants are waiting until February to do so, with Darwin’s birthday as the benchmark. So far, 550 congregations from 49 states and nine countries will participate in “Evolution Weekend 2010.” New congregations are still signing on for this next observance. But there’s an interim anniversary that I believe is cause for celebration now—that is, the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. November 24, 1859 marked a life changing event about life changing.

I knew as I sorted my thoughts for our earlier celebration that I must read it, so I made a foolish promise. I vowed that with summer’s arrival, I would take The Origin to the beach with me and complete it there—silly me! If Darwin had his reasons for delaying publication of his seminal theory of natural selection, I suppose I’m permitted to follow in the same spirit—that is, putting off the actual packing the book into my beach bag, hoping it wouldn’t drown in sunscreen or saltwater, and settling in for a good long and not easy read.

July passed. August passed. In the early days of September, Darwin accompanied me to the beach, and I dived in—to the waves, yes, but also into the pages of this remarkable work that is aptly read in a setting that breathes eternal change, a setting where land and ocean and the creatures of both are in the constant throes of what we might call a selection sublimely natural.

Let’s work backward from the publication of Darwin’s epiphany. Epiphany…a term commonly used to convey a religious revelation, yet so adaptable to an event that conveyed a revelation of nature. Epiphanies often hold hard truths to which we often respond with doubt, denial, even hostility and rage. So it was when The Origin of Species moved from Darwin’s desk to the shelves of British booksellers.

In Darwin’s diary, he posts in the autumn of 1859:

“Finished proofs (thirteen months and ten days) of Abstract on Origin of Species; 1250 copies printed. The first edition was published on November 24th, and all copies sold first day.”

A second edition, of 3,000 copies, was issued on January 7, 1860, less than two months after the first. Four editions would follow.

Why did it take Charles Darwin so long—20 years to be exact—to formulate his findings in a volume that he could share with the larger public? The short and sermon-friendly answer is that he was concerned about the response of religious leaders, and he was concerned about the response of his dear wife. The prevailing theory of Creation was—and still is in many quarters—that species were created distinctly and separately by God and that humankind is one of these species. The term Creationism applies in current rhetoric. Darwin wrote in The Origin:

“On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character…” (113)

It was his practice throughout the manuscript of The Origin of Species to explain himself, to give all possible evidence for the theory of natural selection over distinct acts of creation, and to serve up the harvest of observation that he had gleaned on his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, that extended from late December 1831 to early October, 1836.

“The voyage of the Beagle,” wrote Darwin decades later, “has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career…” (Autobiography, 31)

Just a few short years after returning to Britain, he began to distill his theory of natural selection. Yet eight of his published works would precede publication of The Origin. If one can procrastinate productively, Darwin did it, aided and abetted by a strong dose of anxiety. In the reflections that he wrote in his final years, he explained how in the common struggle for existence that he observed in the habits of animals and plants, it struck him that

“…under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formations of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.” (Autobiography, 48)

All the while he was writing about other, related matters of science. His published works totaled 19, again, eight of them issued before The Origin.

The concerns of his wife, Emma, also figured in Darwin’s reticence to publish his theory early on. I trust that the recent PBS film, “Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” cites a historic conversation between Charles Darwin and his physician father, Dr. Robert Waring Darwin. The two are astride a coach bumping across the English countryside, and young Charles confides to his father his hope to marry Emma Wedgewood, who happened also to be his cousin. (Surely not enough was known, even by Charles Darwin, about the possible consequences of marrying one’s cousin.)

“Well,” remarks the elder Darwin, “there’s only one drawback I can see—religion! …she’s pious, like all the other Wedgewood women.”

To which Charles responded,

“Emma’s Unitarian, Father. You know how grandfather described Unitarianism.”

With a burst of laughter, his father spoke:

“A featherbed for falling Christians! Unitarianism,” he explained, “may be a wishy-washy sort of Christianity compared with the fire-branding Evangelicals, but make no mistake, Emma believes in things—in the after-life and hellfire and soul, but I assume you don’t.”

“Well,” answered Charles, “I’m less certain than I used to be.”

“Well, I don’t believe in them,” retorted his father, “and your grandfather didn’t, but to women of Emma’s [mind], they are matters of vital importance. ….the way around it is to pay lip service, go to church and that sort of thing, if possible avoid discussions, and above all, never, under any circumstances, reveal your true opinions.”

This conversation aside, Charles and Emma married in 1839 and remained happily married. Through the birthing of ten children, the grievous deaths of two of them in infancy, and Charles’ increasing ill health, they were devoted to each other and to their children. Nonetheless, Charles’ love of Emma and his respect for her beliefs was a factor in his reticence to publish a theory that flew in the face of established religion—alas, even Unitarianism!

The deciding event that propelled Darwin into distilling his theory for publication was a letter received from the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin had already set to work on an extensive narrative of his views, when the letter from Wallace arrived in the summer of 1858. It bore an essay that contained, in Darwin’s words, “exactly the same theory as mine.” And it came with a request that if Darwin found favor with this essay, he might send it off to his close friend and advocate Charles Lyell, the eminent British geologist. What followed was an interim publication that included a segment of Darwin’s manuscript and Wallace’s full essay. Neither aroused much public attention. As Darwin reflected in his later autobiographical sketch:

“This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention.” (Autobiography, 49)

Urged on by his close friends Charles Lyell and J.D. Hooker, the esteemed British botanist, Darwin set to work in September of 1858.

“I abstracted the MS. begun on a much larger scale in 1856,”

he wrote years later,

“…and [I] completed the volume on the same reduced scale. It cost me thirteen months and ten days’ hard labour. It was published under the title of the Origin of Species, in November 1859. Though considerably added to and corrected in the later editions, it has remained substantially the same book.”

Had Charles Darwin given full vent to his inclination to write his theory comprehensively—that is, with what for him would have been a far more satisfying host of observations and explanations, we might wonder if it would have been accessible to the larger public. I find it remarkable that the not quite 400-page edition that I’m still reading is the “short story” of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t find it remarkable at all that the larger work of Charles Darwin’s lifetime held a level of detail fitting the complexity of its subject—the very origin of species. It’s a story of which you and I are a part, as the myriad forces of nature continue to sort and select over time measured in eras that encompass life’s beginning into this very morning. Thank you, dear Charles Darwin, for paying such close attention, for recording what you found, and for at long last publishing this amazing story in which we each and all partake.



An Amazing Story – II

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

he wrote in The Origin. Darwin was not simply informed by what he observed; he was moved, he was inspired.

While Charles Darwin was not what we call a Creationist, while he didn’t believe in a micro-managing God, while he didn’t understand we who are human kind to be the final act of life on this planet, he held what I recognize as three core stances of a deeply religious person—that is, humility, awe, and gratitude. And by religious, I mean tending to what matters most and asking the big questions, such as how life came to be as it is on this planet on which we find ourselves. The question rises from the life work of Darwin and grounds the observations and conclusions that led to his publication of The Origin of Species.

