Chalice Reflection & Notice!

Chalice Reflection
of
Diana (“Pokey”) Kornet
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Evolution Sunday – March 22, 2009

When Eric invited me do the chalice lighting for today, he asked me to reflect on my “struggles as a biologist and parent with the concepts of evolution vs. creationism,” but I have to admit I never struggled over this issue. Darwin’s theory of evolution poses a problem only if one takes the Bible literally, and the “Good Book” is so filled with allegory and parables that very early in my education I left behind any notion of its being a literal work. The high school I attended, non-denominational but whose founders were steeped in the Christian tradition, required that students take “Bible” as a minor every year: in 9th grade we were introduced to the major religions in the world and their founders, including the origins and wide variety of beliefs of many Christian sects. In 10th grade we studied the Old Testament, in 11th we focused on the New Testament, and during senior year we read more current material of the existentialists – philosophers and theologians from Kierkegaard and Sartre to Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and William Sloane Coffin. I often wished that our children had a similar requirement during their high school education, for it was a path that encouraged questioning and critical thinking during the formative years.

When our children were young, we read Bible stories to them so they would become familiar with them as a part of western culture, but we told them that often the stories were trying to explain something for people – whether it was the story of how the world was created, the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, or the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood. For me the concept of “God” has always been inextricably intertwined with the natural world; I had no problem conveying my awe and wonder at the intricate miracles of the natural world to our children.

In “Natural Faith” in the recent issue of UU World, William Murry says, “Before Darwin, people in the western world thought species were fixed entities, created by God in the exact form in which we find them today.” When Darwin’s theory of evolution explained that all living things evolved over millions of years from simple organisms through the process of natural selection, there was no longer the need for a “Creator.” This had huge implications for religious thinking: mankind was no longer a special creation made in the image of the deity; rather, man was a part of the natural world. Murry says that today many liberal theologians “conceive of God as a power within the natural universe rather than a source outside it.” Murry quotes from Reinventing the Sacred by scientist Stuart Kauffman, who suggests that we “rename God, not as the Generator of the universe, but as the creativity in the natural universe itself.” I have not read his book, but it is now on my list, for that is exactly where my thinking is: for me, God is the creative force for good. “May the Force be with you” really spoke to me!

Murry states that most UUs are naturalists as opposed to supernaturalists – whether theistic or non-theistic, most UUs do not believe in the existence of a supernatural realm…now THIS is where I have a different point of view. What is “supernatural” anyway?—something we can’t explain through the “natural laws” we understand right now? I would say it is all natural. I DO believe in an existence after this life…we just don’t understand yet how our energy continues.

Darwin’s idea has affected our religious story by calling us out of our separate self-centered worlds to recognize ourselves as part of a great living system…about which we still know relatively little. We are still learning…

“Notice!”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Evolution Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 22, 2009

What did you do on your summer vacation? It’s a question that conjures up the first day of school, a blank page, and a blank stare back at the page. It’s a question which I’m hoping to answer this autumn with at least one book title—The Origin of Species, published 150 years ago this coming November, authored by Charles Darwin born 200 years ago as of this year’s February 12. I’ve enjoyed barely an appetizer portion of the grand feast served up by the writings of and about this man, who transformed our understanding of how we—the whole interdependent we—came to be through the most extraordinary acts of adaptation across the millennia. My appetite has been whetted.

This morning I offer a belated Happy Birthday to Charles, belated because over his birthday I was engaged with my own particular adaptation to life recovering from surgery. I trust you’ll forgive me, Charles, and accept this modest tribute to your life and work in the frame of a worship service in a faith in full partnership with your relentless search for truth and meaning. I’m so looking forward to stretching out on Minot Beach come the summer, after a dive into waters holding more forms of life than I can imagine, and plumbing the pages of your magnum opus from which we humans are still drawing epiphanies of knowledge and wonder. What better place to read The Origin of Species but a beach, where I can close my eyes and breathe in the salt scent inhaled by creatures billions of years ago, where I can swim and imagine that I haven’t yet lost the gills of my sea-siblings—ancestors all.

What a remarkable man was Charles Darwin. What a remarkable life and legacy we inherit. While his theories of natural selection and sexual selection—the two theories for which he is most noted—were not original with Darwin, choice and circumstance and a highly inquisitive mind conspired toward Darwin writing and publishing 19 books, each a facet of his kaleidoscopic powers of observation and reflection. Darwin heeded what I understand as the most compelling though implicit invitation greeting each of us upon birth: “Notice!”

