Three perspectives by:

• A Humanist Perspective by Jerry Lusa
• A Buddhist Perspective by Nancy Thompson

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A Humanist Perspective

By Jerry Lusa, Sunday Services Committee

Maybe it’s the new job. I feel like Gimli standing in front of the Dark Door at the end of the Dim­holt road. Him, a dwarf hesitant to go underground, and me a Humanist / Taoist / Zen Buddhist hesitant to dive into either enlightenment or The Enlightenment. Both enlightenments are the rock on which I stand, the air which I breathe, and yet I stare into a void. Ah, well, here goes…

The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Enlightenment, was the time between 1650 and 1800 when the thinkers of the day got free from the stultifying oppression of ecclesiastical authority that had held back the general progress of European society for a millennium. The sciences and philosophies they developed have blossomed to free us from tyranny, toil, plague and parasite. And it keeps getting better. The number of people dying from violence is steadily decreasing. Diseases are overcome faster than new ones arrive. The number of children starving to death or dying from preventable illnesses each day is dwindling (a big shout-out to Bill and Melinda Gates!) Intolerance is fading, though mostly in places that have embraced the principles which emerged in The Enlightenment. I’m feeling upbeat here.

So what could this possibly have to do with the small-e enlightenment discovered by Guatama Buddha two thousand four hundred years ago, you ask? The Enlightenment has certainly reduced many kinds of human suffering, which is also what the Buddha sought. How many of us know the physical suffering of the raw, organic human existence that the Buddha’s contemporaries knew? We may fanta­size about a noble past, but would we want to go back to lice and flees and tapeworms, and tigers drag­ging people into the night? Would we want to go back in time as servants to brutes, them taking our sons for their armies and our daughters for their palaces? Thanks to the discoveries and the ideas of The Enlightenment, we are largely free of those kinds of suffering – and it keeps getting better!

And yet we suffer: some of it real, some of it of our own making. We all know real suffering. I won’t dwell on that. But the human mind evolved to be ever alert to danger, the snap of a twig or a scent on the breeze. Sitting at our desks and in our kitchens and our living rooms we are divorced from the reality for which we evolved; we know this now, thanks again to the Age of Enlightenment. We know that our minds will find phantoms where there are none. We perceive threats and problems where none are present. We fret over wants when our cupboards are full. Here is where the Buddha’s ancient wis­dom still holds true. We still suffer when we need not.

Big-E and little-e enlightenment are very similar in a way. The little-e kind requires us to abandon our preconceptions of the world and of ourselves. The big-E kind, if we want to not just take advantage of it but actually know it, requires us to abandon wanting the world to be the way we might want it. The laws of physics describe all of what we perceive, and evolutionary psychology can answer our questions about ourselves, but it takes a bit of work to get there, the work of adding knowledge to our minds. Lit­tle-e enlightenment also takes work, but in a subtractive way, shedding that to which we cling.

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A Buddhist Perspective

By Nancy Thompson, UUS:E Buddhist Group

Enlightenment is at the heart of the Buddhist path; it’s what Buddhists aspire to achieve — for themselves, for all beings, for society — by practicing Buddhism. But enlightenment, or nirvana, is not a place that we get to, like heaven; it’s a state of mind that we bring to whatever circumstances arise. Noah Levine, a contemporary teacher in Buddhism’s oldest tradition, the Thai Forest tradition, says the Pali word for nirvana, nibanna, is a cooking term that literally means “no boil,” or to remove from heat. The person who has achieved enlightenment is able to be in the world with wisdom and compassion, fully awake to the world’s suffering but not drawn into it. That’s how a buddha or bodhisattva — those who vow not to attain enlightenment until they have led all other beings there– are able to be of help in the world, by seeing needs and responding compassionately.

The later schools of Buddhism say that we already are enlightened, we already have the innate wisdom and compassion of a buddha, but it’s covered up by fear, anger, confusion, and conditioning. The path, then, is not about becoming enlightened but unpeeling the layers that cover up our true na­ture. It’s about awakening to our inherent worth and dignity and seeing it in others. We all have moments of enlightenment. For a lot of people, they come in nature. When we lose our­selves in a leaf or feel the rhythms of the ocean’s waves or gaze in wonder at a sunset, we feel that con­nection to something larger, something that is beyond words or thought. something that is, simply, enough without any embellishment.

Discovering that connection to the inherent web of all existence is the aim of Buddhist meditation techniques. The thought is that if you can connect to it in meditation, you can begin to bring it into the world with you. And when you see the world and act in the world from that larger view, you discover the compassionate wisdom to see things as they are and the skillful methods to work toward making them better.

