When Julia Ward Howe issued her Mother’s Day call in 1872, women had the right to vote in only one territory in the country, and it would be nearly half a century before we won it nationwide. Still, she proclaimed, ‘Arise, all women who have hearts…Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies… Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

I love this proclamation. I post it on Facebook every year at Mother’s Day. It’s an antidote of sorts to the simpering greeting card graphics that populate my feed at this time of year. Mothers think of nothing but their children… They’re angels sent from heaven. <Gag!>

The reason I love it is because Julia Ward Howe articulates two Truths of motherhood:

(1) With or without formal power, we are powerful.

As Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, wrote in her recent book on women and leadership, we must lean in to our lives, including motherhood. We have to say “yes” to our potential. Key parts of that for me are first, accepting my strengths and what makes me happy. I am good at my stressful, kind of insane job. I would not be good at being a full time caregiver for my children. Fact: I love my kids more because I don’t have to be around them all the time.

Next, I have to stop being too hard on myself. Neither my home nor my children are Pinterest-worthy. I lose my temper with my “spirited” three-year-old sometimes. I’m sure there was more than one person in the social hall last Sunday who heard me holler when he took off running.

His middle name was involved.

I’m sure that someone was appalled, but I can’t worry about that too much. In the moment when I had to focus on safety and teaching him (hopefully someday) not to run around the perfectly designed UUCA indoor track, someone thinking that I’m a bad mother is something I just have to let go.

Finally, I need help to be my best. Last Sunday, our wonderful farmer, Joe, heard Elliott’s middle name, and he trotted across the Social Hall to take my grocery bag, and he packed up our CSA veggies for me. For some crazy reason, when people offer help, my first inclination is to say no. But in that moment, I was a better mom because I had one less thing on my hands. Which I then had to use to drag my screaming child out from under the Hope-Hill school table.

(2) The personal is political.

And there is nothing more personal than our children. Which to me means that my choices for them speak my real values… there are lessons that I want to ingrain in them, yes: that they are special… but not specialER than anyone else, for example.

But it’s my choices for our lives that speak louder than those lessons.

I lean into my career, volunteer, and maintain adult friendships in part because I want my boys to be men who expect women to be strong and independent. I am fortunate to have married well… to a man who is better at a lot of the traditional mama stuff than I am. He stays home right now, and I want my boys to be men who don’t see this and think “Mr. Mom”… they should see it and think “Daddy.”

Not only do I want them to see beyond traditional boundaries of gender, but I also want them to be capable of integrating into the 21st century world. Let’s face it—I am raising The Man.

So, another choice that I am making for them is to invest in our community public school, a school mostly populated with low-income students of color that is overlooked by most of my white, middle class neighbors. I am committing to sending my kids there and everything that goes along with that… to get them what they need and to get it for everybody else’s kids too. I need them to know what it looks like to be citizens in our community, not consumers of it.

And I need to use that power that Julia Ward Howe knew that women wield to show my sons and the sons of others that the only way to save a drowning person is to jump in the water with him. You both come out wet and irrevocably changed for the better.

Mother’s Day Reflection by Kim Green Foster

I have found that we sometimes learn important lessons from what did happen.

However, more often, I’ve learned the most important lessons from what didn’t happen.

Since 1981 the celebration of our mothers has always left me on the outside looking in. Although I am a mother myself, the hurt of not having a mother for most of my life has made me somewhat numb to the need for celebration.

I consider myself motherless. Just admitting that I am motherless was my teenaged defense mechanism. A survival tactic, if you will. The brutality of saying it that way was the only way I could make sense of walking the earth without the comfort of the one who brought me here.  Revealing the truth of my life was simply a salve for my broken heart. Having a mother was sort of a privilege and not having one made me instantly under-privileged.

Today, all of that has changed thanks to Reverend Marti Keller who always asks us to go beneath the surface about everything, including motherhood on Mother’s Day.

As a motherless daughter, I would like to publicly remember my mother. Her name was Mary Ellen Green and I credit her with many things, especially giving me the impetus to live…differently than she did. I did have a mother whose essence is still a part of everything I do and say. She is not separate from me, she is me.

When I have the courage to feel the ache that comes with every inch of me that still misses her so deeply, I ‘m reminded how much I want to thank her for showing me what not to do with my own mothering experience. My mother showed me the importance of not letting one stone go unturned in the pursuit of my own fulfillment. By bearing witness to her endless adoration, I recognized that although her profound love for me, which was deep, lasting and too short-lived, it was still…simply not enough to sustain. Maybe it was enough to sustain me, but not to sustain her or her soul.

I remember watching her daily ritual of mixing cocktails in a tall glass and lighting cigarettes as though she were preparing a sacred ritual that she would engage in throughout the night. These evening ceremonies were her way to have something of her own. The cocktails and the cigarettes were the accouterments that would glam up the boredom of her loveless life as a mother. A single mother, at that.  In her desperate attempts at radical mothering, she worked an unsatisfying job and wasted so much of her spiritual riches on me, without sharing them with lovers, friends, hobbies or anything that was hers to keep.  Mary Ellen was a stunning beauty who eschewed all romantic relationships with men, worrying that someone could potentially harm me or trample on my innocence in ways that no one ever talked about in those days. By rejecting all of the potential suitors, she turned her back on her own need for love. The relationship that she chose with vodka and cigarettes took her further and further away from her own dreams of success, glamour, riches and love.

When Reverend Keller told me that her inspiration for this service was Sheryl Sandbergs’s book Lean In; Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. I was struck by the title, as I was suddenly aware of the rigorous physicality that it takes to simply be a woman. Just landing in our skin, we find our lives choreographed by others from birth.  Our mothers, fathers and society-at-large seem to always pick our steps for us, instilling in us their own version of life’s dance. They instruct carefully when to lean in and when to stand still.

My own mother, in fact, considered it a victory that she met my father; someone whom she thought had money and would rescue her. She didn’t realize that as women, we must rescue ourselves. Women are contortionists, always being what society tells them to be. The world assures us that societally dictated things would make us happy. The world often also recommends if and how much we should work. And even what we should do.  The contortions our bodies, souls and minds endure have simply birthed a generation of new women whose souls seem to be saying, we want to do our own dance. And our dance is so intricate that it includes women who dance with children or without. Women who dance alone or with men or with women. Regardless, we all are mothers on this mother’s day.