Born on February 12, 2009 in Shrewsbury, England to Dr. Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, Charles was a middle child. His older brother, Erasmus, was named for their paternal grandfather, a physician and naturalist who preceded Charles in writing on the likelihood of natural selection as an explanation for the variability of creatures over time. Charles had three older sisters—Marianne, Caroline, and Susan—and a younger sister, Catharine. Altogether there were six children in this household parented by Robert and Susannah. Their maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, renowned for his pottery. Dr. Robert Waring Darwin was a physician, well-loved by his family and neighbors and patients. Susannah was known for her gentle and compassionate nature.

At the outset of what Charles Darwin refers to as a “sketch of my life,” begun in May, 1876, he recounts his earliest memory, “when I was a few months over four years old, when we went to near Abergele for sea-bathing, and I recollect some events and places there with some little distinctness.” Of course this bolsters my intent to read The Origin of Species on the beach.

Barely eight years old, Charles was sent off to day-school in Shrewsbury. Just a few months later, his mother, Susannah, would succumb to what was most likely tuberculosis, the disease that took so many lives on both sides of the Atlantic during this time. Curiously enough, he admits, his memory of his mother focused on her deathbed, what she wore, and the table where she had worked. Even as the young Darwin grieved the loss of his mother, his attention to detail is notable

By this time, he recounts, “my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals.” Darwin also admits to a reputation for mischief, albeit mischief with conscience, since the incident I recount troubled him greatly afterwards.

“I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which of course was a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me.”

The young boy became the young student became the young man. He entertained the idea of becoming a physician—briefly. He even entertained the idea of becoming a clergyman—briefly. Darwin studied at Edinburgh and then at Cambridge. His was a mind that could have sauntered off in any of innumerable directions; but while at Cambridge, he sought the acquaintance of John Stevens Henslow, a professor passionate in his regard for the sciences. Young Charles was drawn to Henslow’s capacity to form “conclusions from long-continued minute observations.” Henslow served as mentor and muse, and it was he who alerted Charles to the opportunity to set sail aboard the Beagle as a cabin-mate to Captain Robert Fitz-Roy. Darwin was invited aboard as the Beagle’s resident naturalist. I can almost hear his response—a rousing high-decibel “Yes!”

The HMS Beagle set sail on the 27th of December 1831 for a round-the-world voyage that would last five years.

“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….I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind; I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed.”

Darwin observed; he collected; he documented; he thought; he reflected. He noticed. He wondered. His gaze fell on creatures of the sea and sky and land never imagined by him. His attention was drawn magnet like to sea shells found inland and coral reefs and atolls whose origins he theorized with inspiration from his Grandfather Erasmus, who had boldly declared “Everything from shells.” (Milner, 19) Off the coast of Chile in 1835 he witnessed a volcanic eruption and related it to the work of geologist Charles Lyell, who had theorized that with sufficient time, natural forces at play in the present explain the formation of such geological phenomena. (Milner, 20)

It was in the Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, where they arrived in the spring of 1836, that Darwin actually observed the coral reefs and atolls and formulated his theory of their formation over millennia atop sinking volcanoes. A few months later, the HMS Beagle docked in England. Laden with specimens and documentation and journals, Darwin’s primary sources were in hand. Soon after, he met with Lyell, who shared the excitement over Darwin’s theory of reef formation, though it varied from his own. Regarding the prospect of public credibility, Lyell’s words to Darwin, penned in a letter to his friend, rang as prophetic as they did enthusiastic:

“I could think of nothing for days after your lesson on coral reefs, but of the tops of submerged continents. It is all true, but do not flatter yourself that you will be believed, till you are growing bald, like me, with hard work & vexation at the incredulity in the world.” (Milner, 21)

Darwin began to distill his theory of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution as early as 1838, just six years after returning to England; but it would be twenty years before he published an account of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t publish. Eight of his 19 published works were issued before The Origin. Darwin was anxious over how it would be received.

Feelings and thoughts called for time to simmer. He had just become familiar with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who posed the dilemma of human procreation outpacing the food supply, with starvation as the solution. While Malthus’s ideas were understandably unpopular, Darwin respected the dilemma that he was addressing, as indicated in his own reflections years later:

“….being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation 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)

And so he did not, though his developing theory remained not quite on the back burner of his attention. He would write and publish on related topics, before occasion rose for the deep breath that told him it was time to make public his theory of natural selection. Weighing the pros and cons of what to say and when, he applied a similar methodology to his decision to marry.

