Chalice Lighting and Opening Reading
“I Do Not Have a Personal Relationship With God”
by Patrick Murfin
I do not have a Personal Relationship with God.
I’ve lost his phone number;
he never answers his mail.
We did not, as young men,
hang out on Wednesday nights,
cigarettes dripping from our lips,
at pool halls.
He is not there like an old neighbor
to fix my broken lawn mower
and hand me a soda
on a blazing hot day.
When I rip my shin on a jutting shelf
and cry out his name,
he does not rush to me
with Band-Aids and peroxide.
He does not, at times of vexation,
when my world lies shattered,
my relationships ruptured,
my children insolent,
my finances hopeless,
come with soothing counsel to my side.
He does not take my requests
like a long-distance dedication
on America’s Top Forty,
or deliver within five business days
or my money back
on my catalogue order--
my business is not important to him.
I do not have a personal relationship with God.
But in quiet moments
in the familiar whistle
of a red-winged blackbird on a cattail,
or in spider webs glinting with dew
in the grass of a clear sunrise,
or the passing attention of an old cat
He/She/It/Whatever does not
speak
or do
or answer
but admits me to fleeting union
with the Greater.
Pastoral Prayer
Our lives mirror the changing seasons
We await the end of winter, tired, restless, impatient.
We await the end of winter, beginning to taste spring.
April rain and May sun call to us, teasing gently,
Calling us to the joy and excitement of days to come.
Our inner selves leap forward prematurely,
Dragging our rusty bodies, who follow without protest.
But winter takes its time.
Winter values every allotted day,
Uses every allotted hour for its saving work of nurture and rest.
Winter is getting ready,
Ready for turning, ready for transformation.
In all our times of restlessness, whatever the season,
May we be reminded to take heed of the lessons of winter.
Let us n pass quickly by, without reflection an discernment,
Without meeting the challenges of who we are now.
Let us welcome new selves only when the work of old selves is truly complete,
Only when we can look back with affection and forgiveness for who we used to be.
Let us take this time—these final days of winter—to prepare,
Let us take this time to get ready,
For our turning will come, our transformation will come,
As surely as winter will turn to spring.
Amen and Blessed Be.
Reading
Universalist minister, Clinton Lee Scott, used to tell the following parable:
There was a certain man who attended Temple on the Sabbath for many years. One day the man stopped going to the Temple. A neighbor inquired of him saying, “Why is it that you no longer attend the Temple on the Sabbath?”
The man responded, “I don’t really care for the teaching of the priests. They do not answer the questions that vex my mind. They do not provide me with a sure salvation for my soul. Indeed, they lead us into deep waters and leave us there without any means of rescue.
The neighbor reported this conversation to the chief priest who said, “Go tell this man who refuses to attend the Temple on the Sabbath that the Temple stands not to provide life preservers, but is rather a place where one learns how to swim.”
CREDOS
Introduction
The Unitarian Universalist religious education class, Building Your Own Theology, has been around for more than twenty-five years. Its goal is to help participants learn to express their own beliefs—to find, as the hymn says, the “soundless wisdom of the deeper mind.” Or, as Clinton Lee Scott suggests, it helps people learn how to swim in the waters of theology, rather than throwing them life preservers for their souls. During the class, each participant writes a credo or statement of belief. We have invited three members of this past fall’s class to share their credos with you this morning. We will hear frist from Lorraine DeFreitas, then Kate Kimmerle, then Steffie Fiore.
Change
By Lorraine DeFreitas
In Reverend Josh’s October Sermon titled, “The Wasp on the Windshield or Becoming Unitarian Universalist Theologians” he asked the question “…in what do we place our highest confidence? What, for us, is ultimately reliable?
The first answer that popped into my head was “change”. This was a surprise because I believe in God. What does change have to do with my belief in God?
I took the Building Your Own Theology class and discovered the connection.
I believe there is a Divine Love or Spirit that is the essence of all our lives. I can comfortably call this force GOD. The purpose of my life is to be open to and develop an awareness of God and learn to live in harmony with this powerful connecting life force.
Prayer and meditation are ways for me to feel connected to this force. My mother taught me my first prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep,….” I remember lying awake as a child thinking about death, not with fear but with curiosity and trying to imagine what it must be like. Later, I’d wake up afraid from a bad dream and pray to God for safekeeping.
God is no longer a safekeeping force. God is a resource, a bonding force, which connects me to everyone and everything. God is not outside me; God is within everyone. Throughout my life God has been a constant, but my expectations and awareness of God have changed.