Enlightenment is possible, Jack Kornfield says, describing it as “unbounded freedom and joy, one­ness with the divine, awakening into a state of timeless grace.” But those moments don’t last. “We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage, after the election comes the hard task of govern­ance. In spiritual life, it is no different: After the ecstasy comes the laundry.”

For more, come to the May 26^th service: “How to Act Like an Enlightened Being.” Check the Sun­day Services page for more information.
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Three perspectives by:

• Marlene Geary
• Jerry Lusa
• Nancy Thompson

Can Redemption Be a Choice?

from Marlene J. Geary, Chair, Sunday Services Committee

Andy: My wife used to say I’m a hard man to know. Like a closed book. Complained about it all the time. She was beautiful. God I loved her. I just didn’t know how to show it, that’s all. I killed her, Red. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I drove her away. And that’s why she died, because of me.

Andy: It comes down to a simple choice: get busy living or get busy dying.

- Shawshank Redemption

In the movie Shawshank Redemption, there are several intertwining stories of redemption. The primary story is that of Andy Dufresne, who has been sent to Shawshank after having been convicted of killing his wife and her lover. Most people watch the movie and believe that Andy is innocent, some viewers are not so sure, but regardless of whether or not Andy actually pulled the trigger, he believes he’s killed her. He carries that guilt.

So, Andy finds ways to pay for the crime against his wife: he builds a much better prison library and starts literacy programs to help the lives of other prisoners.

But that’s not where it ends: that’s not the redemption. Andy might have chosen to work his entire life in the prison and never let himself stop paying for the crime he’s committed. He has a choice: he can carry the guilt for the rest of his life and simply stop living because of it, or he can choose to live.

So Andy opens up the opportunity for redemption: he allows himself the chance to be done atoning for his crime. He chooses the chance to live a life where the slate has been wiped clean, where he has been redeemed.

This chance is his tunnel: Andy starts digging himself a tunnel out of the prison. It takes decades, carving out inch by precious inch of cement. In the end, he escapes with a long crawl down a dark sewage tunnel, but in the end, as the movie says, he comes out clean. He’s free. He is delivered from the guilt he carries; he is redeemed.

Can you offer yourself redemption? Will you let yourself be redeemed? Will you let yourself be your own redeemer? Is there a place in your life where you carry such guilt that you cannot get busy living? If you’re paying for mistakes you’ve made, have you thought about the redemption endgame? We’re all very good at paying for crimes we’ve committed, but can we allow ourselves the choice to be redeemed? Can we allow others to make that choice?

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Redemption: A Humanist Perspective

by Jerry Lusa, Sunday Services Committee

“Redemption” started as a religious word meaning to pay a price to become free from the conse­quences of sin. Today it can mean the act, process, or an instance of redeeming, which in turn means buying back, freeing, or compensating for faults.  We can reach redemption (an instance), or we can practice re­demption (the process).

Redemption helps us recover from choices, actions, or even inaction that we later come to regret. I carry such a regret with me, one that arose from inaction.  It’s not overwhelming; I could easily let it go.  I choose to carry it because of the ongoing redemption the telling of it gives me, and thus begins my tale: “There was a ship…”

My grandmother Patricia Murray Lusa loved to read, and she worked at keeping her mind sharp.  One way she kept sharp in her later years was to memorize Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the An­cient Mariner – all 625 lines! It took her a couple years of nightly practice to memorize the whole poem.  Each night before sleep as she lay in bed she would start reciting from the beginning until she reached the part where she had left off the night before, and then she would add a few more lines to her repertoire.  I re­member the glee with which she recited the poem in its entirety for us, and while I can’t vouch for her preci­sion I’m inclined to believe she got it right word for word.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written in the late 1790’s in an archaic form of English even for its day, using Rime instead of Rhyme for example.  Coleridge’s contemporaries found this annoying.  Still it has endured; almost everyone has heard its most ubiquitous lines though they might not know the source…

Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

Those who know of the poem will know that an albatross is involved, from which we get the phrase, “an albatross around their neck”…

Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.

But the poem isn’t about water or albatrosses; it’s about redemption.  The titular mariner spends much of the poem enduring various trials and tribulations as redemption for having killed said bird, and his redemption is also ongoing: he is cursed to retell his tale in perpetuity…

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

And here resumes my own tale of regret, for I too carry an albatross. In the early 1980’s I was living alone in the city, working at my first job.  I was only vaguely aware that my grandmother Patricia was ill.  She seemed healthy in the summer of 1982 when I invited her and my grandfather to my workplace to show them our mini-computer, the first computer they had ever seen in person.  When she died in a hospital in 1983 I wasn’t even aware she had been hospitalized. I learned later that she didn’t want people to see her in her emaciated condition.