Emma Wedgwood was his cousin, and surely not enough was known, even by Darwin, about the possible consequences of marrying one’s cousin, to pose a clear deterrent. The deterrents were recorded in Darwin’s vacillation about marrying at all. Yes, he made a pro and con list, with reasons for and reasons against. Among the “cons” were: “freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it…..Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.—to have the expense & anxiety of children.” On the “pro” side he listed: “Children…—Constant companion, (& friend in old age)” and most markedly, tongue in cheek I hope, “better than a dog anyhow.” Whether Emma ever saw the list is a matter of speculation, but if so, Charles surely had some explaining to do or he would find that it was not quite a lowly canine who belonged in a doghouse.

The couple exchanged many letters before and during their engagement. Charles poured forth his hopes and his confidence that he harbored a theory about where we all came from and how, along with doubts that stirred in him with regard to a divine force behind creation. Emma was forthright in declaring how painful it would be to her if he held to his theory and certainly if he made it public, and a plaintive opinion that it would prevent their being together in eternity. Emma came from a perspective of Unitarianism, and held firmly to her belief in God the Creator and the promise of an afterlife. Even then, it seems, Unitarians didn’t need “to think alike to love alike,” in the spirit of the 16th century Unitarian martyr Francis David.

Love won out, and Emma and Charles married in January, 1839. Residing for a few years in London, Darwin completed books on his voyage aboard the Beagle and his theory of the formation of coral reefs. The first two of their ten children were born there, including his beloved daughter, Annie. In 1842, the young family moved to the country into what would be their home for many years, “Down.” Emma would give birth to eight more children, though two died in infancy. By all accounts, Emma and Charles adored each other, and they adored their children. Affection was pervasive. Emma was warm and gracious; Charles was playful and indulged his children’s mischief making as if in appreciation for his own early pranks.

As prodigious in his work of observation and documentation and reflection, so was he prodigiously loving as a father. His was a parenting of full heart, and his heart was broken when Annie became ill, very ill, in April of 1851. On April 23 they lost ten-year-old Annie. Darwin poured his grief onto the page:

“We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face! Blessings on her!” (Autobiography, 102)

It was in an article in The Boston Globe just four years ago that Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spoke in defense of his forebear’s theories and empathy with those who find them difficult to understand. Keynes further illumined the story of Annie. In the late 1990s, he had found in his parents’ bureau memorabilia of Charles Darwin which they had inherited. Among this historic treasure was a box with memos by Darwin about Annie. A few years later, Keynes authored: Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution.” While Darwin ceased to believe in a beneficent divinity, according to Keynes,

“…what he realized is that he just went on caring for Annie. He just couldn’t stop caring for her, even though she was dead, and year after year he found he still cared for her as much as he did when she was alive. He realized how fundamentally important the affections are between parent and child and how—to use a modern phrase—it must be a kind of hardwired part of our makeup. He went on to develop a view on our moral sense.”

A theory of natural selection in no way undermines love or the affections or conscience or gratitude or wonder or grief or humor. If we notice, if we deeply behold and reflect on what we witness, and if we bring to bear “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” we will collide with convention, we will unwrap the gifts of truth—hard truth and luminous truth, we will take to heart and mind what our sense of reason and soul reveal, and we will continue to search and to question.

Darwin worked with no knowledge of tectonic plate shifts, with no knowledge of genetics or DNA, with no firm proof that a coral reef is, as Adam Gopnik describes it, “just a funeral wreath around the tip of a defunct mountain.” Darwin’s work was girded by intentional observation and thoughtful reflection over time. “That the details have changed,” notes journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg, “does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.”

Darwin was a man of insatiable curiosity and relentless observation. He was also a man of conscience, affection, humor, and peace. A contemporary of Abraham Lincoln and born on the same day, he was attuned to the anguish experienced by Lincoln over the threat to the Union and the moral quagmire of slavery whose abolition would seem to come only at the cost of civil war. In 1862, the second year of the carnage, Darwin’s friend, Asa Gray, had sent him a newspaper article on the war. Darwin responded to Gray:

“…we read [it] aloud in Family Conclave. Our verdict was, that the N. was fully justified in going to war with the S.; but that as soon as it was plain that there was no majority in the S. for ReUnion, you ought, after your victories in Kentucky & Tennessee, to have made peace & agreed to a divorce.” (Gopnik, 119)

What, I wonder, would Darwin have said on this day that we belatedly celebrate his life and legacy and mark also the sixth year of this nation’s war in Iraq? Surely resistance to the oppression of slavery and preservation of the Union outweigh any rationale yet in play for the current conflict that enters its seventh year. Darwin’s response resonates for our own day. Might we not paraphrase his words and heed his counsel that we ought, after whatever victories are claimed or disclaimed, to make peace and agree to a divorce?

