Recently I came to learn that the number one sport in America is not baseball, nor basketball or football, nor even my beloved figure skating, but birding! That’s what the Audubon website claims, as it says, breathlessly, “Did you know that birding is the number one sport in America? According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are currently 51.3 million birders in the United States alone, and this number continues to grow!”

Birding. As in, becoming knowledgeable about where to look for our feathered friends in a given area: cranes, rails, coots, doves, cuckoos, owls, swifts, hummingbirds, kingfishers, thrushes, thrashers, wood warblers, tanagers, and on and on—knowing your habitat and the kind of life it can support. Then this: knowing what to look for. Noticing distinguishing physical marks. Color variations, variations in size and shape, also in behavior, as in, is the bird acting alone or in a group? Is it stalking, standing still, or flitting about?  Finally, this: knowing how to listen. Some birds that look similar in color and shape are distinguishable by sound only. Sound is key. All of these together, says the Audubon website—knowing where to look, what to look for, and what to listen for—add up to rewards that are well worth the efforts. Birding brings a sense of wonder, and it is just fun.

I was inspired. And it helped me see my topic for today—our diversity as Unitarian Universalists—from a unique angle. Not so much “b-i-r-d-i-n-g” as “b-u-u-r-d-i-n-g.” Our goal is to take out our binoculars and go looking for the different kinds of Unitarian Universalists that are in here, in this bird sanctuary of our congregation, or elsewhere. Carefully watching for distinguishing marks and behaviors. Listening for the varied songs we sing. Doing this because it will bring a sense of wonder at our faith tradition which aspires to do something that is so unique among the religions of the West—to be a true universalism and not a partialism. Doing this because a greater awareness of self and other helps tremendously in appreciating our differences and dealing with them more effectively. “Conflict is inevitable,” says religion writer Max Lucado, “but combat is optional.”

So here we go. Birding for Unitarian Universalists. Consider this sermon a field guide, to use as a reference. Not at all exhaustive and comprehensive, a mere thumbnail sketch, but hopefully helpful enough.

Certainly an obvious place to start is with our theological diversity. A quick test: how you instinctively respond to the following possible sermon topics may indicate the kind of theological bird you are: here we go:

God the Noun

God the Verb

God the Adjective

God the Expletive

Too Confused to Decide

Why Are You Doing This To Me?

Actually, we’re entering into tricky territory. Labeling others and labeling ourselves. As a theist of some type, for example: either supernaturalistic or naturalistic, as deist or pantheist or panentheist or transcendentalist or neo-pagan or even henotheist. Then there’s non-theism of some type: atheist, existentialist, humanist, or some versions of Buddhism. Then there’s types that resist classification as theistic or nontheistic, like agnosticism (which does not know whether or not God exists) or mysticism (which affirms direct experiences of oneness with the universe, and this may or may not disclose anything about God). All these labels! Labels labels labels! How many of you tend to feel that all such labels are confining? You experience the spiritual search as free and open-ended, and maybe you strongly identify with one today, but who knows about tomorrow? It just doesn’t have to be one or the other but not both. It just doesn’t have to be all so cut and dry. It just feels wrong when others seem to have pigeon-holed you—you feel falsified, made out into something you aren’t.

Nevertheless, even as we may prefer the both/and style in religion, labels still have positive uses. They can help to name the different and varied songs we hear in small group gatherings and in religious education classes and in the social hall and in worship. They can help us to appreciate where other people are coming from and how to speak across differences, how to translate ideas into a language that others can understand. Above all, theological labels can help us recognize our own song, clarify it, stimulate deeper self-reflection about what it is we do and do not believe. Does agnosticism express who I am better than something else, at this time in my life? Do I find greater personal resonance with the teachings of the Buddha than with Jesus? How can these labels and categories help me get a clearer sense of what my heart years for, what my head tells me is reasonable, what my soul says is true? Maybe the story my heart, head, and soul tell will be different in the future, but the task of life is not to live in the future but to live deeply right now.

One set of theological labels that I find particularly helpful as I go birdwatching for UUs is this: “pragmatic versus metaphysical.” Now, this distinction draws on a powerful and provocative definition of Unitarian Universalism coming from the Rev. Forrest Church: “Unitarianism proclaims that we spring from a single source; Universalism, that we share a common destiny.” In other words: one source, one destiny. That’s Unitarian Universalism.

I like to expand on it a little more, though. “One source” can also mean: the oneness of all life, the interdependence of all existence; it can mean the mutual sympathy of all things, experienced first-hand if we open ourselves to it; it can mean cosmos, as opposed to chaos; it can mean meaningfulness, as opposed to meaninglessness.

As for “one destiny,” it too can be expanded upon. It can mean that what happens to some happens to all; it can mean all-embracing love; it can mean ultimate spiritual fulfillment for everyone; it can mean ultimate justice, a continuing hope that out of every tragedy the spirits of individuals shall rise to build a better world. It can mean all this.

But now the question becomes: on what basis do we affirm Unitarian Universalism? Why do we affirm “one source” and “one destiny”? Is it because the ideals of “one source” and “one destiny” are so beautiful and noble that we will work to make them live no matter what the nature of reality happens to be—even if reality turns out to be fractured, nihilistic, absurd, or even malicious? Or is it because we believe that ideals like “one source” and “one destiny” have genuine metaphysical standing, reflect the way the world really is, beyond all illusion? “Built into the human makeup,” says scholar of world religions Huston Smith, “is a longing for a ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot [satisfy]. This outreach strongly suggests the existence of something that life reaches for in the way the wings of birds point to the reality of air. Sunflowers bend in the direction of light because light exists, and people seek food because food exists.” In a similar vein, do Unitarian Universalists affirm “one source” and “one destiny” because these ideals reflect a longing for something real that both transcends humanity and attracts humanity to it? Pragmatic UUs will say NO. Metaphysical UUs will say YES. There is a famous quote from UU history that talks about how the arc of the universe is long, yet it still bends towards justice, but pragmatic UUs will work for justice even if the universe has no bend to it, or even if it bends away from justice. God or the immortality of the soul or reincarnation are not on their radar screens. But it’s different for metaphysical UUs. They simply can’t make sense of Unitarian Universalism without such realities. Both, I hasten to emphasize, agree on the value of the ideals of “one source” and “one destiny”. Both work to expand them and magnify them in the world. But they come at them from very different angles, understand them in very different ways, live in very different worlds. The person sitting beside you right now, possibly living in a completely different world, even though their commitment to “one source” and “one destiny” is as solid as yours….

And that’s a little on our theological diversity. The varied kinds of bird song we hear in this place. Any of this coming home to roost for you? (I know…. couldn’t resist….). But now let’s turn the page in our field guide to a different set of things to look for. Not so much about theology as sociology. Specifically, the different ways people happen to enter into our faith community.

Here’s two of them: the “come-outer” way and the “born-inner” way. “Come-outers” are the majority among us—they grew up in non-UU faith traditions and, finding them unsatisfactory for one reason or another, left, only to discover, at some later date, the new world of Unitarian Universalism. “Born-inners,” on the other hand, were born into the faith, grew up as UUs. These are two very different kinds of feathered friends.

Take the come-outer. One of the best descriptions I’ve found of this particular UU bird is from the Rev. David Bumbaugh, who writes, “Throughout our denomination, a large proportion of our adherents are relatively recent come-outers–people who have left the religions in which they grew up and are involved in the necessary process of defining themselves in relation to their new freedom. Consequently, for many of our people, their new-found Unitarian Universalism has a decidedly negative tinge to it. Typically, new Unitarian Universalists may not be able to tell you what they believe, but they will have little difficulty expounding on what they no longer believe. Often they are Unitarian Universalists largely for negative reasons–because this religious body validates and accepts their doubts and does not demand that they meet some external standard of religious belief. Here they may redefine, question, or deny the existence of God; here they may proudly reject any metaphysical or theological explanation of existence; here they may redefine, question, or denounce as invalid such traditional religious practices as prayer or meditation; here they may question all assertions and even give vent to anti-clericalism and hostility to all forms of organized religion, including this one if they wish. Here no one will demand they embrace a view of life they cannot embrace in good conscience.” David Bumbaugh continues: “For [come-outers], Unitarian Universalism is important because it provides them a breathing space, a decompression chamber, an institution which will help them to get unhooked from the religious assumptions with which they grew up. This is part of the reason that we witness, over and over again, the phenomenon of people who join us and for a few months or years are filled with enthusiasm for the church and its program, and then gradually and without explanation drift away. The church has been useful in the process of unhitching them from the past, and when that has been accomplished, their need for our church is no longer so great. They become our ‘graduates,’ people who learned here how to be free from religious assumptions and dogmatic demands which had become painful and crippling, but who no longer feel a need for the church after that task is accomplished. They still feel warmly toward us. If they ever go to church again, it would be to a Unitarian Universalist church. They would hate to see us go out of business, for there may be other people who need us as they once needed us, and some day, driven by some other need, they may come back for a post-graduate course. But for the moment, organized religion no longer has an important role to play in their lives.” And that’s David Bumbaugh, on the come-outer. In process of defining themselves; perhaps a bit cranky and adolescent; knowing more about what they don’t believe than what they do believe; appreciating Unitarian Universalist community because it allows them breathing space to get unhooked from the past; but whether Unitarian Universalism will be in their future is another matter entirely. Maybe, maybe not.

Have you ever seen this feathered friend before? Are you this feathered friend?

Then there is the born-inner. Who here resembles this kind of feathered friend? Consider the rich description that comes from the Rev. Kendyl Gibbons: “I am,” she says, “a child of humanist parents and the product of Unitarian Universalist religious education, shaped by the philosophy of the religious educator Sophia Fahs. She advocated allowing children’s own experiences and growth to lead them naturally to discover wonder and sacredness in life, rather than imposing religious texts or ideas on them. And so I have built my theology out of my own experiences, not according to any blueprint, but rather from the material of my life’s pondered meaning. I cherish the freedom of my religious inheritance, and I have never had a moment when it has seemed likely that any self-conscious supernatural personality actually presides over the universe. Nevertheless,” continues the Rev. Gibbons, “this approach had its drawbacks. As a young Unitarian Universalist in the 1960s, I was educated about human sexuality in a relatively open fashion; human religious experience, in contrast, was a closed book. I discovered my spirituality in much the same way that my peers raised in more conservative faiths discovered their sexuality—accidentally, furtively, without guidance, moved by overwhelming inner tides, and with some sense of shame. I longed for the white organdy First Communion dresses and the menorah candles of my neighbors. I secretly memorized Louisa May Alcott’s “My Kingdom” prayer, written when she was thirteen, and sang myself to sleep with “For the Beauty of the Earth.” I was fascinated by the hidden life of nuns. I yearned for someone, anyone, to take my childish capacity for devotion seriously. But seeds planted in paper cups on the Sunday school windowsill, the dead bird discovered in the backyard, the calligraphic hymns in We Sing of Life, and the annual flower communion were the scant resources my liberal religious education offered. To my parents and teachers—almost all of whom had grown up in other religious traditions—the absence of texts, rote prayers, sacraments, holy objects, and moralistic picture books represented freedom. But without any language for my emerging sense of mystery and wonder, I came to feel the contrary: deprived of the tools with which to understand or express those experiences.” And that’s Kendyl Gibbons, on the born-inner. From the first, freedom to grow naturally, without the imposition of a single text or set of religious ideas. From the first, nurtured in inner-directedness, all questions and all thoughts welcomed. Yet, the result is often a collision with the needs and allergies of come-outer parents and adults. Come-outers welcoming the absence of more traditional religious ideas and practices because they are looking for breathing room in which to get unhooked from the past, but born-inners suffering from this same absence, often needing to leave Unitarian Universalism in order to find spiritual food. It’s so ironic. Come-outer parents anxious for their children to be born in the faith, but the parents’ need to stay at arms-length from their past unwittingly resulting in their children’s faith being stunted and shallow. Born-inners—birthright UUs!—overlooked as our congregations cater to the large majority of come-outers.