My mother was an early feminist, I think. She drank, smoked and she had a commanding tone. She loved music and art and all things classy. She was a divorcee in 1967 and a single parent who had been strong enough to leave the man that she sought for so long, who turned out to not be the knight in shining armor, but a chauvinistic man with a penchant for rage. She was courageous enough to choose her solitude, but too cowardly to go for love with another, using her motherhood as her excuse. My mother loved travel, but never went anywhere.  My mother loved gourmet food, but never went to restaurants. She was always outside looking in. Being a mother was simply not enough for her.  And it never has been for women, but now we all know it. Even as my grandmother would say, “Even the mens know it.“

I would like to think that one of my mother’s greatest accomplishment was birthing a new woman who writes, to share about the job that she started but couldn’t finish. Several years ago, I, along with 27 other women wrote about our experiences of being a mother or choosing not to.

The anthology was entitled, Who’s Your Mama? with the subtitle: The unsung voices of women and Mothers.  My essay, In the Absence of Blood, was about the adoption of my son. This is how it began: “There was no panting, sweating, grunting or ripping out of what was hidden deep within. There was no physical pain associated with becoming my son’s mother.  My soul never thought it was necessary.“

The essay continues, “This unwieldy love makes others judge me, envy me or even hate me. I no longer care how I appear. I have become child-centric.” That is a word my mother would have used.

I wish she were here so I could whisper in her ear, “Motherhood should appear in our lives as a joyful option, not a life sentence.“  Don’t get me wrong. I am eternally grateful that she chose motherhood, however, I will always lament all of the other choices that she couldn’t make, didn’t make or was too scared to make. I think if she had done more, felt more and accomplished more, she would still be here today, happier and healthier and sitting in the front row. I would have never begrudged her for taking some of life for herself.

When I re-read the essay that I wrote in 2008, it was quite an obsessive rant about the depth of my love for my son, despite the fact that he did not come from my body. The title, In the Absence of Blood referred to my choosing adoption over childbirth.  It was not a desperate last resort. It was what made sense to me. As a writer, I then felt compelled to show the world how absolutely and unconditionally adoptive mothers can love their adoptive children.  Our birth experience just looks different. I loved my son so much that I worried about every detail of his life, even the things that I cannot control.  Even things that are none of my business.

In 2008 when my son was only five, I already worried as I wrote; “My son’s burdens thrash around in my head while my hearts plots to destroy them one by one.” I then went on to list some of the burdens that I feared he would encounter…

#1) He is half white.  What will that mean in a color struck world?

#2) His father lives in a different state? What will the world tell him? Will they see him as just another black boy without a father?

#3) He is adopted.  You know all the things that people say about adoption.

When I wrote all of that that, I would never imagine that I would be the one, not society, to add to dreaded list.

#4) His mother fell in love with another woman.

And in true motherly fashion, I worried incessantly about this love.  How would my same-sex relationship impact my child? Would it potentially make him resent me? Would it ruin his life? Make him a pariah at school?  Put him at odds with his religious father and grandparents… Would it make him ashamed of me and our wonderful life?

Doubting myself, I wondered would it be better and easier for him, if I faked it, choosing another unfulfilling relationship that did not serve my soul, in order to fit in with all the other mothers in the crowd who were perfectly equipped with husbands, no matter how good or bad they were? Should I sacrifice me for him, just like Mary Ellen did for me?

At that pivotal moment of fear and doubt, wanna know what I did?   I leaned in.

I leaned in with every ounce of myself to grasp my own happiness, which included becoming an unencumbered partner and a gloriously happy mom. I leaned away from going the way of my mother. I want my child to see a mother with wings and fearlessness and love abounding. I want my child to witness a mother in motion.

As I lean in, my heart informs me that this is what it should feel like to dance to my own beat and my example will show my son to dance.  My mother’s life taught me is that being a mother only, is not enough.

Lesson learned.

Women are all mothers of some kind, whether we have children or not. We are the root of the tree, yet the root often gets ignored when the leaves bloom so prettily. It is our right to claim the depth of our lives; to unapologetically lean in to our true desires. Life’s entitlement for soul fulfillment is no longer reserved for our brothers. It is human to have what our hearts desire and deserve.  We have worked for this.

And, every time I look into the eyes of my loving partner, she is my reward.  I feel like this authentic, mutual, even love that we share is my comeuppance.  Everyday is mother’s day.  As a daughter of a woman who couldn’t own herself, I am determined for my son to see me truly alive, so he can be too.

And so, my choice of a female partner was no longer about my son and his feelings, it was all about me. And when I chose me, I chose him, too.

I no longer worry so much. My choices only enhance the adventure of my life. For him, I strive to be an example of living full out. I want to show him the power of doing the things in life that move us, speak to us and make us come alive. My choices grant him the freedom to love and be loved. That is the lesson my mother taught me.

Micah, my son, will learn more important lessons because of what did happen.

Mama’s Day Our Way by Rev. Marti Keller

Common preaching school wisdom is that we should avoid doing Mother’s Day services, sermons especially, at all costs. While for many it is rightly a time for tribute and celebration, it might bring up painful feelings for those among us who have had fertility problems, or who have lost babies or children, either through death or custody battles, or who are going through hard times with our own sons or daughters.

And despite all the commercials for pampering products or homemade waffles ( or waffle irons), telling us not to forget mom, urging us to give Mom all she deserves, and finally reminding us that it is our last chance to find the perfect gift for Mom, truth is for some of us children, young or older, it is impossible or hurtful to remember mom.

Mom may not be or if she has died, may not have been deserving of the adulation it is assumed we are going to heap on her this day, in the flesh or in memory.

That is the truth, as uncomfortable or unpopular as that might be.

Hallmark certainly wouldn’t like this perspective, nor the florists, nor the thousands of other businesses that thrive on, indeed count on Mother’s Day.

Like Christmas and Easter and many other observances, it has become an incredible pressure on families and enormously profitable for merchants.

The most popular day of the year to dine out and the busiest day for telephone lines.

And despite what I see as the shame and the sham of turning every holiday and holy day into a shopping blow-out, I admit I am hooked into it enough to look forward to, even expect those gifts from my own three children. The bath oil, the little bottles of cologne, the cards gathering dust on the mantle.

This year’s presents, which arrived later on last night, Fed-Ex style, in large boxes with lots of packaging— lovely bouquets of mixed flowers, roses and Calla Lilies with sweet notes typed in by a store clerk somewhere. Just in time for me not to be feeling disappointed, and then feeling guilty about being disappointed.

For assuming that’s what the day is about, and assuming my kids are feeling like paying tribute to me as if I were a royal figure, instead of that very young woman who so many years ago now longed to be, presumed she was ready for parenthood. Who was so clueless, so lost, so unready, so unprepared, so clumsy, and yet who so wanted those babies.