Life is complex. Life is precious. How it began and how we began is not entirely a mystery, though still subject to fierce debate and inviting deeper knowledge. Reverence, that core religious stance, comes alive not through static belief, but through observation and wonder. Hear the final words of The Origin of Species:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Life is precious, wonderful, and amazing. How can we hold back from immersing ourselves in the whole glorious interdependent web of it? How can we resist the invitation of a lifetime: “Notice! Notice!”
Amen.


Sources:

“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.

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.

Charles Darwin, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#CITEREFDesmondMoore1991.

Anthony David, illustration by Alicia Buelow, “Our Inner Ape How deeply rooted is our Unitarian Universalist belief in peace and justice for all?” UU World, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Spring 2009, 30-32.

Cornelia Dean, “Seeing the Risks of Humanity’s Hand in Species Evolution,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D4.

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009.

Olivia Judson, “The Origin of Darwin,” The New York Times Op-Ed, Thursday, February 12, 2009.

Carol Kaesukyoon, “Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D5.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Editorial Observer, “Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His Unconventional Idea,” The New York Times, Thursday, February 12, 2009.

Jennifer A. Lane, “A Brief History of Reef Science,” Natural History, February 2009, 22.

Richard Milner, “Seeing Corals with the Eye of Reason: A rediscovered painting celebrates Charles Darwin’s view of life,” Natural History, February 2009, 18-23.

William R. Murry, illustrated by Alicia Buelow, “Natural Faith: How Darwinian evolution has transformed liberal religion,” UU World, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Spring 2009, 26-29.

Tatsha Robertson, “Darwin descendant defends evolution theory,” The Boston Globe, November 19, 2005.

Carl Safina, “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D3.

John Tierney, “Darwin the Comedian. Now That’s Entertainment!” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D2.

“The Voyage of the Beagle,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Beagle.

Nicholas Wade, “A Mind Still Prescient After All These Years,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D1, 4.

Carl Zimmer, “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D1, 3.

Dream On

“Dream On”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 8, 2009

It’s hard to find a more dysfunctional family than that of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau, and their parents, Rebekah and Isaac. As recounted in the Old Testament Book of Genesis, Rebekah learned early in her pregnancy that the twins she was carrying would contend with one another as “two nations” and “two peoples [that] shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Esau was the first to be born; then came Jacob. While twins, their temperaments were different, very different; their physiques were different. It was difficult to imagine them as brothers, let alone twins. Their father Jacob could not hide his greater affection for Esau, the doer, the outdoorsman, and the son with the direct approach. Their mother Rebekah could not hide her greater affinity for Jacob, the contemplative, the homebody, and the son of willful scheming.

How does the dysfunction play out? Recall the story of Esau as a young man coming in from the field famished, catching the aroma of a stew prepared by his brother, Jacob. “Pottage” it’s called. So hungry is Esau and so attuned to his brother’s hunger pangs as leverage for advantage is Jacob that Esau is seduced by Jacob into selling his birthright as first-born in exchange for “bread and pottage of lentils.”

Years passed and the family prospered through good times and hard times, even as the deception and favoritism continued. Isaac grew old and, realizing that his time was limited, called to him his favorite son, Esau. He asked him to go hunting and bring back the wild game that he so loved that he might eat and then bless his eldest before he bid farewell to all. Rebekah, eavesdropping on their conversation, confided to Jacob what was afoot and ordered her favorite son to go and bring her two goats so that she might prepare them for Jacob to take to his father with the intent of securing his blessing first. Knowing that her husband in his blindness might touch Jacob’s arm and recognize him as the younger twin, Rebekah counseled Jacob to cover his arms with goatskins to deceive her husband’s touch. Jacob complied, and just as years earlier he had leveraged his brother’s hunger to his own advantage, so now he leveraged his father’s blindness to his own advantage. He successfully secured his father’s blessing.

Isaac and Esau quickly discovered the deceit, but the blessing could not be revoked. Such were the ways of family in this culture of a few millennia past. Twice tricked, Esau was livid and sought to avenge the injustice by plotting to murder his brother. Once again, Rebekah came to the fore and sent her darling Jacob off to the safety of her brother Laban’s household in Haran. It is at this point that our morning reading begins:

“Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set.” (Genesis 28:10-11a)

Jacob falls asleep and dreams of “a ladder set upon the earth,” with angels going up and down the ladder and the Lord God standing above all and proclaiming divine authority and divine promise, that God would multiply Jacob’s descendants and bring him back to this land. Jacob awoke and affirmed the ground as holy ground, calling the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means “house of God.” At this point, Jacob vowed that if God would be with him and sustain him, he would give a tenth of all his belongings back to God. In other words, Jacob promised to tithe! It seems to me a small price to pay for God’s promise of sustainability, especially given Jacob’s bad behavior in the eyes of God and family.