I wish I had known she was so ill, that I had paid more attention to her health, and that she had let me visit her.  This is the albatross I carry.  Like the ancient mariner, my redemption is perpetual.  The mariner must tell his tale at an uncertain hour, and I tell my tale to those who will listen.
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Redemption: A Buddhist Perspective

by Nancy Thompson

After the Tiger Woods scandal three years ago, where he was revealed to have had affairs, a Fox News commentator suggested that Woods should convert from Buddhism to Christianity. “I don’t think (Buddhism) offers the kind of … redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,” Brit Hume said. He’s right. Redemption means the settling of a debt, whether of monetary or spiritual value, and Buddhism has no concept that covers that. It’s said that you can have “karmic debt” to those who have been kind to you and those to whom you have been unkind, but it can’t be redeemed. It’s not a one-to-one relationship; it’s more like an attitude or tendency, a turning of the mind from meanness to kindness. That happens by understanding inter­dependence (respect for the worth and dignity of all beings, the first UU principle, and the impact our actions have one others).

There’s no cosmic ledger of debts, of who’s done what to whom. You can have an effect on events in the future by acting in the present moment, but there’s no way to make up for or absolve yourself of past deeds except to change the way you act. Buddhism is a path of personal responsibility – only you know what you have done that causes suffering for yourself or others and only you can change that. Practices can point out the way, but you have to take the action.
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Three perspectives by:

• Marlene Geary
• Jerry Lusa
• Nancy Thompson

Inheritance

by Marlene J. Geary, Chair, Sunday Services Committee

“There was a moment in the 1960s or 1970s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.

Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community- building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.

And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out—worship, prayer, God, holy, sacred, salvation, divine, and many others—are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you’ll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you’ll find today’s UU churches to be unhygienic environments.” — Doug Muder

My religious inheritance? Primarily Roman Catholic. My mother’s family was French Roman Catholic, handed down through generations of Acadians. My father’s maternal family was Congregational- Protestant. Dad’s paternal side was Irish Catholic, straight back to County Waterford – so Catholic that my paternal great-grandmother spirited the baby away to be baptized by a priest, right under my grandmother’s nose. My brother and I were raised Catholic.

My own current belief system sits firmly in the agnostic and religious humanist camp, but I am not one to take on labels easily. I prefer to grow and change with what’s right for me, and I’m glad that  the framework of Unitarian Universalism allows me – and asks me – to do that.

But I still have the trappings of Catholicism around me. I appreciate the “Cult of Mary” that retains within it an ancient form of goddess/earthmother worship going back through to Isis and other far older archetypal female figures. I have a figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, because to me she’s one of the protection goddesses of the American continents. But she stands next to tiny figures of the Buddha and Kwan Yin. My Catholic confirmation name is Bridgette (for St. Brigid of Kildare) and I keep Brigid’s cross hung in my living room: not only a Christian symbol, but purportedly a prehistoric sun wheel symbol. I have something in me about wanting to keep symbols of protection around me and it works for me to use images and statues for that purpose.

I realize perhaps this behavior is sourced out of my religious inheritance: being taught to pray to the trinity (God/Jesus/Holy Spirit) and the saints for protection. I’m okay with that, but it doesn’t mean I’m praying to the iconography. Instead, it is similar to keeping a small library of books around me: books reassure me of the knowledge that is also our collective societal inheritance. I feel as if our religious inheritance and our written (not to mention oral) inheritance must stand together to carry us forward. I acknowledge that it may be theologically immature to select the bits of the Catholic religion with which I resonate – but I have long felt I could not follow the core tenets of the Catholic faith unless I was outside of that religion’s dogmatic and institutional structures.

So I would ask: how do you view the religion of your inheritance? Is it something to be shaken off and left behind? Or it is a “source” that might offer truth and meaning? What if you had no religious inheritance? What does it mean to have a Unitarian Universalist inheritance through generations, when Unitarian Universalism is mere decades old and has gone through so many changes since the merger of Unitarians and Universalists? What kind of religious inheritance will your children have? How will their behaviors differ from yours if you had a different inheritance?