Many times he was asked about his views on religion, and he thought often on the matters linked with religion, most especially aboard the HMS Beagle as he circled the world and noticed and noticed and noticed. In the autobiographical sketch penned for his children at the age of 67, just six years before he died, he again broached the question about the source of belief in the existence of God. He cited the common difficulty “of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.” It’s a stance that suggests theism and a stance that he held as he wrote The Origin. It’s a stance that with the passing years grew weaker, as Darwin’s acknowledgement of non-knowing grew stronger.

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic,” he wrote. (Autobiography, 75)

Interesting, I suppose, that the term agnostic was presumably coined in 1860 by Darwin’s close friend and advocate, the British naturalist Thomas Huxley.

Charles Darwin readily acknowledged the friendship and scholarship and thoughtfulness of others. Without calling himself humble, which would have rendered him otherwise, he simply was. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his acknowledgement that natural selection does not assume any “advancement of life.” In the first edition of The Origin, he wrote:

“Although extremely few of the most ancient species may now have living and modified descendants, yet at the most remote geological period, the earth may have been as well peopled with many species of many genera, families, orders, and classes, as at the present day.” (The Origin, 111)

In the third edition, he appended a section in which he stated:

“…natural selection includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life.”

We as humankind do not necessarily advance as time does. Such a view of what we loosely refer to as homo sapiens is humble to the core.

As for awe, how could one with a lifetime of observing and theorizing natural phenomena and posing the image of “the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications,” harbor anything other than awe? Wonder and awe are hand in hand religious stances, though by no means stances of religiosity, which tends so quickly to ascribe a cause.

As for gratitude, it was manifest in caring for the well-being of others and considering the very real discernment of a peer who had arrived at the exact same theory as his and whom Darwin affirmed and acknowledged, even as he moved quickly into a 15-month marathon of distilling his own. It was manifest in his love of his wife, Emma, his children, and his understanding that the world was far larger than he and his family and friends and associates, far larger. Gratitude is a giving of thanks through day to day behavior, a not taking for granted the givens of life, and a deep commitment to sharing what one witnesses in a precious and fleeting lifetime.

Darwin’s faith may have faded in conventional terms, but his humility and awe and gratitude only increased. It is telling that when Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, surrounded by his dear family, neighbors and notables from religion and science gathered a week later in Westminster Abbey to pay final tribute. It is even more telling that one of the pall-bearers was a Mr. A. R. Wallace, that is Alfred Russel Wallace.

May Charles Robert Darwin rest not in peace, but with sufficient restlessness to counter all possible boredom that might accompany eternal tranquility. Amen.


Sources:

“Agnosticism,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism.

“The Clergy Letter Project,” Michael Zimmerman, http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Backgd_info.htm.

“The Clergy Letter – from Unitarian Universalist Clergy – An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science,” http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Unitarian_Universalists/UnivUnitarianClergyLtr.htm.

“Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” a PBS Production, Directed by John Bradshaw, Teleplay by John Goldsmith, Produced by Michael Mahoney, http://video.pbs.org/video/1286437550/.

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Introduction by Brian Regal, originally published in 1887, The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, New York, 2005.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, with an Introduction and Notes by George Levine, originally published in 1859, Barnes & Noble, Inc., New York, 2004.

Richard Milner, “Darwin’s Universe: Home of Darwinian Scholarship, Music, Art, and Entertainment,” http://www.darwinlive.com/

Chalice Reflection & "All the Time in the World"

Chalice Reflection
of
Diana (“Pokey”) Kornet
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 1, 2009

All the Time in the World

We shall soon hear what Jan intends to convey with this topic – it can be interpreted so many different ways. When she left a message last Monday asking if I would do this, I thought, “How will I possibly have time to fit that in?” We are obsessed with time.

Sometimes we behave as if we have “all the time in the world” to do things, but we don’t. John and I have just returned from a visit with his uncle and aunt in Jackson, Mississippi, to help celebrate his 90th birthday. They moved down there 5 years ago to be near their daughter, who is John’s favorite cousin – we realized we hadn’t seen her in 27 years! My father was 90 on October 1st; our time with him is short. This past Wednesday I visited our 77-year-old aunt in Newton Wellesley Hospital; she has just learned that she has cancer in both lungs, her liver, and her bones. Time is precious. I cherish the 12 hours I spend each week with our granddaughter, Sydney, helping introduce her to life’s wonders...does she have all the time in the world? Our daughter-in-law, Becca, has a new appreciation for growing old!

But time is part of this world. Jan’s mother is now in the timeless spiritual dimension. So is our daughter, Diana, and Jennifer Baird, Shelley Donze, Jack Langmaid, Priscilla Tebbetts, Sumner Smith and so many other dear friends and family members of First Parish. But their energy, their essence, their souls are still here in the Universe, and they know what is going on in our lives. A gifted medium in upstate NY relayed to me that Diana saw our family riding in a truck, and saw “boogie boards.” We have never owned a truck; but 3 weeks before, we had been visiting on the big island of Hawaii. Another cousin of John’s had loaned us their second car, a truck with their boogie boards in back, to use for the week we were there. The same medium told Allison that Diana said, “Desiree says hi.” Desiree Yess was in Diana’s class, but played on the basketball team with Allison, before she died in a tragic car accident in eighth grade.

We may not understand how, but soul energy lives on. Quantum physicists have proven the principle of non-locality: particles once associated are linked forever – when something happens to one, the other reacts at the same time, no matter how far away it is. Time is non-existent in this instance. Experiments have proven that a person’s subconscious ‘knows’ what kind of image will be shown before it appears on a screen, indicated by a change in pulse rate and perspiration on the palms. Time is very “fuzzy” in that situation. Random Number Generator machines all over the world lost their randomness and began to correlate with each other an hour before the planes hit the buildings on 9/11 and continued for several hours afterward; similar phenomena were observed during the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana. If one can imagine a large amount of focused consciousness affecting an RNG, one might expect that the RNGs would cease their randomness when the event occurred and continue a pattern for some time afterwards. But it appears that events which affect the emotions of millions of people are like a rock thrown into the pond of time, with ripples of effect emanating out in all directions from the ‘point’ of impact. Again, time appears very ambiguous, not linear at all.

Time is only in this world.

On this All Souls Day, I light the chalice in memory of those who have rejoined the Universe, where time is non-existent.

“All the Time in the World”

Two Reflections by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 1, 2009

A Reflection on Time

Time is relative we learned early on. So we stretched the meaning of this fact of physics and arrived late to class or late to meetings or late to weddings or late even to funerals or, imagine, late to church. Or we stretched the meaning and arrived unduly early when we’d forgotten to turn our clocks “back” or when Christmas morning just couldn’t come fast enough or even when our readiness to be born pre-empted a due date announced to our birth parents less than nine months earlier. Some of us are late comers; some of us are early arrivals. Some of us are late bloomers. Some of us are early bloomers. Most of us are grateful that at some point we did arrive and we do bloom.

Yet early and late are concerned not so much with time, but with pace and readiness and inclination to do or be whatever. Time itself is a marker. We’re taught to “tell time.” Then we learn about time zones and calendars. Then we discover that ours is not the only calendar, not the only system for “telling time,” hour by hour or epoch by epoch.