It’s a challenge. These two different kinds of birds sing very different songs, at odds with each other. One threatens to overwhelm the other, in fact, and this is NOT diversity. It’s the OPPOSITE of diversity.

But there is a way forward. It happens when the come outer bird takes the next step in its development and follows the phoenix path, becomes what David Bumbaugh calls “born again.” Not in a Christian evangelical sense. But simply in terms of finding oneself in a different place regarding one’s religious past and therefore one’s religious future. Says David Bumbaugh, “Some Unitarian Universalists, having gone through the experience of being unhooked from old, personally destructive religious forms, discover that the experience of freedom is not the end of the journey. Freedom from dogma, freedom from creeds and traditions, freedom from past ways of thinking and looking at the world is not the answer to any ultimate question. Rather, freedom poses the most terrifying of all questions: Now that you are rid of past loyalties, of past commitments, of past concepts, how will you use your freedom? ‘Freedom from’ always casts us into the dilemma of ‘freedom for what?’ To what will you be loyal? By what will you be defined? By what star will you steer? The born-again Unitarian Universalists,“ he says, “are those who have broken the mold of the past, have transcended their rejections, and now reach toward the affirmation of life and the ‘something more’ which underlies all the various forms and rituals, dogmas and assumptions of religion.”

It’s the burning, transforming issue: by what star will you steer? Freedom for what? In this, the future of Unitarian Universalist churches and congregations rests. Taking the phoenix path. More and more come-outers learning to answer in positive ways, which ultimately represents a needed working-through of allergies born of old resentments and possibly old misunderstandings. More and more come-outers doing this, as a way of honoring their own personal and spiritual growth, as well as honoring the growth needs of born-inners together with the needs of people who come into our midst who grew up unchurched, who don’t really have formed prejudices yet (either positive or negative), who want to know what’s up with this God thing and thing Bible thing, who hunger for an experience of the sacred and are open wide, tabula rasa. What about them, and so many other varieties of UU birds that I haven’t had time to mention? We’ve got to keep our diversity healthy. Its ultimate purpose is to be an exciting and enriching environment in which each of us can come into a positive sense of our purpose in this world. Transcending rejections, reaching towards affirmations that make sense, grow our souls, grip our souls, send us into the world as servants and healers and creators and teachers. One source, one destiny. All-embracing love, whether it is but human love that we work hard to magnify, or the love of God. Justice, no matter how the universe bends. Amidst all our difference, amidst all our times of discord, let there be a larger harmony of song we build towards, a harmony of hope, that out of every tragedy the spirits of individuals shall rise to build a better world. Whatever else we find, as we go birding for Unitarian Universalists, let us find at least this.

Just before New Years, my husband and I flew to Memphis for a couple of days.  Just because.

We went in part because we had never been there before, in part because we had two Air Tran tickets we had to use or lose, in part because we had heard there was a hotel downtown, the Peabody, which was old and elegant, with live ducks swimming around in a fountain in the lobby, in part because of Beale Street and the blues – my husband’s second love (I hope). That Memphis is said to be home to three kings: BB King and the other two Kings, Elvis and Martin Luther King Jr, memorialized in statues there.

So we stayed just that one night in the grandly restored hotel and delighted in the trained young mallards, waddling on cue at 11 am and 5 pm. We took part in happy hour at the BB King club and listened to a third rate knock off band. And because it was too cold and damp to do much of anything else, or so we rationalized it, we signed up for a mostly indoor tour of Graceland, and much to our surprise had an absolute ball: checking out the jungle room and the trophy room, with its dozens of gold and platinum records, and the other rooms in what is actually a modest mansion, standing at his grave, still piled high with flowers and handwritten tributes and prayers for his soul.

And then we visited the third stop on what had become a Three Kings tour, the former Lorraine Motel, now a National Civil Rights Museum.

When we moved South almost 17 years ago we vowed to see it in all its stereotype and reality, especially the major sites of the Civil Rights movement history: Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma,  and of course Atlanta.

But never made it before to Memphis, the furthest away, the place that Martin Luther King Jr. had agreed to come in 1968 to help sanitation workers , in his own words ” to bring the colored people of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect… determined to be people.”

He came to Memphis in March of that year to highlight economic injustice as much as racial injustice, even while those men who marched with him during what was to become his last march were to a one black men, black men carrying signs simply stating: I am a man.

The march turned ugly and violent at its edges, a real setback for both the cause of the workers and the non-violent imperative of King’s justice work, so he agreed to return for another one in April.

He never made the second march. He was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a place that accommodated blacks, just as he was preparing to leave for a private dinner.

Right before the fatal shot rang out, he was re-introduced by Jesse Jackson to Ben Branch, a singer and saxophonist with the Operation Breadbasket Band. They would be performing at a rally that evening.

“Ben,” King was reported to have said as he stood by the railing, “I want you to sing Precious Lord for me like you never sung it before.. tonight, especially for me, I want you to sing it real pretty.”

He never lived to hear it again. It had been his favorite song and he often had requested gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to sing it at civil rights gatherings to inspire the crowds; at his request she sang it at his funeral. It was also recorded by Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone and Elvis Presley.

Precious Lord, the lyrics go, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light, take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home…. When the darkness appears and the night draws near and the day is past and gone. At the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand, take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

Guide my feet.  A deeply personal relationship with a directly experienced God, solidly in the Black gospel tradition in which God and Jesus stand with the suffering, leading them through despair to liberation and redemption.

Guide my feet.   We sing this spiritual from our own hymnal with some frequency. We have sometimes chosen this hymn when we do our own marching, as many of us have regularly, including the annual Martin Luther King Day event in downtown Atlanta.

Guide my feet while I run this race cause I don’t want to run this race, in vain, race in vain.

Well we weren’t racing last Monday, the thirty or so of us who hurried up and waited nearly two hours to take our place in the march to the King Center.

We were standing around, a lot, an intergenerational contingent with Coming of Age youth and their mentors, families with small children, and elders who had made the trek many times before. So at some point, we decided to come up with and practice some songs.

This time we picked just a couple of songs to sing at first – We are a Gentle Angry People and This Little Light of Mine, the first a marker song of our UU faith tradition, written by Holly Near, with its inclusive language – we are a justice seeking people, we are black and white together, young and old together, gay and straight together singing, singing for our lives. This Little Light of Mine was picked because of its easy melody and words, its uplifting cadence, its message of hope, the reminder of our chalice.

We sang these over and over again as we made our way past the largest crowds I can remember, perhaps because of the lateness of our starting time, perhaps because of the rare good weather. And then we added another, one of our newest songs, Standing on the Side of Love, just the chorus.

Feeling good, buoyed by the sunshine and the camaraderie, in the spirit of King we walked down Auburn Avenue, holding up our congregational banners and signs asking for marriage rights for all and an end to war.  Just as we stopped in front of the original Ebenezer Baptist Church, King’s home church, two white men holding up a hand-scrawled placard: What God Loves, What God Hates, began to taunt us. It was hard to hear what they were saying and impossible to read their list of divine dos and don’ts, but the tone was crystal clear, and their faces were contorted with contempt, if not hatred.

In that moment of trying to discern something like What Would Martin Do?, I decided to take an offensive of sorts — to turn and face our hecklers, and to sing as loudly and forcefully as we could- We are Standing on the Side of Love.  Over and over again, ignoring their steady stream of invective.

We are standing on the side of love, hands clasped together as hearts beat as one. Emboldened by faith, we dare to proclaim we are standing on the side of love.

We were out there on MLK Day standing on the side of love as our national campaign asserts: Standing on the side of love because every major religion has compassion and love at its center. Staying true to our religious values because that means standing on the side of love. Convinced that too much of our public discourse is driven not by love but by fear, which often scapegoats particular people and deems them somewhat less than human. Which is a violation of all faiths that are centered in love. That Standing on the Side of Love means harnessing the power of love to stop oppression, exclusion and violence.

In that moment, on this particular MLK Day, I truly did believe that we were standing on the side of love in King’s name, and in the name of the God and the very familiar faith that he embraced.

If that sounds and seems presumptuous, or just another attempt to project Unitarian Universalist identity onto yet another famous and admirable figure, this may be so.

However, I was influenced by a couple of recent developments in our relationship with King and his theology, where King stood on God. Who was the God who guided his feet? It seems closer to Unitarian Universalism than had been documented before.

The first development was the enormously thrilling announcement in May of last year that our own Beacon Press had signed an exclusive agreement to partner with the estate of Martin Luther King Jr. in a new publishing program “The King Legacy”, giving Beacon the sole right to print new editions of previously published King titles and to compile Dr. King’s writings, sermons, orations, lectures and prayers into entirely new editions, including significant new introductions by leading scholars. The first re-issued title Where Do We Go From Here?, King’s final manuscript was just released. It has originally been published by Beacon Press in paperback in 1968.

Dexter Scott King, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’ sons, has said that Beacon Press is one of America’s most courageous and visionary publishers, and there is every reason to believe they will do an outstanding job publishing his works and distributing them to the largest possible audience.

Michele Rubin, literary agent for the King estate in a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, told her interviewer that Beacon Press had a lot going for it in the decision to make it the exclusive trade publisher for his books. First that they are completely editorially independent of any enormous multinational media conglomerate. That they are non-profit.

And that they are affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Our UU commitment, she noted, to social justice and the politics that Dr. King stood for go way back.

So we have the King Estate, the heirs and the literary agent, handing to us the task and privilege of continuing to publish his works, because of our reputation as a press and because of an alignment of values around justice and other causes.

But does that mean that King’s religious values were in the same alignment, even so that we might claim him theologically, at least in part, as one of our own?

Did the man raised in a traditional, fundamentalist black church tradition, a fourth generation Black Baptist pastor, come to be a religious liberal? Would he have been comfortable under our theological umbrella?  If times had been different and our racial make-up different, would he – as a non-orthodox Christian and a theist–have considered being part of our movement, not just our causes, but our underlying religious and spiritual sensibilities?

An article in the November/December of 2009 issue of Tikkun magazine by Robert James “Be” Scofield, a spiritual activist and Master of Divinity student at Starr King School for the Ministry explores in some depth the progressive Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr., focusing on his understanding of the doctrines of the Church as expressed in a series of papers written during his seminary years. As Scofield writes, he wanted to provide an intimate look at the young King as he struggled to reconcile religion with a changing, dynamic, and modern world. And ultimately placing him solidly in our Unitarian Christian source of our living tradition.

This spiritual struggle, Scofield and other King scholars, have discovered, started for King at a very young age.  For King’s family of origin, Sundays (and most other days) were devoted to church: family prayer, passages of scripture and fundamentalist teachings, including the inerrancy of the bible and the virgin birth, accepted without question.

As one of his biographers wrote, religion was never separated from life for him, they were so intertwined. His parents pushed him hard from the beginning to be a minister — it was expected. So he sang church solos at age six and at seven he joined his father’s church, not because of a conversionary moment, a sudden revelation, but out of a competitive desire, King confessed, to keep up with his sister, who had just heeded the altar call.

By 13, however, like many of you here today, he is said to have admitted to have major qualms with the dogmas of his church and upbringing, increasingly skeptical, he would recall, of Sunday School Christianity and the unbridled emotionalism that was normative in the black church tradition.  At that young age, he found himself already denying basic doctrines, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and from there as King later said, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.”

What he did take away from his formative years was his father’s ministerial commitment to prophetic critique as part of the Black Christian social gospel movement, and his private teachings about self-worth, respect for the humanity and dignity of others, what is called a homespun personalism, a belief in a personal and infinitely loving God, in whose plan humans are not a means, but an end in themselves.  That we, each one of us, matter to God.