This change is a natural life process; it is the way to learn. I did not have a formal religious education due to frequent moves and my parents’ disagreements about where to go to church. Behind my closed bedroom door, I conducted Sunday Services with my dolls. I used the Easter cards my grandmother gave me. There were quotes from the bible with pictures. The picture of Jesus with outstretched hands welcoming children brought me comfort, I felt loved. One card had the quote: “Ask and you shall receive, Seek and you shall find and Knock and the door shall be opened”. I wondered about this passage. Today it speaks to me about the learning process, which is intentional in my life. Being intentional is being open to life experiences, asking questions, seeking answers and allowing myself to be changed.
Giving birth to a child who had seizures was a life-altering event from which I learned much. My immediate reaction was to ask questions: What caused this? How will this impact her life? What do I need to do to help? I began my search for answers outside myself: doctors speculated about the cause. I read books on seizures, joined support groups and attended conferences to try to prepare for the future. The answers have not been easy to find; sometimes there are no answers, so I have learned to ask different questions, try different approaches, move in new directions, do nothing, patiently wait, change my attitude or my thinking. In all the searching, I’ve learned the answers come from within. There is creativity in making and responding to the changes in our lives. God has become a changing, creative and transforming force in my life.
Our lives reflect this creative energy. The purpose of my life is to continue to learn, to continue to knock at the door, to develop my awareness and openness to life/to God. By consciously embracing this process, I hope my thoughts; words and deeds grow more aligned with this force.
When my father died, I purchased a book titled, “The Next Place.” I was struck with the beauty of the artwork and the words. Here is a quote from it: “I won’t remember getting there. Somehow I’ll just arrive. But I’ll know that I belong there and will feel much more alive than I have ever felt before. I will be absolutely free of the things that I held onto that were holding onto me”.
Some might interpret this as a vision of salvation, the afterlife, Heaven! I choose to interpret it as another form of consciousness, the next place on earth. I believe we all have the potential to get there; it requires deliberate intention to grow from our experiences, from our relationships with each other and our commitment to practice. And it requires our willingness to embrace change. I believe this is an individual and a group process, and it can take many forms. We each have to ask, explore and discover for ourselves. We each have to change. There are many paths; I am hopeful they all lead to the same place, the next place, where life on earth is “as it is in heaven”. Amen
The Divine Spirit of Mystery and Possibility
by Kate Kimmerle
"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man [sic] I put away childish things." 1 Corinthians 3:11
I am a child of the sixties and seventies shaped by the contradictions of those years: violence, assassinations, and Vietnam; John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; … riots in Watts, the Tet Offensive, Cambodia and Kent State. My Catholic schooling began in junior high, the year of Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love. Before high school ended my father had died and Roe v. Wade was passed…
I loved my school-related religious communities, where attending mass & communion and joining in daily prayer were as natural as waking and sleeping and studying, and sex and drugs and rock & roll.
I loved the idea of Jesus Christ as prophet and activist – seeker of justice, lover of the poor and sick and the queer and the downtrodden. This Jesus, this Jew, who practiced authentic love and ethical behavior, this spark of light, slain like the prophets of the sixties – I imagined that this Jesus would be wildly unhappy with the current state of my organized religion and would never commit to such a practice, so I gave it up.
What I could not give up was faith in a subtle, unknowable, unexplainable mystery and possibility that I could not name, that I still have some difficulty naming. I speak of this
Divine spirit of mystery and possibility as the transforming power of love. It is a power to which I surrender repeatedly, and in so doing, draw closer to the ground of my being. I do not mean to describe a sentimentalized notion of love. I am talking about the behaviors of love and compassion that move us closer to the wholeness and holiness in others and in ourselves.
Thanks to my mother and grandmother I learned to love and appreciate prayer as an intentional way to approach and connect with the mystery and possibility of life. I often pray as a way to reflect on the many blessings and gifts in my life and to offer gratitude and praise for the grace that makes this life possible. I also pray for strength, wisdom and to love better.
My emotional responses to the social and private events of my youth live side by side in my memory. Images of violence and injustice and love and death all share the same neural space. These emotions continue to inform me daily – and so I have not taken Paul’s advice to the Corinthians to “put away childish things”.
My sense of the mystery that connects us is never as acute as when I bear witness to birth and death. I know that I was in the presence of the Divine spirit of mystery and possibility when I delivered my stillborn daughter Cara ten years ago. If I were to imagine such a scene without ever having experienced it, I might have conjured up sadness and grief beyond anything that the human heart could hold. There was grief but there was also unimaginable love and respect and joy spontaneously shared between those in attendance. We chose to honor our daughter Cara by birthing her in a natural and loving way. I know it is possible to make space for the Divine spirit of mystery and possibility in grief and in sorrow as much as in joy and pleasure, as my heart was opened to the transforming power of love that day.
