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Gathering Music – Mary Bopp Welcome & Announcements Prelude: “Song of the Soul” (Cris Williamson) performed by Janet Fall Centering Chalice Lighting & Opening Words “Affirmation” by Leonard Mason We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. Rising from the earth, and reaching for the sun, all living creatures shall fulfill themselves. We affirm the steady growth of human companionship. Rising from ancient cradles and reaching for the stars, people the world over shall seek the ways of understanding. We affirm a continuing hop That out of every tragedy the spirits of individuals shall rise to build a better world. Opening Hymn #38 “Morning Has Broken” Morning has broken like the first morning, Blackbird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! Praise for them springing fresh from the Word! Sweet the rain’s new fall sunlit from heaven, Like the first dewfall on the first grass. Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden, Sprung in completeness where God’s feet pass. Mine is the sunlight! Mine is the morning Born of the one light Eden saw play! Praise with elation, praise every morning God’s recreation of the new day! Joys & Concerns Reading “Why Freedom is Important” In 1775, Patrick Henry saw the war with England coming and he delivered an eloquent speech at the Second Virginia Convention in favor of raising a militia. With grand oratory, but oblivious to the irony, he said “There is no retreat except into the chains of slavery.” Henry owned dozens of slaves, yet he declared that he himself would never succumb to being a slave to King George, delivering the famous line: “Give me liberty or give me death!” What makes freedom so important that people die for it? The writer Emmaline Soken-Huberty offers ten reasons. Freedom means freedom of expression. We can speak our minds, but we can also express ourselves non-verbally, in art or movement. Hate speech is generally not considered a protected speech. Freedom means we can practice any religion or none at all. Freedom means a free press, including radio, TV, and the internet. We are free to vote, thereby protecting democracy. Although there is still prejudice, we are free to love who we want. We are still fighting for the freedom to be in charge of our own bodies, whether it’s the “right to choose” or to come out as LGBTQ. Freedom isn’t only about what you can do; it’s about what you’re protected from: things like slavery, discrimination, and harassment. Freedom is linked to happiness. Not all freedoms are equal. Of 38 nations surveyed in a Pew study, Americans valued free speech, freedom of the press, and the right to use the internet more than other countries did. Freedom evolves over time. In the early United States, most people didn’t believe “freedom” applied to everyone. It was limited to white, land-owning men. Things are different today, even as we continue to pursue full equality for all. Freedom is political. For centuries, people have twisted the meaning of freedom to serve their political interests. Freedom for abolitionists and feminists is very different from freedom for capitalists and corporations. When listening to politicians, we need to ask, “Whose freedom are they protecting?” Each freedom is charged with such deeply felt emotions that, like Patrick Henry, people have risked and will always continue to risk their lives for liberty. Offering Offertory Music: “Born Free” (John Barry) Mary Bopp Reading “The Way of the Explorer” (Edgar Mitchell) While on a lunar expedition in 1971, astronaut Edgar Mitchell had a transcendent experience while looking back at Earth from space. It came upon him unbidden, with warning, and shook him to his core. In his memoir “The Way of the Explorer”, he describes it like this: “Looking beyond the Earth itself to the magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of these cosmic bodies was shattered. Seeing this blue and white planet floating there, seeing our sun setting in the background of the very deep black, velvety cosmos, I knew for sure in my gut that there was a purposefulness that was beyond man’s rational ability to understand. Here suddenly was a non-rational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience. Gazing through 240,000 miles toward the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious.” He came home to Earth determined to live life to the fullest, to acquire more knowledge and to abandon the economic treadmill. He did this primarily by founding the Institute of Noetic Science for the study of consciousness and other related phenomena. Of his experience in space, he said further: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon…politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that you son of a bitch.’” Sermon: “Let Freedom Ring” Judy Robbins, Guest Speaker from the Unitarian Society of Hartford Closing Hymn: “Everybody Ought to Know” (Sweet Honey in the Rock) led by Janet Fall Verse 1: Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know What freedom is What freedom is Verse 2: Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know What justice is What justice is Verse 3: Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know What friendship is What friendship is Verse 4: Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know What happiness is What happiness is Verse 5: Well, everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know Everybody ought to know What freedom is What freedom is Extinguishing the Chalice & Closing Words: “The Heart Knoweth” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. The whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church who though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye beams. The heart knoweth. Closing Circle After service conversation: Facilitated by Christina Bailey

05/14/23 by Joshua Pawelek I call this sermon “Spiraling.” Spirals are common in nature—the DNA double helix, the fiddlehead fern, the whorl of our fingerprints, the nautilus shell, hurricanes, whirlpools, galaxies. As such they can serve as metaphors for our all the ways we grow, including the ways we grow spiritually. I often say that our lives, including our spiritual lives, move in circles; yet it is more accurate to say our lives spiral. Because are always gaining more experience, whenever we come around to where we’ve been before, we never arrive at exactly the same place. Or we never experience the place in exactly the same way. We’ve grown. Maybe we’re more knowledgeable, more adept, more practiced, more skilled. Perhaps we’re more content, more at peace; perhaps we’re more sad or agitated. As the pagan writer and activist Starhawk says, “a spiral is a dynamic form of a circle. It comes back on itself, but always with a difference. It moves somewhere.”[1] I believe the early 20th-century Unitarian-turned-Anglican poet and playwright, T.S. Eliot, was pointing toward this when he wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.”[2] We come back to where we were, but there’s a difference. Spiraling is a way to talk about how we grow. Before I say more, I want to thank Ted and Nancy Pappas for purchasing this sermon at last year’s UUS:E Goods and Services Auction. He and Nancy sent me some articles, which I will link to in the online version of this sermon.[3] I have a number of takeaways from these articles: First, spirals as ubiquitous in nature from the micro to the macro to the galactic: the path of an insect approaching a light source, sunflowers, the flight of a hawk approaching its prey, the snake’s coil, the Milky Way. Second, the spiral was a sacred and multifaceted symbol for many ancient cultures and religions. While we can’t know for sure what spirals symbolized five thousand years ago, most scholars of ancient religion suggest that they referred to rebirth, regeneration, growth and change. Third, in ancient cultures the spiral is clearly associated with women and with goddesses, specifically mother goddesses. An article on the website Learn Religions says that “because of its connection with mother goddesses, the spiral is a feminine symbol, representing not only women but also a variety of things traditionally associated with women … lifecycles, fertility … childbirth and intuition.”[4] Fourth, spirals appear in both sacred and secular architecture, from the Greek Parthenon, to the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq, to the Vatican Museum’s spiral staircase, to a newly constructed, 1,000 foot skyscraper at 66 Hudson Blvd. in Manhattan known as “The Spiral.” Finally, the articles discuss the mathematics of spirals, the place of spirals in the sacred geometry of ancient Greece, for example, or the Fibonacci number sequence which produces a spiral when graphed. Starhawk describes the Fibonacci sequence as a “formula that says, ‘What is, plus what was, is what will be.’”[5] 2 + 1 = 3. What is, 2, plus what was, 1, is what will be, 3. And then it grows. 3+2= 5; 5+3 = 8; 8+5 = 13, and on and on. What is, plus what was, is what will be. Not a repeating circle but growth spiraling infinitely. In the words of poet Suzy Kassem, Circles / Of life … / Spiraling / Outwards / For / Infinity.[6] In the words of poet, Jewell Miller, My soul, on its journey, … / by a spiral staircase / Seeks its path to the stars.[7] So, as a common natural phenomenon, an ancient religious symbol of rebirth associated with women, a representation of the Goddess, an architectural feature, a mathematical formula, how might the spiral relate to Unitarian Universalist spirituality? This was Ted and Nancy’s question. My response is this notion of “spiraling.” I realize you may be experiencing some dissonance. If we say someone is spiraling, we typically mean they are losing control, losing their grip on reality, descending into greater and greater dysfunction. We often speak of a “downward spiral.” In the second verse of our opening hymn, Dear Weaver of Our Lives’ Design, we appeal to the weaver to “take up the fabric of our lives … and mend our rav’ling souls.”[8] We might say one who is spiraling is unraveling. This is how we commonly use the term. The downward spiral, especially when we use it as shorthand for active mental illness, is real, painful, and scary. I don’t want to lose sight of that. However, I’m mindful that our lives are also always naturally spiraling. They don’t shoot off in a straight line, a rocket into space. They turn with the days, the seasons, the years. They rotate, revolve and process with the Earth as it spirals around the galaxy. We cycle through the stages of our lives, aging through generations, through time. We’re always returning, but never quite to where we were before. What is, plus what was, is what will be. We’re spiraling. My oldest child just turned 21. My life is not quite the same. What is, plus what was, is what will be. My father-in-law died this year. My life is not quite the same. What is, plus what was, is what will be. I graduated from college. I went back to work after a leave of absence. I moved into a new home. I down-sized. I got married. I got divorced. I retired. My life is not quite the same. What is, plus what was, is what will be. I’m growing. We circle back around to the same place, but it’s never quite the same place. We’re spiraling. Recognizing how today is different from the same day last year or a decade ago or fifty years ago can bring intense emotions. Contemplate for a moment a place you lived during your childhood. Visualize that place, how it appeared from the street, how it felt inside, how it smelled. Who were you then? Who were the people in your life? Who are you now? Where are those people? What was lives on in you. It mixes with what is to produce what will be. That’s what I mean when I say our lives spiral. A spiral pattern created by Ellen Castaldini’s mother Spirals have energy. They turn, they spin, they whirl, they flow. Even when depicted in art, when they are essentially static, etched onto a cave wall or a piece of pottery, sculpted on ancient megaliths or captured on canvas, spirals have motion and power. There is similar energy in the spirals of our lives. One way to understand this energy is to think about the difference between who I was the last time I was here vs. who I am now that I’ve returned. How am I different? What accounts for the difference? What happened to create it? Some movement has happened in me or around me; some power was been exercised, either by me or by some force beyond me. Some energy has been expended. Here’s my question: Are we aware of that energy at work as we spiral? Do we take time to reflect on it? Do we learn from it? Is that energy just carrying us along (which is inevitable if we’re not paying attention); or can we somehow carry it, harness it for the sake of our growth? Starhawk features prominently in my thinking about how we might access the energy of spirals. One of her more famous books is The Spiral Dance, first published in 1979, about neopagan beliefs and practices. It’s been 30 years since I read The Spiral Dance. I have it somewhere but couldn’t find it. I don’t remember what she says in that book about the actual dance. But some of you will remember Starhawk lectured and led a spiral dance here at UUS:E on March 7th, 2013.[9] Despite a raging snowstorm, about 80 people attended, travelling from all across southern New England and eastern New York. The spiral dance is a communal ritual, a modern form of magic, designed to harness the energy of a group. In another of her books, The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature, Starhawk says, “In the spiral dance, we coil in on ourselves, then turn outward to face each person in the group as we pass. When we wind the spiral in, we concentrate energy, eventually releasing it as an upward-spiraling cone of power.” I remember this from our time with her, the whole group moving in toward the center at the end of the dance, raising arms skyward. “In the northern hemisphere,” she says, “the sun moves clockwise across the sky, and water forms a clockwise vortex when it drains down a hole. When we raise power for a positive end, to draw in energies and resources or to create something, we [dance] in a clockwise or sunwise direction.”[10] That’s what we did when she was with us—we danced clockwise. But you can dance in the other direction to harness energy for other purposes. “When we want to release or undo something,” she says, “we move widdershins, or counterclockwise.”[11] The spiral dance ritual harnesses the group’s energy to achieve some purpose, either to create something or to release something. We can understand this theologically. The spiral is an ancient symbol of the Goddess, of feminine divinity, which is one and the same with the Earth or Gaia, to use her ancient Greek name. The spiral dance evokes the goddess. Its energy is her energy. The spiral dance also evokes all the ways spirals occur in Nature. Its energy is that of the coiled snake, the soaring hawk, the river vortex, the twisting tree trunk, the whirlwind, the hurricane, all of which is also the energy of the Goddess. Its motion is the motion of stars around the centers of galaxies, all of which is the motion of the Goddess. I say our lives spiral because as we return to the places we’ve been before, whether in space or in time, we’re never quite the same. Some energy is at work, is flowing, is swirling. There’s a difference. There’s been movement. My child turned 21, my father-in-law died. What is, plus what was, is what I am becoming. Can we give ourselves the space and time to peer below the surface, to let ourselves recognize that in our spiraling we are in fact moving with the rhythms of nature, with Gaia’s patterns? Can we recognize that our Fibonacci 3+5 = 8 is akin to the 3+5 = 8 of the nautilus shell, the fiddlehead fern, the butterfly’s proboscis, the mouse curling in on itself to stay warm while sleeping, the insect approaching light, the lizard’s tail, the tidal whirlpool, the ram’s horn? It’s the same pattern. Can we recognize that the energy at the heart of our spiraling is the same energy at the heart of all nature’s spirals, is the same energy of the Goddess which the ancients represented in spirals on cave walls, baskets, figurines, pottery and ancient tombs? Can we recognize that life spirals unceasingly, and that we are inescapably part of it? Can we recognize, as the poet suggests, that the circles of our lives spiral outwards for infinity. Can we recognize, as the poet suggests, that our souls, on their journeys, seek their paths to the stars, by a spiral staircase? The late, radical feminist theologian, Mary Daly, once defined spiraling as “swirling movement … in harmony with the rhythms of whirlwinds, whirlpools and … galaxies.”[12] For her, spiraling is a practice or a way of being in the world that puts people in touch with Being—her term for divinity, Goddess, Gaia, what she also called Ultimate/Intimate Reality. We are spiraling. The question is do we know it? And as we come to know it, can we harness the energy to release what needs release, and to create what is good and meaningful in the world? Amen and blessed be. [1] Starhawk, The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature (New York: Harper One, 2005) p. 191. [2] Eliot, T.S., excerpt from The Four Quartets, in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: UUA and Beacon Press, 1993) #685. [3] Woolfe, Sam “Why Do Spirals Exist Everywhere in Nature,” May 30, 2014 (blog post): https://www.samwoolfe.com/2014/05/spirals-everywhere.html. Beyer, Catherine, “Ancient Spirals,” May 4th, 2018 (on the Learn Religions website): https://www.learnreligions.com/spirals-95990. D’Silva, Beverly, “Ancient Symbols that Still Resonate Today,” March 20, 2022 (on the BBC’s “The Collection” website): https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220318-the-ancient-enigma-that-still-resonates-today. [4] Beyer, Catherine, “Ancient Spirals,” May 4th, 2018 (on the Learn Religions website): https://www.learnreligions.com/spirals-95990. [5] Starhawk, The Earth Path, p, 192. [6] Kassem, Suzy, “Circles of Life.” See: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/circles-of-life-2/. [7] Miller, Jewell, “Spirals.” See: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/spirals-4/. [8] Dorian, Nancy, “Dear Weaver of Our Lives’ Design,” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: UUA and Beacon Press, 1993) #22. [9] Fine, Pam, “Earth Spirit, Earth Justice, Talk by Starhawk,” in the Patch, Feb. 13, 2013. See https://patch.com/connecticut/manchester/ev–earth-spirit-earth-justice-talk-by-skyhawk. [10] Starhawk, The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature (New York: Harper One, 2005) p. 192. [11] Ibid. [12] Daly, Mary, Websters’ First Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston: Beason Press, 1987) p. 167.