While time eludes our infant grasp, the illusion that we can measure it is imparted as an early fact of life as soon as we convince our parents and teachers that we can count. Whether or not we understand number doesn’t seem to matter. If we can count, we’re deemed prodigious enough to tell time, to measure it, and to be on time. While numbers were an early forte for me, being on time was not. I was perpetually late—though I suppose that’s impossible if it really is perpetual. Slowly, slowly—another temporal measure—I learned to honor my commitments by being “on time.”

It all gets further out of our grasp when we learn about space-time measures. Miles per hour I get, but light-years; light-years still play more in my imagination than my logic. I can stretch my imagination into “the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1 year”—that is, 5.88 trillion miles,” but my thought doesn’t go there. I need immediate examples, a mile a minute say; but as I cast my gaze upward on a starry night and imagine light-years, I’m into the realm of mystery, awe, and bafflement.

As I consider the span of a human life in the fullness of a star-filled cosmos, I wonder how much it really mattered that I was once or frequently late to class. In the spirit of poet May Sarton, it has taken “Time, many years and places” to become myself. I too have “run madly, as if Time were there, terribly old, crying a warning, ‘Hurry, you will be dead before—‘(What? Before you reach the morning?”

Yes, there is so much, so very much I want yet to do, to be, to feel, and to experience. So much, and it takes what we refer to casually as “time.” I wonder if it’s a misnomer to describe ourselves as moving through time. I wonder if instead time moves through us. We matter I believe, but with regard to time, to light-years, to any primordial beginning or any imaginable end, we’re blinks in a nano-second. This can be a great relief. It can slow us down. It invites us to notice and to be more than we do.

The pace of this season invites a slower pace, a slower breath as antidote to crisper air, movements in the symphony of how we can be that are more adagio than allegro. Whatever God might be—whatever, whoever, however, if ever, forever—the ultimately holy has all the time in the world. In the beginning that was beyond the beginning; in the last days that we will never know and can barely imagine, we are called out of our quickened pace. The turning of seasons, the turning of leaves, the turnings of lives—some from who knows where to birth, some from what we know as life to death—invoke reflection on the meaning of it all.

In those lyrical words of Theodore Roethke,

“the blood slows trance-lie in the altered vein.”

In the reverie of Mary Oliver,

“...now is nowhere
except underfoot…”

Our Now is time-space, this morning, this hour, this moment, this sanctuary in this really not so age-old Meeting House. We cast a glance through these light-welcoming windows and ponder time and eternity, measures beyond our measuring.

“…now is nowhere
except underfoot…

…..This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay—how everything lives,
shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.”

“It goes so quickly, so quickly,” she said at the age of 95, with five more years to live. In the century of living known to my Mother, the measure of her days became timeless just a few days ago, timeless.


A Reflection on Autumn

Summer I revel in—the warm ocean—well, relatively so, the balmy nights, the raucous green, the edible close-at-hand garden greens and reds and yellows and purples, the no-coats policy of Mother Nature who never seems to call us in when we forego work for the pleasures of sunlight and starlight. My dear friend, Kathleen calls me “summer girl.” I am.

Yet the season that is draws me in, whispers, “All is not over….come, come into the lesser light. Come into the shadows of firelight. Come into the shining of a harvest moon. Come into the shimmering of leaf-light.”

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way,

writes Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer/poet.

Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth’s green foundations dried,
And fallen all the works of light.

There is a paradox here. We harvest; we let go. We revel in the grandest of colors; light is less. We dream our way through heavy leaves; we quicken our pace as we head back to school, back to work, back to church. Now is a season to lie back in the leaves, envisioning that inevitable moment that we will be fully one with nature, and a season, in the poetic élan of Fredrick Zydek—to “dance just for the colors.” Now is a season to turn contemplatively inward and a season to gaze beyond the boundaries of sacred windows. In the words of my friend, Marietta Moskin, words born in the autumn of 2001:

Leaves—brown and gold
Rising upwards
From the tree outside the lead-paned church window
Gently borne by an autumn breeze
Soaring away
Small, fluttering shapes
Sparkling in the sun
Enjoying their freedom to fly.

Silly rash leaves. Do they have no predilection of their fatal dance? Silly dancing leaves, rising upwards as if the gentle autumn breezes will be forever gentle, as if the ground is an eternity away from their jubilant veins, as if some revelry for which they are so vividly adorned will go on and on and on. Don’t they know? Don’t they know?

“The soul knows
all too well,” mused Zydek,
…”what the trees mean
each time a leaf lets go and makes
the wind its temporary home.”

So it is for us, buoyed with anticipation at the revelry that surely lies ahead as we’re lifted upward by autumn breezes—no matter how late in the season, and then suddenly and without warning, borne by a god-like gust into that other dimension of the bargain made with life at the outset.

Summer I love. Autumn I embrace with all possible grace. Autumn is with us. In that final refrain of the lyrics of Theodore Roethke, “our vernal wisdom moves from ripe to sere.” “From ripe to sere”—a movement that loosens the lessons of fragility—the fragility of our planet earth, the fragility of each of us as we move through the seasons of our living, the fragility of our capacity to sustain life and to know life as we imagine ourselves to know it.

Breathe in the season. Then let it go; let it go. With grace and gratitude, let it go.

Amen.



Sources:

Wendell Berry, “The summer ends…” from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, Counterpoint, Washington, DC, 1998.

Marietta Moskin, “Leaves,” Unpublished poem, 2001, used by permission of the author.

Mary Oliver, “Fall Song,” in American Primitive: Poems by Mary Oliver, Little, Brown and Company, Boston/NewYork/Toronto/London, 1978.

May Sarton, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/maysarton.html

May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself,” from Collected Poems: 1930-1993, W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.

“Now Light Is Less,” Words: Theodore Roethke, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 54.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=light%20year

"A Love Story"

“A Love Story”
for
Association Sunday
A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 18, 2009

Chapter 1

Above all, Unitarian Universalism holds a love story, a love story so large that it embraces countless chapters across the ages. Unitarianism and Universalism didn’t merge into a grand blended family until 1961, but the threads of thought and belief were dancing in the same space centuries ago.

Origen of Alexandria was one of the earliest Universalists. It wasn’t an easy stance in the 3rd century CE, even though Alexandria of that time has been compared to New York City in ours for its diversity of culture and thought. The Roman imperial powers were clinging for dear life to the control of culture and thought.

But Origen, like Emerson 16 centuries later, was “a mind on fire” and he was determined to speak it and teach it and write it. A brilliant student, he was not passive in accepting orthodox teachings; he was considered a heretic. Remember that all of us gathered here this morning are heretics—that is, choosers. At yesterday’s all-parish retreat, when we were asked to name one especially memorable experience here, we couldn’t do it. That is, we couldn’t name just one. We chose otherwise. We behaved in the spirit of Origen and so many other of our spiritual forebears.

To name one heretical belief of Origen’s, he was a universalist—probably not like you are or I, but nonetheless a universalist in claiming that all souls will eventually make it to heaven. There might be a detour or two into a hell that he didn’t deny, but eventually, God would call each and every person unto himself. In Origen’s words:
“…the process of amendment and correction will take place imperceptibly in the individual instances during the lapse of countless and unmeasured ages, some outstripping others, and tending by a swifter course towards perfection, while others again follow close at hand, and some again a long way behind."