From his mother, in addition to a strict behavioral code- no drinking, smoking, dancing, or premarital sex – that Martin struggled with, he also received the message that he was a Somebody, created in the image of God, and a sense of the transforming power of and duties of the Christian life.

By high school, Martin had at least privately rejected the vocation of ministry, asking how religion could be both intellectually respectable and emotionally satisfying. He saw himself as a doctor or a lawyer. It took the teaching and guidance of Morehouse professors such as Benjamin Elijah Mays to convince him to revisit his ministry, who urged him to re-read biblical scripture from the perspective of the deep abiding truths behind the myths, to remove the shackles of fundamentalism, to be rigorous in his studies of text and examination of dogma, to be committed to a social Christianity undergirded by the ethical ideals of the Jewish and Christian faiths.

At the liberal Crozer Seminary, his family teachings about a loving God and the worth and dignity of each person were formally framed by his studies in social gospel and key philosophers including Hegel, convincing him that there was a prophetic element in history– God calling us to our better selves — and immutable moral laws in the universe, laws of love, that superseded all other civic laws. As a young man preaching, King would often quote our own Unitarian abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, who wrote “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice,” that because the universe is inherently infused with justice, with the right, that justice will ultimately win out.

He came to re-affirm for himself a God who was both supremely powerful and extremely good-who created the world out of love for the good of all.

But unlike the white creators and followers of the Christian social gospel movement, King did not believe it was enough to proclaim a doctrine of Christian responsibility and social activism.  As one author observed about King’s approach to transformation, Blacks had to do it. Meaning they had to do the work of building the kingdom of God on earth, instead of just preaching on it.

And given his own experiences of racism, King’s view of human nature tempered religiously liberal faith in inevitable progress with the fact, as he wrote, that reason is often darkened by sin, that element of corruption in individual and corporate behaviors. But finally, in his view, “grace” abounded, the possibility for personal and societal redemption and transformation.

By the time he finished a PhD in systematic theology at Boston University, studying the 20th century giants –Tillich, Wieman, Niebuhr and Bath– he laid out his understanding, as Scofield tells us, of the core doctrines of the Christian faith. An understanding that has been the subject of angry critique in all sorts of places, including a recent blog on the website jesus-is-lord.com, wherein the author says that while she is Black and glad she no longer has to sit in the back of the bus or enter the back door of a hotel or look for a colored sign to relieve herself, but that she wonders whether MLK Jr. is in hell right now on account of his beliefs. She questions, in other words, his ultimate salvation, given that he challenged the doctrines such as the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of the Atonement, and the Second Coming of Christ.

And challenge them he did, from his view of the divinity of Jesus, which he believed was not thrust on him from above, but achieved through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation, a prototype, he wrote, of one among many brothers, to his denouncement of the return of Jesus, saying that the final doctrine of the Second Coming is whenever we turn our lives to the highest and best there is for us in Christ.

He denied a physical heaven or hell in a Copernican world, saying “in reality I know nothing about heaven… personally I don’t believe in hell in the conventional sense.”

The Kingdom of God, for him, was not a cataclysmic future time, but the eternal love of God on earth, and whenever we judged ourselves against the life and teachings of Jesus was the Judgment Day.

He denied the doctrine of atonement, noting that if Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin, then there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness.

Dr. King believed the Bible was written in a pre-scientific world and used language representative of that era, not a textbook, as he described it, written with divine hands, but as a portrayal of the experiences of men written in particular historical situations. It was not the highest use of critique, he held, to prove or disapprove the text as factual, rather to discover what moral implications we may find growing out of the Bible and the relevance Jesus has for these times.

All of these tenets of our Unitarian and Universalist Christian sources.

Beyond his progressive Christian beliefs, he wrote that to discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the many tributaries that kept it flowing, including pagan religious contributions, and even proposing the possibility that at some point that Christianity might not be the crowning achievement of religious progress.

While Scofield’s examination of King’s theology focused on his seminary years, he reminds us that while there were numerous opportunities for him to express different, more Orthodox Christian understandings of these key doctrines over the years, he did not. So he tells us it is not surprising that although Dr. King decided to serve the Baptist Church and remain in the exclusively black church tradition — despite his condemnation of some of his fellow pastors as more concerned with the size of the wheelbase on their cars then making the church recapture its authentic reign, the failure to see Christianity’s revolutionary edge — he was indeed drawn to Unitarian Christianity. We are reminded Coretta had attended Unitarian churches for years before she met and married Martin, and they both attended Unitarian services while in Boston.

Based on his careful reading of the young minister’s seminary papers and the personal theology that emerged, Scofield speculates that King’s decision to remain within the Baptist denomination had as much to do with his assessment that he would probably not be able to play a significant role in the civil rights movement if he chose to join the Unitarian tradition than any religious dissonance or misgivings.

Would Martin as a black man with convictions about a very personal God, a love for the Jesus who in his understanding became a divine exemplar, and a strong sense of sin be fully welcome in our UU movement today?

Would he experience enough camaraderie, both in fellowship and spiritual growth?

Would he find this an effective place of social witness?

I hope so as we stand in support of the search for truth and meaning.

And on the side of love.

The reading before the sermon

http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2009/12/wish-they-were-ethnic.html

The sermon

Dr. King once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” He said it in 1963, there at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and now, almost 50 years later, America has elected its very first African American president. What does it mean? What is the meaning of Obama, on MLK Day?

It’s a question that Tim Wise raises in his book Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Too many people – too many White people – may be thinking that in electing Barack Obama we have settled our national debt to Blacks, if not to all people of color. How horrible to think, about the millions of people mobilized by Obama’s call to change, that they might go back to sleep, hit the snooze button, because they interpret the election as itself the complete solution to hundreds of years of injustice and inequality – because they see it as the entire and perfect fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.

But there is another possibility, going forward. Millions, including you and me, seizing the moment, feeling the fierce urgency of now, as we “channel the energy unleashed by Obama’s historic election into the work of antiracism and social justice.” Making this community right here truly multicultural, ensuring that all people (including people of color) are able to share their gifts and that no one feels invisible and adrift. Whites taking their share of the responsibility for addressing racism, Whites breaking the silence, Whites leaning into their whiteness to understand what it means, Whites willing to do their fair share of the heavy lifting. “To insist on the audacity of truth, says Tim Wise, “and not just hope, to demand better of ourselves than perhaps even we thought possible.” “If we say that we will not allow this one man’s rise to serve as a stand-in for the experiences of the nearly 100 million people of color in this country, people whose lives and degree of acceptance by white folks are quite different from Obama’s – then we may yet be able to mobilize those millions energized by his efforts and his campaign into longer-term work on the road to true freedom and equity. We may in that case be able to experience Obama, symbolically, as adrenaline, rather than anesthesia.”

That’s what Tim Wise says, and I’m with him. The meaning of Obama on MLK Day is opportunity to do at least two things: reflecting together on what racism really is, and committing ourselves to the kind of personal and political work that will bring increasingly more and more of the dream to life. Adrenaline, rather than anesthesia. The fierce urgency of now, reaffirmed.

But there’s a White culture of silence around racism. We’re talking about racism, and the White Jiminy Cricket within me and perhaps in our very midst wants to hush this up, whispers that to talk about race is itself racist, part of the very problem we’re trying to solve. An act of utmost ungraciousness, especially in light of the fact of Obama’s election. For the kind of old-fashioned bigotry we have long known in America that would have made Obama’s election utterly impossible has gone away: slavery, disenfranchisement, the regime of legalized segregation, all reinforced by murder, lynching, and terror on a grand scale. But we’ve progressed far beyond all this. It’s opened the door for people of color to the highest office in the land. So, how ungracious and mean-spirited to continue speaking of racism! Racism is over in America, and it is over in people’s lives to the degree they refuse to speak or act in intentionally mean-spirited, prejudicial terms. Why continue bringing racism up, when I’m not a member of some hate group and I don’t say hateful things about Blacks or Asians or Native Americans or Latinos?

But racism is far more than simply individual acts of meanness. Racism persists, even after the demise of old-fashioned bigotry, even after Obama’s historic election. For racism is like environmental pollution infiltrating the entire ecology of a society. It’s in the earth and in the air. It’s fundamentally a system of advantage based on skin color, which transcends individual acts of meanness even as it mandates them. As the brilliant 19^th century civil rights activist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois saw, the word “White” originated as a legal term and formal designator for special social privileges and protections. It meant “public deference and titles of courtesy”; it meant access to “public functions, public parks and the best schools”; it meant the right to sit on juries, to enjoy voting rights, and so on. But W. E. B. Du Bois also saw this: that in pre-Civil War times, rich landowners used “whiteness” as a way to manipulate poor Whites who owned no slaves, preventing them from launching a labor movement that would have improved their lot and addressed the severe economic injustices of the time. Whiteness, for a poor white, was like a consolation prize, a way of feeling good about yourself at the expense of people of color even as you were starving. Victims, blaming victims, while the real culprits got off scot-free. And Dr. King saw this too. In 1967, he said that White supremacy can feed the ego of poor Whites but not their stomachs.

There is a history to White identity that is fascinating, if painfully so; and it’s about a system which blesses only some and not others. Whites continue to benefit from it even if they don’t feel personally powerful, owing to other aspects of their identity that may disadvantage them socially, like poverty, or disability. And even if a person of color happens to be a jerk and goes around saying and doing prejudiced things against others, still, he or she does not benefit from the larger system. A racist culture that’s been rigged in favor of Whites from the beginning is like a racetrack, and only one of the aisles is free of hurdles owing to skin color. There may be other hurdles, relating to being gay, or being a woman, but not because you are White. One less hurdle for a White person, one more hurdle for everyone else.

Racism is systemic. It’s in the air and in the earth of a society. Pollution. Which means that it has significant inertia to it. “That which happens in one generation,” says Tim Wise, “affects the next, and so on, and in the very same way as before, until and unless something, some force, produces a change.” Definitely, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was one of those forces that produced incredible change, yet the change was not total. Some aspects of our racist culture were unaffected and carried over, as in White privilege. Other aspects simply mutated. Take “Racism 2.0,” for example, which Tim Wise defines as “enlightened exceptionalism, a form that allows for and even celebrates the achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those individuals generally are seen as different from a less appealing … black or brown rule.” Tim Wise continues: “Whereas whites have been able to run the gamut of observable intelligence, articulateness, accent, and erudition [including the ability to pronounce “nuclear” correctly] and still become president, or obtain other high-ranking positions in the private sector, for instance, people of color have long worried about being tokenized, and accepted only when they make whites sufficiently comfortable.” Which Barack Obama does. But does this mean that a person of color must be like a Barack Obama to make it in this world? People of color are all right to the degree that they don’t make White people feel uncomfortable?

Racism is like pollution – has inertia. What is not stopped continues, goes around, mutates. And before I speak directly to the issue of White identity, we need to know one more thing: that racism, like pollution, is a legacy – White people today are not the original cause. We did not ourselves set up the White supremacy system, kill off Indians, enforce slavery, patrol Jim Crow. Yet such evils have helped make us into what we are now. Evils that are part of us, never letting us go. Meaning two things. Clearly, that though we did not start the system, we’ve got to work to end it. It’s bad for everyone. The wounds we inflict on others rebound upon ourselves. They become our wounds. “I have a dream” said Dr. King, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But to the degree that skin color continues to be a source of suffering and division – to the degree that this supremely shallow criterion of difference becomes an excuse to make a power play over others – we are all harmed irreparably. Dr. King’s four little children, and your children, and my children. All of us children of God.