04/30/23 “How precious it is to be together in spiritual community. How precious it is to learn what is on each other’s hearts and minds; to hold and care for each other in times of sorrow and grief; to smile, clap and cheer for each other in times of joy and success. How precious it is to be reminded: each of our lives tells a story worth knowing, each of our lives harbors deep and abiding truths, each of our lives is sacred; and then to know by extension—to know, to trust, to believe—all life is sacred. All life is sacred.”[1] Familiar words to the members and friends of this congregation—words I’ve developed over the last 20 years, words I say every Sunday I’m in this pulpit, words I would miss if I did not say them, words that land on a uniquely challenging, even unsettling notion: all life is sacred. I suspect you typically don’t feel challenged or unsettled when you hear these words. I suspect you typically experience these words as a kind of affirmation: yes, of course all life is sacred, all life has value, all life carries a divine spark. That’s what we believe. That’s what we mean when we talk about the interdependent web. That’s what we mean when we talk about universalism. All life. As I say these words, I don’t typically feel challenged or unsettled. I say them as an affirmation, not a challenge. I say them with the intent to calm, to sooth, not to unsettle. Yet I am keenly aware there is a challenging and even unsettling question waiting in their wake. If all life is sacred, how shall we live? For me this question has always been central to Unitarian Universalism. Ours is not a faith focused on life after death, on future rewards and punishments. Ours is not a faith filled with elaborate metaphysics. Our Unitarian Universalist faith is primarily—not exclusively, but primarily—focused on this life, a faith for here, a faith for now. We’re concerned less with the question, “What shall we believe?” and more with how we shall live. I sense it is true for most people—I know it is true for me—that as we take stock of our living, our day-to-day routines and patterns, our eating, our spending, our decision-making, how we pass our time—when we genuinely reflect, examine, probe our living—we find we’re not always living as if all life is sacred. We believe it, but the belief hasn’t changed our lives. A simple (though actually quite daunting) example: we know greenhouse gasses contribute to the climate crisis, yet we still drive cars that produce greenhouse gasses. Our living doesn’t always—and sometimes can’t—align with our most deeply held values. So what would it mean to more intentionally let this belief challenge and unsettle us, to ask the question more regularly and forthrightly, “how shall we live?” Credit where credit is due: Julia Caruk purchased this sermon at last year’s Goods and Services Auction. When she and I started talking about this service, she said, essentially, that she was struggling with this notion that all life is sacred—not with whether or not it is true, but with how to respond. If the lives of not only humans, but animals, fish, insects, trees are sacred, how can we honor that sacredness with our life choices? She recognized that our living does at times cause harm. In fact, causing some harm is unavoidable. So how can we minimize that harm? She recognized that the natural world provides some guidance, yet in the natural world there is considerable violence and killing. Creatures survive by eating other creatures. One can’t witness this violence and easily draw the conclusion that nature respects all life, or that nature regards all life as sacred, at least not in the ways human beings typically define concepts like ‘respect’ and ‘sacred.’ Witnessing nature informs us that “How shall we live?” is not an easy question to answer. Exploring the question is a trek through trade-offs, compromises, gray areas, temporary answers, a lot of unknowns, and doing our best to do the least amount of harm. This is my understanding of the tension that lives at the heart of Julia’s struggle. I think we all live with this tension, but we don’t always call the question. We don’t always let our belief in the sacredness of all life challenge and unsettle us. Thank you Julia, for inviting us to consider this question this morning. Thanks for purchasing this sermon. I remind all of you that at least one sermon, possibly two, will be up for bid at the Goods and Services auction scheduled for next Saturday at 2:00 PM. We hope to see you there! I asked Julia to share with me her answers to the question. If all life is sacred, how shall we live? I want to share her answers with you. One caveat: though she thought deeply about her response, I’m not sure she was completely satisfied with it. But given all the grey areas, the complexities, the reality of the food chain, I’m pretty sure complete satisfaction is impossible. Most of our responses to this question will be contingent and will evolve as we gain new learning, insights and awareness. About her response Julia said “the more I think about it, the more I feel that empathy is really the key: always striving to learn to see different perspectives.” I note her emphasis on “always striving.” This is an ongoing question in our lives, whether we ask it or not. It never leaves us. We are always striving, not to find final answers, but to find the endlessly evolving best answers given the realities of our lives. Julia divided her response into two categories: “Activism” and “Daily Choices/Lifestyle.” Underlying her activism, she says, is the belief “that other beings exist for their own reasons and not to provide anything for me.” Activism means “Standing up for social justice,” which for Julia includes: women’s rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, animal rights. There are many ways to pursue activism. Julia identifies voting and being politically active and informed; learning true history rather than white-washed history; consuming media written by and centering women, people of color and and LGBTQIA people; going to demonstrations; and donating money (with a focus on women, people of color, and LGBTQIA-led organizations). For daily choices and lifestyle, Julia’s list is extensive. She’s looking for the ways her life intersects with non-human life and asking, given the sacredness of this non-human life, how can I live in a way that causes the least amount of harm? In those words I spoke at the beginning of the service from the naturalist Sy Montgomery, her tool of inquiry is not just her intellect, but her heart. First, Being Vegan. Not eating anything that came from an animal. Buying toiletries that were not tested on animals and do not contain animal ingredients. Not wearing fur, leather, wool, down, angora, or any other animal skin, feathers, or fur. Related to veganism, she adds avoiding palm oil and purchasing fair trade coffee, chocolate, and bananas. Second, Caring for the Planet. Installing solar panels and heat pumps. Driving a hybrid car. Reducing plastic use and overall consumption. Joining the UUS:E Sustainable Living Committee and co-leading an environmental group at work. Mowing as little as possible and not using chemicals on my property. Making my property wildlife friendly. Third, Adopting Rescue Animals. Never buying a pet and rescuing as many as possible. She says, “I spay and neuter them, but not without qualms about how this violates their rights. I try to see the world from their perspective to make their life as good as possible.” Fourth, Rethinking “Pests.” Are they invading my space or did I invade theirs? Not killing critters in my house or on my property. Taking bugs outside rather than killing them. Note: I make exceptions for blood suckers like ticks, fleas, and mosquitos, but not without qualms. Fifth, Valuing Trees and Wild Spaces. She didn’t elaborate on what this might entail, but when we spoke, she was wrestling with the idea of sentience, the capacity for perception and feeling. That is, when we say “all life is sacred,” perhaps we mean “all sentient life is sacred.” But she quickly realized sentience is too limiting. What about trees, producing oxygen, sequestering carbon, providing habitat for countless species? What about algae, fungi, mosses, ferns, all the flora in any ecosystem? It’s all part of the interdependent web and contributes to the whole. Surely it is sacred and deserves our respect. Julia didn’t say this, but given the significant data showing that trees communicate with each other, who are we to say they aren’t sentient? Julia concluded by pointing out there is always more to do and learn. “It is a journey,” she said, “and none of us is perfect.” Thank you Julia! I’ve been thinking about my response to the question. Given that all life is sacred, it is important to me to be as present, attentive and supportive as possible when people in my various circles are struggling and suffering. This includes family members, friends, neighbors, parishioners, co-workers and colleagues. Like Julia, activism matters to me. I understand my activism as building power to change systems and institutions so that their outcomes are more fair, equitable and just. Essential to building power is building relationships. I spend considerable time building relationships not only with people in this congregation, but with faith leaders, labor leaders, nonprofit leaders, issue campaign leaders, elected officials, government workers, and a variety of activists across the region. Like Julia, caring for the Earth matters to me. We don’t have solar panels on our roof at home, but we’re getting closer. We conserve energy, recycle, compost, limit food waste. We never use chemicals on our lawn. We mow as little as possible. We live in complete harmony with 100 chipmunks, 20 rabbits, 10 squirrels, a few woodpeckers, owls, hawks, foxes, coyotes, opossums, raccoons, and bobcats. I was unsuccessful in my attempt to adopt veganism, but we do conscientiously limit our weekly intake of meat. Like Julia, I take bugs out of the house. I let spiders stay in the house (unless they’re really, really big). If there’s an infestation, say of carpenter ants, I have to address it. In the end I use ant-traps in an effort to protect the integrity of the property. It’s a trade-off. I have qualms. When it comes to caring for the Earth, I have never felt that the way I live is sufficient given the magnitude of the crisis we face. For that matter, I’ve never felt that my presence when people are suffering, or my participation in efforts to build power for social justice have been sufficient. Yes, I feel like I’m doing the right thing, like I’m living as I ought to live, yet it never quite feels sufficient. This feeling of insufficiency may be the result of perfectionism, but there’s more to it. I also experience is as the ongoing presence in my life of the question, “given that all life is sacred, how shall we live?” I experience as the ongoing invitation to probe more deeply, to ask: Is there more I can do? Is there a better, more effective way to do it, a more reasonable and sane way to do it? Are there ways I am still living that don’t align with my values? Can I let them go, make more room for how I ought to live? What am I learning? Am I integrating new knowledge into my living? In short, I don’t let this feeling of insufficiency become a negative self-critique. I receive it as an invitation to keep asking the question. As Julia said, “there is always more to do and learn. It is a journey, and none of us is perfect.” I leave you with the invitation to contemplate your response to the question, if all life is sacred, how shall we live? Your answers won’t be the same as Julia’s or mine. They won’t be perfect. They may come with trade-offs and compromises. They may come with costs, some beyond your ability to pay. Most will live in that gray space between black and white. Your attempts to live your answers may still leave you feeling unsatisfied. The good news is that the question—how shall we live?—is always with us. It certainly resides at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist faith. My prayer is that when we encounter the notion that all life is sacred, we will choose to be challenged and unsettled, and we will ask the question, how shall we live? Amen and blessed be. [1] For those not familiar with the worship services I lead at UUS:E, I say these words at the conclusion of our weekly sharing of joys and concerns.

Gathering Music Welcome & Announcements Centering Prelude “I Reach Out” By Sandy Johnson Sandy Johnson, vocals; Dan Thompson, guitar Chalice Lighting and Opening Words Excerpt from Sy Montgomery Opening Hymn #298 “Wake Now My Senses” Words by Thomas Mikelson Music: traditional Irish melody, harmony by Carlton R. Young Wake, now, my senses, and hear the earth call; feel the deep power of being in all; keep, with the web of creation your vow, giving, receiving as love shows us how. Wake, now, my reason, reach out to the new; join with each pilgrim who quests for the true; honor the beauty and wisdom of time; suffer thy limit, and praise the sublime. Wake, now, compassion, give heed to the cry; voices of suffering fill the wide sky; take as your neighbor both stranger and friend, praying and striving their hardship to end. Wake, now, my conscience, with justice thy guide; join with all people whose rights are denied; take not for granted a privileged place; God’s love embraces the whole human race. Wake, now, my vision of ministry clear; brighten my pathway with radiance here; mingle my calling with all who will share; work toward a planet transformed by our care. Silence Meditation Musical Meditation Joys and Concerns Musical Meditation Offering We are taking a special fifth Sunday offering on behalf of DRUUMM (Diverse and Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries), the UUA’s oldest national People of Color organization. DRUUMM’s spring fundraiser and national worship service is on May 11th. We will publish the registration information for those who’d like to attend. As always, thank you for your generosity! Offertory Music “Holy Now” By Peter Mayer Dan Thompson, guitar; Sandy Johnson, vocals Sermon “All Life is Sacred” Rev. Josh Pawelek Closing Hymn #155 “Circle Round for Freedom” Words and music by Linda Hirschhorm Circle ’round for freedom, circle ’round for peace, for all of us imprisoned, circle for release, circle for the planet, circle for each soul, for the children of our children, keep the circle whole. Extinguishing the Chalice Closing Circle May faith in the Spirit of Life And hope for the community of Earth And Love of the light in each other Be ours now, and in all the days to come.