That is, some take awhile, but God still welcomes the “late bloomers”—my choice of words, not Origen’s.

To make matters worse, Origen didn’t screen his students very carefully. He held a rather open door classroom, admitting students at all levels of spiritual and intellectual competence, including women.

As threatening as Origen’s universalist theology and his inclusive practices was his deference to uncertainty and its tie-in with free will. How we choose is driven not by destiny but by our particular path en route to holiness. We might say that Origen was enamored of the “holy possible” and trusted in a loving God who would welcome all souls—no matter how far off course—onto a path leading to salvation. In other words, no micro-management. This, remarks Origen scholar Rebecca Lyman is “extremely strenuous spirituality.”

For Origen, free will transcended even death. If a badly behaving person goes to hell—entirely possible in Origen’s thought—there is still hope. Origen scholar Richard Bauckham explains:

Within this scheme punishment is always, in God's intention, remedial: God is wholly good and His justice serves no other purpose than His good purpose of bringing all souls back to Himself. Thus the torments of hell cannot be endless, though they may last for aeons; the soul in hell remains always free to repent and be restored.

Origen’s story is above all a love story that transcended his intellectual prowess. His truth was inclusive, inviting, and open. We should not be surprised that Origen did not die in his sleep. The powers that be could not tolerate his celebration of creed-resistant, free-will, and open-hearted faith in a God who ultimately loves.


Sources:

Richard Bauckham, “Universalism: a historical survey,” Themeloios 4.2 (September 1978): 47-54, http://www.theologicalstudies.org.uk/article_universalism_bauckham.html.

Rebecca Lyman, “The Perils of Rock Climbing: Origen as Spiritual Pioneer,” in The Role of the Dissenter in Western Christianity: From Jesus through the 16th Century, Edited by Alicia McNary Forsey. A Publication of Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, California, 2004, 47-55.

“Origen, Unorthodox Church Father,” (source: Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (ISBN 0-8010-2151-0), http://www.ovrlnd.com/Universalism/Origen.html.

Chapter 2

Universalism was the first religious denomination in this country to ordain a woman. Her name? Olympia Brown. If you visit Atwood Hall on the campus of St. Lawrence University, you can find a bronze tablet which bears the following inscription:

OLYMPIA BROWN
1835-1926
CLASS OF 1863

SHE WAS THE FIRST WOMAN
TO BE GRADUATED BY
THE THOELOGICAL SCHOOL
AND
ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

HER UNIVERSALIST ORDINATION
IN 1863 MADE HER THE FIRST
WOMAN IN OUR COUNTRY TO
ACHIEVE FULL MINISTERIAL
STANDING RECOGNIZED BY A
DENOMINATION

PREACHER OF UNIVERSALISM
PIONEEER AND CHAMPION OF
WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS
FORERUNNER OF THE NEW ERA

“THE FLAME OF HER SPIRIT STILL
BURNS TODAY”

So it does, with the same passion for open thinking and inclusiveness that infused the life of Origen 17 centuries earlier. Olympia’s life was a love story of family bonds, intellectual curiosity, strength of will, friendship, follow-through, risk-taking, ministry, and equal rights for women.

Born in 1835 in the tiny Michigan village of Prairie Ronde, Olympia learned from her father, Asa, and her mother, Lephia, what it took to persevere. Her parents had migrated a year earlier from the Green Mountains of Vermont and set to work as farmers tilling the far richer soil of the upper Midwest. The eldest of four children, Olympia was curious, imaginative, and attentive, playing in the woods and forbidden swamps and exploring to her heart’s content. Early on she learned about equal rights, with her maternal aunt and uncle operating a station on the Underground Railroad in the nearby village of Schoolcraft.

So dedicated to education were Olympia’s parents that her father took the lead in building a schoolhouse after the brand new Michigan legislature introduced a public school system. It was there that Olympia was introduced to formal education. Curious and quick, she cultivated in these early years a lifelong penchant for learning, teaching, and advocacy for girls and women to enjoy the same rights as boys and men.

As a young woman of 19, Olympia and her sister and a friend headed east to Mt. Holyoke College. Eager and confident, they were not prepared for the rigidity of rules and religion in place at this college. Each young entrant was expected to classify herself as a ‘professing Christian,’ ‘hopefully pious,’ or ‘hopeless.’ Raised as a Universalist by her mother, this did not sit well with young Olympia. Yet she and her sister were subjected to one hellfire sermon after another. Desperate, she wrote to Universalist headquarters in Boston for books that would help her refute what she was hearing. And she asked a question that would guide her lifelong:

“’Why don’t preachers dwell on God’s love when that was such a motivation behind Christ’s teaching?’”

Olympia turned a corner. She left Mt. Holyoke behind and entered Antioch College the following autumn. Headed by the progressive Boston educator, Horace Mann, this co-educational institution held liberal promise. It was at Antioch that Olympia met Antoinette Brown—not a relative. Olympia arranged during a lecture visit by this well-known advocate of women’s rights for Antoinette Brown to preach a Sunday sermon, for not long before Antoinette had sought ordination as a Congregational minister and was refused because of her gender, but her penchant for preaching was undiminished. Olympia heard her and was electrified.

Through unfolding friendships, a dedication to women’s rights, and a fascination with religious exploration, Olympia moved into a life that took her to St. Lawrence University’s theological school and through years of perseverance led to her ordination as a Universalist minister in 1863. It was a life that called her to preach as a minister and lecture as a suffragette across the country on behalf of women’s rights, and to join the feminist ranks of Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Antoinette Brown become Antoinette Brown Blackwell. En route she married, she had children, and she had grandchildren. She lived and loved at high intensity and grand depth. And on the morning of November 2, 1920, at the age of 85, Olympia Brown cast her first vote, along with her lifelong friend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, in a presidential election.

Olympia lived six more years. Beloved by her husband, her son and daughter, her grandchildren, and thousands of women across the country, she was likely reviled by many who shrank in fear at the notion and practice of equal rights for women. At the age of 91, Olympia traveled with her daughter to Europe and had an absolutely smashing good time.

A love story? Wondrously so.


Sources:

Charlotte Coté, Olympia Brown: The Battle for Equality, Mother Courage Press, 1988.

Chapter 3

What’s so scary about a rainbow? As a child I would run outside at first word that a rainbow was arching overhead. I was awed. I continue to be awed. As a child I first heard that story about an angry God turned forgiving, about a God who was so frustrated with creation’s bad behavior that he—and God was definitely a he then—caused a great flood to cover the earth. Only a few were spared, a man named Noah and his curious extended family, lifted aloft in a homemade ark for forty days and forty nights. The boat rocked, and the rain fell, and all the creatures not on board are said to have perished. Then slowly, ever so slowly, the waters receded and this land-starved crew came forth onto dry ground. Noah built an altar to God and God blessed Noah and his family and made a covenant with them that never again would there be such a flood. The sign of this covenant was a rainbow. In the Book of Genesis, we read:

“I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”
(Genesis 9:13)

While we as Unitarian Universalists might not accept the literal truth of this story, we like all other peoples of the earth gaze up at a rainbow in awe. We remark on the spectrum of colors.