The just  barely not a teen who had to go to a charity health clinic for my firstborn’s shots and well baby check-ups, who was  forced to go on food stamps, who put him and his sister through a divorce and for more years than I would ever have imagined a latchkey life . Coming home to a silent, unpolished house after school, refrigerator half-filled with neglected cans or tomato paste and wilted lettuce, peddling up the street for milk I was too scattered, too tired to remember.

Because I was miles away working for a nonprofit organization which ironically was formed to make sure all pregnancies were intended, well planned for, and that mothers had the supports they needed to have well cared for and thriving children when they were truly ready.

It might have looked like I was leaning in, working days   steadily gaining more footing and more income and more influence, working nights at the writing career which had been my degree and my dream. But I was really just staying upright, at least most of the time.

So it was some sort of comic relief that the first Mother’s Day gift I received a few years back was from my oldest son, who was finishing school in Dallas Texas.

He sent me one of those free e-mail cards. The one he sent was not actually a Mother’s Day card, but instead a card commemorating national food allergies week.

He wrote that he wanted to remind me to avoid those foods, those almonds and Brazil nuts, the shrimp and the other shell food that made me break out in hives and threaten to stop breathing.

To be safe and to live, so we could continue to be in adult relationship with each other, with its peaks and valleys. Just live so I can do what I can—no more and no less- to make things right between us when things would get a little or a lot tense, even ugly.

And right with the world he was brought in to.

As a mother—as any and all of us who have known what it is like to fiercely love and nurture another human being are called to do. At least part of the time.

Which was the original intention of our American Mother’s Day, which had its beginnings, not in divine adoration but in activism. It started more than 150 years ago when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community, a cause she felt would be best led by mothers. She called it a “Mother’s Work Day” when the women of her hometown in West Virginia would work on improving the impoverished community’s sanitation and other direct service projects.

Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian poet, pacifist, suffragette, and author of the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, horrified by the bloodshed and the carnage of the Franco-Prussian War—organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace. She believed that mother’s above all others bore the loss of human life and would be the most moved to act to prevent war.

In 1872, Howe’s vision of a Mother’s Peace Day was ONLY briefly lived out in cities and towns across the country– as well as in Edinburgh, London, Geneva and Constantinople. The popularity of this Mother’s Day for Peace waned over time and the event finally disappeared in the year’s preceding World War 1.

In  1905, Anna Jarvis’s daughter, also named Anna, began a campaign to memorialize her mother’s social justice work and her vision of mothers working together to promote health and safety by commemorating a national mother’s day, her efforts paying off in 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill making it a federal holiday.

However as this holiday devolved into a day when instead of petitions and letters to the editors being circulated, this activity was diminished and then replaced by increasing card-sending,  gift-giving and pancake flipping, Anna Jarvis became enraged. She believed that the day’s original sentiment, its original purpose, was being sacrificed at the expense of greed and profit. In fact, by 1923 she was so distressed that she filed a lawsuit to stop a Mother’s Day festival.

By the time she died in 1948, Jarvis was said to have confessed that she regretted every helping to start the Mother’s Day tradition at all.

She had railed without success against what had happened to Mother’s Day, both how it had become so commercialized and how it had lost its point. It had begun as a reaction against injustice and violence, a way to use the values represented by motherhood for the greatest good.

Not a private celebration or a massive cultural take-over glorifying and idealizing motherhood in a way that few if any mothers can match, let alone sustain. Not a time for lessons on how to be a Tiger Mom, but the inspiration to be a Transforming Mom.

It was meant rather to move mothers and non-mothers alike to transcend their individual family lives and work to make a better society, even a better world.

In recent past years this has meant events like a Million Mom March focusing on stopping the senseless gun violence that too often marks American life, including the lives of our children- children in elementary school classrooms, the two year old toddler shot to death by her five year old brother who was gifted with a starter gun.

Or the Georgia mother’s child killed by gunshot once a week for the past decade.

Efforts like the one last year by Christy Turlington Burns, a model turned maternal health advocate who asked mothers to celebrate No Mother’s Day by not answering their phone or e-mail, even when their children called with the idea being to bring home what it feels like to be suddenly motherless, because around the world about 800 women a day die in childbirth, 90 percent of them from preventable causes.

Or this Mother’s Day 2013, when our own Unitarian Universalist Association Standing on the Side of Love faith in action program has joined a campaign, Strong Families/Mama’s Day for the Rest of Us, to recognize, as blogger Shanelle Matthews has noted what she describes as those who have generally not been publicly, or at least commercially celebrated: queer moms, immigrant moms, moms of children with disabilities, and moms with disabilities. If Mother’s Day emphasizes the importance of the maternal bond, she asks, don’t genderqueer moms, adoptive moms, foster moms, trans moms, grandmas parenting grandkids and single moms experience that same bond. If the purpose of Mother’s Day, she inquires, is to highlight the influence of mothers, aren’t stepmoms, incarcerated moms, young moms, refugee moms, low-income moms, and moms living on sovereign  land also influential?

She asks us to consider that the mothers whose lives are not being reflected on greeting cards are in need of something that can’t be delivered, worn or eaten. They need policies that accurately reflect the reality of their daily lives. They need affordable health care, citizenship, access to healthy foods, transportation, birth control, self-care time and support. They need safe spaces from domestic violence, visitation rights, affordable and safe housing, and culturally relevant education in languages their families understand.

She tells us eloquently that they need less shaming and more ways in which it is safe and secure to be the kind of moms they want to be.

Despite all the barriers, we are reminded, the mamas in our lives, in our community, are creating strong and resilient families. Happy Mother’s Day to all of us, to all of them. Let’s be about the work, the celebration of making their jobs easier.

May it be so this day.

For All the Stars, For All the Heavens by Rev. Dr. Michael Tino

http://www.uufellowship.org/sermons/sermonspdf/2010-04-18%20For%20the%20Stars%20For%20All%20The%20Heavens.pdf

The sermon text will be posted as soon as possible.

Having just read about the sect whose adherents
tiptoe around all living things,
I found one adhered to my windshield —
a bug, that is, whirring its wings.

I was stunned to see him still stuck as I left
from earning my daily bread.
One swipe of the wipers would have been deft,
but then one more bug would be dead.

Was it fair to erase his small life in the name
of a clear and unspoiled view?
I admit I’ve committed insecticide
by the thousands, not just a few.

This time let the wind accomplish the task,
never mind that I cause its velocity.
Surely even the hardiest bug feet
would succumb to the air’s swift ferocity.

But as I approached the four-way stop,
he still clung to the glass with a vengeance,
using every sub-ounce of energy he had
to resist the effects of the engine.

Imagine, if you will, the scale of his actions
in terms of his lifespan and size:
You’re hanging on the wing of a B-52
as two years and three months pass you by.