03/26/23 Rev. Josh Pawelek I want to say a few words about something most children do exceedingly well: asking for help. It makes sense. When we’re born, we don’t know how to do anything, except sleep, drink, cry and poop. That’s about it. Eventually we learn to smile, giggle, eat mush, then eat solid foods, talk, crawl, walk, run, jump, dance, etc. Children figure out many things on their own. For example, children learn to talk by listening to their parents or care-givers talk, and then copying what they do. However, when we’re young, there’s just so much we don’t know how to do how to do. We don’t have enough years under our belts. We don’t have enough life experience. We need help. Of course, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, teachers and paraeducators, doctors and nurses, friends and neighbors all have things they want to teach children, whether children ask for help or now. But even so, along the way, there are all sorts of things children want to do that they don’t know how to do. There are all sorts of things children want to learn. So they ask for help. It’s very natural. The baby’s cry is a way of asking for help: “Help, I’m hungry, I need something to eat.” “Help, my diaper is wet.” “Help, I’m all alone in this crib and I want to snuggle.” And it evolves from there: “Help: pick me up!” “Help: my tummy hurts.” “Help: how do you catch a ball?” “Help: I can’t sleep, there’s a monster under my bed. Can you scare it away?” “Help: show me how to do a somersault.” “Help: I can’t get my shoe tied, my button buttoned or my zipper zipped.” “Help: I’m having trouble with my homework.” “Help: How do you spell dinosaur?” “Help: What does this word mean?” “Help: How do you build a tree house? “Help: Can you drive me to the mall?” “Help: When can I learn to drive?” My point is that children ask for help all the time, and their asking is very natural. Help me understand how the world works, how my body works, how to make friends, etc. But as we age, something very odd happens. We ask for help less. In fact, many people stop asking for help entirely. We get to a certain point in our lives when we’re adults, and suddenly, if we don’t know how to do something, we’re embarrassed to ask for help. We feel like we should know how to do a certain thing, and we don’t want people to know we don’t know how to do it, so we don’t ask. Or worse, we pretend we know how to do it, even though we don’t. We want to appear competent, skilled and knowledgeable. We want to appear as if we have it all together and we don’t need help. So we don’t ask. I’m not saying this is the case for everyone. Some adults are very good at asking for help when they need it. But in my almost quarter-century of experience as a minister, I find that more often than not, adults (at least in the United States, and especially in New England) don’t like asking for help. A simple example in my life is things with motors. I don’t know anything about things with motors. A lot of people assume that men of a certain age know about cars, lawnmowers, tractors, leaf blowers, snow blowers, power tools in general, and kitchen appliances. If it runs on gas or electricity, I know virtually nothing. I’ve learned how to do a few things over the years by reading manuals or watching videos online, but I really know very little, and when something breaks, I am more likely to make it worse than better. I will ask for help, because I have to, but there’s always a tinge of embarrassment. I feel an impulse to resist revealing that I don’t know how to do something. That’s just one example. In my experience it’s even harder to ask for help when there are more serious life challenges. When we’re used to always being in control of our lives, but something gets in the way of that, like not having enough money to pay bills, or not being able to drive, it’s often difficult to admit what’s going on. Remember our ministry theme for March is vulnerability. When we feel vulnerable, at risk in some way, it can be very difficult to ask for help. I’m speaking in generalities here, but many of us feel that if we need help, it somehow reflects poorly on us. It somehow suggests that we don’t measure up to some standard of what makes a good person, and we’re very tentative about asking, or we just won’t ask at all. Mia Songbird is a writer, scholar, activist and organizer based in Oakland, CA who says: “So many of us have a deep aversion to asking for help. The idea of asking for help makes us feel like a failure, makes us feel weak. We often think of needing help as a burden. But that is toxic individualism talking! It’s telling us that we should be able to do it on our own, that if we were strong enough, good enough, capable enough, we wouldn’t need help.”[1] Think about this. We come into this world knowing instinctively how to ask for help. And yet somehow asking for help becomes problematic as we mature. We educate, train, socialize ourselves out of something that is instinctual and necessary. Mia Songbird reminds us that human beings “long to give and receive support.” She refers to a friend of hers named Amoretta Morris who says we inhabit a “divine circle of giving and receiving.” I think it is divine. Or sacred. Or holy. She says that while we often focus on what asking for help means for the person who receives the help, we often forget that giving help can be transformative for the giver. There’s a flow to giving and receiving help. When we don’t ask for help, we block that flow.[2] Mia Songbird says learning about this flow was liberating for her. Asking for help is as important as providing help. She writes: “We have a responsibility to each other to ask for help when we need it,” so that people around us can fulfill their very natural longing to help.[3] I take it one step further. Given that human beings have a deep longing to both give and receive support, I say we actually have a moral obligation to ask for help when we need it. As I hear myself say those words, I recognize that they sound strange. We typically think of helping others in need as the moral thing to do—the compassionate, loving thing to do. We don’t typically think of asking for help as the moral thing to do. I’m saying it is the moral thing to do, precisely because it creates opportunities for others to fulfill their purpose. My message for all the kids is this: when it comes to asking for help, you keep doing what you already do so well, what you do very naturally: ask for help when you need it. And hope throughout your lives you will never feel like you can’t ask for help. That is, I hope you will never unlearn how to ask for help. My message for adults: We actually know how to ask for help. We were children once. We were natural seekers of help from our caregivers and teachers. We can regain this capacity to seek help when we need it. But asking for help is more than this. It really is a moral obligation. It gives the people around us an opportunity to fulfill their longing to be of service, to be of support. And it thereby strengthens the bonds of community. Amen and blessed be. [1] Songbird, Mia, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community (New York: Hachette Books, 2020) p. 16. [2] Ibid., p. 17. [3] Ibid., p. 17.

03/19/23 Rev. Josh Pawelek Om Namah Shivaya, shivaya namah om. Salutations benevolent one. Or salutations Lord Shiva. Ancient words. Perhaps one of the most well-known mantras in Hinduism. Thanks again to Janet Fall for guiding us in these various chants this morning. Om Namah Shivaya, shivaya namah om is a prayer, a meditation on divine love, a contemplation of oneness, of all-in-all. It may have a calming effect. It may bring spiritual insight. Even if it doesn’t, one may enjoy the physical act of vocalizing, the repetition of the words, or the way the chant sounds. I call this sermon “That’s How We Learned to Get Through This.” In our lives, what have we learned about getting through difficult times, through pain, through loss, through anxiety and panic attacks—getting through what some may rightly call the end of the world? Om Namah Shivaya, shivaya namah om is one among many answers to these questions. More broadly, spiritual practice—prayer, meditation, being still, being quiet, slowing down, finding calm, finding peace, letting go, gaining perspective; and then adapting, evolving, transforming—spiritual practice helps us get through hard times. Any methods we have for grounding ourselves, centering ourselves, connecting ourselves to others help us navigate through hard times, help us “get through this.” As a reminder, our ministry theme for March is vulnerability. Last Sunday Anne Vogel introduced us to this theme. She asked the question: is vulnerability a weakness or a strength? Of course, it’s always a bit of both. However, Anne rightly emphasized the positive role vulnerability can play in our lives. When we’re willing to be vulnerable, willing to be seen for who we truly are; encountered with our blemishes, imperfections, faults and flaws; encountered in our pain and suffering; encountered in the midst of our greatest need; when we’re willing to ask for help; when we’re willing to trust that others will catch us as we fall; therein lies our capacity, and the capacity of others, to learn, to grow, to give and receive love, to give and receive compassion, to find joy, and thereby to persist, to endure, to “get through this.” So here, at the Unitarian Universalist Society: East, at this liberal religious spiritual community, this beloved community, we welcome vulnerability—your vulnerability, our collective vulnerability. We recognize vulnerability as a gift, as an opening for growth, learning, creativity, compassion, joy and love. Having said that, I also wonder if we sometimes make it sound easier than it really is. “Come, be vulnerable, share your pain. It’s a gift. It’s a pathway to growth and love.” I don’t want to romanticize it and lose sight of how difficult it can be to share one’s vulnerability, especially in a public setting. Our larger society doesn’t look kindly on vulnerability. Most of us are socialized to some degree to hide our vulnerability. Most of us don’t easily share it. It takes practice, which is why I point to the necessity of spiritual practices as instrumental in helping us “get through this.” I’ve also been wondering about and struggling with the tension between recognizing vulnerability as a universal human condition vs. recognizing the vulnerability of particular people or groups of people. Not all vulnerabilities are equal. On one hand, it is true that human beings are inherently vulnerable. None of us can survive after birth without extensive and long-term care from parents or guardians. Throughout our lives, none of us escapes the pain of illness, injury, heartbreak, loss, decline and ultimately death, all of which produce fear and anxiety, sometimes low-level, under the surface fear and anxiety, sometimes full-blown and overwhelming fear and anxiety. There are many things we can do to manage our fears and anxieties. Healthy relationships, financial stability, safe neighborhoods, good schools for our children, meaningful work, friendships, spiritual communities, not to mention access to shelter, nutritious food, and clean water: all help lessen the fear and anxiety that arise from our inherent vulnerability. Which brings me to the other hand: the less access one has to these things, the more vulnerable they are, the harder it is to “get through this.” And why do some people or groups of people tend to have less of these things? Why are some more vulnerable than others? We know we inherit and live within political and economic systems that by design make some people and some groups of people more vulnerable than others. Poor people are more vulnerable than wealthy people. People of color are more vulnerable than white people. Women are more vulnerable than men. People with disabilities are more vulnerable than able-bodied people. Elders are more vulnerable than middle-aged adults. Right now my heart is with transgender and gender non-conforming people who are daily becoming more vulnerable to political violence and what some are calling “eliminationism.” In statehouses around the country there are approximately 370 anti-trans bills under consideration. A March 6th message from the Unitarian Universalist Association described it this way: “We are experiencing the outright political targeting of transgender and nonbinary+ children and adults…. This policy violence and dehumanizing rhetoric creates an environment that can provoke physical violence and further discrimination. We are also witnessing efforts to criminalize reproductive healthcare, comprehensive education about race, Black history, and gender, and numerous issues of human rights that are spreading across countless states nationally. These attacks cut right to the heart of our fundamental religious belief in the inherent worth and dignity of each person, a fundamental right of conscience, and the values of personal agency that give us all the opportunity to live fully into our whole selves.[1] I deeply appreciate that the UUA has put out this message in support of trans and non-binary people and their families in this moment of heightened vulnerability. I appreciate that the UUA is offering programming on how congregations can organize against anti-trans legislation, as well as celebrating Trans Day of Visibility on Friday, March 31st. I hope our congregation can continue to do everything in our power to support trans people, their families and everyone who loves them in this time of heightened vulnerability. The bottom line for me is that what makes our congregation a beloved community is that we can acknowledge and respond to the common vulnerability all human beings share and simultaneously acknowledge and respond to the specific, heightened vulnerability certain people or groups of people face because of who they are. All people live with vulnerability, so we respond. Some people live with more vulnerability, so we respond. How do we respond? My title, “That’s How We Learned to Get Through This,” comes directly from the poet, independent scholar, and activist (who has been described elsewhere as a queer black troublemaker and black feminist love evangelist) Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The quote is from her 2018 book, also a poem, entitled M Archive: After the End of the World.[2] Gumbs calls this poem “speculative documentary,” “written from and with the perspective of a researcher,” what she also calls “a post-scientist sorting artifacts after the end of the world.”[3] This researcher lives many generations from now among the descendants of those who survived the end of the world and evolved in response to it. The researcher is uncovering evidence of the impacts of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis which, we know in our time, are taking an immense toll on the planet.[4] The quote I shared earlier stood out to me as a powerful recognition of an existential vulnerability, along with an enduring question, how do we live with it? How do we respond to it? How do we get through it? Here’s the quote again: “they dug in their memories for the one day. for some of them it was a couple of days per month. rock-bottom days. The days in their lives when the world had already ended. They thought back. And asked: What did we each do then? On the day that everything went wrong, when transportation and communication technologies conspired against us individually. When we personally couldn’t get out of bed, dehydrated with crying. When we didn’t ask for help. When we hurt the people we loved. When the sun died. When we lost everything. When we lost exactly who we needed to save. When we knew there would be no tomorrow. What did we each do then? How did we keep breathing past it (because we are the ones that did). They dug for those memories and stacked them in a row. That’s how. That’s how we learned to get through this.”[5] This fictional (yet not so fictional) researcher has uncovered a critical spiritual practice. Survivors of the end of the world looked back on their hardest days, and remembered what they did to get through it. They dug for those memories and stacked them in a row. I’d like to respectfully adapt this practice for our exploration of vulnerability. I’d like to invite you to recall a hard time in your life: an illness, the death of someone close to you, the dissolution of a cherished relationship, an attempt to get sober, an incapacitating period of mental illness, the loss of physical ability, the loss of a job, financial challenges, being bullied, being targeted due to gender identity, due to race, due to disability, due to something about you over which you have no control. You may even recall your experience of the world ending, as certainly there are days when it feels that way. In the midst of your vulnerability, how did you learn to get through it? What memories can you stack in a row and use in the future? If I may, I’d like to name some stacked memories, which I’ve accumulated over the years, which emerge from my experience of alcoholism in my family of origin, of having a child born with a serious medical condition, and of losing my father and my father-in-law. I remember taking small steps, short steps, tentative steps, one or two each day, and sometimes stepping back if necessary. I remember making lists and checking off the boxes. I remember learning to wait, being patient, trusting that the fear and anxiety would ease in time. I remember worrying less—or not at all—about what others thought. I remember learning what it means to be enough. I remember letting go of the need to be perfect, giving up control, embracing and living with uncertainty, falling. I remember taking deep, cleansing breaths. I remember asking for help. I remember opening up to the love of family, community and congregation. I remember building an altar and praying. I can’t tell you all these years later what words came out of my mouth, but I suspect all the words we pray in the midst of our vulnerability are some version of what the ancients prayed: Om Namah Shivaya, Shivaya namah om. Our father who art in Heaven. Baruch Atah Adonai. Salutations benevolent one. I suspect all words we pray in the midst of our vulnerability are some version of Om, the sound of creation, the beginning sound, the sacred sound of the universe. There is a common, human vulnerability. And some are more vulnerable than others. What have you learned about how to get through this? What memories will you stack for next time? Amen and blessed be. [1] Read the UUA’s entire March 6th message, “UUA Responds to Growing Legislative Attacks Against Trans and Nonbinary+ Kids and the LGBTQIA+ Community” at https://www.uua.org/pressroom/press-releases/response-attacks-lgbtqia-community. [2] Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). [3] Ibid., p. xi. [4] I want to add that M Archive is conceived as a poetic companion piece to professor M. Jacqui Alexander’s 2005 Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. At one time Gumbs served as a research assistant to Alexander. I realized early into my first reading of M Archive that familiarity with Alexander’s work would greatly benefit my understanding of Gumbs’ project. M. Jacqui Alexander is an Afro-Caribbean writer, teacher, and activist. She is both a Professor Emeritus at the Women and Gender Studies Department of the University of Toronto as well as the creator and director of the Tobago Centre “for the study and practice of indigenous spirituality.” I am adding Pedagogies of Crossing to my reading list. [5] Ibid., p.49.