Ours is a faith grounded in a covenant of love, inclusive all-encompassing love. It is no accident that the rainbow has become the sign of intentional welcoming of all among us who are commonly marginalized by religion, all among us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. It is no accident that my heart sings when I see the rainbow flag flying atop the entrance of our Meeting House, proclaiming this covenant of inclusive love.

Last May we voted to become a Welcoming Congregation. It’s not easy for some of us to act on this. It’s not easy for some of us to fly high with this decision, but here we are in a faith grounded in a covenant of love bolstered by further promise and possibility that we can live it.

Last June at the General Assembly of our Unitarian Universalist Association, “Standing on the Side of Love” was launched as “a public advocacy campaign that seeks to harness [the power of love] to stop oppression.” Standing on the Side of Love lifts “compassionate religious voices to influence public attitudes and public policy” on “immigration, LGBT rights, and more.”

Last Sunday, reports my friend Adam Gerhardstein, Campaign Manager for Standing on the Side of Love,

“Over 50 faith communities across the nation stood on the side of love to call for full equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

In Denver, people of faith worshipped on the steps of the capitol. In Clearwater, Florida, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people of faith shared their personal stories with the media. In Washington, D.C., I marched with over 1,500 people of faith under the Standing on the Side of Love banner at the National Equality March, attended by more than 100,000.”

Rainbows by the thousands are evident in the photos taken in Washington last Sunday—rainbows and broad smiles and hopes for a renewed covenant of love and compassion.

Unitarian Universalism holds a love story, a love story so large that it covers countless chapters across the ages. From the “strenuous spirituality” of Origen through the hard-won voice and vote of Olympia Brown, from an ancient story of a rainbow arching in the sky as a sign of a covenant between God and humankind through the rainbows of fabric and hope lifted by people of faith and hope in churches, on statehouse steps, and in the streets of our nation’s capital, a love story unfolds. Its chapters number far more than the few that I share with you this morning.

What’s so scary about love? My friend, the late Forrest Church, used to say that the opposite of love isn’t hate; the opposite of love is fear. Only love overcomes fear.

Just days before she cast her vote in the 1920 presidential election, Olympia Brown preached her final sermon. Speaking to her longtime congregation of the Universalist Church of Racine, Wisconsin on September 12, 1920, she concluded with this charge:

Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideals which have comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty and made the world beautiful for you. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that you are worthy to be entrusted with this great message and that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.”

May it be so as we seek to live out a love story that never ends.

I love you. May the God of love bless us each and all. Amen.

Sources:

The First Book of Moses Commonly Called Genesis, The Bible, Revised Standard Version

Adam Gerhardstein, E-mail Report of October 14, 2009.

Standing on the Side of Love: Harnessing Love’s Power to Stop Oppression, http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/about/.

"The Other Side of the Pond"

“The Other Side of the Pond”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 11, 2009

How clearly I remember it. My husband, Dan, and our daughter, Sarah, had spent the night in Taos, New Mexico. The next morning we set out for the pueblo, an ancient village inhabited by indigenous people known as the Pueblo. Clearly tourists, easily identified as European Americans, we were welcomed. Dan, Sarah, and I were acquainted with but by no means steeped in the history of our own ancestors’ oppression of the Pueblo and millions of other indigenous peoples. We treaded lightly and slowly as we navigated the twists and turns of the village that was home to families whose lineage was tied to this mountainous site in what is now northern New Mexico centuries before the prospect of gold was a gleam in the eye of any far-off explorer to the east.

Toward what we thought was the conclusion of our visit, we entered the gift shop. Behind the counter were a young man and a young woman, both seemingly in their 20s. We exchanged pleasantries, we discussed the beauty of the wares for sale, and we then moved our conversation around a corner into the grist of the American Indian Movement known as AIM, the unjust imprisonment of poet and AIM activist Leonard Peltier, and the continuing oppression of Pueblo and other indigenous nations at the hands of power structures with a history. Then I can’t remember who—the young man or the young woman—spoke of a nearby lake, a sacred site not recorded on any map. Nestled into a lap of topography not far from the Pueblo village lies Blue Lake. Oral tradition holds that the people of the Taos Pueblo were created from its sacred waters. It is holy ground. “Why is it not on maps?” we asked naively. “It’s the only way to protect it,” came the reply.

In the early 20th century, the U.S. government appropriated this sacred lake and the surrounding area; it was a site promising lucrative natural resources and tourism. Blue Lake became the focus of 64 years of legal contest—protests, appeals, and advocacy by the Pueblo and their allies—before it was returned to the Pueblo in 1970. Was it a matter of property rights? No, it was an issue of religious freedom. Just a year before restoration, Pueblo elder Paul Bernal proclaimed at a Congressional hearing:

“We are probably the only citizens of the United States who are required to practice our religion under a permit from the Government. This is not religious freedom as it is guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Of course it’s not on a map. Of course.

The story haunts me. It is part of a history commonly invisible to most of us whose ancestors shaped this nation as we know it but were rarely beholden to this land and its indigenous stewards.

Like many of you, I learned early on a pledge of allegiance that carried far more than loyalty to “one nation, under God.” I learned allegiance to the assumption that this nation was founded by my European forebears just a few centuries ago. I learned that Columbus “sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred nine-two.” I learned that the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria were worthy of the most vivid hues in my box of crayons. I learned and memorized the “really important dates”—1492, 1620, 1776, 1789. I didn’t bother asking what my daughter, Sarah, often refers to as that vital “second question.” I didn’t bother asking or wondering or doubting, because I really didn’t have to.

Once a body of belief begins to crack, once what is held to be historic gospel begins to erode, once any of us becomes privy to another story, another history, another reality, we cling to the familiar only out of a need to be reassured, only out of a penchant to take our cues from loved and respected teachers and preachers and parents and grandparents and touted authorities on this and that because climbing into a boat guaranteed to rock is just way too scary.

But conversations matter. Stories new to us but ancient to others matter. Histories written or recalled across generations from a different lineage matter. A religion that holds faith and doubt in reverent balance matters as we consider in the chalice of religious community what happened and what didn’t. A religion that holds faith and doubt in reverent balance and the search for truth in the highest esteem matters mightily as we ponder the formation of heroes and history.

When Christopher Columbus approached the islands of North America just over half a millennium ago, he and his shipmates were received with warmth and wonder. Arawak men and women swam out from the beaches of the Bahamas, curious about this strange large craft nearing their shores. As Columbus and his sailors reached land, the Arawaks welcomed them with food and gifts. Their hospitality was immediately evident to Columbus and his crew.

Bartolomé de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus and a Spanish priest, transcribed the explorer’s journal.

“The Indians,” observed Columbus, “have large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time....They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions....With fifty men,” calculated Columbus, “we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Las Casas proceeded to document the large-scale ravage of the Arawaks and hundreds of Native American communities. Las Casas documented genocide.

While Columbus’ sojourn to the “new world” has been hailed by Western Europeans and European Americans as a pivotal discovery of uncharted terrain, the Arawaks and their counterparts across central North America discovered the seed of an emerging political state that has long vacillated between lifting and shifting yokes of oppression.