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A Humanist Perspective

By Jerry Lusa, Sunday Services Committee

Inheritance is a flexible word. It’s a noun created from the verb inherit by adding the suffix –ance, which indicates “the act of” or “that which is”.  The resulting noun (ehem) inherits its meaning from the verb. The term Mendelian inheritance is an example of the word being used to represent an act, in this case the passing of traits from parents to offspring according to sets of rules.  Examples of inheritance as things which are inherited include: property, biological genes, personal characteristics, and cultural heritage.  We can inherit lawnmowers, Lladro collections, eye color, temperament, regional character, styles of dress and languages.

Gregor Johann Mendel didn’t know about the genes behind the patterns he discovered in the inheri­tance of traits, but his work helped steer future scientists to discover the genes themselves.  Genetic inheri­tance goes deep, over three billion years deep!  Virtually everything alive today shares exact copies of a few dozen core genes inherited from a vastly distant ancestor.  You, me, Archie the therapy dog, grasshoppers, worms, even bacteria in the garden soil, we all have the same DNA sequences for transcribing proteins.  Unless you were born in a mid-oceanic thermal vent, you’re one of the immediate family (and even if you were you’re still a close cousin). How’s that for being connected!

When I think of inheritance in my immediate family, an episode comes to mind in which an older generation decided to address years of unresolved sibling conflict during the dividing of their parents’ estate.  I have often wondered if the deceased might have bequeathed their estate to a more charitable group had they known the ill will that it would release.  It was not lost on me as a young man that the real inheritance wasn’t property and money but a legacy of familial rift.  Note to self: get my relationships in order and help my kids with theirs.

Family feud aside, there was at least an initial presumption of equitable inheritance among my rela­tives, which is called partible inheritance.  This is not the case in all cultures, especially in the past.  People have invented almost every conceivable permutation of inheritance scheme, including matrilineal succession where property is passed along the female line, and a plethora of patrilineal succession schemes including the current Islamic practice where female descendants (only) get half the proportion given to males. If this bla­tant sexism offends the post-Enlightenment reader, it might be some consolation that the quirk of odd frac­tions in Islamic inheritance gave Muhammad ibn M?s? al-Khw?rizm? the impetus to develop algebra.

There is also duty that comes with some forms of inheritance, and mathematics is a good example.  We have an obligation to posterity to learn, cultivate, preserve and pass on this elaborate knowledge that we have inherited and which is so essential to our way of life.  Likewise, artists are obligated by the inheritance of their craft that looms over their work, the standards of prior art by which they will be judged.

Inheritance in whatever form can be a double-edged sword.  We can get the good or the bad, or even both in the same stroke.  I inherited my great grandfather’s height, which is handy for reaching the top shelf in grocery stores, Jiffy pie mix usually.  But being tall isn’t so useful where there are low doorways, ceilings and stairwells; decades of cranial bumps and scrapes have taught me to fear colonial buildings like those at Sturbridge Village.

I’m curious to see where Rev. Josh and the lay ministry take the concept of inheritance in the upcom­ing March sermons.  Inheritance as an idea ranges far and wide.  It is deeply moving for me to meditate on how all living things have some of the same genes; it is a spiritual moment of inheritance and connectivity.
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Inheritance: A Buddhist Perspective

By Nancy Thompson

What can you say about inheri­tance, the ministry theme for March, when your spiri­tual tradition says that everything is impermanent and empty?  That set of china that your great-grandmother brought over from the old country? Even as it sits in the cabinet, wrapped in bubble plastic, it becomes more fragile with time. It may survive you – and even your children – but eventually it will become pieces that make it no longer able to function as china. And really, they are just plates and cups; the meaning you ascribe to them is not an inherent  part, would not carry over if the china went out of your family. So inheritance in Buddhist terms isn’t about material things. It has more to do with view and energy. What do we get from our ancestors, and what can we give to our children? The Buddha said, in the very first lines of the Dhammapada, that we create the world with our minds. Our sense of self is created in part through our earliest interactions with our families, whether they respond to our infant needs and treat us as valued and important or ignore them or see them as a burden.