02/19/23 I am slightly embarrassed. My intention this morning was—and still is—to continue reflecting on the proposed changes to Article 2 of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) bylaws, which I began in my sermon on January 22nd. I’ll explain my embarrassment, but first, as a reminder, Article 2 is the section of the bylaws that tells the world, in writing, who we are as a religious people. It proclaims to the world, in writing, the center of our faith. It currently lists the seven Unitarian Universalist principles and the six sources of our living tradition. These lists—the principles and the sources—will go away, in writing, if the new version of Article 2 is accepted by the UUA General Assembly over the course of two years of voting. As an aside, I emphasize in writing, because while what we say in writing about who we are matters immensely (which is why I continue to talk about it), I firmly believe the world learns most about who we are, not by what we say about ourselves in writing, but by how we live, how we engage the world. As the 19th-century Transcendentalist Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker once prayed: Be ours a religion which, like / sunshine, goes everywhere; / its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living.[1] In religious short-hand, we might say deeds, not creeds. I am embarrassed because when I spoke about the proposed new Article 2 last month, I was responding to a rough draft proposal originally published last fall. What I understood last fall is that the Article 2 Commission that produced that rough draft was holding a series of feedback sessions in November and December. Some of you attended those sessions. What I did not quite understand is that the Commissioners would use the feedback they received in those sessions to create a final version of their proposal to submit to the UUA Board of Trustees for its mid-January meeting. When I spoke about Article 2 a month ago, I was completely unaware of the final version, which has some significant differences from the rough draft. That’s why I am embarrassed. I was speaking to you about already outdated material. I hope and trust you will forgive me. [To read the final draft of the Article 2 Commission’s report, click here.] Love is our ministry theme for February, so I want to talk about the place of love in the proposed new Article 2. However, before I do, it feels really important to name that quite a few of you have shared reactions to and concerns about the Article 2 proposal. I don’t have the space to address all those reactions and concerns here—and I don’t necessarily think that’s my role—but I do want to say there will be opportunities for us to discuss the Article 2 proposal as a congregation. Carrie Kocher currently holds the role of UUS:E Denominational Affairs chairperson. Carrie, I’m pretty sure, accepted the nomination for that role, without knowing (because who knew?) that Article 2 would be up for debate this year. Carrie, like me, is receiving a lot of the comments, reactions, concerns, etc. Carrie and I are committed to organizing three UUS:E public forums on Article 2 proposal, likely in May. The purpose of those forums is for Carrie and I, and any other UUS:E delegates to the General Assembly, to develop a good sense of how you want your delegates to vote regarding Article 2 and the likely hundreds of amendments that delegates will be proposing during the General Assembly. Among those of you who’ve offered comments, observations, concerns, I want to thank in particular Malcolm and Susan Barlow, Carol Lacoss, Judy Durham, Lorry King, Fred Wildes, Carrie Kocher and Sudha Sevin. Many others have commented, but I want to personally acknowledge these eight. Their comments have gone into depth and are leading me to deepen and nuance my own assessment of the proposal. We’ve talked about everything from the wordiness of and lack of poetry in the proposal; to observations that there is too much emphasis on antiracism and anti-oppression identity and practice at the expense of promoting a more holistic religious setting for spiritual searching, experience and growth; to concerns that the rough draft makes no reference to democratic processes and what that implies for the future of our faith; to fears that with this proposal the UUA is actually attempting to usurp power from the congregations. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot out there on the internet, some legitimate some not so legitimate. There’s a lot of anxiety in the system, so to speak. There are camps forming within Unitarian Universalism, which is problematic, though to some degree predictable and I don’t believe fatal. I have complete faith that the UUA’s democratic, General Assembly process, over the next two years, will produce the best final new Article 2 possible. Our ministry theme for February is love. I feel the most important and essential change the proposed Article 2 makes is the way it centers love as the preeminent value of Unitarian Universalism. My favorite sentence from the rough draft proposal is “Love is the enduring force that holds us together.” I kept repeating those words when I preached about this a month ago. Now I’m upset. That language was removed from the final version. The final version says “love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.” It’s a clunky sentence. “Enduring” is such a beautiful, poetic word. Love is the enduring force that holds us together. I miss it already. Despite that change, something else emerged out of those national feedback sessions that moves me deeply. Vivian Carlson focused on this last Sunday in her reflections on love. The final version of the proposed new Article 2 adds this statement: “We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.” As an aside, I wish the statement didn’t use the phrase “doing the work.” Its jargony. It adds no value to the sentence. “We are accountable to one another for living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of love.” The spiritual discipline of love. Framing love as a discipline brings it out of the realm of pure feeling or mere sentiment, out of the realm of Hallmark and Valentine’s Day, and more importantly, out of the realm of consumer capitalism, asking: what is the practice of love? How do we manifest love in the world? How do me make love real, impactful, healing, transformative? Last week Vivian asked the question this way: “how do we keep our hearts open to the source of love when others are difficult, hurtful, hateful?” She reminded us that “the spiritual discipline of love calls us to understand that many who have been hurt, met with hatred and violence often know only how to share the same with others. They have not been held in the heart of another. They do not know the experience of love.” The spiritual discipline of love attunes us to the knowledge that we typically don’t know about a person’s life circumstances, that we typically don’t know about the ways they have or are suffering, about what burdens they are carrying, about how their day is going. I told the story earlier from my colleague, Rev. Jo VonRue, about her fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Fong. As a child Rev. VonRue was poor, at times homeless, often wore dirty clothes that didn’t smell good, struggled in school and was the target of bullying. Though she was terrified of Mrs. Fong, who tolerated no shenanigans, she says “she was never unkind towards me.” One day Mrs. Fong pulled her aside and asked if she knew what deodorant is. She was mortified. However, she writes, “when I was recently asked about a time when someone stuck their neck out for me, Mrs. Fong was the first person I thought of. It’s funny how perspective changes over time: something that once seemed mortifying now strikes me as a gesture of caring; of love.” I don’t want to speculate on Mrs. Fong’s motivations. She probably woudn’t say she was holding herself accountable for living her values through the spiritual discipline of love. But who knows? Maybe she was conducting her life and her teaching in accordance with the values of a faith community. Maybe she just had a wonderfully caring heart and knew what needed to be said in that moment, even if it would be difficult for the child to hear. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that opportunities to practice love abound. They are everywhere. They meet us every day. A Unitarian Universalist spiritual discipline of love, in my mind, orients us to these opportunities, sensitizes, alerts, attunes us to these opportunities, helps us not pass by without noticing them, helps us respond to them as best we can. A spiritual discipline of love helps us respond skillfully when, as Vivian challenges us, others are difficult, hurtful, hateful. A spiritual discipline of love helps us respond skillfully, as Rev. VonRue challenges us, in “the messy, vulnerable places.” A spiritual discipline of love helps us respond to the neighbor in crisis, the neighbor who is sinking down, as the hymn says, the neighbor facing homelessness, the neighbor whose anxiety will not subside, the neighbor whose depression keeps deepening despite treatment, the neighbor who is lonely, the neighbor whose child is struggling, the neighbor who cannot shake their addiction, the neighbor for whom the treatment did not work, the neighbor who has just lost their beloved, the health care worker neighbor or the teacher neighbor who are burned out and exhausted, the immigrant neighbor who cannot access health care to treat a condition that could be life threatening, the prisoner neighbor preparing for re-entry, the survivor neighbor of the earthquake who has lost everything and everyone, the child neighbor who needs deodorant. Indeed, a spiritual discipline of love calls us back to that ancient, moral commandment to love neighbor as self; the commandment, in Vivian’s language, to hold others in our hearts, even those who are hurtful and hateful. I don’t know what this spiritual discipline of love looks like, not yet. But I do look forward to figuring it out, exploring, experimenting, testing, practicing … with you. And assuming some version of this love-centered UUA Article 2 is adopted next year, I already have an elevator speech ready to go. When people ask me to explain Unitarian Universalism, I will tell them: It’s the practice of the spiritual discipline of love. Amen and blessed be. [1] Parker, Theodore, “Be Ours a Religion,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: UUA and Beacon Press, 1993) #683.