By now my distraction was thorough and pure
as I pondered his heroic deed.
Lucky for us I was in a school zone
which kept us from reaching top speed.

And so he enjoyed his retirement years
as I putt-putted my way down the street.
But you cannot delay the inevitable
fate that you’re destined to meet …

“It’s all gravy from this point forward,”
we say, looking back at our youth.
Each moment is magnified to ten times its size,
making visible each tiny truth.

You’d think that would slow down the passage of time,
delicious days stretched into years.
But even wound down to a wonderful crawl,
your life shifts into higher gears.

And so did my car, with the school in my mirror
as traffic stacked up behind.
The bug’s wings were beating nearly as fast
as the wheels turning ’round in my mind.

“We have to keep moving forward,” I said.
“Why do you keep holding on?”
The thought seemed to reach his tiny bug head
and in the blink of an eye he was gone.

Why did he mount such a titanic struggle?
I wondered as I drove down the hill.
A warm spell in winter meant hundreds of bugs
were smashing into my front grill.

He may have flown straight to a flower-filled yard
or into the path of a truck.
But the freedom and joy he was destined to taste
came only when he came un-stuck.

Haiku by Nina Gross

Folding underwear.
I smile because the children
Are out back, barefoot.

My Pen is Empty by Nina Gross

My pen is empty to the sight,
With only a trace of ink.
I write just the same.

I am thinking about my mother.

As I write, the little birds on our back porch come to the empty feeder.
I know I can refill their feeder and buy new bags of seed.
They can enter and leave their hanging cage.
My mother has a hanging cage too–

A construct of her own end
Looming in her mind,
Looming larger all the time
So that she cannot miss it.

She will revisit it over and over like the birds, Leaving her wanting and empty and wondering and thin.

Mother you still have time.
Take your time.
Alight, alight, alight again and soar!

Your pen still has a trace of ink,
Write just the same.

The sea king, king of the world,
shall take your aching heart that weeps
and gather you into his rolling arms of salt
to rock the pain and grief away, and soothe
with surge and sweep of love like waves
your hurt and ache, and give instead
all joy and light,
the sun upon the sea at dawn -
the brilliant light, so soft
that colors all the world to see
with green and rose:
your silver steps race down the foam
to touch the sun,
and fill the hollows of pain and loss -
the sea king, whose strength is deep
is always so and shall remain,
and all the tears you weep
can only add to depth and breadth and height
and never be to us so clear
as when we finally weep the most, and all our sorrow
add to his, and follow the curl and surge of love
out to sea, out, farther out -
run deep, run far and then
rise like columned clouds at dawn
to tower over the waves of night
catch the first bright flare of light
and brim with gold and rosy sun
and know that all life comes to this:
the surge and flow and warmth of pain,
the surge, the flow, the warmth of bliss.

Sermon: Comes the Poet

Quite a few years ago now, in this very sanctuary, a not so young at all but very new minister was ordained on a spring Sunday. She had invited her mentor, a woman who had once interned here and at the time was in the early years herself of a long and sustained and successful ministry in a college town in Alabama, to deliver the sermon; traditionally   both a personal message of advice and inspiration to the one who is about to be formally consecrated or launched as a Reverend   and a kind of a state of the union address about our faith tradition.

She titled her sermon “Comes the Poet,” from a poem of the same name by Walt Whitman from his  collection Leaves of Grass and used as the primary text for a book by professor of religion and theologian Walter Brueggerman, quite a controversial book at the time: Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation.

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already
cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d
their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist,
The geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

Ordinations are like wedding services for the couple being married, or in this case the minister being crowned and blessed. Like the marriage I performed just yesterday late afternoon outside   at a lakeside park. The young man and woman facing me were only barely present at this grand occasion into which they had poured so much energy, coming to the decision, as I told them,  to risk loving, to  risk living from their very hearts and souls. To make the commitment, hopefully permanent, to this relationship, this institution.  I could tell, as is so often what happens, that they were both overjoyed and terrified, and somewhere far away from the words I was speaking to them. Perhaps one day they would want to know what had been said, but for that moment they were experiencing their own private, inner ceremonies.

So it was for the person being ordained that afternoon, that person who was me. It was a grand day, made so by many people in this congregation, who had planned it, did the inviting and the decorating and the catering.

By the colleagues who came to support me, march with me, speak to me about what I was leaving behind, and what was coming ahead, with so much gravitas and honesty. But, like a bride, I was not really there, and exactly what the preacher said slipped away.

So what I remember of it is only this: that the speaker, my mentor, The Reverend Diane Jordan Allende, quoted the Whitman poem about that poet worthy  of being called poet, saying that I had told her  the  very first time we had met that I was poet: a sort of self-ordination . Which made people who knew me and those who didn’t laugh, both with me and at me in the kindest of ways.

I imagine, or dimly recall, that at that moment I may have drifted back in my memory to the first scribblings I wrote at seven or eight, the short free verse poems that my mother typed up on thin onion skin paper and kept for many years. Poems that were praised and put up on a bulletin board by a beloved third grade teacher, who made me feel special and capable.

Then the report I did on famous poets when I was 10, at the conclusion of which I said I hoped one day I might be known like one of them. Perhaps it was Emily Dickinson. Perhaps it was Robert Frost.

At which point my fifth grade teacher announced to the class that I was bragging and furthermore my poems did not rhyme. I did not write again, or at least share my poems for many years.

Came the poet to a child who did not know it was wrong to welcome her. And the poet was shot down.

Again, it was a supportive teacher, a high school history instructor, whose assignment to   write a report on apartheid South Africa became a clutch of original poems, including one about the Church’s role in discriminating against what they viewed as the primitive and immature Bantu religion. In this one, I ask:” What kind of God is it that tells them that because their skin is pale that they are meant to be my master, that they are meant to live on the best land, to drink the best wine, to eat the best food. “Despite the misspellings and the poor typing, I get a good grade and my poetry is resurrected.

These memories, some sweet, some painful are what most likely distracted me from being present during my ordination sermon, as happens to us all when something is triggered in us, that takes us far away.

So I contacted Diana recently to ask her if there was any way she had kept a copy of that sermon, written before  it was common practice to email it, post it, podcast it as soon as it was delivered. She searched for it, remembered it had been on an old hard drive, so lost to her and to me.

But she told me that she was sure she must have talked about the poet’s eye and the power of language to move and change people.

Brueggermann’s intro is subtitled:  Poetry in a Prose-Flattened World.  Apparently it is he who has said, she recalled, that preaching at its best and truest is a poetic construal of an alternative world. He also has said” Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification.  It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing nor is it a soothing good humor.  It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age.”