And so we shape our children and our world: What is our attitude toward others? Toward the environment? Toward wealth? How do we define suc­cess? What would we do to get it? The Buddhist teachings on karma, which essentially means that our actions have consequences, describe how that energetic inheritance works. It doesn’t mean that if you kill a fly you will be reborn as a fly. It’s more that as you act in a kind and loving way, you’ll move in that direction. If you act from fear and anger, you’ll create fear and anger.  We have individual karma, family karma, and societal karma. Whether you believe that we return for multiple lifetimes to work out our karma or that it ends with our death, it’s easy to see how our actions influence what we give our children in our bank accounts, the environment, the structure of society.  Karma is not destiny; it can be purified by recognizing the effects of our actions and changing them. Bud­dhism challenges us to both recognize that we are re­sponsible for the consequences of our actions and thoughts and to see that every moment is a fresh be­ginning, every moment is a chance to start over, to change our thoughts — which changes our actions which changes the world.
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A Resilient Community, by Marlene J. Geary

A Humanist Perspective on February’s Ministry Theme: Resilience, by Jerry Lusa

A Buddhist Perspective on February Ministry Theme: Resilience, by Nancy Thompson

A Resilient Community

by Marlene J. Geary, Chair, Sunday Services Committee

“Communal spiritual practices and mutual care for each other enhance resilience in the midst of adversity and in the aftermath of trauma…” – M. Jan Holton, from her ethnographic research with the Dinka men, the “Lost Boys of the Sudan.” “Back in the 1970s and 80s African American pastoral theologians Edward Wimberly, Archie Smith, and others challenged their colleagues to see the limitations of the clinical paradigm of pastoral care with its focus on healing through one-on-one pastoral counseling relationships. They described a communal approach to pastoral care in the African American Church, arguing that this approach focused on sustaining its members in the face of racism, knowing that individual healing was not possible without social transformation.” – Carrie Doehring

It’s hard to break into a new community, I think, especially a tight-knit one like ours. I’m celebrating the beginning of my fourth year here at UUS:E, and I still remember how daunting it was to realize that everyone knew each other so well. For me, it wasn’t long before I reached out to some people and then lots of folks started reaching out to me. And soon I felt like part of the family.

What was most remarkable to me as a newcomer was the way that people cared for each other. I saw this most clearly in my small group ministry, where we went deep with trust and honesty, intimacy and ultimacy. If I had one wish, it’d be that everyone was a part of a small group ministry. The experience of a small group ministry’s discussion is fantastic in and of itself, but it’s a wonderful thing to have a core group of people that know you, often before you get to know the rest of the congregation. Knowing people that care for you makes it a lot easier to scan the crowd on Sundays, head to big events like our Mid-Winter Goods & Services Auction, and relax at events like the All-Society Summer Picnic in July. It’s nice when you can count on someone knowing your name and caring enough to want to be a part of your life. This is what brings me back again and again: the people of this congregation and the way they care for each other.

There are small groups like this all over UUS:E. Not only small group ministries, but other affinity groups where members and friends get the chance to be a part of each other’s lives, reach out to each other and offer love to the light in each other. Groups like the Rainbow Alliance; the Humanist Group; the Buddhist Group; the Dream Group; the UU Christian Fellowship; the Couples Group; the Young Adult Group; the Retired Men’s Group; the Covenant of UU Pagans; the Breakfast Club and more.

Connections to each other help us through times when our society seems to be tipping the scales of collective mass insanity and we’re overwhelmed with the related empathic distress. Bonds with each other help us when our worlds are collapsing under pressure or exploding with possibility. I think that caring for each other is key to making our congregational family sustainable over the years. And I believe that caring for each other is part of what makes our community so resilient. I count myself pretty lucky to have found UUS:E.
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A Humanist Perspective on February’s Ministry Theme: Resilience

By Jerry Lusa

We don’t have to look far to see examples of resilience; it is the hallmark of life everywhere! Every living species has adapted to the world around it. Each living thing can suffer degrees of damage and still repair itself to keep on living. Complex animals, like hagfish and hamsters and humans constantly replenish aging cells; we have resilience against the very mortality of our own tissue. The unique resilience of living things to stay alive is astonishing!

Nothing in the universe works against the decay of entropy the way life does. No stone, when split, can heal itself. People have invented fabrics that can repair rips by themselves, but only the first rip in each place. The Internet can keep running when core servers are lost, but those servers won’t ever repair themselves. Life does repair itself!

Life is resilience, literally. Cut us and we heal. Infect us and we defend ourselves. We complex animals have resiliency in the structure of our bodies. Our Hox genes give us pairs of limbs and senses along our head-tail axis, giving us physical redundancy that is insurance in a dangerous world. Stereo hearing is a great thing, but I can personally attest that it’s possible to get along with just one working ear.

Some of the most complex life forms have developed special kinds of resilience. I’m referring to those animals, including us, that are self-aware. We have ways of healing damage to our awareness, to our spirits. I marvel at how elephants grieve at loss in ways we recognize in ourselves. They suffer, they grieve, they heal, and they get back to the business of being elephants.