01/22/23 by Joshua Pawelek Note: Rev. Josh offered this sermon in response to UUA Article 2 Commission’s rough draft report released in the fall of 2022. It does not take into account the final version of the report, which incorporates more of the seven principles language from the current (1985) Article 2. Friends: our ministry theme for January is finding our center. Two weeks ago I spoke about shared ministry—a collective practice, a way of being church together—which lives at the center of our congregational life. Last Sunday, in observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday, we named the work of racial justice and also lifted up women’s rights and reproductive justice, GLBTQ justice, and environmental justice among many others avenues for social justice that are central to who we are as Unitarian Universalists. There are many other aspects of our center we can name. Last night we had a wonderful, all-congregation game night. Community—beloved community—being together—having fun together—playing together—all reside at the center of who we are as a congregation. A commitment to religious freedom lives at our center. The use of reason in our spiritual and theological searching lives at our center. A celebration of religious pluralism lives at our center. And there’s more. However, imagine that someone who is completely unfamiliar with Unitarian Universalism asks you to tell them about your faith, asks What is it? Says, You don’t share a common set of beliefs, so what holds you UUs together? More than likely, your response will include something about our seven principles. Because we don’t gather ourselves around a common set of beliefs. We gather ourselves around a set of seven principles: The inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of democratic processes; the goal of world community; and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. These principles are not beliefs. They are not confessions of faith. They are our covenant, our agreement with each other, and with Unitarian Universalists across the globe, about how we intend to live. They are guides to living here and now, living with each other, living in our wider community, in our nation, on our planet. Our principles are aspirational. To live them well is difficult. We often miss the mark, so we keep trying. Here, on Sunday mornings, and as we engage in congregational through the week, we receive an invitation—the ongoing invitation—to understand, explore, and live these principles. They inhabit a prominent space at the center of our faith—both in the intangible and soul space of Unitarian Universalism, and, in a very tangible way, on paper. That is, the seven Unitarian Universalist principles, along with the six sources of our living tradition are written in Article II of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) bylaws.[1] You might suddenly be thinking, Oh no, he’s preaching about bylaws. The last thing I want to hear on a Sunday morning is bylaws. This can’t be happening. Oh, it’s happening. Article I, by the way, tells us the name, Unitarian Universalist Association, and offers one sentence about the UUA’s history, that it is the successor organization to the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. Then comes Article II, which is entitled, “Principles and Purposes.” Again, this is where we encounter the seven principles and the six sources of our living tradition. This is—on paper—the center of our faith. The title of this sermon is “Have We No Principles?” It’s a rhetorical question, sort of. In the spring of 2020, the UUA Board of Trustees created the Article II Study Commission, and charged it “to review Article II of the UUA Bylaws, and propose any revisions that will enable our UUA, our member congregations, and our covenanted communities to be a relevant and powerful force for spiritual and moral growth, healing, and justice.” That’s the first sentence of the charge. The full charge is actually much longer, totaling 900 words.[2] This charge emerged after two years of dialogue and debate at the 2018 and 2019 UUA General Assemblies, and also after specific attempts to revise the principles going back more than a decade, including an effort to more clearly articulate the worth and dignity of non-human life, and including the movement to establish an 8th principle that calls us to conduct our congregational life and build beloved community in anti-racist, anti-oppressive ways. The Commission has completed its work. It published its proposed new Article II this past fall. We’ve included it in our eblast a few times. We’ve had some online conversation about it with our Policy Board and Program Council leaders. We’ve included it as an insert in today’s printed order of service. If you’re following the online order of service, the proposed new Article II can be found there as well. I really like the proposal. Yes, there are some aspects of the language I might want to nitpick if I were in a nitpicky mood, but I will be happy and supportive if this proposal becomes the new Article II. However, I do note two, somewhat glaring absences. First, the proposal lists no principles. Second, the proposal lists no sources of our living tradition. If the proposal becomes the new Article II, the seven principles we’ve come to know and love, the seven principles that have lived at the center of our faith for almost forty years, will go away. The same goes for the six sources. So, when I ask, “have we no principles?” it’s a rhetorical question, except that, on paper, we actually won’t have principles. Instead, the proposed new Article II names seven values at the heart of our covenant. Love is the central value, or as the proposal reads, “the enduring force that holds us together.” As we read further, “Love inspires and powers the passion with which we embody our values,” which include: justice, generosity, evolution, pluralism, equity and interdependence. If you’re curious about the process that this proposal needs to go through in order to be adopted, it’s pretty simple. First, the UUA Board has the opportunity to amend the proposal this winter. Then in June, the UUA General Assembly, meeting in Pittsburgh, will have the opportunity to amend the Board’s version and then vote to accept or reject it. In order to be accepted, it needs a simple majority vote. If accepted, there will be a year of further study, some final edits, and a final vote at the 2024 General Assembly. At that point it will need a two thirds majority to be adopted as the new Article II of the UUA bylaws. There’s a lot I can say about why I like the proposed new Article II. But I don’t think any of it actually matters until we acknowledge, reflect on and live with the grief that many of us will feel if this change goes through. The UUA adopted the current seven principles in June of 1985, the same month I graduated from high school. I’m not sure when, exactly, I became aware of the seven principles. It might have been during college. It might have been when I moved to Boston in 1989. At some point I became aware of them, and they have been the center of my faith ever since. They have been my response to the question, What is Unitarian Universalism? For better or for worse, they are in my bones. They are in my heart, my spirit, my soul. The rabbi preaches in response to the Torah. The Christian minister or priest preaches in response to the Christian New Testament. The Imam preaches in response to the Koran. I preach in response to the principles. I anticipate experiencing grief and a sense of loss if they go away. I’m mindful that a majority of you became Unitarian Universalists after 1985. For you, the seven principles have been the only center of this faith you’ve ever known. And even for those of you who were Unitarian Universalists prior to 1985, like me, you’ve lived with the seven principles for nearly 40 years. They have lived in us. So yes, we will experience grief and loss if they go away. It will feel strange learning the new language of our center. It will feel strange referring to values, rather than principles. It will feel strange referring to inspirations rather than sources. It will take time to change. I invite us to breathe together. Breathe deeply, mindful that this conversation about Article II, especially in its early stages, is as much about grief and loss as it is about embracing a new articulation of our center. Breathe. As we breathe, I’d like to share four, broad reflections on what I am thinking and feeling as I contemplate the loss of the seven principles. First Reflection: Confidence It has been my experience over the years that when I share the seven principles with people who are interested in Unitarian Universalism, the principles invariably resonate with them. The principles inspire them. People say Yes to them. People say some version of, these are my principles. People say some version of, I didn’t know religion could be like this. I’ve tried to read the proposed Article II as if I were very interested in Unitarian Universalism, but also brand new to the faith, visiting for the first time. When I read it that way, I feel confident that if the UUA adopts the new language, the same thing will happen. People will read the statement of values, and the values will resonate with them. People will be inspired. People will say: Yes, these are my values. People will say, I didn’t know religion could be like this. I feel confident. Second Reflection: Change Alone is Unchanging The seven principles were never intended to last forever. As the charge to the commission noted: “There is nothing sacred about the number of principles or sources, nor their specific wordings.” In the UUA bylaws there is an expectation that Article II will be revised on a regular basis. It has always been true of liberal religion that it embraces change, re-invents itself, adapts to better respond to the unique circumstances of its historical era. Liberal religion lets itself evolve. As much as it honors ancient revelations, it doesn’t cling to them. There is wisdom in our willingness and ability to change. When we are not willing or able to change, we risk becoming mired in outdated language, let alone outdate theological, social and cultural norms. Our willingness and ability to change is what keeps us healthy, vibrant and fresh as a religious movement over the long run. Our willingness and ability to change is what keeps us open to the reality that revelation is never sealed, that there are always new truths to be discovered, new relationships to build, new insights to gain, new hallelujahs to cry out. Change is good. Third Reflection: Love, The Enduring Force The seven principles have some glaring absences too. Perhaps their most glaring absence is their failure to mention love in any way. I am planning to preach more about this in February. The bottom line for me is that religion at its best promotes love. Religion at its best puts love into action. When I read in the Article II proposal that “love is the enduring force that holds us together,” my heart sings. Finally, that center of our faith that has been missing from the seven principles, has been found. I am filled with joy. Final Reflection: Words Ultimately Fail Us Anytime we ask language to articulate our center, our deepest-held beliefs, our purpose, the things that matter most, we confront a dilemma. No words can ever truly capture what we really mean. Yet words are all we have. So we do our best with the words we have, knowing, ultimately, that our words are inadequate. When I read the proposed new Article II, I feel like so much of it already lives in an unspoken form in the current Article II. And when I read the current Article II, I recognize that much of it will live on in the future, even if its specific words go away. This is because there is something deeper and more enduring to our faith than the limited and very human words we use to describe it. That something is, in fact, eternal, though our words are finite. The question for me is not whether we have the uniquely right words, but whether the words we have serve as good guides for our covenant, our living together. Future generations will gather at their proverbial rivers and call out our names. They likely won’t remember the words we used to describe the center of our faith. They’ll surely be using different words by then. But they will remember something of how we lived. My prayer is that whatever words we end up using, they will be the right words to guide us into lives of compassion, healing, justice and love. Amen and blessed be. [1] Read the current Article II at https://www.uua.org/files/2022-10/uua_bylaws_10312022.pdf. [2] You can read the full charge to the UUA’s Article II Commission starting on page 6 of its fall, 2022 report: https://www.uua.org/files/2023-01/a2sc_rpt_01172023.pdf.

08/29/21 by Joshua Pawelek My father spoke to trees, specifically the oaks in his backyard. And he was fairly certain they spoke to him. As most of you know, Dad died of a heart attack this past May. For those of you who don’t know, he spent his career as a research scientist at Yale University, primarily studying skin cancer and the ways that cancer metastsizes. He often generated scientific ideas through his daily meditation practice, sitting in a chair in the backyard, facing his beloved oaks. We always knew the oaks were important as the setting for his practice—their presence deepened his experience, freed his mind for a-has and eurekas. Some of you from the Unitarian Society of New Haven might remember he gave a sermon on trees in late 2019. In that sermon he said, “I have had the distinct feeling that the trees were communicating with each other and maybe even with me.” More recently he reported that the oaks were giving ideas directly to him. I have no idea if those beautiful, old oaks spoke to him. But I love the idea that they might have. So I’d like to make the case that they did speak to him, and, furthermore, that trees speak to all those who are open, attentive, attuned, curious, and genuinely willing to listen. My father is not alone. In a 2019 essay entitled “Animism, Tree-Consciousness, and the Religion of Life,” University of Florida professor of religion and environmental ethics, Bron Taylor, describes an experience he had while running in the Arroyo Seco, a canyon carved by the Los Angeles River. “One misty morning, while descending into the canyon,” he writes, “I gained a subtle perception that the trees, shimmering in a light breeze, were trying to communicate with me—not with spoken words, but as thoughts that came into my mind. They told me how hard they were working to purify the air we were polluting. I perceived their ethical judgement as well: We should change our ways and learn our planetary manners.” [1] In mainstream US culture this experience of trees speaking is outside the norm. Professor Taylor confesses he had a vivid imagination. But for most of human history, people across the planet believed spirits resided in natural things and were quite capable of communication. Scholars of religion often call this belief Animism. According to professor Taylor, “Animism … refers to perceptions that natural entities … have one or more of the following: a soul or vital life-force or spirit, personhood… and consciousness, often including special spiritual intelligence or powers…. Sometimes Animism involves communication and/or communion with such intelligences … or beliefs that these intelligences … are divine and should be worshipped and beseeched for healing or other favors. Animism generally [results in] felt kinship with [these intelligences].”[2] Although scholars often describe Animism as an ancient, discredited belief, it has never disappeared from the world. We witness versions of it in indigenous cultures on every continent who hold the land as sacred and experience nature as kin. We also encounter versions of it in modern, technological societies. We encounter it in the way people express a profound sense of relationship to the natural world and its creatures when discussing environmental crises like climate change. We find versions of it in the American, English-language nature writing of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold and those who follow in their tradition. We find it in the nature-centered work of poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry; in Tolkein’s Ents of Fangorn Forest; in Rowling’s Whomping Willow guarding the Forbidden Forest. We find it in Afro-futurist writers, oriented toward the African continent (Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Marlon James) who center the orishas or similar earth-based spiritual entities. We encounter it in Neo-Paganism, Wicca, Druidism, even in Religious Humanism.[3] It lives in our congregation. As Eileen Driscoll sang, the trunk of the tree … the branches … the leaves are calling me. They speak to me…. The trees, they are talking to me.[4] When I began my ministry at UUS:E, one of the first memorial services I officiated was for Nancy Johnson, at which we read her poem, “Trees.” She writes: Pressing against their sturdy trunks / I feel the sap surging through my veins, / And sense the sweet buds bursting forth. / In this embrace I gather peace, strength, hope / And a promise of renewed life.[5] My point is that myriad versions of this ancient spiritual belief exist today. We encounter them all the time. Of course, beliefs don’t prove trees literally speak. When a respected research scientist acknowledges that his ideas come from trees, most of us, myself included, are likely to react, on our better days, with some measure of loving, tolerant incredulity; and, on our worse days, with concern for that scientist’s grip on reality. He doesn’t mean it literally, does he? Has he told his doctor? We can get stuck here, feeling compelled to make a choice. Either the trees are speaking or they aren’t. Yes or no? Which is it? Make up your mind? But it’s also true: a well-lived spiritual life doesn’t require such choosing, advises us to avoid strict binaries, invites us away from black/white thinking into life’s grey spaces, shows us life as a continuum where the edges of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ blur and blend together, where connections, like tree roots, run deep, and where multiple possibilities reside. I might have become stuck, but a friend who knew about Dad’s tree-talking lent me a copy of Richard Powers’ 2019 novel The Overstory. Dad had read this book. I’m sure some of you have read it. For those who haven’t, Powers tells the stories of how nine main human characters relate to trees. In doing so he creates what I call a tree communication continuum, which I find helpful as I reflect on Dad’s experience. Underlying the continuum is the incontrovertible evidence that trees communicate with other trees, often through fungi that link their roots into vast underground networks. In The Overstory, the character Patricia Westerford, a dendrologist (one who studies the characteristics of trees), discovers and is the first to publish scientific evidence of trees communicating among themselves. She’s a fictional composite of the real-life scientists who’ve made these ground-breaking discoveries, such as the German scientist Peter Wohlleben who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (which Dad quoted extensively in his 2019 tree sermon); and the Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard, who recently published Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.[6] Westerford’s groundbreaking book in The Overstory is called The Secret Forest. Again, she and her book are fictional, but the science is real. She writes: “Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal (fungi) … link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information.”