Poetic preaching as sharp awareness and deep metaphor, an antidote to the one dimensional, bible toting drilling (and sometimes droning) of the radio and television ministers who dominated and still dominate the airwaves, or the showy, shallow pyrotechnics of the mega church pastors.

That is what Brueggerman believes and my mentor was charging me to aspire to, and charging those in the pews to expect, at least some of the time.

The true God comes singing… finally comes the poet. As poet Denise Levertov observed, the prophetic role of poets to awaken sleepers.

April is National Poetry Month, and in an article heralding this, one well known regional poet told a reporter that poetry is still the smallest niche of American literature, it is this tiny little speck in the spectrum, he said. You’re not going to make a living off poetry. So you do it, he has come to realize, for the love. You do it for the art. Which is cliché, he said, but it’s true. It’s a calling.

Austin Klefon in his wonderful little book Steal like an Artist, who reminds us that T.S Eliot believed that immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better, also is convinced that not making a living off of poetry, working a day job, is good for the soul, and better for writing. He says that a day job puts us in the path of other human beings, who we can learn and steal from, and which allows for creative freedom if we remain disciplined in regularly using what time remains in the service of our creativity.

Indeed there is a long history of writers, especially poets, with day jobs: William Carlos Williams who worked his whole life as a medical doctor.

Eliot who clocked in to a London bank. Others who were hotel clerks and secretaries and writers for fashion magazines.

As a young working mother and  just beginning to be published poet, I was interviewed  for a study of women poets by a graduate student in anthropology, who was examining the changing role of women in the world of arts, which she argued had been sadly neglected. She focused on a small sample in the San Francisco Bay Area. While there was a diversity of ages and lifestyles, and maturity in the writing styles, all of us pieced together a creative life in the midst of holding down other jobs and for some, caretaking, as I was, of  two very small children.  I was teaching in a childcare setting, submitting freelance articles and reviews to local newspapers, writing a book on parenting and holding together a marriage.

And while I bemoaned the difficulty I found in carving out time and energy to write, and the narrowing of my world to the constant and demanding tasks of child raising and housekeeping, when I wasn’t working for money, I spoke to the researcher about my “real body need to write”, which led to capturing poems as they flew into me: reflecting the life I was given, no matter what form it took.

In a poem called “Exchange”, while bemoaning what I saw as a loss of emotional range, creative flow and magic in my life, I wrote” I never knew them again, the sorrow or the melancholy dreams, the beating wings or moth’s fluttering… these leaden mornings we rock together in uneasy stillness… it seems we must always change one gift for another—fertile dreams for  conception, passion for birth.”

Poems came to me as I heard stories about the women of my mother’s generation, like her best friend Pearl, who lived in her three bedroom one bath brick house on the corner, and “polished door knobs when she felt like fleeing, took out the jar of wax and spread it until the twenty knobs lit up like candles in the National Cathedral.”

Poems sparked by a children’s party, where I found myself” on this birthday lawn/ exposed without my pretty gold babies/ creased like a white duck skirt in all the wrong places.”

Or an extended period of rainlessness, coinciding with the birth of my second child, a daughter, and the connection between her infancy and the story of Noah: Drought’s baby/you have never heard/ a storm define our roof/ or watched a rainbow/ inscribe God’s covenant in the sky.

Verses that rolled out like the pastry dough of pies I made with other women writers: “We should have stayed with apple picking/piles sorted, bruises gone over and cut away/our talk light and measured/our deepest fears laced with brown sugar and cinnamon.”

Poems written in addition to or instead of weeping over a dying partnership:   If I could believe in spring leaves/ I could hold on to love renewing itself at the ends of festering branches.”

Or the found moments, the pure joy of checking in on a sleeping child: “ the diligent moon transforms your room into a nursery/nestled in the rich soil of darkness/ you lushly  bloom at dawn.”

What I called then a real body need to write, even if it took rising an hour before the rising of my early rising children, and mopping my floors late at night to buy myself the time while they napped, came, though I did not at the time articulate it at the time as such, as spiritual practice, with spirituality defined by Roman Catholic poet Carolyn Forche as  the capacity to be awake, a consciousness. To notice and to experience what is outward and inward reality in the present moment. Which leads to what she describes as the revelation of the deep essence of selfhood, the inwardness, the light.

Her voice is one of many in A God in the House, a recent collection of poets talking about faith, poets from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions, from those who embrace a personal God to those whose theology and spirituality is more universal and grounded in the natural world.

Their assignment was to link their writing with their religion or spirituality, some seeing the hand of God directly in their creativity, others  noting how their particular practices, such as sitting or walking meditation,  makes possible or  enhances their  poetry.

Which enables a writer like Zen Buddhist Jane Hirschfield to stay fearlessly in the moment, to experience awareness and allow wildness. To live a life that belongs to her alone, that does not belong to others.

Among us Unitarian Universalists, when we talk about the connection between poetry and spirituality, we see how poems force us to think differently, to pay close attention to the sound of words and slow down. We talk about how poems capture small moments in beauty, offering sometimes unexpected clarification. How it helps express one’s soul, however we experience or define it.

In a volume of works by Unitarian Universalist poets, Jennifer Bosveld asked them, in all of their cultural and theological diversity, to tell her about the intersection of their poetry and this faith tradition. One poet explained that for her there is a natural affinity between writing and her UU affiliation because both require a searching, a putting aside of easy answers in favor of an exhilarating and often lonely quest. Another spoke about the healthy skepticism of our world view that serves poets well.

Another believes there is a very close link between Unitarian Universalism and writing poetry, because they both ask us to walk inside our own experiences,striking up whatever light we can. Others speak about the link between authenticity and poetry, self-culture and poetry, and the honoring and celebrating of all life.

We have our famous UU poets, or poets we claim: William Wordsworth Longfellow, perhaps Emily Dickinson, William Carolos Williams, Carl Sandburg, ee cummings,   Sylvia Plath, and May Sarton.  Mary Oliver is not a Unitarian Universalist, though our Beacon Press has published her, and we very often use her amazing poems in worship.

For me, May Sarton’s poems were not her highest form of literature. I preferred her autobiographical writings, with their observations of nature, of the sacredness of gardening and of domestic life. But her writings about creativity and the poetic life have impacted my sense of myself as a poet and poetry as spirituality.

UU Scholar Beverly Anderson Forbes, who died just last week, wrote about Sarton’s work on spirituality in a compilation and study guide. In it, we learn about her views on Creativity as a Dialogue with God, in which she says she has felt the world of art, especially the world of poetry, was a dialogue between herself, which must present resolution instead of conflict. So angry prayers were unfit for God’s ears. She wrote that there was Hell in her life but she kept it out of her work.