There’s a second implication to the racism as legacy idea. It’s this: that White people who become proactively antiracist – who become part of the fierce urgency of now don’t just do nothing (which is in effect a vote to support the system) – need to enter into this work with deep sincerity coupled with deep humility and a dash of self-deprecating humor. It’s an attitude and an approach that will save us as we become more conscious of all the ways we benefit from the old system of advantages and also unwittingly act it out in our lives and feelings, reinforce it, serve it. It’ll also save us as we enter into the conversation with people of color and hear, perhaps for the first time, the extent of their frustration and resentment. As in our reading today: the complaint of the bi-racial author against his unintentionally obnoxious White co-worker who says, very sincerely and innocently, “I wish I was ethnic.” Or when White people declare that they are colorblind. Fact is, race is something that has been pushed into the face of people of color for as long as they have been alive. They know what it is like continually to be seen, not as free, self-determining individuals (which is what Whites expect and get for themselves), but only as members of a group – either as a “credit to their kind” or as confirmation of some negative stereotype. It turns out that color blindness is really only just another instance of White privilege, a claim to racial innocence which is nothing but evasion and denial. It’s the system of racism coming through unconsciously and unwittingly, and it drives people of color nuts. And they’ll tell White people, too, who are willing to listen. And as Whites listen to the frustration and the pain, they need to realize that the system is larger than they are – as in the movie the Matrix, it just comes through and takes over (BZZAP!) – and that it will take a lot of careful work and a lot time to become more aware of this as it is happening, together with forming new habits. Far better to be gentle and encouraging with oneself in this process than to be a bludgeoning taskmaster.

Which takes us directly to something I said earlier, and extends it forward: How part of the fierce urgency of now has to do with Whites taking their share of the responsibility for addressing racism, Whites breaking the silence, Whites leaning into their whiteness to understand what it means. Whites can’t really understand color of any type or work effectively with people of color until they come to understand their own, come to terms with it, tie it to a larger commitment to a more just society.

This is in itself a huge area – there’s an entire scholarly discipline dedicated to it called “critical whiteness studies” – so here, we will only be able to scratch the surface.

Do that, and what immediately comes up: guilt and shame. I knew them in a non-racial context , as a doctor’s son, who enjoyed social status without ever having earned it on my own. It was all stolen glory, and I moved through my old home town feeling like I was never truly myself – always part phony, part fake. I knew guilt and shame like this, and I knew it as I saw First Nations people around me, Native Indians in my old home town, struggling with a legacy of cultural brokenness that was a direct result of Whites who immigrated into the New World and stole directly from the aboriginal peoples already there. I wondered about the waves of immigrants, like my grandfathers, who came after this, who innocently and unwittingly mixed their labor with long-stolen goods. How legitimate can any gain be when it is ultimately founded on a crime?

Whiteness comes with guilt and shame like this. Knowledge of ill-gotten gain. And because it is so powerful, so painful, it morphs into many different forms. Guilt that spills over into fear and anger directed towards people of color, irritation at why they “always” have to make such a big deal about racism. Or guilt that makes a White person overly-zealous about it all, making them feel like everywhere they turn, everywhere they go, they are responsible for saying something, that they can’t pick and choose their battles. Or guilt that causes a White person to distance themselves from other Whites and to over-identify with people of color, to deny their own whiteness completely.  Cultural appropriation in worship, cultural appropriation in all other places and phases of life.

Just some of the transformations of guilt that are endemic to White identity. How about guilt that leads to quick solutions that are ultimately more about restoring and redeeming a White person’s sense of innocence, rather than actually achieving significant things for people of color and society as a whole? Ultimately, I believe that this is the fantasy underlying such movies as Dances With Wolves, however powerful and profound they are. The White person becoming a hero and Messiah to the people they once oppressed. Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Pocahontas, District 9, and of course, Avatar. The fantasy becomes real in small and large ways. A white ally who goes into a person of color “safe space” and takes over the conversation, thinks they have all the answers, feels like they have to come to the rescue – and once again, people of color don’t get to realize their own ability and capacity; they don’t get to save themselves. Or this: just listen to what historian Shelby Steele says about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in his powerful book, The Content of Our Character: “[Consider] a famous statement by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965: ‘You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You’re free to compete with others,’ and justly believe that you have been fair.’ On its surface,” continues Shelby Steele, “this seems to be the most reasonable of statements, but on closer examination we can see how it deflects the emphasis away from black responsibility and toward white responsibility. The actors in this statement – ‘You [whites] do not take a person [blacks]…” – are whites; blacks are the passive recipients of white action. The former victimizers are challenged now to be patrons, but where is the black challenge? This is really a statement to and about white people, their guilt, their responsibility, and their road to redemption. Not only does it enunciate a black mission, but it sees blacks only in the dimension of their victimization – ‘hobbled by chains’ – and casts them once again in the role of receivers of white beneficence.” That’s what Shelby Steele says. It’s so ironic – guilt and shame that in effect reproduces the oppression that the guilt and shame is a response to. The fantasy of swooping in and being the hero, being the patron, making it all better – but this is more about a White person’s ego than it is about magnifying the strength of people of color.

Many transformations to a White person’s guilt and shame. And leaning into this is an aspect of the heavy lifting that Whites are challenged to do, as they partner with people of color in the good work of antiracism and justice for all. Whites knowing themselves. Whites becoming helpful allies to people of color, at work, here at UUCA, here in America, in this age of Obama. For Shelby Steele, what’s required is “healthy guilt,” which he describes as “simply a heartfelt feeling of concern without any compromise of one’s highest values and principles.” But then he asks, “How can Whites reach this more selfless form of guilt? I believe the only way is to slacken one’s grip on innocence. Guilt has always been the lazy man’s way to innocence – I feel guilt because I am innocent, guilt confirms my innocence. It is the compulsion to always think of ourselves as innocent that binds us to self-preoccupied guilt.”

This is an extremely powerful insight. Self-preoccupied guilt as the lazy person’s way to redemption and reconciliation. And the way beyond it is to give up the idea that the fundamental moral goal of life is purity. Got to slacken the grip on innocence. If my hands must be totally clean for me to do any good and worthy work in this world, then I’m stuck. History paralyzes me. I can go no farther. The sort of evil that flows from the bureaucratic mindset divorced from human compassion – it stains my hands. The sort of evil that comes from obeying whatever the authorities say and shying away from being disturbers of the peace – it’s underneath my fingernails. The sort of evil that flows from how we allow ourselves to be deceived when at a deeper level we know real wrong is being done – I can smell it on me. I am guilty. But my dirty hands are all I’ve got to work with. My hands. I must forgive myself and be forgiven. And with these dirty hands, I must resolve to work for justice. I must resolve to do what is right. My whiteness comes with a lot of social privilege, and so let me use it to do good, as an ally, not as a Messiah. Let me offer it upon the altar, rather than ignore it or give it away. Let it be my offering of righteousness. Let it be part and parcel of the fierce urgency of now. Let it be my contribution to the Dream.

“There is a promise that is a common theme in world mythology and folklore,” says philosopher Sam Keen in his book entitled Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions. “We discover beauty only when we embrace the beast. Where we stumble and fall, there we find the gold. Beneath the fault lies the virtue. The stone the builders reject becomes the cornerstone. The treasure is hidden in the trash. Authentic happiness,” he goes on to say,” is only possible when we allow ourselves to experience the full range of human emotions, including boredom, fear, grief, anger, and despair.”

And so it is. Beauty only when we embrace the beast. And for religious liberals, this point has particular poignancy, since for too long, our movement has been suspicious towards emotion, often wanting to recast religion and the religious life as a hyperlogical sort of thing, presuming that only when you become free of emotion, spiritual sanity and truth will come—but it won’t come. Can’t possibly come. Cutting-edge neuroscience tells us that reason and emotion operate in the very same brain centers, so for one to conquer the other is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. In cases where people’s brains have been damaged—through a stroke, or a tumor, or a blow to the head—and they can no longer feel anything, even though reason and logic remain intact, what happens is that their lives fall apart. They can no longer make even the simplest decisions or set goals for themselves.

Just in pure neurological terms: no beast, no beauty. But also in practical terms. Here, I’m thinking of an article in the UU World magazine from 2009, by my colleague the Rev. Christine Robinson, entitled “Imagineers of Soul,” and I’ll quote her at length. She writes, “Four out of five Unitarian Universalists came to Unitarian Universalism after a childhood spent in other faith communities. We left those communities because we no longer believed what they taught, and we often left wounded and bewildered by our experiences. If we were led to feel that our inability to believe what we were taught was due to a flaw in our nature, we brought with us a burden of shame. […] And because of that deep, shaming message, many Unitarian Universalists experience their rejection of what others believe—and, often, what they themselves used to believe—as not simple or freeing but as complex, angry, brittle, and defensive.

“But we don’t need to pretend to believe what we cannot believe in order to reclaim our spirituality. We Unitarian Universalists mostly have what twentieth century American theologian Martin Marty has called ‘wintry spirituality’: Our religious experience is of doubt, shades of gray, and absence. Although there are plenty of wintry spirits in conventional religious communities, what is celebrated and held up as ‘real spirituality’ is the summery, ‘What a friend I have in Jesus’ sort of spirituality, which comes in many theological variations but which is always celebrating the clear presence of spiritual ideals.

“There are summery Humanists who can hold on to the glories of the human spirit and its potential for unlimited growth even while watching the evening news. There are summery Transcendentalists who have never for a moment doubted that their lives were a part of a Great Plan. There are many among us who live in quiet faith that God is with them. But most UUs are doubters, clearer about what they don’t believe, aware that the ideals or beliefs they hold could be wrong, and experiencing God’s presence or surety of their ideals only in fleeting moments.

“Many people come to our congregations thinking that, since they don’t have an unending conversation with their friend Jesus, they must have no spiritual life at all—a painful thought. They come to us to see if here, by any chance, someone will point them to experiences of depth and wonder and meaningfulness, sans dogma; if something will bring tears to their eyes and strangely warm their hearts. They are hoping to be introduced to a spirituality for agnostics, theists, Transcendentalists, pagans, or liberal Christians that is not dependent on unending sunny days of the soul.

“Once here, they need some help in discerning how their wintry spirituality can feed them. Since they are unlikely to have had soul-shaking spiritual experiences, they need ways to discover the more subtle movings of the Spirit of Life. They need someone to elicit their story about the time the world stood still for them, or how one day, out of nowhere, on a bus, they were released from anxiety and freed to move ahead in their life, to hear those kinds of stories and say, ‘Wow, that sounds wonderful,’ and ‘Yeah, it went away; it does that, you know.’ They need to learn the rich history of wintery believers and faithful skeptics. They will be grateful and they will be able to say to themselves, ‘There’s not something wrong with me after all,’ and they will be healed of their shame.

“Until the healing happens, though, if there is one thing a person who has been shamed knows how to do, it is to shame others in return. That’s how it happens that, amongst Unitarian Universalists, the tools of scorn and shame are so often used to scare off any hints of spirituality.

“At a meeting of the worship committee, one member ventures the thought that she’d be a better worship leader if the group would spend some time talking about the spiritual aspects of worship. ‘I don’t know why you’d want THAT!’ someone says, his voice tinged with scorn. That was the end of that topic. He knew not what he did, and if he’d been called on it, he would have protested that he was just speaking the truth: He can’t imagine why anybody would want to talk about spirituality. If it had been a debate team or a science lab, this rational argument would have done no harm; it might even have provoked those who disagreed to work harder, but in a spiritual community, scorn is deadly.

“Our faith, our thinking about our faith, and our conversations with others about faith don’t do well around belligerent language, close questioning, and scorn. Very few people are willing to talk about their spiritual lives if they think they will be ridiculed or misunderstood.

“Imagine what may be going through a fellow church member’s mind: If I think you are going to laugh at me, ridicule me, or try to prove me wrong, I’m not going to say that when the congregation really gets to singing and clapping with the musicians, that’s when I feel the spirit move through the room. I’m certainly not going to tell you about that one precious time, when I was scraping the bottom of my barrel, I felt, for an infinitely sweet half hour, held in the palm of God’s hand, and that sometimes my longing for a repeat of that amazing few moments is so strong that I could just weep. I just can’t bring myself to say that aloud. I’ll just shut up and wait, if I don’t wander away, for someone to imagineer a place where it’s safe to speak about my tender, precious spiritual life.