Humans, with our elevated cognition and language, suffer keenly – probably more than any other animals. We hurt, we are aware that we hurt, and we reflect on our pain, all of which compounds our suffering. And yet we have ways of coping, which is a good thing because there has been a lot to cope with through the ages!

Our ancestors faced horrors that we in first world countries only imagine: predation from animals, horrific maladies, deadly neighbors, and all this lurking in the shadows of their imaginations. Yet we know they had resilient spirits because we are resilient and we got our resilience from them. We find hope in each new day the way they did. We move past grief to live in the present the way they did. We have resilience. We are resilience!
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A Buddhist Perspective on February Ministry Theme: Resilience

By Nancy Thompson

Remember Weebles — the children’s toy with the slogan “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”? Small, round, sort-of-human figures, they had a curved – but weighted—base so that young children could push them over, and they would spring back up. My friend, Ven. Lawrence Do’an Grecco, a Zen monk, sometimes brings Weebles to illustrate his talks on equanimity, the quality that allows you to roll back up when you get knocked down, whether by ill fortune or giddy joy.

Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist teacher with the Insight Meditation Society, defines equanimity as balance – which is key to resilience.

To some degree, equanimity is what’s known as a fruitional quality – the result of other practices. It is the fourth of the Four Brahma Viharas, or heavenly states, and said to be the most difficult to attain. To dwell in equanimity, you have to accept impermanence and emptiness – the current situation, whatever it is, will not last. Nor will it define us. Emptiness says that states of being (and beings) are not solid, permanent, or independent. We change in response to circumstances; we adapt; we persevere. Life goes on.

We lose equanimity, and resilience, when we think that a situation has to be a certain way to be acceptable, that we can’t go on without whatever thing or circumstance we think is necessary. Then we suffer. If we can be flexible and work with what we have rather than insisting that things be a certain way, we can come back.

We can experience this in meditation. When we lose concentration, we come back. When the room is too hot or too cold, too loud, too quiet, with too many people or not enough, we watch thoughts arise and pass, pains arise and diminish, and emotions move through our minds like clouds across the sky. The sky is there no matter what is front of it – and when the clouds move or the storm clears or the bright sun sets, there it is. It doesn’t come back; it was always there, just obscured. And like the sky, our inherent goodness is always there, just obscured by circumstance. Knowing that is the weight in the Weeble, the source of balance and resilience.
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By Jerry Lusa,
Sunday Services Committee

We don’t often use the word discernment in everyday conversation. It reminds me of the word recondite, which we also don’t use much. Recondite is one of those abstruse, little known words, but it is also very special because it just happens to mean “abstruse” and “little known.” Yep, recondite is self-referencing; a little known word that means little known. I picture a dog named Recondite chasing its own tail.

This brings me to another way that the word discernment reminds me of recondite, which is that discernment is also self-referential. Discernment is about finding the essence of things, which is what we do when we look for meaning in a word. To understand discernment, we have to discern its meaning. Look at the dog spin!

The dictionary defines discernment as going past the mere perception of something and making detailed judgments about that thing. It is the ability to judge well, to grasp and comprehend what is obscure. When I hear the word obscure I start thinking about recondite again. I’d better stop before the dog gets too dizzy!

Discernment is about making judgments, but not petty judgments. It’s not just judging, it’s judging well, like appreciating the harmony in a choral performance. And it’s not judging the ordinary; it’s judging the obscure, like detecting the faintest hint of vanilla in the “nose” of a cheap merlot. It’s starting to sound like discernment is a snob. But discernment shows up in almost every imaginable context. We discern other people’s emotional state when we are mindful of them, as when a parent comforts an upset child. We discern the ineffable when we meditate, what is left when no thoughts remain.

For me, discernment has two flavors, inner and outer, which we experience in very different ways. We use what I’m calling outer discernment when we look for truths about the world. Disciplines like science, math, logic and reason, even history and psychology are built upon myriad discernments between truths and falsehoods. The various categories of fallacies to which we humans are so susceptible are all failures to make these outer discernments properly. The scientific method and much of math and logic are tools for discerning truthful knowledge.

It took centuries of scientific discernment for us to know that a rainbow is the result of Rayleigh scattering and also that we perceive rainbows through the visual cortexes in our brains. This outer kind of discernment that gave us our recorded knowledge has served us well and we need to continue doing it. I wouldn’t want to ride in an airplane that was engineered by emotion or spirituality. And those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

What I’m calling inner discernment is essential to how we experience life to our fullest. It’s about expanding and refining how we feel toward the world, each other and ourselves. It’s not some-thing we need to prove and there’s no reason to try. We can work to discern the subtleties of exotic and fine foods, and our meals are more pleasurable for it. We can train our ears to the complexities of music and discern depths of beauty that were not there be-fore. Inner discernment can enrich our relations with others; for example, we can discern our own foibles and, to mangle a phrase, “by exposing, end them.”