She believed that her creative work, her poetry, brought her a sense of wholeness. Whatever the wounds we have to heal, she said, the moment of creation assures that all is well, that one is still in tune with the Universe, that inner chaos can be probed and distilled into order and beauty.

She wrote at 70 that she was full herself perhaps only when she was creating something

For me, her most influential writing was about the relationship between poetry and grace. A quote of hers stayed on my refrigerator for years, yellowing and fading. In it, she said that while in her view all of her writing was a gift from God, poetry was a gift of grace, coming through her,  whole and perfect, like small unexpected and unmerited comforts and kindnesses.

Since I was a young girl, much of my poetry has come from that place. This gift of grace has given me access to ways of seeing my life and the world that I cannot explain otherwise.

As Sarton declared: If I were in solitary confinement, I’d never write another novel, and probably not keep a journal, but I’d write poetry because poems, you see, are between God and me.”

Unitarian Universalist minister and poet Angela Herrera writes about how poets pray:

What do you do with the secret verses of your heart?
With your need for redemption, the story without words?…
You weave their energy into a poem… luminescent strands shot through with light from an unknown origin.  And you whisper it into the dark…

May it be so.

A Benediction in Verse: Spiritual Journeys; Spiritual Homes
by Janet T. Paulk

While the future may bring physical separation,
There are many ties that will bind us one to another:

The words not spoken, yet heard,
Connecting us, through the threads of our deeper consciousness;

The fields of energy created through the act of love,
Which spin a cocoon with power to envelop the entire world;

Remembrances of bondages we have broken,
Here, in this, our religious home:

The tangled webs entrapping us, which, through community,
We weave into positive futures;

And the strangling knots which we untangle,
And remake into bows.

The umbilical cord connecting us to this place may one day be severed,
But what is created through our experiences and relationships here,
Can nourish us into fuller beings.

So may we learn how to nourish, and nurture, both ourselves and others
Wherever we may go.

And may the “I and thou” of us ALL be joined together
In unending love and everlasting peace.

Amen and. . . . . . Awoman

Give me that old time religion. Give me that old time religion.  It was good enough for little David. It was good enough for Old Jonah. It was good enough for the Hebrew children. It’s good enough for me.

This old spiritual, which becomes the rallying song for a mob of incensed bible thumpers in the fictional heavenly hamlet of Hillsboro Tennessee, is the haunting underscore for the gripping courtroom battle between two larger than life   lawyers  over the fate of a high school biology teacher who has dared to teach about evolution in a state that has banned it. He is arrested in his classroom, thrown into jail, burned in effigy and put on what is called the monkey trial, referring to the  heresy or  truth  at the very heart of the outrage: that humans are descendants of  and part of the primate  family.

It is a carnival of national media, hot dog and bible vending. It is a horror of  fear  mongering,  fire and damnation.

In the play and the film Inherit the Wind, the dueling attorneys are not only on opposite sides of the guilt or innocence of one man.

They are on opposite sides of a longstanding battle that has pitted The Word of God  against the  Findings of Science. Science in this case and in so many others over the years embodied in the scientific theories and religious beliefs of Charles Darwin. Or what was presumed to be his theories and religious beliefs.

Inherit the Wind was written as a response to the threat to intellectual freedom presented by the blacklisting McCarthy era of the early 1950’s, using the famous Scopes Trial set in the vague “not long ago” as a metaphor for the shield of dogma used to repress freedom of thought and the use of human reason that was sweeping the country.

It did not claim to be an historically accurate depiction. Place names and names of trial participants were changed. Several fictional characters were added, including a fundamentalist preacher and his daughter, fiancée of the accused teacher. But much of the exchange between the two lawyers and the words of the judge were lifted straight from the actual trial transcript of 25 years before.

In   the steaming hot summer of 1925, in Dayton Tennessee, the real life John Thomas Scopes , a 24 year old general science teacher and part-time football couch ,was tried for violating the state’s anti-evolution statute making it unlawful to “teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals,” a misdemeanor punishable by punishable by a fine of no less than $100 or more than $500 for each offense.

This law that he had admittedly violated was one of  similar ones that had been introduced in fifteen states under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic candidate for President, who led a fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin’s theory of evolution in American classrooms, believing that the teaching of evolution was undermining the traditional values he had long supported. The same Bryan who volunteered to help the prosecution in the trial in Tennessee.

Historians tell us that these crusades to purge what was generalized as Darwinism from public education began as early as 1917, and were most successful in the South where Fundamentalists controlled the large Protestant denominations.

The first law passed in Oklahoma. Later that same year, the Florida legislature approved a joint resolution declaring that it was “ improper  and subversive to teach Atheism or Agnosticism or to teach as true Darwinism or any other hypothesis that links Man in blood relationship with any other form of life.”

It wasn’t just chance that the Tennessee school teacher was accused and arrested. Like other civil and intellectual rights issues, his was part of a carefully orchestrated legal strategy to find just the right defendant at the right time.

He had been recruited to be the needed defendant at a meeting in the town drugstore, where an ACLU member and a progressive Methodist, and some of  the  local leaders joined in asking him to stand for a test case: partly because they believed it was it was an unjust law, and partly because they believed a controversial and well attended trial might greatly help their town, which was shrinking in population and might fall on harder times.

He admitted on the spot that he had taught from the still state approved textbook Civic Biology( which was sold at that very drugstore) which included lessons in evolution, believing no one could teach science without them.

The townsmen got what they wanted, along with contempt and notoriety in the national media, as up to 5,000 people poured into the courtroom and onto the lawn outside it to witness the proceedings or even get a glimpse of the two famous lawyers- Bryan and Clarence Darrow, an outspoken agnostic freethinker, holding forth day and night.

As historian Douglas Linder describes it, very much like scenes in Inherit the Wind, banners decorated the street. Lemonade stands were set up. Chimpanzees said to have been brought to the town to testify for the prosecution, performed in a side show on Main Street.

Anti-Evolution League members sold copies of Hell and High School. In Linder’s words, “holy rollers rolled in the surrounding hills and riverbanks.”

Evangelists in actuality erected an open air, temporary tabernacle, and nearby buildings were covered with posters, as one reporter observed, exhorting people to ‘read your bible,” and avoid eternal damnation.

The trial itself, as shown in both attorneys’ opening words, was not narrowly focused on that particular state law and the violation thereof  in one high school class, but was billed from the start as a titanic struggle between good and evil, truth and ignorance. With Bryan insisting that “if evolution wins, Christianity goes” and Darrow countering that “Scopes isn’t on trial. Civilization is on trial.” That the anti-evolution law made the Bible “the yardstick to measure every man’s intellect, to measure every man’s intelligence, to measure every man’s learning.”