[7] She writes about the way trees send chemical signals to each other when they’re under attack by insects; how they coordinate nut production, how larger trees “store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded.”[8] She writes about trees as communities. She also offers a compelling view of trees as adaptable, responsive, creative, constantly seeking different ways of branching, spreading, flowering, acquiring water, sun, nutrients. She says they guess, they experiment, they see what works and they change accordingly.[9] In response to conditions they divide, multiply, transform, conjoin and endure.[10] This is all one end of the tree communication continuum. She isn’t literally talking to trees, isn’t hearing their voices. She’s studying, researching, experimenting. Though she seems very spiritual, she’s clear that one doesn’t need a mystical experience to learn what trees have to teach. The information is there for those who pay close attention. Science is thus one way for information to flow from trees to humans. On the other end of the tree communication continuum is the character Olivia Vandergriff, a college senior who suffers a near-death experience and, upon coming back to life, hears trees speaking to her, follows them to northern California and, at their direction, becomes an anti-logging movement leader. She definitely hears tree voices. She also feels, perceives, intuits, tastes, smells, hugs and, eventually, inhabits trees. I read her as undergoing a sustained mystical experience, and assume that is how Powers wants us to read her. He never implies she is living with mental illness, though he is aware people who hear voices are often diagnosed this way. Maybe it’s a mystical experience, maybe mental illness. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters is that as a college student she is shallow and lost; but as one to whom trees speak she gains clarity, purpose, vision, a sense of profound urgency for the planet, and is willing to take action. How do I interpret my father’s claim that the oaks spoke to him in light of Olivia Vandergriff? Given that he heard the voices in response to his spiritual practice, I observe him as similar to the fictional Olivia, undergoing a regular, meditation-induced mystical experience. It was not distracting. It didn’t reduce his ability to function. Rather, it increased his clarity, purpose, vision and sense of urgency. Furthermore, I see a person perceiving, in a healthy way, that the world is alive, and that he was guided, held, and nurtured by trees. Finally, between the scientist and the mystic on the tree communication continuum is what I like to call the sensualist. Throughout The Overstory, a number of characters become so attuned to the physical lives of trees that they begin, not to hear voices, but to receive messages through their senses. Earlier Susan Barlow read The Overstory’s opening passage, in which the character Mimi Ma sits on the ground and leans against a pine tree. “Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, words before words.” The scene continues later in the book: “Messages hum from out of the bark…. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say…. The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.”[11] Divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, endure—a compelling message from the physical bodies of trees about how life responds to being alive. We humans share a significant amount of DNA with trees, as we do with all living things. Doesn’t it seem possible, that if we slow down, sit still, pay attention, attune ourselves to the patterns, the currents, the hums, the smells, the hardness of bark—to all the connections that are already there, just beneath the surface—that we might actually experience the trees communicating, signaling, bathing us in sensual meaning, speaking words before words, telling us what they want us to know? Doesn’t it seem possible they speak this way constantly, and it is our task to listen? That possibility was the heart of my father’s faith. What words before words do the trees speak to you? Amen and blessed be. [1] Taylor, Bron, “Animism, Tree-Consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers’ The Overstory,” posted in the Minding Nature Journal (Winter, 2019, Volune 12, Number 1). See: https://www.humansandnature.org/animism-tree-consciousness-and-the-religion-of-life-reflections-on-richard-powers-the-overstory. [2] Taylor, Bron, “Animism, Tree-Consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers’ The Overstory,” posted in the Minding Nature Journal (Winter, 2019, Volune 12, Number 1). See: https://www.humansandnature.org/animism-tree-consciousness-and-the-religion-of-life-reflections-on-richard-powers-the-overstory. [3] Furthermore, a popular life coach and self-help author named Holly Worton says the idea for her latest book, If Trees Could Talk, was given to her by a yew tree she encountered on a forest retreat. See “Interview with Holly Worton” at NFReads.com at https://www.nfreads.com/interview-with-author-holly-worton/. Also see Worton’s blog post, “Tree Communication: How to Talk to Trees,” on HollyWorton.com, July 18,2020. She writes: She writes, “When I talk to a tree … I’m talking to its spirit…the thing that makes it alive…. It’s the soul of the tree.” See: https://www.hollyworton.com/how-to-talk-to-trees-communicating-with-tree-spirits/. [4] Driscoll, Elieen, “Tree Song,” unpublished. Composed for UUS:E worship service, August 29, 2021. [5] Johnson, Nancy, “Trees,” unpublished. Composed for UUS:E worship service, April 18, 1993. (Special thanks to Sandi Hartdagen and Donna Johnson who found the poem!) [6] For an excellent overview of Suzanne Samard’s work, see her May 4, 2021 National Public Radio interview, “Trees Talk To Each Other. ‘Mother Tree’ Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too” at https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/04/993430007/trees-talk-to-each-other-mother-tree-ecologist-hears-lessons-for-people-too. [7] Powers, Richard, The Overstory (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2018) pp. 218 – 221. [8] Powers, Richard, The Overstory, pp. 218-221. [9] Powers, Richard, The Overstory, p 491. [10] Powers, Richard, The Overstory, p. 500. [11] Powers, Richard, The Overstory, pp. 499-500

06/03/19 by UUSEadmin On May 26, 2019, the service was titled “Living Your Faith: Finding and Walking Your Path as a Unitarian Universalist.” Stacey Musulin presented the following talk. Revised Manifesto Image courtesy Ian Riddell and Kimberley Debus Those who participate in the Living Your Faith program are encouraged to write and deliver a “manifesto.” This is defined in our learning materials as “a specification of your beliefs and a description of how your practices support and further those beliefs.” It’s like a capstone project that strives to bring together what a person believes with who she aspires to be. In March, my Living Your Faith compadres and I wrote our manifestos and shared them with one another. At our last meeting, I received some really good feedback on my delivery as well as what I’d written. The best advice I got, other than to sloooow doooown, was to open up more and talk about the uncertainties I have, and the times when I feel I’m losing my way. We recognize that the spiritual path we Unitarian Universalists are on is not a lock-step linear route to inner peace and enlightenment. I value that Unitarian Universalism supports people in their search for truth and meaning over our lifespans, both individually and collectively within the congregation. I have sincere gratitude for the joys and wonders in my world, but life can also be hard, messy, and hurtful. It’s ok to question everything. I don’t have it all figured out. I know that I will struggle and change my beliefs over time, but the important thing is to keep trying, keep learning, and keep evolving. As professor Brene Brown said in her recent Netflix special, The Call to Courage, “You’re going to know failure if you’re brave with your life,” and I hope that over time, I will learn to be more courageous in my precious time here on Earth, and I believe that my faith can help me do that. I would like to share with you some of my own history and those that have influenced me on my spiritual path: I only recently joined UUS:E. I am not a life-long UU. I was first introduced briefly to this faith at age 13 by a classmate, Emily. I’d never heard of Unitarian Universalism, so I asked her, “What do you believe?” Emily paused, then answered, “We believe everything is connected.” That summed it up for her and it obviously struck a chord in me because here I am at age 48, remembering her simple words of faith. That short sentence left an impression: “We believe everything is connected.” Like so many in this country, my beliefs and cultural expressions have been influenced by Christianity. My ancestors identified as Catholic and I attended Catholic school for 11 years. However, one of my grandfathers for a time sought other religious community in the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and both my parents encouraged me to question what I learned in Catholic religious education classes. When I was a teenager, my father told me I could choose whether or not to be confirmed in the Catholic religion. I chose not to be. When she was middle-aged, about the age I am now, my mother studied many concepts of spirituality, from Bart Ehrman lectures & books about the historical Jesus to the writings of psychic Sylvia Brown. When she died, my mother identified as an agnostic who believed in a soul and some kind of afterlife. When I met my husband, Andrew, I found a fellow person-of-Catholic-traditions-who-no-longer-identified-as Catholic. He and I enjoyed deep conversations. Andrew introduced me to the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Campbell, Stephen Mitchell’s excellent translation of the Tao Te Ching, Karen Armstrong, and the Bhagavad Gita. In short, I am grateful to my family for demonstrating and supporting the idea that there is no one single path to truth. I am also very grateful for the religious education experiences I’ve enjoyed at UUS:E these past two years. I began coming to UUS:E in March 2017. I’d done a little internet research beforehand. A liberal religious tradition and the absence of a set creed intrigued me, but I think I was most curious to find out what Emily meant by, “We believe everything is connected.” As I learned more about Unitarian Universalism, the concept that participating in a discussion on race, attending a Social Justice Committee meeting, creating art, or learning strategies for nonviolent communication can count as religious education and spiritual practice at first surprised me. However, I think I always believed that those self-improvement activities, and any actions that help people directly, were more important than the traditional religious practices in which I may have engaged in the past. It was just really nice to finally have that understanding acknowledged. I credit the influence of my participation in the Living Your Faith program this year for my decision to officially join UUS:E. I so appreciate the time, thought, and energy that facilitator Tom Gervais and my co-participants, Angie, Carolyn, Ed, Elizabeth, Peter, and Wendy shared with me. With everyone’s support, I met my personal goals to improve my confidence in articulating my spiritual beliefs and to define and develop some sort of spiritual practice. So what do I believe? I believe in the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, and acknowledge at least six sources of faith…I leave room for the possibility of there being a few more sources of inspiration, like art, music, and maybe even mathematical equations. I believe in the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and to even aspire to a higher level: to treat others as they would wish to be treated (within rational limits, of course) I believe in the power of language, of reason, and the scientific method. I believe that our minds are powerful forces, both individually and collectively. I believe there is inherent goodness in humanity, and that inherent goodness is best expressed in activities that support the rights and worth of all people. I believe that actions are more important than words and I recognize the admonition in the New Testament book of James that says, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” I believe that “it takes a village” – that there is value in engaging and growing with other people, even when it is not in my introverted nature to do so. I believe that it is in my very nature to be imperfect and to experience suffering. But I also believe that it is possible to learn from my mistakes, to gain wisdom from the difficult experiences I have lived through, and will live through in the future. I believe it is possible to move beyond the negative emotions I feel. Hopefully I can be a wiser and less-judgmental person for having lived those experiences. I believe that there is some kind of all-inclusive Divine energy, but whatever that Mystery is, is not necessarily something that I can have a personal relationship with or fully comprehend with my human mind. I believe that other people can hold different beliefs and have different practices, and that my beliefs and practices are not superior to that of others. I believe that freedom of conscience is a fundamental human right. I believe that it doesn’t matter what I label my spiritual beliefs, so long as they “work” for me, respect others, and support my continued development to be a better person. Finally, I believe in what my wise teenaged UU friend Emily believed, that “everything is connected.” I think that the Seventh Principle, “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” may have been written as the final UU principle because it can be interpreted in a way that encompasses all the ideas within the previous six principles. Body, mind, and spirit are connected. Past, present, and future are connected. All life forms, our planet Earth, the Universe, and the Great Mystery (whatever you might believe that to be) are connected. The purpose of our lives is to realize the connections, and to achieve balance and peace. So how can I get to that state of connection, and feel good about who I am and what I do? In Living Your Faith, we discussed the importance of spiritual practices, but that these can take many forms. I try to meditate daily in an attempt to give my consciousness a break and realize that my true Self is not the myriad of thoughts and emotions running through my mind at any given moment. When meditating, if I stick with it long enough, I notice that I can breathe more deeply. I practice noticing the thoughts I have and realize that there is a “me”, a truer Self, that is separate from them. I am very, very good at imagining and preparing for the worst possible future scenario. While this may sometimes be a good survival strategy, it is not the best way to appreciate the gift of the here and now. Meditation and mindful actions (such as yoga or gardening) are one way to balance my “monkey mind” (no offense to monkeys) and allow myself to be a better spouse, dog-mom, daughter, sister, friend, and co-worker. On the days when concentration and releasing thoughts fail, I meditate on a short prayer I heard Reverend Josh use in an archived sermon: I don’t know….I am not in control….I have something to learn…I am here now. The key is to commit to a spiritual practice consistently, and not to allow chores, work, and worries to get in the way of what I need to do to try to stay balanced. There is a tendency to judge in our culture that left unchecked, creates toxic environments in our political system, our communities, our workplaces, our families, and within ourselves. Compassion and empathy can seem in short supply. I recognize that I can be quick to judge as well. However, when times get tough, I can, as Fred Rogers quoted his mother, “(l)ook for the helpers, You will always find people who are helping.” Witnessing the helpers, and learning and emulating their examples is one way to develop the empathy and compassion I think is needed in our outer and inner worlds today. When encountering extreme behaviors such as racism, sexism, and other forms of violence, I can employ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s principle to “attack the forces of evil, not the persons doing the evil.” I can demonstrate respect for life and keep hope through actions supporting the goal of a Beloved Community. Hopefully, my minor contributions may combine with others’ actions, like the effect of a steady wind creating multiple ripples on the surface of water. Over time and under the right circumstances, I have faith that those combined ripples can form great and powerful waves of good in our world because everything is connected, all our actions are connected. I can also commit to educating myself in ways to improve my connections with other people, the Earth, and my own Self. I will continue to read, study, ask questions, attend service, and engage in other experiences to expand my understanding and create positive connections with others. When I feel the actions of others bruise my ego or put me on the defensive, I can identify the needs of others and how those needs and values are similar to my own, thus breaking down the illusion of “me” versus “them.” I can meditate on the concept that all life holds within some Divine spark that I share as well. When I do not live up to my ideals or potential, or when my life seems hopelessly out of balance, I need to be compassionate towards myself, just as I continue to strive to be more understanding of others. Forgiveness is important to freeing oneself from the disappointments and frustrations of the past. The important thing when one falls down or falls short, is to get up and try again, to try to stay connected to your true Self, your beliefs, your loved ones, your community, and your world. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “…we must keep moving. We must keep going… if you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.” I think that admonition can apply to just about anything we want to accomplish in our lives. In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality…Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” I believe that the purpose of our lives is to realize how we all are connected to one another. As my husband, Andrew, often says, the most important thing in our lives is our relationships. The sharing of our stories, our concerns, and our joys is a sacred act that binds us into community at each Sunday service. With the love and support of my family, friends, and my UU community, I know I have a better chance of living a more purposeful, active, and balanced life that I would if I were going it alone. Diversity of thought and action is celebrated here. The inherent sacredness of each life and the stories we represent and relate are respected here. How do we stay connected amidst our differences? Retired UU minister and author Jane Ranney Rzepka credited her mother for explaining what holds a liberal religious community together. She said, “We don’t think alike, we walk together.” Being together, truly together, and present to ourselves and each other to me, is the best way to show “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Thank you for listening and for helping me on my personal spiritual path. Thank you for being with me now, and in all the days to come.