While writings by and about Bartolomé de las Casas are available in abundance, the record of Las Casas reached me through the pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn tells the story of Columbus’ arrival from the “viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.....of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills....the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem....” He presents the narrative of our nation through voices that have been muted in the history books to which we have grown accustomed. And there are so many history books to which we have grown accustomed.

My favorite stretch of Boston is Commonwealth Avenue just west of Beacon Hill. Many of you know it well and are familiar with the compelling sculptures that mark the island of this elegant avenue. One that struck me above all the others is that of Samuel Eliot Morison. Depicted in casual seafaring attire, Morison sits astride an outcropping of ledge, one hand on a stack of books, the other holding binoculars, his stone-hewn eyes gazing out to sea. I learned that Morison was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, a Harvard historian, and a celebrated author, most notably a biographer of Christopher Columbus.

On an early page of Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Mariner, he wrote:

“The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”

One would then expect a narrative that elaborated on this clear-cut statement. But in the closing paragraph of his work, Morison had this to say of the explorer:

“He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship.”

Zinn observes that Morison states outright the horror story of Columbus’ actions and uses the harshest term possible to describe their outcome—genocide, but that he then goes on to diffuse the horror by burying it in layers and layers of other information more interesting to the author. The careful reader concludes that for Morison, a seaman himself, the quality of seamanship outweighed the nasty reality of genocide. It is, in Zinn’s words, “to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.” The stone-hewn Morison of Commonwealth Avenue gazes off into the distance, a scholar seaman long detached from a momentary nod to a wrenching truth.



“Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas,”

writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a historian, writer, and co-founder of the Indigenous World Association, which lobbies the United Nations on behalf of indigenous peoples’ rights. She continues:

“That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization. However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding…that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day. This year feels different in indigenous communities as they celebrate the great victory of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the General Assembly…”

Just days earlier, on September 13, 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations had adopted this landmark declaration, the harvest of three decades of advocacy by indigenous peoples worldwide. While 143 nations voted in favor, four voted against: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Why? Why would this nation rooted in the principles of justice for each and liberty for all not affirm in our own time a declaration of human rights on behalf of the earliest residents of this land?

“America has a European history of violence that has been unaccounted for and even at times rigorously denied.”

writes George Tinker, Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology in Denver. Dr. Tinker is also an ordained Lutheran minister and director of the Four Winds American Indian Survival Project in Denver. He further identifies himself as ‘mixed blood,’ that is “part Indian and part white,” and tongue in cheek notes, “I’m also called a ‘man,’ even though only one of my parents was a man.”

The context of Tinker’s statement is an essay grounding a “soul work” forum. In early 2001 our Unitarian Universalist Association invited a number of ministers and scholars from liberal religious traditions for an intensive consultation on theology and anti-racism. The meeting site was our UUA offices in Boston. The hard cover outcome is the volume, soul work: anti-racist theologies in dialogue. Some of you participated in a series of workshops co-sponsored by this congregation and First Parish Old Ship in Hingham on the matters covered by soul work, chapter by chapter. It was not easy work.

Neither is Tinker’s message easy to hear:

“When the first Europeans came to the Americas—the Spanish to the Caribbean, the English to North America—they came with clearly preconceived notions of conquering indigenous peoples, and theological and intellectual grounds for justifying and legitimating their exercise of violence. In New England the Puritans were the ‘new Israel,’ self-righteously displacing the aboriginal Canaanites.”

“….the celebration of Columbus Day,” declares Tinker, “is an example of what addictions therapy would call denial. …[It is] an act of denial on the part of white Americans with respect to the history of violence that has been at the core of the American colonial project.”

Self-righteousness and denial go hand in hand. Neither leaves room for humility. Neither leaves room for accountability. Guilt is an unproductive option, commonly fueling denial through attention to “what we feel” at the expense of “what happened and what we can do about it.”

As people of faith, as citizens and residents of a nation that promises liberty and justice for all, what can we do about it? What can we do about truths untold, about truths quickly told and all but discarded, about horrors committed by celebrated heroes, about a negative vote cast by this nation at the United Nations, a missed opportunity to begin to redeem our national history through affirming the rights of indigenous peoples in this nation and throughout nations? What can we do?

We can learn the truth in love. We can read historical accounts that tell the whole story. We can enter a dialogue with one another and extend the dialogue with neighboring congregations on anti-racism and human rights. We can advocate for this nation to join with 143 nations of the world in affirming the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. We can heed the counsel that Dr. George Tinker gives to his white students at Iliff:

“…take a step away from the center out toward the periphery and look back at the center again as something that’s hurting you as a white American as much as it’s hurting Indian people, blacks, Hispanics, Latinos, and Asian Americans.”

We can join a growing movement that includes George Tinker and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and the city of Berkeley, California and our own Unitarian Universalist staff at 25 Beacon Street in observing Indigenous Peoples Day as a holiday in place of Columbus Day.



Imagine, you’re the man or woman in the gift shop in the Taos Pueblo. A white family comes in, begins a conversation, asks some questions. With reticence you tell the story of Blue Lake. They leave; you wonder. What is it that they hold sacred? What is it that they celebrate?

Those of us whose ancestry is from other shores are newcomers. No matter that our ancestors go back to the 1600s; we’re newcomers. We’ve barely arrived on the other side of the pond and already we’ve forgotten why we set sail? Was it an escape from religious oppression? Was it a flight from famine? Was it a quest for gold to feed a hungry queen? Was it a crusade to appease a fragile god? And our arrival?

What is it that we hold sacred? What is it that we celebrate?

In the spirit of the late Alfred Arteaga:

Five hundred and [seventeen] years of eventstook place, we cannot change that.We cannot stand up like Las Casasand say this must stop; we cannottell Tainos, on first seeing the Spanish arrive,to run, to run, and not stop running.What was, was.We cannot change the number of days, norcan we change the events that happened.We can, though, choose to remember or forget,to celebrate, solemnize, recognize.

May it be so. Amen.





Sources:

Alfred Arteaga, “Tomorrow Today,” in Literary Sampler, Found at: http://www.legacy-project.org/index.php?page=lit_detail&litID=147 .

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Indigenous Peoples Day,” Beacon Broadside, A Project of Beacon Press, October 8, 2007, http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2007/10/indigenous-peop.html.
“Indigenous People’s Day,” http://www.uua.org/socialjustice/calendar/114099.shtml.

Soul Work: anti-racist theologies in dialogue, edited by Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2003.

“Taos Blue Lake,” Sacred Land Film Project, http://www.sacredland.org/index.php/taos-blue-lake/.

“United Nations adopts Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” UN News Centre, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23794&Cr=indigenous&Cr1.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf.

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Harper Perennial, 1990 (First Harper Colophon edition published 1980).

Chalice Reflection

Chalice Reflection
of
Mark Alves
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 4, 2009

At sunset this evening our Jewish friends will begin celebrating Yom Kippur. Jan asked me if I would light the chalice this morning and offer a reflection on my experience as a co-facilitator of the “Our Whole Lives” program. I would like to ask a question. How as a toddler, pre teen, teen, young adult, and adult did you come to experience your full human sexuality? I am sure some of us are still trying to figure it out. Fortunately for our children, we have the OWL program that offers them an opportunity to explore human sexuality in a safe and age appropriate manner.