“A shame-ridden people deal with pain by flaming every intimation of spirit.” And that’s it. That’s what I read in the Rev. Christine Robinson’s UU World article. Does it speak to your experience? She puts her finger on the shame that many of us can carry into this place because we were no good for the religion of our childhood, or it was no good for us, or because our wintry kind of spirituality seems so different from the sort that society celebrates and holds up as the real deal, or because we have a summery kind of spirituality that keeps on bumping up against obstacles in this home for the human spirit. The beauty of free religion trying to happen in our midst—the free flow of the Spirit of Life, trying to happen—but unless the four out of five of us (and in fact I would say the five out of five of us) learn how to face the shame, befriend it, work with it intelligently, then we will act it out against each other. We will hurt each other. We won’t be able to live up to our “speak the truth in love” principle. “If there is one thing a person who has been shamed knows how to do, it is to shame others in return.” Unconsciously, reflexively communicating belligerence, close questioning, scorn. We say with our lips that this environment is undogmatic and open, but because we are not seriously dealing with the emotional dimensions of our life together—don’t have emotional intelligence on an institutional level—the practical result is that we develop spiritual spores. We wall the unloved and unappreciated parts of our tender, precious spiritual lives away. Put ourselves on ice. But this is a survival strategy, and not a way of life. There can never be free religion, when emotionally we are unfree. Never. I don’t care how many advanced degrees there are in the room, what the collective IQ is in this place. Beauty, only when we together embrace the beast.

The promise applies to us collectively, and it applies to us personally. The anger in us, the gladness, the fear, the laughter, the sorrow, the shame all give us our sense of solidity in the world, our history, our integrity. Like nerve endings, they connect us to ourselves, and they connect us to the world. Through them, we know truly who we are, warts and all, and what we want. Says Sam Keen, “Until we pause to register how something feels, we have not digested our experience—we don’t know what it means. As long as I am only sensing a world around me, I have not taken a position in the middle of my own experience as a unique person with a particular set of memories and hopes.” The one life that is ours is wild and precious to the degree that it is Technicolor with emotion and we know how to hold all that dazzling, intimidating, burning Technicolor in the palm of our hands. We know how to tolerate it, think with it, relate to other people and to the world through it. Through the beast, beauty.

I want to say a little more about emotional intelligence—what’s involved—and then introduce our spiritual exercise for this month. Just as a bit of background: today’s sermon is the fourth in our “Planting Seeds of Soul” series, which draws from Warren Lee Cohen’s book entitled, Raising the Soul: Practical Exercises for Personal Development. In October, we planted the seed of self-knowledge; in November, it was the seed of clear thinking; and in December, it was willpower. All of them aim towards a certain quality of living I am calling soulfulness, characterized by self-awareness and enjoyment and perspective and non-anxiousness and compassion. Doing justice to the inner self so we can do justice in the outer world. That’s what the sermon series is all about.

But now: emotional intelligence. What exactly is it?

The phrase was originally coined by Yale psychologist Peter Salovey in the early 1990s to describe such things as awareness of one’s own feelings and the capacity to regulate them in a way that enhances living. Both give rise to yet a third important aspect of emotional intelligence: empathy for the feelings of others.

Take self-awareness. It’s about understanding how it is that, even as feelings are central to who we are, we can nevertheless be woefully unaware of them. Our emotions have Technicolor range and complexity, and yet so very often we experience them only in grays, or only greens and never reds. It’s a strange picture we get of our inner life. But why? Says Sam Keen, “No matter how wise and loving our parents, they could not have kept us innocent and spontaneous. Every child must explore, test limits, disobey in order to develop and independent personality.” And so we are forced out of the Garden of Eden forever. We grow up, the pain of growing up becomes unbearable, and we develop survival strategies to help us endure. We become experts in stopping the natural flow of emotion when we sense that it’s about to take us to a place that we’ve been taught is unlovable and unacceptable. We feel fear, which threatens to disrupt the “good soldier” survival strategy we’ve worked so hard to develop, and we stop the flow. We feel joy, which threatens to disrupt the “don’t expect too much out of life” survival strategy, the “get-with-the-life-is-miserable-and-then-you-die-gameplan” strategy, and we stop the flow. That’s right—sometimes the beast we face is joy. Sometimes the beast is enthusiasm, playfulness, generosity, gentleness. And so we stop it. We snuff it out. Each of us has a unique way of doing this. Finding something else to worry about. Workaholism. Drinking. We’ve already talked about how, when others threaten to uncover our spiritual shame, we can take on a scornful tone with them. Make fun of them, to stop the flow. But through self-awareness, we develop a mindfulness discipline where we watch exactly how we do this, and exactly when. We become students of ourselves, students of our own experience.

Besides self-awareness, there is a self-management aspect to emotional intelligence. How we hold all that Technicolor in our hands. And this is significantly impacted by the kind of beliefs we have about our emotions. Fill in the following blanks:

“I think of my grief or fear or despair as _____.”

“What my grief or fear or despair says about me is _____.”

“If I were to fully experience my grief or fear or despair, I would _____.”

“What I’d most like to do with my grief or fear or despair is _____.”

Don’t know about you, but I find it easy to fill in the blanks with negative stuff. Negative beliefs, that make it so hard to relax into the flow of emotion, trust it, have faith that ultimately it’s going to be all right. “Dealing with any [unpleasant] emotion,” says Sam Keen, “is like running the rapids in the Grand Canyon. In the turbulent Colorado River the greatest danger is getting thrown out of the boat and getting caught in a whirlpool or roller that sucks you down. If you struggle prematurely to get to the surface, you will likely drown. But if you go deeper, the action of the water will spit you out twenty feet downstream on the surface.” That’s what Sam Keen says. The only way out is through. And it’s so hard, since the emotions we’ve learned to stop have become truly scary. We’ve walled them off, and over time, they’ve become like poltergeists. What we repress festers. So easily they possess us, Exorcist-style. But to befriend such emotions, we’ve got to believe that friendship with them is both possible and desirable. In turn, belief paves the way for breathing into the unpleasant emotion, smiling at it with our hearts, building up tolerance so you can just hold it in your hand for a while, learn from it, allow the energy it represents to transform and become something different. Shame, turning into anger, anger turning into sadness and grief, sadness and grief turning into empathy for our parents and teachers and fellow congregants and others, empathy turning into compassion for a world in which Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is indisputable: how the suffering of birth, old age, sickness and death is unavoidable. Life, with all its changes, is suffering. And yet, through suffering, there is a path. There is a path running to enlightenment. Through the beast, beauty.

That’s emotional intelligence. And now, it’s time to present this month’s planting seeds of soul exercise. If you choose to join me in practicing it, please don’t forget about the others. Practice them as well. The system I am presenting is comprehensive and meant to develop our full personhood, our thinking-willing-feeling self. It’s an issue of balance.

Four basic steps.

Step one: Establish a baseline for your work on your emotions. Discover what you truly believe about them by completing the fill-in-the-blank questions I mentioned a moment ago. How might you adjust your beliefs or replace them so that you become more able to trust the flow of emotion even when it takes you into difficult places?

That’s step one. Step two is developing the parameters of a personal mindfulness discipline, where you become a student of your experience, a scientist who simply observes the flow of emotion without judgment or criticism. In developing the parameters, decide on a time every day during which you can set up your psychic laboratory and give your feelings the most concentrated attention you can without detriment to your daily responsibilities. Besides this, set the intention that you will be looking for two things in particular: the emotions which come easily for you, and the ones that you stop the instant they surface. How do you stop them? What strategies do you use?

Step one, step two, and now step three. During the actual time of the exercise, allow feelings to come in, and just observe. Watch your emotion as you would a bird alighting on a tree. Don’t scare it away with any sudden movements. If you feel jarred by the emotion, if it threatens to overpower you, soothe yourself with deep breathing. Breathe in and say, “I acknowledge this emotion and I breathe into it.” Then breathe out and say, “I acknowledge this emotion and I breathe it out.” Breathe in, breathe out. Smile as you breathe. Relax. Trust. Allow the whirlpool that has sucked you down to spit you back out. Let the emotion flow.

Finally, step four. This one has to do with times when you are outside the laboratory: here at church, or at work, or at home. When you sense that you’ve just stopped an emotion—when you’ve automatically scared away the bird in the tree—acknowledge that you just did that, acknowledge that this was part of survival growing up, and be thankful for that, but that was then and this is now. Now is a different time. So find appropriate opportunities to express the neglected emotion. Look for them. See what that’s like. Conversely, when an emotion flows freely, when it’s like a whole flock of birds descending upon the tree, as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, take a deep breath. Try to consciously live with it for longer than usual. Someone in the social hall says something about spirituality (or politics, or anything else, really) that immediately strikes you as ridiculous, and you feel the irritation surging up, the aching desire to express scorn. Take a deep breath and press pause. Hold the feeling in your hands. I know it’s hard. I so know it. But if you do, the bird will change shape. The bird is mythological, magical. Perhaps you will see the shame that’s there, or something else. The bird is trying to tell you a story … about you. It’s coming home to roost. It’s your one wild, precious life singing to you, a songbird.

Beauty, only when we embrace the beast. Let’s plant the seed.

The holidays always take me back to times at my grandparents’, when I was a kid. 9655 81^st Street in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The trip from my home in Peace River would take around six hours; we’d leave after Dad got off work at the clinic and drive all 300 miles south listening to eight track tapes of family favorites, including Barry Manilow, ABBA, Captain and Tennille, the Bee Gees, but also Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the Red Russian Army Choir booming out “Kalinka.” All this great music, filling up the inside of our 1970s wood-paneled station wagon, sailing through the frigid night. Then, the music would click off, and this was the sign: we’d arrived. I’d instantly wake up. Baba and Dido’s house. Christmas lights like electric gumdrops framing the windows. Sometimes even Northern Lights high above, a shimmering red and green river running through the Alberta sky. Baba and Dido, waiting for us in their warm kitchen with a big tray of sandwiches (some of which were onion for my Dad: onion, salt and pepper, bread, and that’s it—a favorite of his, but not my Mom’s). This is how our holidays with them would begin.

And during those holidays: abundant time for the imagination. Mom and Dad and Baba and Dido busy doing adult stuff; so my brothers and I had to figure out what to do for ourselves. No computers or video games. No Charlie McButton temptations. Just the low-tech mysteries of a creaky house with lots of old things to explore. Strange but cool smells. Mothballs. My Dad’s old bedroom: his Boy Scout uniform hanging in plastic in the closet and, on a shelf, the classic book Tom Sawyer, with this inscription: “To Robert Makar, from Joan Scott.” Joan Scott? Who was that? Did my Mom know?

Then there was Dido’s office. He had come over from the Ukraine in the 1930s—didn’t speak a word of English, but with his immigrant ethic of hard work, he learned in no time. There, on the office wall: a big plaque honoring his 40+ years of service in the Canadian National Railway, as a carpenter. And on his shelves, all sorts of books which I suspect he never read but collected because he knew that education was the way to success. I loved to flip through them.

Finally, in the TV room in the basement, best of all: a huge wooden table with thick legs like tree trunks, to which my brother and I would haul big sofa cushions. We’d make a fort; and in the deep darkness of that fort we’d click on the flashlight and start the storytelling. Supremely low tech, but supremely high yield. Avatar in 3D simply can’t compare.

Just some of the memories that the holidays bring back for me. Nothing really accomplished in those times, no big or even small projects completed; and yet from those seasons of free play came a sense of history and identity and creative ability, growing quietly and resolutely. Nothing less than imagination coming into focus in me, and about this, the writer of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, once said, “When your imagination is out of focus, you can’t depend on your eyes.” Focus the imagination first, and then you will see truly.