No less a chasm than existed for Darwin himself  in his own time, his own country, his own marriage and his own conscience.

In his Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson devotes a mere 15 and a half pages out of 478 pages of text to Darwin, the Agnostic or perhaps Atheistic  poster person for scientific humanists on one hand, and the  white bearded Anti-Christ for religious fundamentalists on the other.

And arguably the best known scientist in history. Perhaps because Darwin’s contributions to evolutionary science and the ensuing religious controversies were far more modest than he is either given credit for or damned for.

In Bryson’s telling, Darwin, deeply disappointing to his prosperous physician father: indifferent graduate of a Unitarian primary school;  failed  medical student who couldn’t bear the sight of blood;  failed law student: and a theologically tepid divinity graduate from Cambridge bound for a post in the Anglican Church; embarked on his five year voyage on the naval survey ship HMS Beagle essentially as dinner company for the captain, whose hobby was , ironically, to seek out evidence for the literal biblical interpretation of creation. Since Darwin was already a less than wholeheartedly devoted Christian, this was a constant source of friction between the two men, living for years in very close and uncomfortable quarters.

His previous pastimes of partridge shooting, dogs, and rat-catching ill equipped him for the work of serious biological research, except perhaps his college pursuit of collecting beetles. Not dissecting them or rarely comparing them with published descriptions, but managing to find and identify some rare species nonetheless.

Over the five years of his expedition, he stopped shooting all the birds and other animals he spotted, and while he couldn’t draw them, wrote about them in his journals. He found a magnificent trove of fossils, survived an earthquake in Chile, and discovered a new species of dolphins, among other findings.

And upon his return, never left England again.

One thing Darwin did not do on his voyage, Bryson tells us, was to propound the theory ( or  even a theory) of evolution. For starts, he writes, the theory of evolution was decades old by the time Darwin was working on ideas of his own, including the notion of a very old Earth.

It was only after he returned home and read Thomas Malthus’ essay on the principle of population, who proposed that increases in food supply could never keep up with population growth, that Darwin began thinking that life was indeed a perpetual struggle, and that natural selection was the means by which some species prospered, while others failed. That all organisms competed for resources and those that had some inborn advantage would survive, pass them on to their offspring, and by these means constantly improve or transform.

This awfully simple idea as Bryson calls it, this singular notion, was Darwin’s contribution to the evolution debate, which he did not call “survival of the fittest,” but the coining of which he admired.

He did not much use the term “evolution”, preferring instead “descent with modification.”  Nor, as often reported, did he even notice the difference of beaks among finches in the Galapagos Islands, a neon sign of their adaptability, but a more skilled birder friend of his who realized what Darwin had only neutrally captured in his specimen collecting.

It was a slow and  often interrupted slog for Darwin to translate his voyage observations into the rudiments of his new theory, drafting a 230 page “sketch” some two years later, then putting his notes away and for the next 15 years busying himself with other matters—like marrying, fathering 10 children, devoting eight years to an opus on barnacles, and fighting off a host of strange disorders that left him chronically listless, faint, and flurried as he put it, sometimes only able to work at 20 minutes at a stretch. Perhaps a tropical disease or perhaps psychosomatic illness, some say was the result of the enormity of what he had discovered scientifically for human morality and the future of the belief in God.

How much of a contrast was his notion of the slow and unpredictable, flawed and un-pretty , and even cataclysmic process of the evolution of creatures was  with the swift orderliness  and predictability, and the lyricism of the Genesis story of the Bible with its six day process of  a  creation composed by  God.

“What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write “he clumsy, wasteful, blunderinglow and horridly cruel works of nature” Charles Darwin brooded in l856, about to start the Origin of Species. A creation with emerging fossil evidence of all manner of adaptations from glorious  to grotesque  and deadly.

“ I cannot persuade myself,” Darwin said, “ that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of  Caterpillars.”

Or orchestrate explicable and inexplicable disappearances— including  mass extinctions

What came to be Darwin’s personal God had appointed natural laws to evolve life rather than intervene. There was no providence, no design, no special intervention, as in the creation, appearance, or special evolution of humans. His God had transmuted  into an absentee landlord and nature self sufficient.   And he knew how controversial, how incendiary this notion was outside a narrow band of scientists and fellow intellectuals. Yet still he remained convicted.

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect we wish to be created at once by aspecial act,” he wrote.

Much to her perpetual distress, his God was not the God of  his beloved and pious wife Emma, who believed almost onto death in a God who revealed himself  directly and actively both in his works and his words, and she feared always for  his salvation and their separation after life.

What Darwin was discovering through scientific inquiry and the processes of his own freethinking not only challenged  the all judging  God of the Calvinists and Anglicans of his day, but also the all Great and all Good benevolent God of his Unitarian forebears, including his grandfather.

It was a radical and terrifying thought to him, one that felt like genuine heresy: that the human mind,  morality, the belief in God were perhaps only conditioned artifacts of the brain.  That every instinct, every desire could be found there, each an evolutionary inheritance.

That’s why there is reason to speculate that he lived a life of a tormented evolutionist, that his peripheral religious discoveries in pursuit of how life changes, how we adapt, that may well have made him violently and chronically ill, that indeed delayed the publication of his Origins of Species until he could no longer. Even after another anonymous author came out with a book suggesting that human beings might have evolved from lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator, taking on himself the first round of wrath,  blasted from pulpits throughout England,  Darwin still kept his notes locked away.

It was only when another scientist, a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, sent him the draft of a paper outlining a theory of natural selection that was, in Bill Bryson’s words, uncannily similar to Darwin’s secret jottings that Darwin unlocked the drawer and published them. The two had previously corresponded, with Darwin having pointedly suggested that while his research had been tucked away for 20 years, that the subject of species selection was “his” and that he was preparing his work for publication, though in actuality he was not.

The compromise between the two scientists was to present their papers together at a scientific society meeting.  The younger scientist seemed pleased to be included and thereafter referred to their collective research as Darwinism, the term that has been used to describe a mash up of evolutionary research ever since, some of its his, some of it not.

When an advanced copy of On The Origin of Species was sent to a distinguished editor for review in 1859, he advised the author that as the audience for such a book was very narrow, Darwin might rather consider writing a book on pigeons. Everyone is interested in pigeons, he said helpfully.