04/13/15 Because I’m in the middle of teaching our Building Your Own Theology class and inviting the participants to look deeply into themselves and their experiences in an effort to name what they believe; and because I am moved and inspired by what they are saying in class; and also because it’s been a hard few months here at UUS:E and I am looking for my own sources of grounding, comfort, solace, and peace; and also because our ministry theme for April is transcendence; and finally because it’s just plain fun for me—for all these reasons I’ve decided to share with you this morning my current thoughts on God—how I believe. There’s a story floating through the sermons of many ministers—it’s often attributed to the late Rev. Forrest Church, though I’m not sure it’s original to him—in which the parishioner says to the minister,” I try and I try and I try, but I find I just don’t believe in God.” The minister responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.” It’s possible some ministers tell this story as a way of saying “I know, there are many versions of God out there—jealous, angry, punitive gods; capricious, whimsical, unpredictable gods; callous, arrogant, selfish gods; homophobic, sexist, racist gods; imperialistic, nationalistic, violent war gods—but I know who God really is, and after I’m done listening to you tell me about the god you don’t believe in, I’m going to tell you about a god you can believe in.” To be clear, that’s not my intention here. I don’t move through the world harboring the secret conviction that the God I believe in is somehow right when all those other Gods are wrong. I don’t come to a sermon like this with the assumption that if you just open your heart to what I have to say, you’ll get it, you’ll see the light, you’ll believe. However, there is a religious impulse in humanity: a longing to connect and commune with a reality larger than ourselves; a yearning to serve, to help, to heal, to be good; a drive to imagine, to conceive, to create, to shape, to build; an instinct to worship, to praise, to offer thanks; a hunger for a better world—a more fair, just, peaceful, loving and sustainable world. Human beings express and act on this religious impulse in countless ways, through the construction over time of countless religions, theologies, spiritualties, rituals, practices, holidays, festivals, folkways, and self-help regimens— a vast, beautiful, sometimes tragic, sometimes horrendous, always multifaceted testament to humanity’s longing to encounter the Holy. When I speak to you about God in my life, I am not attempting to extract the one true belief out of the whole and then proclaim, “Here it is!” When I speak to you about God in my life, I’m simply adding one more, small voice to the vast, beautiful, sometimes tragic, sometimes horrendous landscape of human religion. I hope not that you will believe as I believe, but that you will be inspired to respond to the religious impulse that moves you and thus make your contribution to that vast, beautiful, sometimes tragic, sometimes horrendous human religious whole. Our April ministry theme is transcendence, a term often given as a quality of God. Transcendence hangs out with its close friends otherworldly, supernatural, ultimate, boundless, sublime, infinite, absolute, eternal. In his Handbook of Theological Terms[1] Van Harvey says transcendence “has been used to designate any ideal or thing or being that ‘stands over against’…. It conveys ‘otherness.’” God “is said to transcend the world in the sense that his being is not identical with or his power not exhausted by the [earthly realm].” “When this idea of transcendence has been radicalized … it has led to the view that [God] is ‘wholly other’ and, therefore, unknowable.”[2] Radical transcendence. Sit with that for a moment. A radically transcendent God exists ‘over and above’ the world, over and above humanity. A radically transcendent God lives somewhere else. A radically transcendent God is distant, separate, detached, beyond, unreachable, unknowable, inscrutable, wholly other. I read earlier from the introduction to the twentieth-century, Neo-Reformed—sometimes called Neo-Orthodox—Swiss theologian, Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. Commenting on the Apostle Paul Barth says “However great and important a man Paul may have been, the essential theme of his mission is not within him but above him—unapproachably distant and unutterably strange.” Barth often used the Latin term deus absconditus, the hidden God. There are religious people of all sorts who are quite comfortable with a radically transcendent God. I’m mindful of a quote, also attributed to the late Rev. Forrest Church: “The power which I cannot explain or know or name I call God. God is not God’s name. God is my name for the mystery that looms within and arches beyond the limits of my being.” We might call this a liberal version of deus absconditus. I find it enormously and refreshingly sane and wise to locate God in mystery, to believe in a God we cannot explain or know or name. Such belief requires us to admit our own limits; to acknowledge we don’t know everything; to find peace in the darkness; to accept that we cannot control every outcome; to accept that we must, at times, let go, that we must, at times, surrender. This is humility. At its best a wholly other God leads us to humility in our interactions with others and with the world. The problem is, I’m not sure most gods like being radically transcendent. It seems difficult for them to remain distant and unknowable, shrouded in mystery. It’s hard for them. All too often transcendent gods leave their otherworldly home and visit earth; they descend; they come down to play, provoke, punish—to send plagues and swarms of locusts, to cause droughts and floods. One of my favorite stories of a radically transcendent God who makes himself known is the Hebrew Book of Job, a somewhat unique piece of Jewish wisdom literature from which we read earlier. Job was a righteous man—God-fearing, obedient. Satan wagers with God that he can induce Job to curse God. God accepts the wager, and Satan proceeds to destroy Job’s life, ruining his livelihood, killing off his family members and livestock, afflicting his body with horrible diseases. Job never curses God, but when he wonders why he’s been made to suffer so horribly, God becomes angry and sarcastic saying, essentially, “You didn’t make the world. I made the world. I can do whatever I want, it’s not your place to question, and you wouldn’t understand anyways.” One of the enduring critiques of transcendent gods is that they do whatever they want, that they’re capricious and arbitrary, that they mis-use and abuse their power without feeling a need to justify their actions—at least without justification we mere mortals would understand. They don’t stay radically transcendent. They descend. But perhaps the problem doesn’t lie so much with the gods themselves, as with the people who speak for them. Many people don’t find an unknowable, radically transcendent god all that helpful or interesting. They’re uncomfortable with theological silence, uncomfortable with mystery, often because they need a God who can help them achieve certain social or political goals on earth. They want a transcendent god with all the power and the glory, but not the radical version. They want a knowable God who, more than anything, instills fear. My mind wanders to Jonathan Edwards’ infamous 1741 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sermon, which became the model for American hell-fire and brimstone preaching: “There is nothing that keeps wicked Men at any one Moment, out of Hell, but the meer Pleasure of GOD. By the meer Pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign Pleasure, his arbitrary Will, restrained by no Obligation, hinder’d by no manner of Difficulty.”[3] (I think this sermon should have been called God in the Hands of an Angry Preacher!). There’s often a political dimension to this kind of knowable, transcendent God—he’s a king, an autocrat, a dictator, a tyrant. He rules from the top of a hierarchy. People who promote such a God on earth often occupy parallel social and political positions—or would like to—and they favor this kind of God precisely because his power, anger and arbitrariness engender fear not only to keep a populace from rebelling, but also to motivate sufficient numbers of followers to commit violence in God’s name. I’m aware there are ten thousand other versions of knowable transcendent God, many of them quite friendly, but knowing how easy it is for transcendent God to be coopted into the service of selfish human aims, I’ve tended in my life to seek God not in some otherworldly place, not in some higher realm, but right here, among us, around us, within us, infused in the dark, brown earth, thawing with the lake ice as winter turns to spring, sinking into to early April mud, tunneling with the earth worms, falling warmly with early April rain, rolling and crashing with the great ocean waves, rising and setting with the sun and the moon, coursing through our bodies, pulsing with our blood, beating with our hearts, breathing with our lungs. I’ve longed for God to be nearby, close, present, immediate—like a friend, a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, a lover—a wise counselor when my way is unclear, a source of inspiration when my well runs dry, a muse for my creativity, a provider of comfort and solace when life is hard, a bringer of peace in the midst of chaos—a still, small voice, speaking from that place within me where I know my truth, where my conviction resides, where my voice is strong. I’ve longed for a God not beyond knowing, not unapproachable, not in Heaven, not on Olympus, not in the underworld, but right here in meaningful human interaction: the helping hand, the smile, the caring gesture, the thoughtful gift, the offered prayer, the full embrace, deep listening, meaningful conversation, the good night kiss, “I love you,” “thank you,” “I miss you,” “I’m sorry,” “What can I do?” I’ve longed for God not ‘wholly other’ but wholly familiar: in the music, the rhythm, the harmonies, the hymns, the silence spaces between the notes, the beat that goes on and on; and in the holy quiet, in the ritual words, in the heartfelt sharing, in the chalice flame. I’ve longed for God not to punish and judge and condemn, but to urge us in all manner of ways to build the beloved community, to welcome, to include, to be curious and adaptable, to apologize and forgive, to work for a more just human society, to work for a more sustainable earth, to work on behalf of the generations to come , to love, to love, to love. I’ve longed not for a transcendent God, but an immanent God. In his Handbook of Theological Terms Van Harvey says “Immanence is the technical term used to denote the nearness or presence or indwelling of God in the creation. It is usually contrasted with Transcendence.”[4] Often God is both transcendent and immanent, so I don’t want you to draw too fine a distinction. The point I am making is very personal: Transcendent God, the God of Heaven, the God of the Whirlwind, the Creator of the Universe, the Almighty, the Strict Father—none of that has ever appealed to me. It may be because I don’t feel strongly about the afterlife. I’m not longing to see God after I die. I’m longing to live the best life I can live now, and thus I long for an immanent God—God here and now. Those of you who’ve been listening closely to me over the years know that as much as I tell you I long for immanent God, I never say I know God is real, mainly because I can’t prove it. And I rarely say I believe in God, mainly because so many people confuse what they believe to be true with what they know to be true, and I don’t want to do that. Remember: we know something is true when we have some way of proving it. We believe something is true when it’s really important to us and we have no way of proving it. When someone says I believe X about God, what I hear them saying is “I really want X to be true,” or “I long for X to be true.” Belief isn’t knowledge. It’s longing. It’s wanting. It’s desire. I long for immanent God to be real, and I’ve learned through experience that the best way to satiate that longing is to live “as if” immanent God were real; to live as if every inch of the earth is sacred and matters; to live as if every human being is sacred and matters, every creature, every drop of water, every stone, every blade of grass is sacred and matters. Live as if it were so. You won’t prove anything God, but that’s not what matters. Living well, living the best life we can live here and now matters. A final thought about immanence. Van Harvey’s Handbook of Theological Terms mentioned radical transcendence, but not radical immanence. If radical transcendence is the extreme otherness of God, radical immanence must be the extreme sameness of God. My mind wandered, again, this time to the passage from Daniel Quinn’s The Holy which we read earlier. The main character Tim is sitting in the dessert, perhaps sleeping. He wakes up to discover what he first imagines is “an alien creature towering over him—a visitor from the stars, bristling with silver spikes and armored in glossy green.” Soon “he saw that the creature meant him no harm—accepted him as an equal, seemed to enfold him in its own aura of vibrant power and dignity, as if to say, ‘It’s all right. I see you too are alive. No more is required. We are comrades.”[5] Eventually Tim and the reader realize the visitor is a cactus and Tim is somehow able to see—for a brief moment— into its essence, the “vibrant, sublime energy emanating from within.” Eventually he runs up a hill so he can peer down into the valley and behold the same energy coursing through the entire landscape: “Every leaf of every tree was radiant, lustrous—incandescent with power that was unmistakably divine.”[6] This passage struck me as a description of radical immanence. I’ve never had an experience like that, though I know people who have. And I have certainly had those kinds of spiritual experiences—sometimes in nature, sometimes in response to music, sometimes in the midst of prayer—when I feel utterly related, when I feel at one with all there is. Such experiences are short-lived, fleeting, but they offer powerful opportunities to sense, to intuit, to grasp one’s connectedness to the whole of life; opportunities to sense, to intuit, to grasp the reality of our interdependence with the whole of life. Extreme sameness. Radical immanence. Is it God? I don’t know. But I promise you I will strive to live as if it were so. Amen and blessed be. [1] Harvey, Van A., A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York; Touchstone, 1992). [2] Harvey, Van A., A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York; Touchstone, 1992) pp. 242-243. [3] Edwards, Jonathan, Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, 1741. Read the text at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=etas. [4] Harvey, Van A., A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York; Touchstone, 1992), p. 127. [5] Quinn, Daniel, The Holy (New York: Context Books, 2002) p. 378. [6] Quinn, Daniel, The Holy (New York: Context Books, 2002) p. 379.