Although we have no control over what happens to us in life and death, I believe we can make choices given the circumstances that we find ourselves in. I believe we can act with faith and hope and love in and for ourselves and others and our world. By faith I mean trust in the intuitive belief of what is just and right.
I carry this faith with me out into the world, in my effort to live my UU principles. This faith guides the actions of my longing for a just society, where all human beings are valued simply for who they are. My belief in the transforming power of love compels me to fight oppression and seek justice as a form of spiritual practice. I label myself a spiritual activist, and I am political to the extent that the personal is political; but more importantly, I believe the political is spiritual. In the words of a beloved rock poet, I believe “…the love you take is equal to the love you make.”1
In writing this theology, I have become certain of one thing, as written so eloquently by Rachel Naomi Remen:
…real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.2
1 John Lennon & Paul McCartney, “The End” from Abbey Road, Apple Records (1969). I was actually thinking of Lennon as the beloved rock poet…
2 Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000) 338.
Wind
by Steffie Fiore
If I could suggest a symbol for the divine, it would be the wind. I can't see the wind, but I can see it’s power and it’s ability to affect all in the world. I see that it moves with both gentleness and ferocity. It moves among us, inside us, through everyone and everything.
When I am on my bike, the wind in my hair is unmistakably the breath of the divine. The wind roaring past my ears on a fast descent is evidence of the power within me. The wind can challenge me, or push me from behind with a blessed strength. The wind feeds me. I breathe it in and it gives me power. It takes my breath away. It brings tears to my eyes.
The divine. I believe the divine is the energy, the spirit of life that exists in and among all things. I believe the divine does not have a consciousness. The divine does not have a plan for me. It does not communicate with me. It exists in nature, in people, in animals; it is ours to experience, if we so choose.
I believe spiritual experiences are as often small and quiet as they are breathtaking and majestic. All we need to do is quiet down and look, and listen, and feel wonder at and connection with the great spirit of life.
When I am aware of this connection, I am cognizant of the behavioral imperatives that my beliefs prescribe. I must remain committed to working with children to help them grow into their best selves. I must continue to work for social justice. I must show respect and consideration to others, even those whom I cannot understand. I must live my life in service to my family. I must demonstrate a forgiving spirit, a healthy sense of humor, and a willingness to shine my light upon others. I must be quiet and listen.
I intentionally connect with the divine from time to time. Sometimes I do this by visiting with my Happy Place, what some might call an altar. I do this by being involved with this church and by taking care of my most beloved husband. I connect with the divine in my emerging yoga practice. I connect with the divine on my bike. Nowhere more so than on the bike am I more connected with the tremendous power around and within me.
I do believe that I have some very important roles in life. I believe my most important role is that of a wife. I embrace this role and it’s responsibilities. Whether I am providing emotional support, challenging my husband, running the day to day business of our lives, or simply baking my beloved his favorite chocolate-chip cookies, I do so with a loving spirit that fulfills me and brings both of us great peace and happiness. I cherish this role and consider it an essential part of my spiritual life.
I am not sure my life has one overriding and all-important purpose. I don't believe it will ever be revealed to me in some dramatic, existential moment. I believe the larger purpose of my life can be understood by looking at the collection of smaller purposes that guide my behavior.
I live according to my values. I work to make the world a better place. I have a few relationships that bring happiness to all involved. I live in loving service to my family.
I have a heck of a lot of fun.
I believe that there are great mysteries in life, and I am happy for these mysteries to remain as such. When the wind whips up a whirlwind of autumn leaves, I do not question the power behind it, but simply delight in the experience.
Life is marvelous, exhilarating, miraculous, and so precious. I love my best, I live my best, and I have faith in this mysterious divine. I have the spirit of life rushing through me. I have the love of the most incredible man I have ever met. And I have a basement full of bicycles on which to chase the wind.
Extinguishing the Chalice and Closing Words
“Ancient Knowing” From Earth Medicine Ancestors’ Ways of Harmony For Many Moons
by Jamie Sams
The wisdom of the Ancients
Floats upon the seas,
Nestles in the forests,
And stands among the trees.
This ancient form of knowing,
Grows amidst the sands,
Waiting for the human race
To learn from the land.
There among the whispers,
Of creatures, stones, and wind,
The wisdom of the Ancestors
Is waiting to befriend
Any human seeker who
Wants to find the way.
Honoring the ancient wisdom
Through actions taken today.