What is OWL you might be asking? Our Whole Lives is a series of sexuality education curricula for six age groups: grades K-1, grades 4-6, grades 7-9, grades 10-12, young adults (ages 18-35), and adults.

Our Whole Lives helps participants make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual health and behavior. It equips participants with accurate, age-appropriate information in six subject areas: human development, relationships, personal skills, sexual behavior, sexual health, and society and culture. Grounded in a holistic view of sexuality, Our Whole Lives provides not only facts about anatomy and human development, but helps participants to clarify their values, build interpersonal skills, and understand the spiritual, emotional, and social aspects of sexuality. Our Whole lives embraces the values of self worth, sexual health, responsibility, and justice and inclusivity.

Five years ago I was asked if I would be interested in co-facilitating the OWL program for First Parish. I was intrigued and decided to accept the position as long as I was trained. There were two reasons for my agreement to help. One, I wanted to learn about the program that was part of the UU community that I had become a part of. And secondly, a more selfish reason, I wanted a deeper understanding of the program my children would someday take part in. I must admit that when I found out that the other facilitator was going to be Diana Karcher it made the decision easier.

I was fortunate to co-facilitate the OWL program with Diana Karcher, who has an abundant amount of energy and a true love for people and especially our children. Diana and I learned as much, if not more than the children. Diana and I observed the children gain a confidence from new found knowledge and understanding. We watched each of them walk away with a clearer understanding of his/her values, newly equipped with the knowledge we hoped would help them to make good decisions. I hope that they each found the experience to be helpful and look back on the program as a worthwhile experience.

As circumstances would have it, my oldest daughter Melissa will be starting the OWL program in a few weeks. For obvious reasons, I cannot teach the program. Jim FitzGerald is looking for someone from First Parish to be a co-facilitator. Scituate has graciously offered to host the program; however we only have one facilitator at this time. What a wonderful opportunity someone from First Parish could have. If you are interested, please speak with me or Jim. I am willing to assist in any way I can.

Thank you.

A Chalice Reflection & "At-onement: A Circle Ministry Sunday"

Chalice Reflection
of
Jack Martin
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
September 27, 2009

At sunset this evening our Jewish friends will begin celebrating Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement - the holiest of all Jewish holidays. Yom Kippur is designed to provide an opportunity for self-reflection for what has occurred over the past year - a time to own personal responsibility for any shortcomings, mistakes, and misdeeds made during the year and to make amends for wrongs and injuries committed.

Our UU faith tradition does not have a day intentionally designated to process our atonements for misdeeds or shortcomings. However, the past four years, at First Parish we have founded and cultivated a ministry that in many ways mimics many of the intentions of the Jewish day of atonement— self-reflection, holding ourselves accountable, being the best we can be for one another. It is Circle Ministry. Circle Ministry is not a one time a year event, but occurs twice each month. It is not an individual, solitary process, but involves engagement, feedback, and support from others. In Circle Ministry carefully chosen topics and evocative questions prompt the discussion and self-reflection for each two-hour session. In every group, as our stories are told, insights into self and others are gained, and bonding of group members occurs.

The joy of Circle Ministry comes in sharing our personal stories. Because our stories generally make us feel vulnerable to being fixed, exploited, dismissed, or ignored, most of the time we tell them only gradually or not at all. Neighbors, coworkers, church friends, and even family members can live side by side for years without learning much about each other’s lives. Circle Ministry is a corrective to this fear of making ourselves vulnerable. Members of the group speak from their own experiences; they tell their own stories from their heart and soul; criticism, fixing, and advice giving are avoided; and deep, generous and respectful listening is the central principle that makes the process work.

Sharing time matters. Sharing time provides rare moments in our lives when we get below the surface. The more we know about another person’s story, the harder it is to dismiss, marginalize, distance or harm that person. Sharing time works because we come to understand ourselves, others, and our world in more complete ways. Sharing time has been rippling through our church community for the past three years. Calls have been heard; needs have been acted upon; and support, care, and hard work have been given to our church and to our community by Circle Ministry groups. Our faith community here at First Parish has been greatly strengthened and enormously enriched because of Circle Ministry. It is my hope that more of you who have not yet experienced Circle Ministry will take advantage of this shared ministry program and join with us this fall.

“At-onement: A Circle Ministry Sunday"

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
September 27, 2009

Just a few days ago, a good friend died. He was also a mentor, a colleague, a scholar, a preacher, a public figure, a husband and father, and a prophetic teacher for all of us. At the age of 61 and a day, shortly before sundown, we lost Forrest Church.

It is a time of turning. The leaves are turning. The birds are turning south. Creatures of field and forest are scampering about to store food for the cold months ahead that they might tuck into the earth for warmth and shelter. We humans turn reflective as the remains of a day swell into a burnished montage that mirrors the horizon of treetops, as a harvest moon shines like a pumpkin lit from within. I ponder what it means, this letting go, this turn of direction, these celestial orbs that all but tease with the arresting magnificence of their settings and risings, and this loss of life and presence to which we’ve grown accustomed.

When I did my first memorial service, it was a graveside rite, and I turned to Forrest to ask his counsel. I was then Assistant Minister at All Souls in New York City, where Forrest was Senior Minister. It was just over a decade ago. My learning curve for ministry felt frustratingly slow. But I had a master teacher. He offered these words:

As we stand now together under the rounding dome of the sky, with the resilient Earth beneath our feet, washed by air and sunlight, we recount things timeless and reassuring.

We know, deep in our flesh, the sure cycles of nature, the fit of a human life span into the seasons of the generations, the Earth, and the Universe: a sublime and elegant design.

From dust to dust; from spirit to spirit; from eternity to eternity: Between these spans, a human life fits.

Many of you know that Forrest had a lot more to say—about love and life and death and the universe and what it means to be Unitarian and Universalist. As for Unitarian, he used to quip that ours “is the religion to have when you’re having more than one.” Forrest was a consummate Universalist. He recognized the inclusiveness of it all. He understood that we are woven. His gospel was love. He understood the God he described as “greater than all but present in each” as a loving God. And he didn’t hesitate to use God language. After all, he was a preacher whose last name is Church!

This morning these words that he offered during my early years of ministry invoke reverie on the cyclical nature of each of us and the cyclical ways of earth and sun, moon and stars.

“As we stand now together … we recount things timeless and reassuring.
We know, deep in our flesh, the sure cycles of nature, the fit of a human life span into the seasons….”

His words sound amid the holiest time in the Jewish calendar, the Days of Awe, ushered in with Rosh Hashanah, literally the beginning of the year, and observed by Jews worldwide. Today’s sunset marks the beginning of the day that concludes these Days of Awe, Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement.

Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year. “This moment of most intense spiritual experience,” observes Arthur Waskow, “is the moment of atonement—the moment when all misdeeds are covered over.” Waskow compares Yom Kippur to the prayer shawl known as a tallis, describing this day as “a kind of tallis in time—a prayer shawl to cover the confusions of the year. As worshippers…pick up the tallis, they cover their heads for a moment so as to wipe away the pointless, pathless wanderings of the world,” making it possible “for a moment to look toward God, ….to stand face to face with God.”