Let’s take a closer look at this dream, one of many biblically recounted dreams that shifted the tectonic plates of ancient history. A man in flight from an avenging brother, Jacob beheld in the vulnerability of sleep angels of God going to and fro on a ladder that joined heaven and earth, with God at the top proclaiming divine authority. Jacob awoke shaken by a transformed consciousness of where he stood—in a holy place. He was humbled. Yes, it was about time; but he was through a dream humbled. And from such a stance, he entered into a covenant with God.

According to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, Jacob’s dream is an example of “the Holy Other address[ing] people in the vulnerability of the night.” Writes Brueggemann:

“The dream requires a total redescription of Jacob’s life defined by God’s promise. …Jacob pledges to be allied with [this promise], a pledge that entails accepting himself as a carrier of the promise. Quite concretely, Jacob promises to tithe. When he awakes, the world is different because of this holy voice in the night.”

In the dream, unlike in Jacob’s daytime behavior, there is no guile. Ultimate gratification sealed in the covenant between God and Jacob trumped the immediate gratification through which Jacob had lived his life thus far. God promises sustainability; Jacob promises generosity through the specifics of tithing. A covenant is made, not a deal, but a covenant.

Dreams lace the biblical narrative. We read in the Gospel According to Matthew the account of the Magi, summoned by Herod the king who had heard the story of what they had seen, a star rising above the birthplace of a new king. Learning that Bethlehem was the place, Herod sent them to find the child and come back with a report. Off they went to Bethlehem, found the child, and left their gifts at his feet. In a dream came the warning not to return to Herod, but to travel home by a different route. Joseph, the father of the newborn babe, was similarly warned in a dream to take Mary and their child and flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.

Dreams are dreamt, plans shift, and history turns a corner. The devious Jacob becomes accountable to the holy in a new covenant. A king is prevented from venting murderous envy on the babe who would transform our understanding of how we might live. Dreams introduce radically different options at a time of natural vulnerability. Our consciousness takes a rest, and something else steps in.

“Dreams,” writes Brueggemann, “are recognized as disclosures of otherness, an otherness that may indeed open us to authentic reality and to a truth that lies beyond reason.”

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and scholar of matters mythical, psychological, and religious, observed that:

“…in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.”
(Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars. 304 f.
in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 394)

A richer dimension arises in our dreams that gives us the chance—depending upon our interpretation, and this is pivotal—to turn enter new venues of consciousness and behavior, to become more whole than we had ever imagined possible! Enlightenment does not stop with reason. Wrote Jung:

“The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”
(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 302)

Dreams and their interpretation are the very stuff of transformation. The biblical dreams that I’ve recounted speak to the realities of our own day.

Not unlike Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, not unlike the power-hungry Herod, we have escalated our assumptions into a state that is unsustainable. Once again, theologian Walter Brueggeman lends his interpretive gifts to the matter. The triumvirate of autonomy, anxiety, and greed describes a dysfunctional human family. Surely in our own nation and yes, as Unitarian Universalists, we have been giddy with individualism. Even the iconic Ralph Waldo Emerson lifted up “self reliance” to the status of an idol. The quest for autonomy, or hyper-individualism, perpetuates a myth that any of us might be non-dependent and unaccountable; we become anything but our brother’s or sister’s keeper, and we will surely not be kept! Who needs an ultimate Other? Who needs the notion of God—not an old man in the sky, but the transcendent power of love and life? I think of that game from kindergarten, The Farmer in the Dell. It concluded with one lone person in the middle of the circle, and we all sang out: “The cheese stands alone.” Such is surely the case with “big cheeses.”

The inevitable sequel to the myth of autonomy is anxiety. Runaway independence is neither achievable nor sustainable.

“The outcome of such autonomy without allies or support,” claims Brueggemann, “is an endless process of anxiety, for one never has enough or has done enough to be safe and satisfied. As a result the autonomous person, championed in current economic theory, is caught in an endless rat race of achievement that produces bottomless anxiety—about the market, about performance, about self-worth.”

Sound familiar? Anxious autonomy spills into desperate acquisitiveness—that is, greed. Anxious autonomy whispers in our ears, “You don’t have enough; you must do better; you must get farther ahead.” The mania overtakes not just those who stand at the top of a very different ladder, but those who stand in the middle and those who stand at the bottom—not quite like the angels who fluidly connected heaven and earth. Brueggemann speculates “that this triad of autonomy/anxiety/greedy acquisitiveness is the story of our recent economic collapse.”