The esteemed editor was proven dead wrong when first edition of 1,250 copies sold out the same day. In his autobiography, Darwin reports immodestly about the immediate success of his book, citing the first day sales and adding that a second edition of 3000 sold out shortly thereafter. He  noted that 16000 copies had been sold in England over less than 20 years, and the book, even though a “stiff one”, had been translated into almost every European tongue, and Hebrew, where someone found  that his theory was contained in the Old Testament. The reviews were numerous, he had saved them all—some 265–and many articles and essays and books on Darwinusmus had followed.

It has never been out of print, and scarcely out of controversy, whether over the flimsiness of some of its science, such as lack of fossil record at that time of his proposed intermediate species. Or arguments that the complexity of nature is proof that there must be intelligent design, since how could it be so randomly so. Or critiques of the vacuum in his work about how species originated, rather than how they might become stronger or better.

The controversy in his own time and beyond around his own latter day prejudices as one biographer pointed out: he may have thought blacks were inferior, but was sickened by slavery. He subordinated  women , but was dependent upon his wife and daughters. Did he indeed take his theories about how nature culls its unfit members and extrapolate this to human beings?

Some have said that social Darwinism was added to his work by others and at later times. His notebooks, historians have seen, contain arguments for competition, free trade, imperialism, racial superiority and sexual inequality from the start.

As for Darwin’s religious views, or his scientific theories and their radical implications for religious belief, he was nearly miraculously redeemed immediately upon his death in his home country. Despite his admission that after 40 years he had left Christianity in any form, and his unwillingness  to claim anything else other than a sincere agnosticism, he was nonetheless  buried in Westminster Abbey following posthumous pomp and circumstance. The Unitarians and free thinkers were the most laudatory, but religious writers of all persuasions it has been written then testified to his “noble character and ardent pursuit of truth.”

Opposition to Darwinism on the basis of the threat to fundamentalist faith has ebbed and flowed on this side of the Ocean, with the Scopes trial effectively halting the proposed laws in other states that would have banned the teaching of evolution, but the law being tested in Tennessee was not  lifted until 1967, and there have been other more recent attempts to put disclaimers in textbooks about the “controversial” theory of evolution or to have Creationism taught along side in science classes.

But the cry for one- sided Creationism and anti-Darwinism have not gone away in response to legal rulings. A Georgia Congressman Paul Broun saw four thousand voters write in the name of Charles Darwin in his last unopposed election in angry response to Broun’s statement that both evolution and the Big Bang Theory were lies straight from the pit of  hell.

Why is there still so much controversy over Darwin’s Theory?

Richard Dawkins and others do not believe his ideas are still controversial because they imply that species can change or that he thought the age of the earth was large or that humans are animals like all other animals. Dawkins believes that the proposition that the living world is not shaped by Design and that it lacks a Plan or Meaning– rather that it follows from natural selection which can look so much like intelligent design– that disturbs many people.

It undercuts our belief that We Are Special. It right sizes our standing in the scheme of things, in the disorder of the universe.

So humbling and yet so liberating a singular notion.

Call to worship

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

- Howard Zinn

Reading – The Optimists Creed by Christian D Larson

Promise Yourself

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

Homily

A family had twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other thought it was too cold. If one said the TV was too loud, the other claimed the volume needed to be turned up. Opposite in every way, one was an eternal optimist, the other a doom and gloom pessimist. Just to see what would happen, at Christmas time their father loaded the pessimist’s room with every imaginable toy and game. The optimist’s room he loaded with horse manure. That night the father passed by the pessimist’s room and found him sitting amid his new gifts crying bitterly. “Why are you crying?” the father asked. “Because my friends will be jealous, I’ll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I’ll constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually get broken.” answered the pessimist twin. Passing the optimist twin’s room, the father found him dancing for joy in the pile of manure. “What are you so happy about?” he asked. To which his optimist twin replied, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

On the wall in my office I have a beautiful plaque with the Optimists Creed on it.  It was presented to my great grandfather C.H. Chapman who was at one point named National Optimist of the year.  I read the creed all the time and I always think, “there’s a service in there.” Then on a road trip with my wife I heard the James Taylor song, “The Secret ‘o Life” and I had the same thought, so I combined the ideas.

This morning I’ll talk to you briefly about optimism and share this choice that I made years ago.  It is a choice, optimism; and not an easy choice.  We live in the same world, we read the same news.  Pessimism is the easy choice, it’s easy to see the wrong in everything, to gloss over the good and stare at the bad. To walk out of a music service and say, “I really liked all the songs but we sure don’t pay that guy to give sermons.”

We all know these people, right?  People who say “I just saw one of the best movies I’ve seen in years but you’ll never believe how terrible this girl’s haircut was.” or “I went to a wedding this weekend, it was really beautiful but, can you believe it, cash bar! ugh”  or tell you Les Mis was the best filmed musical of all time and then spend 25 minutes talking about Russel Crowe.

Optimists will say things like, “I saw a movie and it was ok, but the acting was great.”  “The wedding as a whole was a mess but the couple was really happy and in love.”  It’s not what we see, it’s what we focus on AND what we choose to share with those around us.

I like the line in the Creed “To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.”

Optimism is for me, it makes me feel good, but a big part of that is that it makes those around me feel good.  Some days I smile when I don’t really feel like it and on that day, maybe somebody needs that smile.

There’s a certain vulnerability in optimism.  You have to be willing to open your heart and try things and sometimes they fail. But we can choose to see failure differently.  You can be crushed and retreat or you can spread your arms wide and say, “how fascinating!” and then either try it again or try something else, equipped with new knowledge.

Writer Vera Nazerian said this:

“People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.

An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all the great stuff that’s out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.

An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.

When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.

Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty!”

In January both choirs went up to the mountain and I gave a little homily called “Big Stupid Crazy Ideas.”  This homily in a nutshell explained why we were preparing a 75 minute major work in German with orchestra that, at the time, felt way beyond our capabilities.

The sermon boiled down to big stupid ideas aren’t so stupid if you really believe in them.  Then they become a road to growth and a road to something magnificent.  Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

I love the optimists creed and I fail at it every day.  I’m not always strong enough that nothing can disturb my peace of mind.  I’m not always too large for worry, too noble for anger or too strong for fear, but I try.  I really try.  It’s a high bar and I don’t cross it but striving for it feels good.

You heard in the Howard Zinn quote earlier, “The future is an infinite succession of presents,”  In every present moment there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of things to focus on.  Optimism is not a grand formula or a “secret”  it’s just a choice.

Choosing to focus on the good little things instead of the bad little things.  Choosing to promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate.  Choosing Kindness over Cynicism and hope over fear.  Sharing a smile, sharing your sunshine. Enjoying golden moments.  That, I believe, is the secret of life.