I mentioned discernment in meditation earlier, which may seem a stretch at first because meditation involves the absence of thinking, a mental si-lence. But consider that “grasp” and “comprehend” need not be cognitive. We can grasp emotionally and we can comprehend spiritually. In the emotional or spiritual sense, meditation is discernment of the world surrounding us, and also of ourselves apart from our egos. Being apart from our egos is what makes meditation such a unique and significant experience.

A child sees a rainbow without the slightest discernment. For adults, though, it takes this inner discernment to get past the science of Rayleigh scat-tering and visual cortexes to discern the joy that we have in us for rainbows. In much the same way that we let go of our egos when we meditate, we let go of outer discernment when we enjoy the emotive and spiritual experiences of being human.

I like to save the best for last, and for me this is the best part of discernment – when it comes in the form of an epiphany. It might come as awe from discerning some new knowledge, or from gaining knowledge from discerning a new experience. Either way the feeling is deeply spiritual. I’m feeling a little epiphany right now!

Quotations On Discernment

Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.

- Lord Byron

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

- Chanakya

“Let discernment be your trustee, and mis-takes your teacher.”

- T.F. Hodge

“[Eomer:]‘How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’

‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yes-teryear…It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of The Rings

“One of the first things we learn from our teachers is discernment: the ability to tell truth from fiction, to know when we have lost our center and how to find it again. Discernment is also one of the last things we learn, when we feel our paths diverge and we must separate from our mentors in order to stay true to ourselves.”

- Anne Hill, The Baby and the Bathwater

 “The first rule of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging.”

- Molly Ivans

Through discernment, we recognize the good and find peace in the decisions we make, progressing ourselves to the future that awaits us.

- Christina Schneider

“The kinds of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch..”

- Elliot Eisner, Cognition and Curriculum

Humility

by Marlene J. Geary Chair, Sunday Services Committee

I’m the kind of person to whom quite a few things come easily. I was gifted with many talents and I count myself lucky in that respect. For example, I’ve never had to question whether or not I could learn some¬thing – it’s always been simply a matter of whether or not I wanted to. Acquiring knowledge and synthesizing it for use is a skill I often take for granted and I forget sometimes that others cannot learn as quickly or as deeply as I can in the same time frame.

Cooking is another skill that comes easily to me, too. It doesn’t really matter what it is; I can probably cook it into something that’s luscious and delectable and soul-nourishing. With one exception.

There’s a casserole I can’t make to save my soul. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that it will taste horrible – or have no taste – when it comes out of the oven.

What’s the dish? A simple American classic: Macaroni & Cheese.

This is not brain surgery: it’s pasta and cheese. I’ve used recipe after recipe, from Alton Brown and Paula Deen to the Joy of Cooking and America’s Kitchen to my grandmother’s recipe. To no avail. This is not a dish you’d want me to make for a potluck. Ever.

For years, I refused to admit that I had this Achilles heel. I kept trying. I’ve thrown out more batches of homemade mac & cheese than I should mention. For a while I stopped making it because I didn’t want to fail at something in the kitchen. I don’t like to fail at anything. I don’t like to give myself room to fail. It was in¬conceivable to me that I couldn’t master something so basic when so many other things in the kitchen came so easily.

About five years ago I had a complete success: I added bay scallops and a few other ingredients that transformed the dish into a gourmet masterpiece. But I was never able to replicate it and besides, it wasn’t your June Cleaver classic mac & cheese. It didn’t count.

Over time, this lesson of trying in spite of inevitable failure started to sink into my head. It transformed from frustration to amusement. Out of amusement came a startling realization that I could admit most humbly that even if I couldn’t do something, I could still derive joy from it. I didn’t learn that lesson as a kid.

Making mac & cheese remains a lesson in humility for me. This humility has given me the space to grow, to allow myself some compassion even when I’m not perfect at something. Each time I decide to try again, I give myself the space to take the risk even if failure is an almost-certain option.

And yet, humility hasn’t been a way to deny failure. Instead, the heavy weight of failure has eased it¬self in my mind. Failure is a more transitional part of my learning process now, rather than an end unto itself.