There are elaborate rituals for worship on Yom Kippur, and they vary from synagogue to synagogue. Some are ancient and some, innovative. One ancient rite that finds its way into contemporary practice reinforces the belief that on this day it is possible “to stand face to face with God.” The priest speaks aloud the name for God not spoken at any other time, the name that may be rendered YHVH/Yahweh, an apparent acronym for the identity of God revealed to Moses through the burning bush as told in the third chapter of the Book of Exodus. While some render Yahweh as “I am who I am,” Waskow explains it as “a kind of distillation of ‘I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming.’” It’s a name “that was not a name in the sense of a label by which God could be called and controlled, and therefore the Name which could not be said aloud…. Only on Yom Kippur was the Name said, aloud, in all its original awesomeness.”

Central to Yom Kippur rituals ancient and modern is a turning, tshuvah, “repentant return,” and “for all human beings.” According to Waskow, the centrality of tshuvah survived the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE with added strength. The rabbis held that the very arrival of the day invoked God’s forgiveness, but with a critical qualification:

“If someone said, ‘I will sin and repent, and sin again and repent,’ he will be given no chance to repent. If he said, ‘I will sin and Yom Kippur will effect atonement,’ then the Day of Atonement effects no atonement. For transgression between human beings and God, Yom Kippur effects atonement; but for transgressions between a person and his fellow, Yom Kippur effects atonement only if he has made peace with his fellow.”

This Day of Atonement is thus a day of “at-onement.” There is a paradox here. One stands as an individual before God and all that is holy and turns, repents, of all that is unseemly across thought, word, and deed in the year that is past. One also stands as a member of religious community before God and all that is holy and can do so credibly only if one “has made peace with his fellow.” There is no allowance for hypocrisy here, no crack in the ritual that allows a person to be at-onement with God while hiding unreconciled discord with fellow humans. At-onement with what is holy, with what is ultimate, with “that which is greater than all but present in each,” happens only from a well of right relationships with one’s family, with one’s friends, and yes, with one’s presumed enemies.

It is a time of reflection, of turning, of reconciliation, of at-onement. It is apt that our first Circle Ministry session of this church year will take place a week from today, so close to this time of at-onement.

Also known as small group ministry, the premise is that we gather in a circle—that most inclusive shape—and listen deeply. Yes, participants speak, but out of a covenant that underscores deep and respectful listening. “Silence” is the first topic of the season, for it is in a circle of silence that we quiet ourselves, that we diffuse our inner noise that cuts us off from our fellow humans sitting around us. Each person checks in. What is happening in your life? What is happening in my life? No commentary, no expressed sympathy or advice or murmurs. It’s all part of the behavioral covenant of this ministry of circles. And when the topic is introduced—in this case, “Silence”—silence is held for a moment before anyone speaks. I suppose it’s a tad ironic that we do deign to speak about silence, but as stories are heard and told, we enter a sphere outside of our own egos. The very sequence of holding silence, listening deeply, hearing, and being heard is a form of reconciliation that permits us to know an at-onement that is rare in the rhythms of our daily lives.

Within each of us there is a silence-
a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it- and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are….

Silence reveals. Silence heals.
Silence is where God dwells.

writes the poet, Gunilla Norris.

You may or may not use the term God to describe your experience of amazing silence, of attunement to the day, of reflection in this season of letting go. You may or may not find the term God meaningful in this season of imminent death all around us though you would never know it to look out the window or walk on the beach or stroll through a park or lie back into a pile of leaves vividly costumed and newly arrived from their downward dance. You’d never know that in this glorious silence, this all-out beauty fest, gardens and friends were so close to deep slumber. “God” might not work for you, but try “awe,” days and days of it.

Turning, tshuvah, reflection, reconciliation, is so naturally the holiest time of year. For Jews, yes, but for all of us who are creatures of the phenomenon we call nature. Summer’s boldness is becoming autumn’s brilliance is becoming winter’s bones is becoming spring’s buds. We are creatures of cycles.

“So goes the year,” writes Waskow, “the circle-dance of life in tune with the music of the sun.” And yes, in harmony with the moon, as we’re reminded by these Days of Awe, these holy days that take their calendar cues from the moon as it circles the earth even as the earth swings elliptically about the sun.

We gather in the solo reflections of our hearts in this house of meeting to reflect, to meditate, to wonder, to sing, and to hold silence. We gather in the community of this congregation to affirm and be affirmed that we are not solo acts, but gossamer strands of a cosmic web. We gather in circles to listen and discover that we are heard. We move through our days and become story after story after story. And on a holy day some among us pause and dare to see “face to face” an essence whose name is spoken aloud only on that day. Some of us pause and don that prayer-shawl that “the confusions of a year” might be diffused through a holy glance at what matters most, a holy act of turning and transformation that mirrors this season of turning and transformation.

History merges with timelessness. A life merges with eternity.

From the eternal to the specific, from the arcs of celestial bodies to the circles in which we sit together to the circle of hearts present here and now, we discover the holy.

“When our heart is in a holy place,” we sang moments ago,
“We are bless’d with love and amazing grace.

…. [When] we hear our voices in each other’s words,

….When we share the silence of sacred space,
[When] the God of our Heart stirs within,
[When] we feed the power of each other’s faith,
Then our heart is in a holy place.”

So it is as we consider this imminent Day of Atonement, as we experience a ministry of circles, as we worship together, and as we seek to live out our lives in “inclusive spiritual community.” We stretch our souls. We discern our roots in the traditions that are Christian and Jewish. We revere by participation or consideration a holiday, a holy day, that moves in its own arc across the sunset and sunrise of consciousness that we are all turning, willfully, willingly, but as surely as summer turns to autumn; and in turning, we find ourselves amid “the seasons of the generations.”

“The very interweaving of the themes of history and nature, the human life cycle and moments of spiritual experience—remind us that in some sense all the realms of life are dancing with each other. The circles of the sun, and of the moon; of a single human life between the generations, and an entire people’s history of renewal; of every quiet act of newness, birth, creation—all are echoes of One Circle.”

So writes Arthur Waskow, affirming Judaism’s celebration of festivals as reverence for “the Unity that underlies all life.”

I lost a friend this week. We all lost a friend this week. Some would say his death was untimely, that 61 is too young, far too young, to die. We speak out of our own yearning for life. We take again and again that first deep breath and cry out in our longing for life. What is enough? What will ever be enough as we consider our own life span? Forrest died surrounded by family and friends, surrounded by a congregation called All Souls, embraced by an even greater family of all souls.

Into “the seasons of generations, the Earth, and the Universe….from dust to dust, from spirit to spirit, from eternity to eternity,” his life fit magnificently and will echo throughout eternity the One Circle that embraces us all, the great silence from which each of us have emerged and into which each of us turns with all possible grace and gratitude.

Let us hold together a moment of silence.
………………………………

Amen

Sources:

Forrest Church, quotes from sermons and books and conversations, www.allsoulsnyc.org

Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation, Bluebridge, 2004.

Joyce Poley, “When Our Heart Is in a Holy Place,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005.

Arthur Waskow, Seasons of Our Joy: A Celebration of Modern Jewish Renewal: A Creative guide to the Jewish Holidays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1982.