06/02/13 by UUSEadmin Alex Kapitan, LGBTQ and Multicultural Programs Administrator, Unitarian Universalist Association. Hello! And welcome, welcome, welcome again! How many folks here are here for the first time? Can you raise your hand if you’ve never worshipped here before? Fabulous! I’m so glad you’re here. And how many folks are here for the second or third time? I’m so glad you came back! I am actually one of you—I have only visited this congregation once before. I’m so delighted to be back with you today, and completely honored to be speaking to you from up here! I want to thank the leaders who invited me here and made it possible for me to join you today—Rev. Josh, the worship team, and the Welcoming Congregation Steering Group. Like Rev. Josh mentioned, my name is Alex Kapitan and I work for the Unitarian Universalist Association in our national office in Boston. I’m part of our Multicultural Growth & Witness staff group and one of the things I get to do is support the Welcoming Congregation Program. This is always an exciting time of year for Welcoming Congregations because in many parts of this country June is claimed as Pride month, and congregations like this one get a great chance to publicly share their own pride at being welcoming, inclusive, and affirming of all things gay, and lesbian, and bi, and trans, and queer. And that is certainly something to be proud of! UU Society East was originally recognized as a Welcoming Congregation in May of 1999, 14 years ago. And that recognition took place after years of intentional work—5 and a half years, to be precise. It was in 1993 that UUSE began the journey by engaging in a workshop series—only a few years after the Welcoming Congregation Program was launched by the Unitarian Universalist Association. And when you took stock in 1999 and voted on whether to seek recognition as a Welcoming Congregation, the vote was unanimously in favor. Can I get some applause and some pride for that?! Thank you for your longstanding commitment. Today, as you have many times over the past 14 years, you are recommitting yourselves to that promise you made in 1999—the promise of being a place of welcome, inclusion, affirmation, and advocacy for people that dominant culture, and certainly many mainstream religions, have deemed abnormal. I am so delighted and honored to be here in this sacred place, in this Welcoming Congregation, to share with you a little bit of my vision for what it can mean to be a Welcoming Congregation in this new century, and how we can collectively live our welcome as a spiritual practice. Before I dive in completely, I’d like to invite you to look inward for a moment. Please find a comfortable position. Feel the floor, the chair you are in. Breathe deeply. Think of a time when you felt a profound sense of welcome. (pause) Hold that experience in your mind, and consider whether the space you were in or the interaction you had was changed because you were there. What effect did your presence have? Stay present, and consider what it felt like in your body to experience that welcome. What was the effect it had on you? If you’ve never had an experience like this, or if you can’t think of one, imagine what it would feel like. (pause) Now imagine what it would be like to feel that way—that full and total welcome, that belonging—every time you entered this space. And better yet, imagine what it would be like to know with every fiber of your being that that sense of welcome and belonging was unconditional—that there was nothing about you, no part of you, whether worn on your sleeve or hidden deep inside, that would make you unworthy of welcome, of belonging, of love. Do you know what I mean when I ask you to imagine being free from the sense that there is something about you that is inherently wrong, or bad, or simply enormously different? Back in 1999 UUSE’s Welcoming Congregation Task Force said that as a Welcoming Congregation you were striving to overcome the “heterosexual assumption”—that dominant cultural norm that shows up even when we aren’t aware of it, the norm that the default is straight, and being something other than straight is different, not normal, less-than. Many people with same-sex attractions have experienced fear and shame moving through a world that tells them that straight is normal and good, and it’s an experience that is shared by many people here. But I’m actually talking about more than that one particular difference right now. I’m talking about what else you are carrying that makes you feel visibly or invisibly marked as different. What is it about you that makes you feel like the orange in a row of apples, with a song playing in the background—one of these things is not like the other… one of these things, doesn’t belong? We come here carrying hidden trauma of all kinds—internal scars from childhoods full of landmines, or young adulthoods full of heartbreak, or ongoing depression that is barely held at bay enough to be here today. We have been subject to violence of all kinds—physical, emotional, spiritual. We come here with a huge diversity of experiences—far more than we think—in terms of financial means, educational background, ability, age, sexuality, gender identity and expression, race and ethnicity, relationship and family structure, language, nationality, body size, personality types, spiritual paths and beliefs. All of us carry weight from feeling different in some way—maybe we feel that sense of difference most when we are with our families of origin; maybe we feel it most when we are out in mainstream culture, maybe we feel it most here in this space. What are you carrying? (pause) What would it be like if you could trust, unequivocally, that you were valued here for the pieces of yourself that make you feel different, not despite those pieces. That in this space there was nothing about you that could make people reverse their welcome or reject you from the circle of belonging? When I think about Beloved Community, this is what I think about and long for. A community of radical welcome, where each person affirms the piece of the divine that lives in themself and in every other being. Where we can hold each other in all of our messiness and all of our brokenness, where love and compassion reign supreme. Where each of us fully, completely, belongs. That’s my vision of Beloved Community. But how does it become manifest? I’ll tell you what I think. I think that being a Welcoming Congregation is how we practice Beloved Community. In its infancy, the Welcoming Congregation Program asked people of faith to deeply engage with the question of what was standing in their way of being fully welcoming and inclusive of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. By intentionally engaging with this question, we were invited to grapple with the assumptions—like that “heterosexual assumption”—that were forever present in our community around who belongs. Who belongs here. Who is one of us. Who belongs, and how do we communicate that circle of belonging—consciously and unconsciously, verbally and nonverbally. How does the language we use, the songs we sing, the way we teach our children, our hiring practices, our requirements for membership, and a hundred other basic elements of how we create and live out community here—how do all these things communicate who and what is valued, and who and what doesn’t belong? At its very core, the Welcoming Congregation Program asks congregations to challenge their own sense of where the boundaries of belonging are—to draw the circle wider. To practice this, so that we can keep practicing it and keep drawing that circle wider, little by little, step by step, slowly but surely. To make it a core practice to continue to ask, “where are the boundaries of belonging now?” “how can we expand them further?” This is a big ask. It’s a big deal to first look at where that circle is drawn, and it’s an even bigger deal to acknowledge that there’s room to grow. And then it’s a huge deal to actually take steps toward expanding the circle, and then to keep taking steps—to never stop and say “right on, we’ve arrived. We are done now.” This is a process of transformation. Every time. Redefining the boundary of belonging and redefining who “we” are means change. And with change comes growing pains. I know that you know this, because I know that UUSE has engaged with this sort of transformation many times. Not only when you spent 5 and a half years stretching yourselves through the Welcoming Congregation Program, but other times as well—like the more recent time that you literally transformed your building in a way that made it more accessible to people who use wheelchairs and other folks with limited mobility. Now that’s transformation. You drew the circle of belonging wider to say yes, folks who are not able to easily navigate stairs belong here, and we have to transform our very space in order to communicate that. This process of transformation is a spiritual practice. It’s spiritual, because removing the barriers to authentic relationship with ourselves and each other and moving toward manifesting the Beloved Community is the most deeply spiritual work I know. And it’s practice, because it doesn’t magically happen—naming ourselves as a Welcoming Congregation, or as an ally, doesn’t automatically transform us. This welcome takes practice. So how do we engage in welcome as a spiritual practice? How do we get to the place where you, and every other person here, feels that profound sense of welcome and belonging and trust every time you enter this space? And on the other hand, because it takes both of these things, how do we get to the place where you and every other person here can venture into the uncertainty and risk of truly being messy and still being in relationship, knowing that the trust and belonging of this space can hold that messiness? Well, before we talk about how to practice welcome, let’s take a second to chat about what gets in the way of that for us. I’m going to go back to that “heterosexual assumption” again. That’s just one example of the millions of unnamed and generally unconscious assumptions that we are barraged with as we move through this culture—assumptions about what is normal and what is different—who is an apple and who is an orange. Think again about one or more ways in which you are reminded that you are different, whether here or in some other part of your life. Some of us here are introverted and constantly feel as though people expect us to be extroverted—that we would be more valuable if we were extroverted. Some of us here have no desire to be a parent, but everywhere we go the expectation is of course we want to have kids someday, that that’s the right way to be. Some of us here are hard of hearing, and the assumption is always that we should be able to hear perfectly. Some of us here never graduated from high school, and there are a thousand ways that we are reminded that that makes us somehow less-than. There are a lot of ways that I feel like an orange in a sea of apples, but I’ll give you the biggest example from my life. Every time I’m out in public and have to go to the bathroom, I’m reminded that I’m different. One of the linchpins of our culture’s worldview is that all people are men or women—no overlap and no other options. But I’m not a woman or a man, and so everywhere I go I’m faced with a thousand reminders, small and huge, that I’m supposed to be a woman or a man, that the way I am is not normal, is wrong, is downright impossible. That I don’t exist. Ladies and gentlemen. Boys and girls. Brothers and sisters. Pink or blue. He or she. Every time someone points me toward the women’s locker room, I shrivel inside. Every time I buy a plane ticket now and I have to provide my “gender,” I feel like I’m participating in my own invisibility. Every time someone assumes my pronouns and says Alex, she, her, I have an out-of-body experience. “Who are they talking about?” my internal self asks. I’m gone. I’m not there anymore. I can put on a smile and survive, but I’m no longer fully present. Each time I’m reminded that I’m different or that according to our dominant culture I don’t exist, it’s like a feather or a pebble or a stone is added to the burden that I carry. One feather or pebble or stone is nothing, but they sure do accumulate. They accumulate over the course of my day, over the course of my month, over the course of my lifetime. Those stones don’t go away. To the point where I have to decide, do I want to take that on today? Do I have the emotional reserves to take that on today? Would I rather stay away from the places where I’m most likely to encounter feathers and pebbles and stones. The more experiences of being different a person carries, the more we are reminded that we’re different. The bigger the difference, the more we are reminded that we’re different. The more our difference shows up in every aspect of our lives, rather than just in one or two parts of our life, the more we are reminded that we’re different. And unfortunately, the more assumptions we each make about each other, the harder it is to be in real relationship, to create Beloved Community. Because every time we make an assumption, we are unconsciously perpetuating the norms of our culture. And that sucks. Because we have been taught our whole lives to make assumptions. We have been taught, in ways we don’t even know, to identify who is “like us” and who is not, and then to put value judgments on that. We have been taught to be uncomfortable with difference. But I need you to know something that is completely core to practicing welcome as a spiritual practice—I need you to know that you are a good person. This is something central to our Unitarian Universalist faith. You are inherently good. No matter what you do that hurts yourself or hurts someone else, it will never make you a bad person. All of us are works in progress. For me, being a person of faith and being part of a faith community is what helps hold me and call me back to my higher self. It’s what makes it possible for me to take risks. When someone calls me “she,” that sucks for me. But that doesn’t make that person a bad person, because they’ve been taught to look at me and make a snap judgment as to whether I am a she or a he. Unfortunately, it does take a toll on me. It may be a small thing to that person who calls me “she,” but to me it’s a pebble on top of a sheer ton of other pebbles, other reminders I’ve had that day or that week that I’m not real or I don’t belong. People have all kinds of reactions to the information that they are using a pronoun for me that hurts me. I’ve seen confusion, anger, dismissal, denial, rejection, self-deprecation. When we are challenged around things like this, often the place we go is a place of feeling as though we are being told we are a bad person, when really what we are being offered is the opportunity to stretch and grow and be in more authentic relationship. The person who messes up my pronouns isn’t a bad person, they are a human person. It’s what we do with the negative or difficult emotions that come up for us when we encounter difference that counts. I’m gonna say that again: It’s what we do with the negative or difficult emotions that come up for us when we encounter difference that counts. Because that’s where the practice comes in. What would it be like if those assumptions that fill our every interaction and encounter were gone? If we met each other, and encountered the world, through curiosity and care, intimately in touch with the knowledge that we actually know absolutely nothing about each other until we take the risk of entering into authentic relationship, approaching each other with openness and with wonder. Until we embrace the platinum rule—have you heard of the platinum rule? It says, do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Because how I want to be treated isn’t necessarily how you want to be treated, and the only way to know how you want to be treated is to get to know you in a real way. I know that’s a tall order—I’m full of them, you might be starting to catch onto that. But the good news is that it starts small. Practicing welcome starts small. It starts with conversation. It starts when you don’t settle for what is comfortable, but take one small risk at a time. During social hour, who can you talk to who you’ve never talked to before? Who is on the margins of the room? When you do talk to people you already know, what do you talk about? Do you stay to “safe” topics or do you talk about what deeply moved you about the service, or how you are struggling. It starts with conversation. It also starts with love and compassion for your own self and for others. It starts with gentle, personal work to practice sitting with discomfort. When you experience a negative emotional reaction in the face of something new or strange or unexpected, can you sit with that discomfort? Can you breathe and notice what’s coming up for you? Can you pause before you speak? When you are tempted by defensiveness, reactivity, dismissiveness, can you instead practice love and compassion for yourself and for the people around you? And then it starts with noticing the cultural norms here in this place, collectively working to understand where the circle of belonging has been unconsciously drawn. All communities draw that circle of belonging somewhere—where is that edge for you? What are the assumptions that you unconsciously make about who “we” are here? Who is going to collect those feathers and pebbles and stones and maybe even boulders when they come here—those overt and also under the surface reminders that they are different from what’s most valued here. Every time an assumption shows up, it impacts someone here. Someone feels devalued for having an experience that doesn’t line up with that assumption. Someone knows that they will never invite their brother to come here, or their best friend. Someone wonders if this is really a place where their child will be fully valued as they continue to grow. It starts with noticing where your collective edges are. Just noticing them. And then practicing pushing back on them. Questioning the assumptions that are being made. Using language a little differently. And it starts with the people who are already here. For some of us here, this is a place in our lives where we actually do feel that sense of welcome and belonging already. For others of us here, this is a place that maybe comes close or maybe doesn’t even come close, but we are here anyway. Some of us feel like this place is the best chance we have of not experiencing stones and boulders, so we’ll settle for feathers and pebbles. How can the circle be expanded for us—the people who are already here but don’t feel as though we can be totally present here? In closing, my invitation to you is this: As you are continuing the amazing work and ministry that the Welcoming Congregation Steering Group is doing, and the amazing work and ministry that has come before and made you who you are today, never settle for what is comfortable. There is a common perception out there that LGBTQ equals “gay” and that “gay” equals white, college educated, middle class, able-bodied. My invitation to you is to keep layering on race, class, age, ability, to layer on gender nonconformity, fluid sexualities like bi and queer. To layer on other marginalizing experiences. What does welcome look like then, when you bring all of this into who you are making a home for? Into who belongs here. When the commitment of being a Welcoming Congregation is looking for your edges and working to push them back? When the goal becomes centering care, curiosity, and compassion in all of your interactions? In deepening your relationships with each other here in this community and breaking down the walls and assumptions that separate us? I’m not asking you to make it happen all at once and right away. I am saying that by practicing welcome in this way, by extending the circle of belonging bit by bit and embracing transformation as part of engaging in welcome as a spiritual practice, you will expand the circle of belonging far wider than just to lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer people—although you will reach many many more of us as well in the process—and you will bring much needed healing to people who have been members of this community for years. And that is what being a Welcoming Congregation can be. That is what practicing Beloved Community looks like. May we make it so. Ashe, Amen, and Blessed be.