Paradoxically, humility is teaching me to equate in importance the lack of an ability to do something with the talent to be able to do other things. It seems as if humility is a key to trying new things and to being at peace with the process regardless of outcome. This is a hard lesson to learn for someone who can take so much for granted. But I figure I’ll keep making mac & cheese to give myself a regular reminder of humility. And I’ll do the best I can to apply the mac & cheese lesson to the other parts of my life where I could use some humility-based compassion.

“In the meantime,  There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance. The happy morning is over, The night of agony still to come; the time is noon: When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing…”

- From “For the Time Being” by W. H. Auden

In this excerpt from his poem “For the Time Being,” W. H. Auden speaks of the time between: those days and minutes and hours when we live between the major events of our existence. The time between is the time you spend in the car between games and events when you’re serving as a taxi ser-vice for your kids. The time between is the unceremonious dinner after dinner that your family shares, aside from the great turkey dinners and holiday feasts. The time between is the day upon day that you spend working, waiting for your escape to the beach or the mountains or simply your own back yard. The time between is when you’re waiting for your tea to steep or coffee to brew, when you pick up the paper or rake the leaves.

We’re filled with gratitude, or we’re reminded of it, when the major events come: holidays, wed-dings, births, deaths, wins and losses, promotions, tournaments, cruises, transitions. We’re grateful that we have so much: love, warmth, kindness, food, material things, opportunities.

We spent this summer talking about noticing miracles of all kinds. And so our discussion contin-ues with gratitude: there are gifts even in these mid-times that aren’t about the highs and lows, mira-cles for which we can be grateful at any time.

But in the dull times, the time being in which we spend so much of our days, gratitude doesn’t usually come first to mind. And so Auden tells us that even during these in-between times, we must practice our scales of rejoicing.

For the time being, he tells us, life goes on, life moves forward, there are bills to be paid and verbs to learn. And for the time being, in these moments-between, we can practice rejoicing, we can practice being filled with gratitude. And just as the practicing of a musician makes her more skilled for music, so the practicing of gratitude makes us more skilled for being grateful.

Gratitude By Mary Oliver

What did you notice?

The dew snail; the low-flying sparrow; the bat, on the wind, in the dark; big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance; the soft toad, patient in the hot sand; the sweet-hungry ants; the uproar of mice in the empty house; the tin music of the cricket’s body; the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning; the little bluebirds in their hot box; the salty talk of the wren, then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

What did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit; the carrot, rising in its elongated waist; the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the pale green wand; at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liq-uid beauty of the flowers; then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willing-ness, her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue, her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her sturdy legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root; the everlasting in its bonnets of wool; the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body; the tall, blank banks of sand; the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders; the sea and its triangles; the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green breast of the hummingbird; the eye of the pond; the wet face of the lily; the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak; the red tulip of the fox’s mouth; the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

Miracles “The Lazarus Key”

“The Lazarus Key” by Marlene J. Geary Chair, Sunday Services Committee

Years ago I was talking to my friend Mary from Louisville. She happened to slip the phrase “Lazarus key” into a sentence and I stopped her with “wait, what?” I knew she wasn’t talking about islands off the coast of Florida.

“Lazarus,” she said. She was referring to the Christian story where Jesus called forth Lazarus from the cave where his (presumably) dead body had been prepared for eternal rest. Lazarus heard Jesus and came out of the cave looking none the worse for wear but probably quite hungry. Christians have longed called this rais­ing of Lazarus from death one of the miracles of Jesus.

Mary explained that a Lazarus key in your life was something that brought you back, got you unstuck, made you alive again. A Lazarus key was a catalyst miracle – small or otherwise – that moved you along, usu­ally in some kind of personal quantum leap.

Have you ever experienced that moment in time when you felt your world pivot and transform itself? That’s a Lazarus key. Some piece of information, some action, some connection that triggered a movement within akin to transformation.

Or maybe you finally reached the top of a mountain you’d been climbing or the road you’d been run­ning and felt the physical realization that you were changed forever. You found a Lazarus key: you could see with new eyes; your body felt new; you felt wholly and completely alive.

Perhaps it was simple: the touch of a kitten’s paw, the gurgle of a baby’s laugh. Maybe it was the first time you read Thoreau or experienced the wonder of your favorite music. It could have been the moment you realized you didn’t have to ever go back from where you came. Possibly it was the moment when you awoke from a coma or you crossed that marathon finish line.

Some call these moments of catalytic life-change, these Lazarus keys, miracles.

How would you define a miracle? Is it possible for a Unitarian Universalist to celebrate miracles? Can something be a miracle if it is not related to religion? Have you ever experienced something that you would call a miracle?