That’s what I want to talk about this morning, as we explore chapters three and four in Walden: what it takes to focus the imagination, and how this represents time well spent. “I love a broad margin to my life,” says Thoreau. “Sometimes, in a summer morning,” he says, “having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.” That’s what Thoreau says. It’s all about imagination coming into focus, in order to see truly. Doesn’t matter whether it happens at Walden Pond in summertime Concord or Baba and Dido’s house in wintertime Edmonton or your own house here in Atlanta, in cold January. What matters is time well spent in the cultivation of the human spirit, as we move into a new year and a new decade. Growing like corn in the night.

But it is a controversial issue, and Thoreau knew it. He sat in his sunny doorway, there at the edge of Walden Pond, in pursuit of a broad margin to his life, with or without a book to read, and he could just feel the withering disdain of many of his fellow-townsmen. To them it was, no doubt, “sheer idleness,” but, he says, “if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.”

Thoreau stands with nature, as he critiques his contemporaries. Being the gadfly he is—a modern-day Socrates—he wants people to recognize how they are stuck. “I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them,” he says, “for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot.” So he takes us to task for our common prejudice against creative loafing, doodling, doing nothing. Far better to cram our days with important things to do; far better to push ourselves to do more and do it faster. For it is said: “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Doing nothing structured raises suspicions. It raises anxieties.

It definitely does for parents, especially these days. One child psychologist says, “This generation of parents has swallowed whole, and in some cases, is choking on, the belief that the sooner you expose a child to learning, the more he or she will learn. If they don’t get it during those critical early childhood years, well, forget Harvard.” Another psychologist says, “As a society, we have talked ourselves into believing that we have to make every moment count, and that we have to fill our children as we would empty vessels. Parents feel compelled to give their kids every advantage they can afford. So they cram their days with art, music, sports, and even weekend enrichment programs.” No wonder that kids today have half as much free time as they did 30 years ago. That’s what a national study coming out of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research shows. Kids are as time crunched as their parents.

And the intentions are all good. We want our kids to be all that they can be. But the trend to overschedule is backfiring. Children, with a range of symptoms from headaches and stomachaches to temper tantrums, sleeping problems, an inability to concentrate in school, an inability to tolerate and manage boredom. As for parents: stress and exhaustion. Running a frantic race to keep up. More at home on the road than in their own living rooms.

Above all, the idea that it’s a waste of time to do nothing is false. The co-author of a book entitled Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., says, “There is a myth that doing nothing is wasting time, when it’s actually extremely productive and essential. During empty hours, kids explore the world at their own pace, develop their own unique set of interests and indulge in the sort of fantasy play that will help them figure out how to create their own happiness, handle problems with others on their own, and sensibly manage their own time. They need time to recharge their batteries and process what they’ve learned. Free time allows them to explore, to be scientists, discoverers, creators, and innovators. They do that when they build pillow forts in the family room, sail away in a laundry basket to a foreign land, or find the remarkable in the mundane.” Dr. Hirsch-Patek continues: “In our well-intentioned efforts to give our children the best of everything, perhaps we’ve forgotten the importance of a balanced life. As parents, we have a choice. We can groom our children to be worker bees—to take in information and it spit right back out—or we can help them be creative problem-solvers, to look at a cloud and see dinosaurs or birds, to be energized by their own imaginations and curiosity. That’s where doing nothing, sometimes even to the point of being bored, comes in.”

In other words: corn needs night to grow in. What Dr. Hirsch-Patek is arguing for, and what Thoreau is arguing for, is a greater sense of trust in this, which is ultimately self-trust. Why anxiously fill our children up, and fill ourselves up, as if we were empty vessels when, in fact, we are already full of good things just waiting to be recognized, powers to be released, creativity unleashed? This is exactly what Thoreau is talking about when he says, “I love a broad margin to my life.” The margin is where the wild things are. The margin is where the magic is, which can be brought in to infuse all our living. No wonder he loves it. No wonder he invites it in, as he sits there in the sunny doorway of his cabin at Walden pond from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, in defiance of the anxious busy-ness of his neighbors. Like corn in the night, he grows.

And he invites us to do the same. It’s not just about our children. It’s about all of us. We all need a broad margin to our lives. Imagination focused, so that we can see the world truly. Time well spent.

Reading is a big part of it. “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!” he says. “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” For Thoreau, it’s the classics that do this best. Plato, Shakespeare, Emerson, scriptures from the world’s religious traditions, helping us see things from angles that we’re not necessarily used to. A book called Walden. Lifting us up out of our near-sightedness and putting us up in the balcony, giving us a balcony view of our lives. “These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us,” he says, “have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.” And at the very least, even if their answers cannot be our answers, still, our way of imagining ourselves is shifted, we feel surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we feel welcomed into a common purpose of wisdom-seeking that spans millennia, and in this we can experience genuine consolation. Says Thoreau, “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.” We are united across the generations. We are not alone.

Besides this, reading has what Thoreau calls a “liberalizing” impact. Just listen to this quote, which makes him sound exactly like a contemporary Unitarian Universalist preacher: “The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience … may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let ‘our church’ go by the board.” In other words, become post-Christian! Don’t leave Jesus Christ behind, but join him with Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Lao-Tzu, and wise women and men of all places and times. How we imagine religions is changed forever, through reading.

If, of course, we read, and read well. But, says Thoreau, “Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books…; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.” Oh, it drives Thoreau nuts. How shallow reading and limited reading dry up the imagination, impoverish its vocabulary, narrow its scope and power, render it fuzzy. Can’t imagine what he would say about today’s mass media culture. We’ve got unparalleled technology in something like Google Earth, yet increasing ignorance about the basics of world geography. More than 40% of Americans under the age of 44 did not read a single book—fiction or nonfiction—last year. “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, who joins Thoreau in a concern that is by no means new.

He also joins Thoreau in his approach to focusing the imagination that balances reading with something else equally important: sustained attention to the things of the world. Direct experience. Listen to what Emerson says in his American Scholar address from 1837: “Books,” he says, “are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. […] Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” That’s Emerson. And as it happened so often, Emerson wrote about it, and Thoreau lived it. Thus Thoreau’s social experiment of one at Walden Pond. Him sitting in his sunny doorway, rapt in a revery, reading God directly in everything around him so as to feel personally connected, so as to feel like he belongs. Reading God in the railroad, as when he envisions the whistle of the locomotive as the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, or the train engine as a fiery steed, shaking the earth with his feet, breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils. Reading God also in his natural surroundings: the distant lowing of the cows, the whip-poor-wills “chanting their vespers,” the hoot owls, the screech owls. “When other birds are still,” says Thoreau, “the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then — that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.”

This is just a sample of many similar passages in chapter four of Walden, and at some point you might have paused to ask yourself, What the heck is Thoreau trying to do here? What’s going on? For myself, I was helped by something I read in a book by creative art therapist Shaun McNiff, called Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things. “Sustained attention to the particulars of a thing” he says, “passes through resistance and opens the soul. ‘Depth’ has more to do with staying in compassionate and attentive contact with the presence of another than with revealing ‘deep’ secrets, which may take us away from the immediacy of the present engagement. Deep down is always right here and now.” Again Shaun McNiff says, “The medicine of renewal comes through the imagination and constantly looking at things in different ways, with desire, or at least with aesthetic appreciation. […] I can change the significance of a bus ride I take every day by approaching it aesthetically. […] Personifying the bus expands my compassion for its experience. The demon bus, the thing I loathe to ride, is transformed into a psychic helper who shows me how to look at things differently. Stuckness, boredom, anxieties, and even depression involve a certain failure of imagination….”

And that’s it. Moving into a new year, a new decade, we don’t want imagination to fail us. We want it focused, so we can see the world truly. Reading good books will expand our minds, but then comes the task of sitting with Thoreau in the sunny doorway of his cabin at Walden Pond, allowing for this broad margin in our lives, listening to the sounds of our world, playing with them creatively, transforming them poetically, reviving what we take for granted, personifying train engines and bus rides and traffic and all other things that from one perspective could be seen as horrific, but we befriend them instead, we expand compassion for them. It’s about feeling connected, feeling at home. Time well spent. There is an angel possibility in the uncarved block of marble that lies before us as the new year, and everything depends on whether we can see it. “I saw the angel in the marble,” said Michelangelo, “and carved until I set him free. ” So may we.

The longest night of the year fast approaches: the winter solstice. It comes quickly, and to the ancients, this was always a source of anxiety. Will the longest night move so fast that, like a bird of prey, it’ll sweep in, snatch up the light, swallow it, and overtake all? Or will the light ultimately triumph? Will the sun return?

It was a moral cosmology, forces of good and evil infusing the physics of our universe. We know it is not literally true, yet there remains the poetry of it, the logic of it, which we can still take seriously, and we do. Light triumphing over an encroaching, threatening darkness. Many faces to this, many ways. The Hindu celebration of Diwali, the festival of lights, occurring between mid-October and mid-November. Advent candles of hope, peace, joy, love, on the way to Christmas. Moravian star, greening lights. Hanukkah candles symbolizing the miracle light of freedom.

Ancients, walking with us still, no matter what our religion happens to be. The old. old logic of sun-return still moving within our celebrations, within our Unitarian Universalist chalice flame as well, which is nothing if not a memory of all the flames that didn’t die, despite everything. Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Just listen to one of the oldest recorded prayers in human history:

From unreality lead us to reality.
From bondage lead us to freedom.
From darkness lead us to light.

This comes from Hindu scriptures known as the Upanishads, and it is of a piece with this holiday season, another way of saying the same thing, another way of affirming the eternal hope of the human heart. Hindus believe that there are times when ignorance and suffering are so great that nothing less than God becoming human to lead the people out of the shadows will suffice. Vishnu enters human history, for Vishnu is that aspect of the divine which preserves, and strengthens, and unifies; and when Vishnu takes on a human form, that form is called an “avatar,” which simply means “an incarnation of God.” Love takes human form, whenever the need is greatest, and some Hindus say that there have been thousands of avatars over the course of history.

Several are traditionally singled out for special recognition, including Krishna and the Buddha, and many Hindus would like to include Jesus as well, as the avatar through whom most Western people have learned the truth about the power of love at the center of the universe. Love taking human form whenever the need is greatest. Baby Jesus, born in the middle of nowhere, in a backwater town in Judea, in a time of devastating brutality.

And it’s our calling too, wherever we happen to be. The avatar impulse surging up in us as well, as an unconquerable inner light of love. Not the kind of love that is fundamentally a tingly feeling. But love that is active, effective, a choice; as theologian Carter Heyward puts it: “a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives.” This, says another theologian, is how we are in fact saved. If salvation has any meaning at all, this is it. Who is this theologian? Faustus Socinus—one of our Unitarian forebearers from more than 400 years ago. Jesus saves, he said, by virtue of the example of his life. If we follow his example and are converted to humanity—if we make the active, effective choice to participate with others in the healing of brokenness—then salvation can have meaning for us. Only then.

Love taking human form, in us—our way of being saved this winter season and all year round. There is a marvelous story about a woman who once stood before God and she was angry about all the suffering and hurt in the world and she cried out, ”Dear God, look at all the anguish and injustice, all the distress and unfairness in your world. What kind of God are you? Why don’t you send help?” And God said, “I did send help. I sent you.”

From unreality lead us to reality.
From bondage lead us to freedom.
From darkness lead us to light.

The avatar impulse surges up, surges up, and there are times when we see it surging up in the events of human history, as in the Christmas Truce of 1914. Love taking human form in this way too.

It’s a remarkable story. A little more than 90 years ago, millions of people from all over Europe rushed enthusiastically to the call of war, embracing the old Roman saying, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” The mood was jovial. The war would last only weeks. “You will be home before the leaves have fallen off the trees,” said the German Kaiser, in early August 1914, to his troops.