How do we find our way out of this mess? How do we transcend our desperation to recover with a wholly other way of being?

Return to Jacob on the run. Return to the wise men, tempted to be not so wise. Return to a young father whose newborn babe is threatened by an autonomous/anxious/power-greedy head of state. Directions arrived in dreams. Wholly other options for being arrived through layers that lay deeper than reason, deeper than habits so ingrained that consciousness freezes.

In Brueggeman’s wisdom, the alternative to the autonomy/anxiety/greed triad is the biblically based covenantal existence melded with affirmation of God’s—or divine—abundance melded with generosity. Autonomy is traded in for the covenant of community. Jacob is the prime example of this, freed into the realm of covenant through his dream in flight to Haran. Anxiety is traded in for affirmation of the abundance of God. Once again, Jacob’s flight is taken in anxiety over his brother’s threatened revenge. As a consequence of his dream, he enters into a covenant with God in which God promises him abundance through sustainability and Jacob promises God generosity through tithing. Greed and acquisitiveness are traded in for generosity—that is, Jacob’s prior behavior contrasted with his newfound generosity. So too the dreams of the Magi and of Joseph hold the promise of relationships that are covenantal, directions that are life saving and life sustaining, and lives that are generous to the core.

“As far as we can discern,” wrote Jung, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” It is time for illumination.

We are tempted—all of us—to succumb to a desperate hope that we’ll return to a Dow Industrial Average well above 10,000, fluid lending practices, and a job market with employment that is familiar if not sustainable. If we affirm a community of covenant grounded in love of neighbor, if we give thanks for an earth for which we still have a chance to be stewards, and if we respond with a level of generosity that embodies our gratitude—including generosity to this very community grounded in a covenant of love, we will know a future beyond our wildest dreams. We will know a future in which the angels of our most promising nature walk freely between what we imagine as heaven and what we inhabit as earth. It is possible, it really is. Amen



Sources:

Walter Brueggemann, “The Power of Dreams in the Bible,” The Christian Century, June 28, 2005, pp. 28-31, http://www.religon-online.org/showarticle.asp?title3218

Walter Brueggemann, “From Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey: What the Bible has to say about ‘bailout,’ and other comments on the crisis we now face,” Sojourners: Faith, Politics, and Culture, February 2009, 20-24.

The First Book of Moses Commonly Called Genesis and The Gospel According to Matthew in The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars 304 f, in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965, p. 394

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965.

Priceless

“Priceless”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 1, 2009

Today is Stewardship Sunday…sort of. This morning is our opportunity to think about stewardship, generosity, and all that relates to both. This week is our extended time to think some more about stewardship and generosity, to sift it out, to dream about it, to imagine, to reflect, to connect, and to prepare for next Sunday, when those among us who have agreed to lead our annual stewardship venture will help us morph our thinking into actions of commitment and commitments of generosity. So let’s call this morning Stewardship Advent Sunday.

What are we about with an advent? An approach, a preparation, a pregnancy of sorts, with the guarantee of an outcome if not a guaranteed outcome. For what are we preparing? Not quite a baby, but a hope that this congregation that was born 288 years ago will continue to breathe and will thrive.

During those 288 years, we have known good times and not so good times. Imagine all the members and friends of this church across these 29 decades. Imagine that all of us are assembled here this morning. Consider what we have witnessed in our cumulative lifetimes.

We the assembled historic congregation have borne witness to wars that tore body and soul, from the wars of European newcomers with the indigenous nations of this continent through the world wars of the 20th century into the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To each of these episodes of carnage, members of this congregation have borne witness as religious community. Members of this congregation have participated on battlefields and in the halls of power. Members of this congregation have figured in the founding and evolution of world organizations such as the United Nations, designed to convene in peaceful and respectful assembly an almost unimaginable diversity of cultures and viewpoints. Members of this congregation have convened in this Meeting House with what has sometimes felt like an almost unimaginable diversity of viewpoints, however culturally monolithic we might seem, to stretch our individual personhoods into a larger soul, the soul of religious community.

Yes, we have borne witness to wars that tore body and soul, and we have borne witness and continue to bear witness to the hope that peaceful assembly on matters intimate and global describes the foundational nature of this faith community. To paraphrase that 16th century Unitarian martyr, Francis David, as we sought to love alike, we didn’t always think alike. The fabric of our community has been shredded and parsed many times over. The fabric of our faithfulness has been stretched. The largesse of who we seek to be stops short of nothing less than beloved community.

We the members and friends of this historic congregation have borne witness to an ongoing roller coaster of socioeconomic health. While it wasn’t until the 19th century that economic statistics were even documented, there have been other markers, from weather to wars, that described economic cycles before that time. In 1797, seventy-six years after this church was founded and over 200 years ago, economics were topsy-turvy in response to deflation in the Bank of England propelled by England’s war with France in what was known as the French Revolutionary Wars. It was a crisis that lasted three years. This, by the way, was a time in the history of First Parish when there was no stewardship campaign. No need! This congregation was supported by taxes! Such would be the case until 1824, when we were no longer the “town church,” a delayed reaction to the 1820 separation of church and state in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Not a great time for a stewardship drive, since the previous five years were marked by a major financial crisis in this nation, with “ widespread foreclosures, bank failures, unemployment, and a slump in agriculture and manufacturing.” How did we do it? Somehow, we did. Those of you in our imagined historic congregation who hold the stories of this time are more than welcome to share your strategies for our own day.

Jump ahead to 1857. The iconic Rev. Joseph Osgood was your minister then. Just two years earlier, the women of First Parish had purchased an organ for the Meeting House. I trust that they paid cash. In 1857, over 5,000 banks failed and unemployment soared in reaction to the failure of an Ohio based bank that burst a bubble of European speculation in U.S. railroads. Sound familiar? Not the railroads, but the bursting of a bubble? Unemployment was rampant. It continued for three years, but in 1857, no one knew how long it would last.

Time for the 20th century, although the roller coaster of famine and plenty moved in its perilous course across the intervening years. It was October 1929 when another bubble burst. The fallout known as “The Great Depression” would span more than a decade. Some of you recall that time. It was not pretty. Soup lines and hungry children were commonplace in the national landscape. My own mother was 20 years old then, a young nurse in a small Midwestern town. Yes, she’s 100 years old now, and she still clings to habits of frugality. She also shares readily the stories of neighbor helping neighbor during the leanest of times because “What else could we do?” In 1921, just eight years before the fallout, First Parish had celebrated its bicentennial, still flush with the illusion of a booming economy, still hopeful that World War I, known then as the Great War, had been “the war to end all wars.”

As the nation recovered, albeit largely on the dubious economic merits of the Second World War, Roscoe Trueblood came to this pulpit. For 24 years, Rev. Trueblood joined with you as you continued to find your place in this community and this faith. During these two score and four years, some of you remember that you wound your way through three economic recessions, spanning a decade between the early 1950s to the early 1960s.

And here we are today. Take a deep breath. Times are tough. Times have been tough in the past. You, the historic congregation bear witness with your scars of loss and grief and yes, with your proverbial merit badges of resilience and vision and commitment. Stewards all, you have walked the walk; you have kept the faith.

The winter from which we are emerging has been marked by war and socioeconomic crisis. It has also been marked by a spate of illness and injury and loss. You, the historic congregation, have known such seasons intimately. Just three years before this parish observed its bicentennial, 21 million perished from the 1918 influenza epidemic linked to war that also ended that year. If you visit Central Cemetery, I don’t doubt that you will find an undue number of headstones marking lives that stopped short that year, lives fragile in their infancy and their age. How many funerals did our Meeting House host during this period of rampant illness and loss?

Surely one of the most poignant records of life’s fragility in our historic midst are the Cohasset Mariner Quilts, one crafted by the women of Second Parish, known to us today as the Second Congregational Church, the other, by the women of First Parish, known to us today as First Parish Unitarian Universalist. Thanks to current member, Penny Myles, we have a historical narrative of these two quilts, both crafted in the 1840s, just a few decades after the centennial of this congregation and about 15 years after the splintering of First Parish into First and Second Parish. (Sometimes, we haven’t been so good about not having to think alike to love alike!)

On the First Parish quilt, known as the Album quilt, there is a bittersweet reminder of how women of that time used this art as a testament that they had lived. Sisters commonly sewed squares that adjoined each other. In the case of the Hall sisters, it was as if they had stitched their memorials in the pattern of a family plot. Susannah Hall’s square held the inscription: “Hope on, hope over.” It was dated August 26, 1846. A few years later, at the age of 24, Susannah was gone. The wistful thread coursing through each square was a longing to be remembered. Life was fragile and precious.

Just yesterday, we celebrated the life and memorialized the passing of a dear and lovely young woman whose spirit of resilience embodies what it means to persevere with grace. We have been reminded again and again this year, this winter, and through the seasons of our historic faith community that life is fragile and precious.

We are reminded through reflection on times and circumstances past that this is a resilient congregation, upheld by the tensile strands of love. This has been a cruel winter, but it is not the only cruel winter we have weathered. You are a well-weathered congregation, seasoned by centuries of communal faithfulness. You are stitched together not by hard and fast creeds, but by a covenant of love that endures.

Do we always love well? Of course not. Do we have occasion to practice the hard stuff of forgiveness? Absolutely! Does redemption have a place in our faith? I surely hope so. Such is the ballast of religious community grounded in a relationship of covenant.

Consider where you have been. Consider the season upon us. Consider the approaching spring. Be reminded that just a few years ago, you adopted a statement of mission. Let it be a mirror for our spirits this morning:

We welcome all to our inclusive spiritual community. We affirm our Unitarian Universalist Principles and put them into action by worshiping together, caring for one another, and working for a safe, just, and sustainable world.

Ours is a mission of resilience, inclusiveness, affirmation, faithfulness, hope, perseverance, caregiving, and commitment.

Echoing those words that we spoke responsively:

“Alone in the world, I was beset by sorrow and hurt in my life—so much loss and emptiness, so little hope and understanding.
….Then I came into community, a religious community of hope and love. Here I found support and compassion, wisdom and grace, and the power of shared suffering. And together we made life sweeter.”

You, the assembled congregation of 288 years have made life sweeter. You, the assembled congregation of almost three centuries, have persevered.

Twenty-eight laughs, an underestimate; 9 hugs, think thousands more; 52 smiles, add an infinite number of zeros. A free day, a morning perhaps, to take them all in: priceless! Okay, this quip from the MasterCard commercial doesn’t distill it. How could it possibly do so? Close to three centuries of laughter and tears, births and marriages and illnesses and loss, economic rollercoaster rides, wars and epidemics, congregational splits and familial trials, and yes, the winter at hand. Yet the laughs and hugs and smiles and hope embodied in our very mission statement testify to the religious community that you have chosen, the religious community that has made life sweeter. This morning is a time to ponder this. This morning is priceless.

BUT that commercial, that MasterCard commercial, gives a clue to something else. The structure that cradles these priceless dimensions of our faith community carries a cost. Even a MasterCard credit card comes due. Our religious community is priceless, but it is not costless. It costs us time and energy and yes, money, that construct from which some of you recoil. But do any of us enjoy the comforts of homes rented or mortgaged without paying the bill? Do any of us enjoy the benefits of education for our children without paying the bill? Do any of us head to Shaw’s or Stop n’ Shop or in the most basic ways sustain ourselves without expectation that there is a cost?

Our religious community may be priceless, but the sustained covenantal relationship enhanced by the exquisite beauty of this Meeting House, the meeting rooms of our Parish House, the professionalism of staff called and hired, the richness of curricula that lend wisdom to our young and not so young, the music that peals from this sacred space Sunday after Sunday all carry a cost. Cherish what is priceless, and ponder if you will how we will bear the cost together, as we consider the commitment and opportunity of stewardship.

Yes, it’s a tough time, but we have weathered tough times before. We can do it now. It is my hope that for those who know especially tough times, we will do what we can, and for those whose homes and pantries and even a few vacations are secure, we will do more than we think we might. Religious community is sustained by gifts given and received, not in equal portion, but equitably.

If in years hence, you are imaginatively reassembled as a historic congregation of 388 years, I am counting on each of us to know that on our watch, we cherished the priceless and bore the cost. Let’s take a week and think about what this religious community means to us. What will we do to sustain it? What will you do to sustain it? I know you’ll respond generously. I’m counting on you. I will do my part.

I love you and am so grateful for each and every one of you.

Amen.




Sources:

Jan Carlsson-Bull, “Sacred Quilts,” A Sermon given at First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Cohasset, MA, February 5, 2006.

Selwyn D. Collins, Ph.D., “Influenza in the United States, 1887-1956,” Extract from Review and Study of Illness and Medical Care with Special Reference to Long-time Trends, Public Health Monograph No. 48, 1957 (Public Health Service Publication No. 544), http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/influenza_collins.htm.

“Congregational History,” First Parish in Cohasset, http://www.firstparishcohasset.org/about/history.htm.

Michael E. Hanlon, The Great War in Numbers, excerpt with permission, El Sobrante, CA, THC Publishing, 1992, http://www.worldwar1.com/sfnum.htm
“List of recessions in the United States,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States.

Penny Redfield [Myles], “The Cohasset Mariner Compass Quilts,” Paper prepared for Liberal Studies 401, Simmons College, December 9, 1991.

Douglas Taylor, “The Blessings of Community,” from For All That Is Our Life: A Meditation Anthology, Helen and Eugene Pickett, Editors, Skinner House Books, 2005.