"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.