But he was wrong. Leaves would fall off the trees four times before it was over. Grinding, catastrophic years. The jovial mood torn away, the mask of sweetness torn away, once the battles actually began. One reason was this: military tactics had failed to keep pace with advances in technology, like repeating rifles, machine guns, and barbed wire, and out-of-date strategies meant excruciating vulnerability. Armies tore chunks out of each other, were deadlocked. Thousands upon thousands of men slaughtered. Just like the leaves, men falling.

So into the trenches they went. This was how the soldiers on either side would protect themselves in the autumn and winter of 1914 (and beyond). Dig in and prepare for future offenses which would hopefully break through the deadlock and deliver victory. Keep your head down. The enemy sometimes no more than 70 yards away, 50 yards away, 30 yards away. Crack of rifles, dull thud of shells ploughing into the ground, but you could also hear the enemy talking, laughing, hurling insults. At times see shadowy shapes in the distance.

So there they are, the soldiers, in the cold, in the muck, mud sucking at their boots, miserable in trenches. It’s Christmas Eve, and they feel the darkness of a world at war surrounding them, threatening to snatch up the light and swallow it for good. And then suddenly, along various areas of the Western front, it happens: love takes human form. Salvation. The shooting stops. First silence for months. Christmas trees go up, and then there is singing, back and forth: “Silent Night.” ”Oh Christmas Tree.” “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Each side applauds the other, and then a thought begins to stir: was the enemy really as bad as the politicians and papers were saying? Across No Man’s Land: something other than cruelty and death and madness happening.

Happening spontaneously at different points along the British-German front, each instance independent of the others. Almost two-thirds of the front transformed: soldiers singing, each side singing to the other instead of shooting. Then up and out of their trenches, meeting each other in their common humanity. Playing soccer together. Exchanging gifts, exchanging stories, mourning each others’ dead, burying each other’s dead.

It’s the ancient prayer again:

From unreality lead us to reality.
From bondage lead us to freedom.
From darkness lead us to light.

It’s what keeps me going, as I reflect on the different kinds of trenches we find ourselves in, fighting away, personally, nationally, and internationally. With all this talk about World War I, I can’t help but think about our years of war in Iraq, and now an intensified war in Afghanistan. At least in Iraq, what had been planned as a short and decisive intervention became in reality a grueling counterinsurgency that put our women and men into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since Vietnam. Too many times, the leaves will have fallen off the trees, before they all come home. Too many times.

And I say all this acknowledging the severe truth in President Obama’s recent Nobel Peace Prize speech, where he says, “The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.” “I face the world as it is,” he says; “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s army. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” This is what President Obama says. Severe truth.

Yet this truth must coexist somehow with another truth: that “no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.” Never say those old Roman words: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” Never say them. Never imagine oneself to be a pure agent of the Light, and one’s mission a holy mission. “For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will,” says President Obama, “then there is no need for restraint—no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the even a person of one’s own faith.” The battle of pure good versus pure evil could only ever be for gods of myth, and never for mere mortals like ourselves.

The two truths must somehow live together, in tension. Wars are sometimes just, and no matter how just, wars are a tragedy, and a folly. Severe, severe wisdom that can bury a person in despair. Bury you and bury me. The longest night of the year, flying like a bird of prey, threatening to snatch up the light, swallow it up forever and forever.

That’s why, in this holiday season especially, I cherish the brave light of our Unitarian Universalist chalice, that memory of all the flames that didn’t die, despite everything. I cherish our advent candles and menorah candles, I cherish our Moravian star and greening lights. They bring hopefulness and healing, and I accept them into my fear for the world. I breathe them in . I am reminded of the avatar impulse in us, the same impulse that led those soldiers so many years ago to place Christmas trees in front of trenches, to sing Christmas carols, to transform No Man’s Land into a soccer playground. Love taking human form, in them, in us. Salvation. And though it did not end the war—sometimes we cannot avoid the fight—still, the miracle made them more human in a dehumanizing situation, freed them from self-righteousness and false pride, freed them to treat the opponent honorably as fellow humans with hopes and fears.

And above all, they told the story far and wide. The Christmas Truce of 1914. They kept the story alive, a story that reaffirms my faith in the world and perhaps yours, a story that is itself one of the many small factors and large factors that one day, one day will combine together and the chemistry will be right and suddenly, impossibly, the unconquerable avatar impulse deep within will realize itself fully and completely, fully and completely, and the human race will finally awaken, it will awaken from its war sickness, and it will learn a different way. It will.

From unreality lead us to reality.
From bondage lead us to freedom.
From darkness lead us to light.

To this ancient prayer I say, AMEN.

Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Willpower

Rev. Anthony David

Dec. 13, 2009

“As soon as you trust yourself,” the great writer Goethe once said, “you will know how to live.” Again and again, we hear stories that testify to this truth.

Consider this one, coming from William James, pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who struggled with self-trust. As a young man William James was in the grip of the free will-determinism controversy: are humans mere machines, predetermined in everything they did, or is freedom of the will a reality? This ancient question only amplified the chronic instability that he experienced in his family of origin; it gnawed at him, tore at him; and then, after a series of health issues and the death of a beloved, free-spirited cousin, the bottom fell out. “Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects,” he wrote, “I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin … who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.” James continues, “After this the universe was changed for me altogether, I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and though the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.” That’s William James’ horrible vision. Self-trust destroyed. Fear of his own existence, of his own body and mind potentially working against him, potentially becoming inert, mummified, non-human, green. The pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life, revealed. Self-trust completely stripped away, together with knowledge of how possibly to live.

Yet the story does not end there. Around fifteen years after the horrible vision of the green-skinned patient in the asylum, in 1884, William James would stand before Harvard Divinity students, Unitarian ministers-in-training all, and present a lecture entitled “The Dilemma of Determinism,” defending freedom of the will against determinism, commending self-trust, pointing out, among many other things, that the very existence of regret—the feeling we get when we do something which we wish we hadn’t—suggests that deep within we know we are not puppets whose strings are pulled by forces beyond us. Freedom is a reality we know deep within, said James, even if our intellects may be tangled up by the complexities of philosophical debate or paralyzed by the lack of indisputable evidence to decide the matter once and for all. Something happened to William James that gave him his life back. Something happened that gave him a voice, got him up there to speak before our Harvard spiritual ancestors, made him the pioneering psychologist and philosopher that we know him as today.

It was something he read, several weeks after the horrible vision. An essay by French philosopher Charles Renouvier, in which he defines free will as “the sustaining of a thought because I chose to when I might have had other thoughts”—in which he says that to recognize this capacity is itself a free act. This is what James seized on. This is what turned things around. In his journal he would write, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and [the brooding] in which my nature takes most delight and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting.” Inspired by Charles Renouvier, William James planted a seed of soul, and he carefully cultivated it, and it grew into self-trust, and this self-trust taught him how to live.

That’s what we’re talking about today, in this third installment of the “Planting Seeds of Soul” series: building self-trust by encouraging and increasing the feeling of being free, of being able to summon inner forces to act. As meditation teacher Warren Lee Cohen puts it, “By building accomplishment onto accomplishment, you can cultivate this very capacity to do anything that you set your mind to, creating a new kind of ‘muscle’ in your soul.” That’s the goal.

And the achievement of this can’t be overestimated. To be able to say no when it would be easier to go along; to be able to say yes when it would be easier to stay safe; to be able to replace an unhealthy habit with one that is healthier; to be able to adjust the course one is on: without some sense of control over our lives, we fall into despair. Freedom undeveloped and unfulfilled festers. To ourselves, we become as fearsome and strange as the figure of William James’ horrible vision.

We’ve just got to have a sense of our freedom. Jonathan Haidt talks about this in our study book from last year, The Happiness Hypothesis. He cites a classic psychological study in which benefits were given to residents “on two floors of a nursing home—plants in their rooms, and a movie screening one night a week. But on one floor, these benefits came with a sense of control. The residents were allowed to choose which plants they wanted, and they were responsible for watering them. They were also allowed to choose as a group which night would be movie night. On the other floor, the same benefits were simply doled out: the nurses chose the plants and watered them; the nurses decided which night was movie night. This small arrangement had big results: On the floor with increased control, residents were happier, more active, and more alert (as rated by the nurses, not just the residents), and these benefits were still visible eighteen months later. Most amazingly, at the eighteen-month follow-up, residents of the floor given control had better health and half as many deaths (15 percent to 30 percent).” Jonathan Haidt’s conclusion? “Changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.”

Even the smallest arrangements in the direction of expanding control have big results. Jonathan Haidt cites yet another classic study, in which people were exposed to loud bursts of random noise. “Subjects in one group were told they could terminate the noise by pressing a button, but they were asked not to do it unless absolutely necessary. None of them ended up pressing the button, yet the belief that they had some form of control made the noise less distressing. Later in the experiment, when they were given difficult puzzles to work on, they were far more persistent than the other subjects, who were exposed to the loud bursts of noise without any sense of control.” There’s just a Hanukkah subtext to all of this. Take from people a sense of control, and it is as if you have stormed their temple, ruined their religion of the spirit, banished them to the mountains; but give it back to them, or help them to rediscover it for themselves, even in the smallest ways, and the temple is restored, the temple is rededicated, and at the center of it all is the miracle of willpower, the miracle oil in the lamp, lighting up the dark.

It’s why town hall meetings and congregational meetings matter. Why volunteerism matters, and financial generosity. Each is an opportunity for people to increase their sense of engagement and energy, and here too science reveals big results. Studies show that if you participate regularly in congregational life, chances are you will be healthier and happier and live longer. Plant the willpower seed, and good things grow. It can happen institutionally, and it can happen personally. Practice the soul exercises I’m sharing with you on a monthly basis. Make a Happiness Pledge, or continue working on the one you committed to this past April, as I am: my pledge is refraining from eating beef and poultry and pork for all sorts of sustainability reasons—feeling good about this change in my diet, feeling better, although I have to admit, I fell off the wagon pretty badly during Thanksgiving, thanks to our music director Don Milton III and the amazingly deliciously tempting turkey he cooked…. But perfectionism is not the point. It never is. It just paralyzes the will, but what we want is to strengthen it, plant the seed and help it grow. What counts is effort. Show up, and keep on showing up. With every exercise of will, to increase the feeling of being free, of being able to summon inner forces to act.

Even and especially when we’re not really sure what it is we ultimately want, or what’s ultimately best. As Barbara Sher says in her fantastic book I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was, “many of us get stopped. Every time we resolve to change our lives, every time we go to pick up the baton and get into the race [to pursue our unique destiny and potential], something happens. For some mysterious reason our determination melts. We look at the baton and think ‘This race isn’t it.’ And we put down the baton, uneasy because time is slipping away, frightened that we’ll never find ‘it.’”

Determination melts. Willpower drains away. We become the green-skinned horrible vision.  And it IS horrible, this sense of personal powerlessness which translates into doing nothing, because in this way we lose all sorts of precious opportunities. We lose our way. “Action,” says Barbara Sher, “is absolutely essential for people who don’t know what they want.” “I can give you four good reasons,” she says, and they are:

#1: Action helps you think. “By exposing you to real-life experiences and seeing how they feel to you, action will help you do much better thinking than you could ever hope to do sitting still and weighing all the theoretical factors. Even action in the wrong direction is informative.”

Reason #2: Action raises your self-esteem. “Most inaction,” says Barbara Sher, “isn’t solely about indecision—it’s because of fear. But every time you want to do something that scares you, and you dare to do it, your self-esteem goes up a few degrees. When you’re fearful but you step forward anyway, you do yourself a great service.”

Action helps you think, it raises your self-esteem, and now, reason #3: it brings good luck into your life. “Try it,” says Barbara Sher. “Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can to achieve it. I guarantee you, your life will change. You might not get where you thought you were going, but you could easily wind up somewhere better. You’ll get breaks you never could have planned for because you never knew they existed.”

Finally, reason #4: Action builds self-trust. “Sometimes,” she says, “your wishes or your timing look a bit odd, but if they feel right, stick with them. You can trust your animal instincts. The animal inside us knows how fast to move and how much we can carry. And it tells us things that don’t always make sense—at first.” Like Jessie in our story from earlier—our forty-five-year-old lady in a straight skirt and sensible shoes—sometimes, to get to the point where you can make the big practical change in your life in Atlanta, Georgia, you have to go to Bear Grease, Minnesota first, and you have to race sled dogs. You just have to.

And there’s the four good reasons for action even when we’re not really sure what it is we ultimately want, or what’s ultimately best. It’s the quote from Goethe, exactly: “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

And now it’s time to introduce this month’s soul-raising exercise.

It’s extremely simple—deceptively so. Choose a simple task that you will do each and every day at exactly the same time, like turning a ring once around your finger at noon, or shifting a set of keys from one pocket to another right in the middle of your sermon. As meditation teacher Warren Cohen says, “The task is better if it serves no obvious or current purpose in your life—in other words, you do the task in and of itself, out of a certain dedication just to doing it.” This guarantees that the complete focus is on doing what William James did: voluntarily cultivating the feeling of freedom, without reference to anything beyond it.

Four basic steps:

Step one: Choose the task and the time you will do it every day. It’s best if the task is simple and can be done without making you look too weird. (NOT, for example, doing the American Bat Face on your daily MARTA trip… You all remember the American Bat Face, right?) Choose a good task and create a plan in which you do it along with the other two exercises—you don’t want to forget about the review of the day and the clear thinking assignment. Remember, each exercise complements and balances the others; practicing any one of them requires practicing them all.

That’s step one—step two is: do it, and keep track of how it goes, in your journal or with friends, or both. Be sure to celebrate your successes. If you forget, do the task as soon as you remember. It’s never too late.

Step one, step two, and now step three: As you get more proficient at performing one task, add another. “Work your way up to three simple tasks per day, each of which you aim to do at its own specific time. Try spreading them out through the day and thus also learning about which parts of the day are better times for you to engage your will and which pose the most challenges” (Warren Lee Cohen).

Finally, step four, which comes into play after some practice, and you notice a subtle feeling of inner confidence developing. When this happens, direct your attention to the feeling of freedom; try to become aware of where it is centered in your body; direct this feeling to well up into your head and then pour down, down your spinal cord. Let your confidence enliven the rest of your body. Light up like a miracle Hanukkah lamp.

It’s about rededicating the temple of yourself. Rebuilding, restoring, making things whole. Believing in freedom to be free. Going to Bear Grease, Minnesota to figure out what to do here in Atlanta, Georgia. Turning the ring once around your finger at noon, clapping three times at 3 o’clock, practicing faithfully whatever small task you end up choosing, following the increasing feeling of will force into the vibrant larger life that waits for you.

Rev. Anthony David

Dec. 6, 2009

Poet Katha Pollitt writes,

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I’d ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, “Someday you’ll know what it’s like!”
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
The only thing I didn’t understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I’ll be
thirty-nine, and I still don’t understand it.

That’s Katha Pollitt’s moving poem. For all her life, she (or the dramatic ego of the poem) has understood futility. For all her life, she has understood cruelty, loneliness, and disappointment. But then there is the reality that people are saved everyday. Unexpected things like sparrows, foghorns, grassblades, and tablecloths bringing hope and beauty and peace to us, and our spirits receiving them. Despite everything, we get what we need to keep on moving through life, one step at a time.

Yet this the poet does not understand. How can life be larger than just sorrow? How can life be large enough to dance in? I am struck by how Katha Pollitt spends so much time tracing her understanding of suffering to concrete experiences: of standing for hours on hot asphalt, trudging for balls; of children having been snobbish and cruel to her, as a child; of seeing solitary diners in restaurants and hearing her grandmother scream at her. But as for the insight that “people are saved every day”: not as much room in the poem for that. Katha Pollitt doesn’t spend equal energy tracing it to concrete details and experiences. She keeps it at arm’s length, keeps it abstract. “This year I’ll be thirty-nine, and I still don’t understand it,” she says, and in the end, my sense is that she may never understand. That what she’s really doing is declaring dejection and despair—confirming that life indeed is as small as it sometimes seems, and joy, when it occurs, is a tragic exception. It’s what we tend to do, after all, in order to survive the harshness of futility and cruelty and loneliness and disappointment—especially when growing up. We shut down, we blank out, we shrink. 39 years old, 49, 59, we continue grinding out our survival strategies, even though the circumstances to which those strategies were tuned no longer exist. We stop believing. People all around us saved every day, and we see it, but just as soon as it is out of sight, it goes out of mind. No room in the poem for that; no room in our lives. The sparrow, the foghorn, the grassblades, the tablecloths might even have brought a saving grace to us, personally, but there’s no room. Dejection is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And Henry David Thoreau will have none of it. In the chapter of Walden we are focusing on this morning, chapter two, he says, “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as a chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Thoreau says, “I have read in a Hindoo book, that ‘there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince.” This is our Henry David Thoreau, our Unitarian Universalist ancestor. He stands on the side of the reality that we are saved every day and that this is the deepest reality of our lives, not some tragic exception; that though we can be lost—though we can forget who we really are—we can be found again, we can remember, we can wake up. [Cry of the chanticleer.]

Our topic this morning is the art of living deliberately and not accidentally, or hurriedly, or unconsciously. Peace in the heart, so there can be peace in the world. “I went to the woods,” says Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear….” Today we take a closer look at what this meant for Thoreau, and what it can mean for us today.

It begins with his famous line: “Simplify, simplify.” I’ve seen it on more bumper stickers than I can shake a stick at; on T-shirts too. But what’s it really mean?

It’s classic Thoreau to articulate a concept humorously. So, in chapter two, he tells the story about an incident that occurred right before his coming to Walden: his close call with owning his own farm. The Hallowell farm. Oh, he was tempted. The location was secluded; a river ran right by it; he mentions “the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I would have.” “But above all,” he says, “the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark.” For all of this—seclusion, beauty, nostalgia—he tells of being “ready to carry it on, like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders.” This is high drama, folks. But then the owner’s wife, Mrs. Hallowell, changes her mind; she doesn’t want to sell after all. Mr. Hallowell, in a panic, offers Thoreau the significant amount of ten dollars to release him from the deal he has already struck, and Thoreau graciously allows him to keep his money, together with the farm. And the point to all this? Thoreau’s realization that not owning the farm actually opens him up to a richer and more satisfying relationship with it. “I have frequently seen a poet,” he says, “having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.” Thoreau is the poet here; and we read in Walden how he has carried away the riches of the Hallowell farm without any damage to his physical poverty. He gets the better deal: while the farmer keeps his few wild apples, he revels in the seclusion and beauty and memory which feeds his soul. Not things but meanings, experiences.

This is what it means to simplify. It’s about opening up to Life Abundant in your own life. Refusing to fill yourself up with things that feel urgent but are in fact draining and demoralizing, so that you end up having no room for big meanings and experiences which vitalize. Refusing to endlessly ruminate on experiences of futility and cruelty and loneliness and disappointment so that there’s no room for anything else. Refusing to be like a shortsighted man in a picture gallery, who studies a masterpiece from two inches away, and intellectually he has clearly and accurately identified 12 different kinds of blobs of color and 7 different shapes, but he can’t see the whole thing, can’t make out the big picture, can’t get the full impact of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He’s blind to all that—even as all that is the source of true worth. Our lives, says Thoreau, are “frittered away by detail.” We live too up close to things, shortsighted, and this is a form of spiritual sleepwalking. But to simplify is to make room for abundance. It is to empty ourselves of the nonessential, so that we can be filled with the essential. It’s the king’s son in the Hindu parable, lost but now found, coming home. It’s the cry of the chanticleer.

The art of living deliberately starts with simplifying, and this naturally leads to the next phase, which is aspiring. “We must,” says Thoreau, “learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” “That man,” he says, “who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.”

As I think on what this means, a story comes to mind from the work of Abraham Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. His focus was on self-actualization or, as we Unitarian Universalists might say, people giving full expression to the worth and dignity that is inherently theirs. In the course of his studies, he determined that self-actualizing people very naturally have spiritual experiences—profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world; more aware of truth, justice, harmony, and goodness. But now here is the story. When Maslow’s students began to talk to each other about their peak experiences, they began having them all the time. It was as if the simple act of being reminded of their existence was enough to make them happen. Talking and thinking about moments of people being saved every day makes it more likely that we will have such moments ourselves. Conversely, if we do not talk and think about such things, we may block their happening.

Thus we are to aspire, says Thoreau. Talking about God evokes God energy. Talking about heaven brings heaven closer. Hold fast to an infinite expectation of the dawn, hold it close, since (as he says), it “does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.” It goes with us, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. When facing some kind of scarcity in life, you say to yourself like a mantra, over and over, “I trust that everything I need is inside me and near me, and it will become available to me as I need it.” If our lives are frittered away by detail, this will seem like a load of hooey, and nonsense. But in reality it is the largest thing imaginable, a hope, a peace, a vision of Life Abundant, and it requires us to prepare tremendous room in our hearts. We must prepare the way to receive it.

An infinite expectation of the dawn. This is what is on my mind, as I reflect on an anecdote about Thoreau that’s a personal favorite. I first encountered it when I was actually up at Concord, Massachusetts, visiting the fantastic museum there. A picture of skaters on a pond, and this excerpt from a letter by writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, dated December 30, 1842. She writes, “One afternoon, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau went with Mr. Hawthorne down the river. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice–very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next to him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.” That’s the anecdote. I laughed so hard—and then I teared up. Sophia clearly preferred her husband’s statue-like decorum; but, figure skater that I am, I’ll take Thoreau’s athleticism and joy over that any day.

To me it’s a personal and precious symbol of living deliberately. For the man who danced and leapt on ice also suffered from the chronic illness of tuberculosis and often had great trouble breathing. He was continually plagued with poor health. But this did not stop him from reveling in life. “Men esteem truth remote,” he says, “in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.” This is what Thoreau says.

To live deliberately, we simplify and we aspire. And in this way we accomplish what Thoreau calls the highest of arts. “It is something,” he says, “to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.” We can do it. Futility and cruelty, loneliness and disappointment; survival strategies we learned growing up that now make us unhappy; dejection as a self-fulfilling prophesy. Yet there can be a new morning in our lives. “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.” Let us conceive of renewal.

I’ll close with a second poem, one which, for me, sparked a moment of emotional awakening in a time when I was struggling. I had painted the atmosphere and medium through which I looked at my life in dirty grays and blood reds. I was in a place where I, like the speaker in Katha Pollitt’s poem, could not possibly understand how people are saved every day. And then I read this:

“The Cure,” by Albert Huffstickler.

We think we get over things.
We don’t “get over” things.
Or say, we get over the measles
but not a broken heart.
We need to make that distinction.
The things that become part of our experience
never become less a part of our experience.
How can I say it?
The way to “get over” a life is to die.
Short of that, you move with it,
let the pain be pain,
not in the hope that it will vanish
but in the faith that it will fit in,
find its place in the shape of things
and be then not any less pain but true to form.
Because anything natural has an inherent shape
and will flow towards it.
And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single instant.

**

That’s the poem. Life is large enough for all the things that count. Wisdom is seeing this shape, as natural as a leaf, in which all things can find their right fit, eventually, provided we simplify and make room for them. And God can culminate in the present moment. And God can culminate in the present moment. And over and above it all, fearlessly: the lusty cry of the chanticleer, proclaiming morning.

Let’s proclaim morning together.

The cry of the chanticleer.

All together, 1-2-3: