This is what the poet Rilke says:

May what I do flow from me like a river

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

The poet, Rilke. His prayer … his resolve. Ours as well. “May what I do flow from me like a river.” “Singing as no one ever has.” As Unitarian Universalists, we talk about inherent worth and dignity in each and every person; we affirm it; and surely what we affirm, above all, is an inner healing intelligence, an inner abundance of mind and heart and soul, an inner wisdom like a river, ready to spring forth when unblocked.

Abundance that is a “swelling and ebbing current,” a “deepening tide moving out and returning.” These are Rilke’s visionary words, and in them, I sense a rhythm of becoming more than we ever thought possible, a rhythm of new relationships and new possibilities. Creativity, and the joy that it releases into our sciences and arts and our daily lives.

Here’s one activity that (for me) has always helped to release joy. It’s called “poetry communion,” and it works like this: usually I assemble people into two groups. One group completes a short question that begins with the word WHY, and the other group completes a short answer that begins with the word BECAUSE. I ask people to do this on the spot, no lengthy preparation and no stress. No contriving. Just letting things flow and writing down whatever comes. Then, in the end, I randomly read one WHY card with one BECAUSE card, and that’s when the unpredictable happens, the silly, the bizarre, and sometimes even the amazing. Dots connected that perhaps have never been connected before. Moments when rigid categories of thought that have been hammered home all our lives, dividing and dissecting our experience, keeping things neat and tidy, suddenly fall away, are shoved aside, and we see the world anew.

I have here some Why and Because cards, filled out at the start of this service. Haven’t even looked at them yet. Here we go. Poetry communion….

* * *

Do you feel the energy that’s just been released? Can you feel the river rising within you, moving?

And surely it’s been this way in all moments of illumination, when women and men around the world and in all times have felt the river flowing in them, leading them to sing a new song. In our study text for the Planting Seeds of Soul series, called Raising the Soul: Practical Exercises for Personal Development, Warren Lee Cohen mentions Isaac Newton and his brilliant insights into the laws of motion. Countless people before him seeing apples falling from trees, but no one before him thinking at odd angles to usual categories of thought, no one before him seeing and mathematically defining the dynamic relationship between apples and the earth like he did, which, as he saw, apply as much to apples falling as to people walking, birds flying, the cosmic dance of planets and stars and galaxies. Dots connected that had never been connected before.

Did you know that Isaac Newton was a Unitarian? We want to follow in our spiritual grandfather’s footsteps. So many kinds of apples falling for us—in our personal lives and relationships, or at school, at work, in this congregation, wherever we happen to be—and we want more moments when we can discover newness in the midst of all that we have taken for granted, more moments when we see dynamic relationships we have never seen before, more moments when we come to know our world as if for the first time.  Feeling the river within us, flowing. Singing a new song.

That’s our purpose today. Planting the seed of open-mindedness.

But what exactly are we opening?

See this cartoon in your mind’s eye. Comes from a book entitled Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions, by Sam Keen. A man in a prison, his sad face looking out between two solid bars, perched just above his hands, each of which grips a bar. Stuck in this prison but good. Yet when you zoom out and take a look at the whole picture, you see no other bars. Just the two he grips hold of, as if for dear life. He could let go, he could look around, see avenues of escape to his left, to his right, behind him, but no. There he stays, absurd in his stuckness, his sad face perched above his fists. No escape, even as the opportunities for escape are boundless.

This cartoon came to mind when I encountered an article on being lucky. Comes from Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. How is it that lucky people consistently encounter positive opportunities, whereas unlucky people miss them, or even consistently experience the opposite? What’s going on? Richard Wiseman conducted an experiment on people who self-identified as either lucky or unlucky, and here’s what he says: “I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: ‘Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.’ This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper that said, ‘Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.’ Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.” Dr. Wiseman’s conclusion, from this and other experiments? “[U]nlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

And so, to answer the question from a moment ago: What we are wanting to open today is our mindset: the collection of prejudices and biases that we bring to the encounters in our lives, including our own self-encounter. Prejudices and biases that are just like the two sole bars in our absurd existential prison.

But where do they come from?

From Gordon Allport, author of the classic book The Nature of Prejudice, we learn that prejudice is partly an outgrowth of normal human functioning. “The human mind,” he says, “must think with the aid of categories…. Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it.” Yet what this inevitably sets up is a tendency to distort perception. Individual things become invisible, hidden behind the category of thing it is, meaning that differences within categories are minimized. All of a sudden, to be a Unitarian Universalist means, for example, that you voted for Barack Obama and you support the Democratic plan for health care. All of a sudden, to be a Unitarian Universalist means that you can’t possibly be Republican. All you Republican Unitarian Universalists out there, invisible behind a label. You affirm our Seven Principles as much as anyone. Yet you are not as liberal fiscally as you are in terms of social values. You reflect an important source diversity in our midst. Yet where are you? Can’t see you…. And so on, and so forth. The diversity we supposedly treasure, compromised.

This is what unchecked, unreflective categorical thinking leads to. Also this: an exaggeration of differences between categories. There’s an old Yiddish story of a peasant whose farm was located near the border of Poland and Russia, where boundary markers shifted with every international dispute. The peasant did not know from one year to the next whether his farm was in Russia or in Poland, and eventually he hired a surveyor to resolve the uncertainty. After weeks of painstaking assessment, the surveyor finally announced that the farm was just inside the Polish border. “Thank God,” the peasant cried with relief, “now I won’t have to endure any more of those horrible Russian winters!” A funny story—yet how often do we hear in polite Unitarian Universalist conversation something similar? People smugly distancing themselves from others perceived to be truly Other: as in, for example, evangelical Christians. “They aren’t searchers like us.” “They aren’t thinkers like us.” But Gina Welch, a self-professed liberal and atheist, in her recent book In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church, reveals something very different. She says, “In spite of my smug self-conception as a tolerant person, I had this calcified, unrecognized prejudice against evangelical Christians. Their politics angered me, their culture seemed silly. Most of all, their vocal efforts to see the world converted to their views made me, frankly, afraid of them.” But then she decided to walk a mile in their shoes—live among them for several years. Who were these people, really? And she says, “The biggest surprise for me was the individual reflectiveness of church members.” She says, “I think I’d had this stereotype of evangelicals as blisteringly arrogant dogmatists. But I observed instead humility and a kind of obsessive self-reflection, enacted through prayer. They call it listening to God’s voice, but it seemed to be like a constant internal pat-down of conscience, which really resulted in care with choices, and a movingly ample capacity for selflessness and generosity. I learned a lot,” Gina Welch says, “by their example.” Even with people with whom we may disagree on fundamental things—even with people whose values we fight in the political arena—if we can hold back from exaggerating differences and seeing the people as alien, our disagreements will feel less absolute and less daunting. Can’t take the worst of them—like Glenn Beck—and see them as representative of the best, or the rest. Stand back from the exaggerations, and we’ll be more likely to luck into positive opportunities for bridge-building and cooperation. Luck will happen.

You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. The very nature of our thinking in categories predisposes us to clenching up our minds, keeping us in the two-bar prison, and this is only reinforced by social conditioning in our earliest years and beyond. As poet Jane Kenyon writes about learning in the first grade:

“The cup is read. The drop of rain
is blue. The clam is brown.”

So said the sheet of exercises—
purple mimeos, still heady
from the fluid in the rollingsilver drum. But the cup was

not red. It was white,
or had no color of its own.
Oh, but my mind was finical.
It put the teacher perpetually
in the wrong. Called on, however,
I said aloud, “The cup is red.”

“But it’s not,” I thought,
like Galileo Galilei
muttering under his beard….

Can’t you just see the small girl in the poem, saying out loud “the cup is red” even as she knows it is not red? “The cup is red.” “It is normal to be with a person of the opposite sex.” “The world is a dangerous place.” “I am not good enough.” You are taught it and you say it and say it, even as you mutter in your beard, but you say it and say it so often that it becomes a part of you and you forget ever muttering in your beard. The hurtful voice of mother and father, or teacher, or society, becomes your very own voice in your very own head, and now we’re talking internalized oppression, now we’re talking about that river within us, that river every person alive is born with, dammed up, stopped up, blocked. That’s what we’re talking about.

Got to open up. Plant a seed of open-mindedness. Here’s how. And before I go over the steps, remember, for those of you who are choosing to practice these spiritual exercises with me, which we are learning one per month, don’t forget to keep practicing the others we’ve covered so far:

Review of the day

Clear thinking

Willpower

Emotional intelligence

Positivity

And now, open-mindedness. Step one is to establish a base line. As you go through your day, be mindful of your automatic responses to yourself, to other people, and to the world around you. Notice moments when your energy contracts, and you can just feel your hands tightening around the bars of some prejudice.

Someone tells you that you did a good job, and instead of just saying “Thanks” and allowing yourself to feel good, you put yourself down somehow, you instantly clamp down on the good feeling. Put that on the list.

Or: you are in a gathering of Unitarian Universalists, and the subject of prayer to God comes up, and you say, “Well, we don’t have any of that around here. Unitarian Universalists don’t do that.” Put that on the list.

One thing that’s on my very long list relates to diet. Not too long ago, my daughter Sophia asked me if I wanted to try one of her milkshakes. Now Sophia is a vegan and eschews all animal products. No eggs, no dairy, no meat. So the milkshake: made of hemp protein, green powder, vanilla, cinnamon, cacao powder, almond milk, banana, wheatgrass, and carob chips. She hands it to me, and I hold it carefully like a grenade. I already know she’s into weird food. “Dad, try it!” “Heck no,” I say. It’s green, and it has brown chunks gurgling around in it. But after 20 minutes of cajoling and some ridicule, I did try it, and hey, it was pretty good. Then she told me the ingredients. My response: “Uuuuurrrgggh.” Put it on the list.

Step one is about listening to your life, and establishing your base line of prejudices.

Step two is to stretch. To explain, let’s take a look at some additional insights about luck that come from psychologist Richard Wiseman’s research. “Unlucky people,” he says, “often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. […] Unlucky people [are also] creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.” Isn’t this interesting? Accordingly, in step two of the exercise, when you find yourself in situations in which a prejudice kicks in, look for opportunities to stretch yourself. Allow intuition to guide you, or introduce some kind of variety—all to the end of enabling a different perspective than the one you are used to to live within you for a time. That’s exactly what Gina Welch did, in her effort to walk a mile in the shoes of Christian evangelists. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden experiment is all about this. Large scale, small scale. All about transforming NO! into OH?

Finally, step three: each day you do the exercise, conclude by reflecting upon how things went in the evening (similar to or along with the Review of the Day). Track what happens in your journal. Practice compassion towards yourself, as you get clearer about the prejudices you bring to your life. Practice right effort, as you open your mindset more and more, and you look around and realize that your prison has only two bars in it, and things suffocated and diminished by prejudices of your mind start surprising you, dots are starting to connect that had never before connected, fantastic Isaac Newton-like insights popping up like lighbulbs over your head, and you are feeling freer than ever before, free religion is becoming more and more a reality for you, and you are feeling joy rising up in you, the river rising and rising within you, flowing, flowing freely, and what you find yourself doing, effortlessly, effortlessly, is singing, singing as no one ever has, and you are

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

But what is the message we take if we look at the same decade here at UUCA? Did we fall into the general malaise of the nation, or did we rise above and thrust forward into the new millennium full of energy and action? I think to almost any observer, a look back at the past ten years at UUCA would conclude the latter. It was a decade full of growth and vision that left us stronger and wiser.

At the start of the naughts, we had just made the bold move of bringing on a professional Director of Religious Education. As we celebrated Pat Kahn’s tenth year of service to UUCA in 2009, we were able to see how much of that vision had come to fruition in this decade: successes go from a strong curricula in all class levels, to family ministry teams, to a vibrant Coming of Age program, to service projects run by our children and youth, among many others.

But we did not stop at the professionalization of our RE programs. Over the past decade, we grew our staff to include a full-time professional Director of Music, a Director of Welcome Ministries, and a paid Youth Coordinator. With each of these positions, the congregation has been investing in the same sort of vision for our potential that the RE council and Board had when they brought on Pat.

Another major legacy of the decade was the renovation and expansion of our beloved building, made possible by a generous capital campaign and some remarkable lay leadership. The new building that emerged is larger, more accessible and much more energy efficient and sustainable than before the renovation. Without the expansion of the facilities, much of the rest of the growth we have experienced would not have been possible.

More recently, we have embarked on the major new project of running our own Atlanta Progressive Preschool. Unlike the past, when we hosted schools as tenants, APP is fully UUCA owned and operated, and one of its goals is to nurture our values in the broader community.

With the growth of our assets, staff, operating budget and programs, have come new demands on governance. This past decade, the congregation moved into a policy-based model of governance, which is more appropriate for the type of congregation we have become. At the core of
the model is the flexibility to allow the congregation to continue to move towards its vision.

All this change has not come without growing pains. The Board has recognized that there are areas that have not kept up with the pace of change, and we are working with the staff to address them. With a larger staff and budget, along with our own preschool, we need more a robust financial management system and administrative services than we currently have, and we are taking proactive steps to build it. With the move to policy governance, we need to reinvest in our volunteer system, and a major new volunteer management initiative is under way. Finally,
we need a road map for our vision of this new decade, in the form of a new long Range Plan, a project you will be hearing much more about.

The phenomenal strengthening of UUCA throughout the naughts would not have been possible without an engaged and generous congregation and strong lay leadership. As we move towards our vision of what the teens will bring us, we ask you all to take an active role in building our future.

Ellen Beattie
UUCA Board of Trustees Member

Dear Henry,

I’m writing to share my thanks for your gift of Walden. I’m reading it along with the congregation I serve, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, and with every chapter, every time, something wonderful brings me home to my Unitarian Universalist spiritual roots. Penetrating critique and insight. Continued relevance, even more than 150 years after you published the thing. Passages that make me howl with laughter. Passages of such beauty that I can’t help but weep.

Now we are on to Chapter 11, which you entitle “Higher Laws.” At one point, close to the end, you write about a man named John Farmer, but he really represents everywoman and everyman. “John Farmer,” you say, “sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work…. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere … and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him — Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?”

That’s what we read in Walden. A beautiful vision of essentials, conveyed, if not through notes of a flute, then through words of a book like your book, or through something else. A vision elevating us, opening us up to a voice of wisdom, which you and your Transcendentalist colleagues liked to call “genius.”

And so you say, “No man ever followed his genius till it misled him.” For genius, as you define the term, can’t possibly mislead. On this, Transcendentalism as a spiritual movement and a reform movement took its stand and takes it now. Genius is a capacity to glimpse, in one total vision, the right ordering of the whole of society which, in turn, leads to the maximum benefit of each individual. Genius, in other words, is not just mere idiosyncrasy, or eccentricity, which is how some people today might understand the term. Genius is, rather, a glimpse into order that is universal. Genius is like a compass which points towards how things ought to be—the ways and the rules—that will bring the world to fulfillment.

It’s something that Antoine de Saint Exupery illustrates in his book, The Little Prince, when he has the book’s hero speak with a great king:

“Sire [said the Little Prince]–over what do you rule?”

“Over everything,” said the king, with magnificent simplicity.

“Over everything?”

The king made a gesture, which took in his planet, the other planets, and all the stars.

“Over all that?” asked the little prince.

“Over all that,” the king answered.

For his rule was not only absolute: it was also universal.

“And the stars obey you?”

“Certainly they do,” the king said. “They obey instantly. I do not permit insubordination.”

“I should like to see a sunset . . . Do me that kindness . . . Order the sun to set . . .”

“If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragic drama, or to change himself into a sea bird, and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong?” the king demanded. “The general, or myself?”

“You,” said the little prince firmly.

“Exactly. One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform,” the king went on. “Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable.”

That’s the passage from The Little Prince, and Henry, you were acting out of that magnificently simple King-place within you when, one afternoon, near the end of your first summer at Walden, you went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, and the village taxman informed you that you had not yet paid your taxes, and you said good. You spoke out of that deep genius vision place within, which saw American society at the time full of rules essentially requiring an entire category of citizens to go throw themselves into the sea of slavery. The system was not reasonable. So you said no. You did not “recognize the authority of the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house.” Your civil disobedience took its stand on your King-like genius, which enabled you to envision the kind of society that WOULD be worthy of your obedience, because it IS reasonable.

Would you pay the taxman today, Henry? Rules and laws requiring entire classes of people to throw themselves into the sea are still in place. People who can’t get quality, affordable healthcare. People who love each other but aren’t allowed the dignity of marriage. Always, always, the poor. And on and on. Just not reasonable. Just not right. Would you pay the taxman today?

For you, it is all a question of “life in conformity to higher principles.” And that’s the larger issue that you raise in our reading for today. You raise it with urgency. Your Transcendentalism (which us our Transcendentalism) is no easy spirituality. It’s not just about big moments of conscientious objection, as when you refused to pay your taxes. “Our whole life is startlingly moral,” you say. “There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.” Everything we do—even acts which are the most private and seemingly mundane—either amplify the music of genius within us, or muffle it, block it. There’s no neutrality, no Switzerland of the spirit. Everything that John Farmer does counts.

And this is why—so it seems to me—you spend so much time in Chapter 11 talking about food. Diet. “Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open,” you say, and how and what we eat can help to keep the channel open, or to close it. A very different motivation than the usual, than what is normally behind the vast array of diet possibilities currently out there, such as Atkins or South Beach, the Zone or the F-Plan, the Scarsdale Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Astronaut’s Diet, the Sleeping Beauty Diet, the Three-Week Trance Diet, or the More of Jesus, Less of Me diet. I’m serious. I could go on and on.

One food-related issue you bring up has to do with obesity. Drawing on an observation from science, you say, “It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, that ‘some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them’; and they lay it down as ‘a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly … and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly’ content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid.” You say all this, and then here is your concluding insight: “The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.” Henry, just tell me what you really think about the problem of obesity….

But did you really have a lot of “vast abdomens” in your day? We sure do now. Two-thirds of Americans, more than 190 million of us, are overweight or obese, making this, in the estimate of the Obesity Society, “the most fatal, chronic, relapsing disorder of the 21st century. Obesity is a leading cause of United States mortality, morbidity, disability, healthcare utilization and healthcare costs. It is likely that the increase in obesity will strain our healthcare system with millions of additional cases of diabetes, heart disease and disability.”

It’s a mess. As Yale University scholar Kelly Brownell puts it, “If you go to McDonald’s today, you can buy a quarter-pounder with cheese meal—that means the large drink and the large french fries—for less than it costs to buy a salad and a bottle of water.” And then he says, “There’s something wrong with that picture.” Over $30 billion dollars spent each year on food advertising, and too much of it is making our children gross feeders, too much of it makes eye-catching claims about products being healthy when they are anything but. Laws allowing this tantamount to demanding that entire classes of people throw themselves into the sea…. I know personal responsibility is, of course, a key factor in making things better, but to really win the battle against obesity, completely, we’ve got to change the laws and make them reasonable. Come together in our schools and in our neighborhoods. Fashion the changes from a genius-oriented, King-oriented perspective. If increasing taxes on cigarettes led to a drastic drop in smoking, then what might just a penny per ounce tax on sugared beverages do?

A tax law, which even you, Henry, would approve of and would, in fact, contend has deep spiritual implications. “Every man,” you say, “is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own…. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.” Once again, the urgency theme. No act is too small to impact eternity.

It’s prophetic, Henry: your comment about “gross feeders” and “vast abdomens.” And so are your comments about eating meat. You say, “there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh…. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience.” Again you say, “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” Because of my year-long happiness pledge to abstain from meat, I’m starting to understand this better and better.

All I know is that, 150 years later, your words still sing. The John Farmer in me gets it. But John Farmer today is bringing different experiences than your readers from yesteryear. John Farmer today often brings a lack of awareness of this uncleanness to which you refer. Or, he’s bringing a hyperawareness of it, a hypersensitivity.

Fact is, many people today have no idea what it’s like to be one’s own butcher and scullion and cook and consumer. We just grow up and through a consumption pattern that has been set up for us by culture and by family. We take it for granted. It’s just who we are. We go to the one-stop grocery store, look into the freezer, grab what’s lying there (shrink-wrapped or in a box), and there is no thought regarding where it comes from and what the journey there might have looked like. Shopping for price tag and taste only.

And then there’s the people who bring something completely opposite: hyperawareness and hypersensitivity. They’ve researched the ins and outs of the “industrial agriculture system”—defined in part by mechanical methods of planting and harvesting; animal agriculture on a mass scale; human manipulation of natural processes through a variety of means like chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; or growth hormones for livestock; or genetic engineering. This is industrial agriculture, and it has led, undeniably, to a radical transformation in food production, resulting in levels of plenty around the world that have simply been unknown in all previous generations of human existence. Starvation has always been a major threat for the human race—except now. Thanks to industrial agriculture.

And yet when these people look more deeply into it—this source of human plenty, this ultimate reason for why we can one-stop shop—what they discover is also a vast ugliness. An uncleanness that you, Henry, could never have even dreamed. All the unintended consequences of the system, including pollution, economic injustice, and a decrease in biodiversity. All the hidden costs, all the environmental side-effects. Those shrink wrapped chicken breasts we buy at the grocery store, for example: how the living beings they came from were “confined in windowless sheds filthy with their own excrement; [how] their beaks were seared off to prevent them from pecking their neighbors due to the stress of overcrowding; [how] breeding and hormones had sped up their growth so that the weight of their bodies deformed their legs and arrested their hearts; [how] they were fed a constant stream of antibiotics to stave off disease (meanwhile creating antibiotic-resistant strains of disease with the potential to plague the rest of creation); and [how] their feed might legally include ground-up cattle parts, as well as the corn from those vast fields treated with enormous quantities of pesticides and herbicides” (from Amy Hassinger’s “Eating Ethically” in the Spring 2007 edition of the UU World). This is just one instance of the vast ugliness that comes at a person when they dare to look deeper into the industrial agriculture system.

As for what all this hyperawareness and hypersensitivity can lead to: one form it takes is to hear about what happens to chickens and other animals and to hear about all the flaws and downsides of industrial agriculture and simply to shut off. To deny. The shock of it all so overwhelming that we turn a blind eye. This, or the other extreme: to hate with pure hate the agricultural system that has blessed humanity; to demand that the system change instantly and immediately, even if the changes are not sustainable in the least; to see humanity as one big blight upon the earth and for oneself to feel ashamed for even existing—to feel cursed by an original sin—to believe that one has no right to take a place in an interdependent web and a circle of life that, in truth, love us and make room for us and only want us to leave a lighter footprint…..

What I’m saying, Henry, is that both forms of hyperawareness and hypersensitivity are obstacles to living in the truth. We cannot any longer turn a blind eye to the ugliness of industrial agriculture; and yet reactive hate towards the system and towards ourselves is no answer either. Perhaps you are in agreement with me, for you say, “Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

I appreciate this. It is wrong for the laws of our land to require animals to throw themselves into the sea. The genius vision in you sees that, and I see it. But I and we also know that it is a journey. It is a destiny we must drive towards, to become a better human race.

And it will not be without its complexities. One comes up in the very opening of the chapter, where you say this: “As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.” All I can say is, Whoa! Way to make a point! Your point being, I think, that there is within each of us the animal, representing energies which become creatively useable by us only when tamed and transformed.  Healing the division within ourselves is necessary to healing divisions without.

And then there is this complexity, which, truth be told, I’m really relieved to know about. You yourself were not a strict vegetarian. You ate meat rarely, it is true; but there were times when practicality or convention left you with few or no options. Said your friend Moncure Conway, “Thoreau never attempted to make any general principle on the subject [of vegetarianism], and later in life ate meat in order not to cause inconvenience to the family.”

You see, I’m writing this letter to you fully aware that I’ve not been perfect in my pledge to eat a meatless diet this year. Oh, I’ve given up my “I [heart] bacon” T-shirt, and I’m no longer the rabid meat-eater that I was. But once and a while, there have been times when practicality made things difficult, or the time of year. Like Thanksgiving with friends. Or the Superbowl. Henry, I know: “There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.” Yet in the eye of your genius, as in mine, we know that perfectionism is an obstacle to growth. We are tempered by reality. We are tempered by humility. Wee must not allow our big genius visions get in the way of our living with each other. Even Transcendentalists must remember that we need not think alike to love alike.

And so may our Transcendentalism never become a grim affair of finger-pointing and guilt-mongering, even as it urges us forward. Let us sing our spirituality. Let it be the same kind of music to us as it was to John Farmer. Lovely notes from the flute, waking us up from our slumber, gently raising us above the street, above the village, above the state in which we live, so we can see it all from a mountain-top perspective. A voice in the music, saying to us: “Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?”

Henry, I love you—thank you for being a spiritual grandparent to us all—

Sincerely,

Anthony

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

It’s from her poem “To Be of Use” and continues:

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

This is part of my vision for a great congregation—everyone finding a way to contribute to the common good. Sometimes the volunteer work is exciting, and sometimes it is “common as mud.” But all of it is important. It’s worth doing well.

This March and April, we are entering into a season of volunteer recruitment. In March, we’ll be inviting all friends and members to take a “Strengths and Talents” survey. Because this one will be different from last year’s in several key ways, I hope everyone will take it—either online, or in worship on March 14.

How will this year’s “Strengths and Talents” survey be different? For one thing, we are adding “sustainability” to the part which focuses on skills that people have and would like to offer at UUCA. We are also including a few key survey questions that will enable the staff to have a baseline sense about how many people actually volunteer at UUCA, how many people read the monthly newsletter, and similar other things.

Finally, we are asking people what specific program areas they want to serve in. There are 12: “children’s ministries,” “music and the arts,” “faith in action/sustainability,” “our wider movement/ denominational affairs,” “our congregational home/office/ facilities,” “fellowship & community building,” “youth/ teenagers,” “adult religious education,” “pastoral care/ caring community,” “stewardship/generosity,” welcome/ membership,” and “volunteerism/gifts ministries.”

This year’s survey will also set us up for a fantastic follow- up event, scheduled for Sunday, April 11: a Volunteer Expo. The Expo will take place in the social hall between the two services and after the second service. Each of the 12 program areas mentioned above will have a table, staffed by people who represent just some of the related teams and groups. It’s a great opportunity to find out about what’s going on and how you might get involved. People who participated in the “Strengths and Talents” survey will also receive special invitations to go to the program tables they expressed interest in.

I hope we can all see the annual “Strengths and Talents” survey, together with the Volunteer Expo, as a step in the right direction of redeveloping our volunteer ministries at UUCA. Please participate and let me know how it works for you.

Why volunteerism? My quick answer is that this is one of the best ways to make friends at UUCA and feel like you are a part of the community. I hear this from volunteers again and again.

But there are other reasons as well. One is related to theology. Our historical stance of congregational polity— together with our Sixth Principle—affirms that Unitarian Universalist congregations are “a work of the people.” It’s democracy in action through volunteerism.

Another reason is this: service is a core spiritual practice. It’s a major means by which Unitarian Universalists grow personally, relationally, and spiritually. By finding significant service work through the congregation, benefiting the congregation itself or the larger world, people can discover and live out a ministry of their own.

Yet another reason to volunteer has to do with justice and fairness. As Unitarian Universalists, we can’t coherently seek to heal suffering in the larger world if the situation of the ministers, staff, and small group of existing volunteers in our home congregation is a burn-out zone. Many hands make light work—but few hands make the work very hard. It is an ironic reality of large congregations that fewer volunteers step up even as dreams get bigger—and that is simply not sustainable in the long haul.

I speak very frankly here, but only to emphasize the importance of vital volunteerism at UUCA—of everyone finding their place of service. I love this congregation, and I want it to continue aiming toward greatness. I’m committed to finding ways in which UUCA can live out the wonderful wisdom of Marge Piercy’s poem. “The pitcher cries for water to carry / and a person for work that is real.”

Blessings,
Rev. Anthony David, Senior Minister

Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Positivity

Rev. Anthony David

Feb. 14, 2010

Reading before the sermon

Our reading today is from a book by Susan Vaughn M.D., entitled, Half Empty, Half Full: Understanding the Psychological Roots of Optimism.

Once upon a time a scientist broke the rats in his laboratory into random groups. The rats in the first group were placed one by one in a big tank of water made opaque with milk. They had to swim for a set amount of time. These rats were the lucky ones, since their tank had a tiny island hidden under the water on which they could perch without having to swim. Their island was always in a fixed location in the tank, there for them to find without fail, a way of getting a tiny leg up and a respite from the swim.

The rats in the second group swam for exactly the same amount of time in the milky water as those in the first group. But their tank had no island, no oasis amid the vast vat. After their swims, the rats in both groups were plucked from the water, weary and bedraggled. Both groups then rested, ate, and otherwise recuperated before the real Rat Race.

When the big day came, both groups of rats were at it again. The researcher once again made them swim one by one. But this time all the rats swam in a tank without an island. Much as they swam, there was simply no oasis to be found, no respite from having to paddle like mad just to stay afloat. The researcher rescued them before their whiskered noses slipped beneath the water. Then he carefully recorded precisely where and for how long each rat swam before returning it to its cage, wet and waterlogged, probably surprised to be alive.

When the scientist tallied up the time each rat spent in the tank, imagine how surprised he was. He found that those lucky rodent racers whose island had been there for them the first time swam for over twice as long, looking for the island where it had previously been. In contrast, those who had never found a predictable foothold in their hour of need were reduced to wandering aimlessly around the tank, swimming in seemingly directionless circles, chasing their tails in vain as they looked for a means of escape.

Now, you may find it a stretch to say that the rats that had experienced a consistent island in their prior swims were optimistic. But given that they were broken randomly into two groups in the first place, how else can we understand what kept them looking for twice as long as their competitors rather than paddling haphazardly around the tank? Isn’t their belief that there is something definite to swim for a positive expectation rooted in the reality of their earlier experience? Since there was no island in the tank in which they took their second swim, isn’t it fair to say that what made the difference as to whether they sank or swam was the illusion of an island, their ability to conjure an inner image of an island to swim for when the going got rough, even if such an island existed only in their imagination?

The sermon

It’s Olympics time again—and I love the Olympics. I see it as a sports version of our very own Unitarian Universalist values, of the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. All these good things, evident in the pageantry of Friday’s Opening Ceremonies. The people of Canada’s First Nations opening and blessing the event … then the 2500 athletes from around our troubled world, parading in … and I’m just realizing that one of the most fun parts of the Parade of nations is seeing what people from different lands actually wear … and then the stadium floor is cleared, transformed, and through magic of light and sound it becomes an ocean floor, whales swimming across, singing their song … then things change again, the stadium becomes a forest, Sarah McLaughlin performs her song “Ordinary Miracles”… then another change, another transformation: an immense screen coming down, taking the form of the Canadian Rockies, images of Olympic events projected on it, with skiers and snowboarders suspended from the ceiling … then later on, k. d. Lang singing Leonard Cohen’s amazing song, “Hallelujah” … and on and on. I’m just an Olympics nut. Friday night, snowing like crazy outside, snow in all our United States of America (except for the lone holdout, Hawaii), but I and the family are bundled up, watching the spectacle taking place far away in Vancouver….

And then came the lighting of the Cauldron. Four ice towers to rise and then fall into place, and at the center, a Cauldron to hold the Olympic flame. Four lighters of the Cauldron, too, which goes against the venerable tradition of just one final person to light the flame, together with its message about atomic individualism, lone rangerism. Four lighters, with a radical message about relationship, about how greatness is something we help each other get to, the power of team…. But the message got lost in the midst of a malfunction. There was a jarring pause in the profound seamless flow of the evening’s events. A problem with the hydraulic system, and in the end, only three of the four towers rose. Only three flames rushed up to light the Cauldron. One of the four lighters never got to put her torch to use. Perhaps an ironic echo of the Georgian luger who had died earlier that day, tragically, during a practice run.

The Opening Ceremonies were just not perfect. Not perfect. More than good enough, though, to get the 2010 Winter Games started. Something Canada should still feel extremely proud of.

But now let me ask you. How do you think the media treated the issue of the malfunction? What’s your best guess?

My working hypothesis is that the electronic media is essentially the human nervous system writ large. In the human body, bad news runs faster than good; neural pathways conveying threats are literally quicker—much quicker—than ones conveying positive things. It’s an evolution-based “negativity bias,” and it informs and is reinforced by a society that invariably features bad news on the front page and slips in the good news elsewhere, in easy-to-miss spots—and actually prides itself in doing this, sees this as responsibility. Sees this as realism and as virtue.

This is what Chris Chase, writing for Yahoo’s sports blog, says in his article entitled “The Ten Best Moments From Vancouver’s Opening Ceremonies”:  Number 1: “The gaffe heard round the world.” “Former hockey star Wayne Gretzky, two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash and Alpine skiing legend Nancy Green were able to light their cauldrons, but speedskater Catriona Lemay Doan was left with her flame when the fourth torch failed to emerge from underneath the stadium. It was an embarrassing end to an otherwise flawless Opening Ceremony. Instead of the indelible memory of four cauldron-lighters, this ceremony will be most remembered for the cauldron that wouldn’t rise.” And that’s his number 1 best moment. It all goes downhill from there.

The media as the human nervous system writ large. Bad news running faster than good. So easy to get stuck in malfunctions, such that nothing else beyond can be seen and appreciated, and a more balanced perspective is blocked. Balance becoming impossible, negativity becoming contagious, the downward spiral taking on a life of its own—and people call it virtue.

It can happen to the Olympics, and it can also happen to congregations like ours which aspire to live Olympic-sized values, from the inherent worth and dignity of every person to the interdependent web of all existence. So much that is good going on, and yet congregations can get stuck on what church consultant and Unitarian Universalist minister Larry Peers calls “problem-saturated stories.” “A problem-saturated story,” he says, “has a dynamic of its own. Often when we are telling a problem-saturated story about our congregational situation it has a trance-like effect. The story is reinforcing. We ‘see’ only those things that reinforce the story. Whatever is contradictory to this problem-saturated story goes un-storied and is not ‘seen.’” Larry Peers goes on to say, “You can recognize the problem-saturated story when you’re in a group where someone offers an example of how difficult or awful something is in the congregation and before you know it the rest of us can’t help but chime in with more evidence for how truly bad and impossible the situation is.” All eyes and minds riveted on some malfunction, and there’s no room left for other perspectives or possibilities.

It’s the downward spiral. Rumination on the problem making you extra-vigilant for more of the problem, or other problems; extra-vigilance helping to trigger even worse things. Can’t let the problem go. Can’t get bigger than the problem, see it from a different point of view, get loose. Happens in our relationships, happens in our solitude.

And it’s more than just sociological or psychological in importance. Our situation as spiritual beings having a human experience means that our most profound religious realizations—the actual having of them—depends on an attitude of prior interest and openness. Desire for a certain kind of truth helps to bring about that truth’s existence. Philosopher William James talks about this in his magnificent article entitled “The Will To Believe.” “Do you like me or not?” he asks. “Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt … ten to one your liking never comes. […] The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence.” What William James is saying is far more than just good advice on Valentine’s Day. If we want to live in a world in which ordinary miracles happen, hallelujah happens, forgiveness happens, healing happens, peace happens, creativity happens, our Seven Principles happen—all these things and more happening even in the midst of all the strife and all the pain—then we have to meet these possibilities half way. Got to open the door, first, to experience realities that can transform us as we cannot transform ourselves, whatever we want to call them, Goddess, God, the Tao, Buddhamind. Got to believe that the island is out there, somewhere, despite all malfunctions to the contrary. Got to keep swimming.

That’s what planting the seed of positivity is all about. A growing ability to conjure up an inner image of the island to swim for, even as the going gets rough. That’s what we’re talking about today, in this fifth installment of the Planting Seeds of Soul series. Positivity, like a flame for which everything is food, and everything helps it grow.

A story comes to mind—a remarkable example of what the human spirit is capable of. It originally comes from American doctor George Ritchie, who was in Germany during World War II, attending to wounded soldiers and people who had been imprisoned in the Nazi labor and death camps. “It’s about one of these prisoners in particular: a Polish inmate at the Wuppertal prison camp. When the Americans came to liberate the prisoners at this camp, they were struck by the health and vitality of this one man, whom they assumed had only been in the camp for a short while. Called him Wild Bill Cody. As it turns out, he had been in the camp for nearly six years, since 1939, living on starvation rations and in the most oppressive atmosphere. Surrounded by degradation, humiliation, death. Scarcely a darker time could be imagined. Then the liberators learned that he had been imprisoned in the camp immediately after he had witnessed Nazi soldiers murder his wife and children as well as many members of his community. He had seen them lined up and shot. He had plenty of reasons to hate, to be bitter and to want to seek revenge. However, he described to them that at the moment of his greatest despair, at losing all he had held most dear, he knew that he must forgive his captors (and the murderers of his family). He must forgive them completely and learn to see the divine spark that also lives in the hearts of these Nazi soldiers. And so he lived for six years in the prison camp and soon became the respected mediator between different ethnic groups that had little more affinity for one another than they did for the Germans.” This is the story, which originally comes from Dr. George Ritchie and as relayed by Warren Lee Cohen in his book which we’ve been drawing from in our sermon series, entitled Raising the Soul. Warren Lee Cohen’s closing words: “Wild Bill Cody was a source of hope for all who knew him. He spoke many languages, but most importantly he spoke the language of humanity, of forgiveness and positivity. This unusual quality not only saved his life, but it was also a source of tremendous strength for all who met him.”

This story can tell us so much about the nature of positivity. Perhaps the first thing is this: that it’s NOT a form of irresponsibility, or a way of avoiding reality—wishful thinking that prevents a person from seeing problems as they are and tackling them head on. “This,” says Susan Vaughn M.D. in her book, Half Empty Half Full: Understanding the Psychological Roots of Optimism, “has not generally proved to be the case.” There are important exceptions, she admits: “First, there are some gamblers whose belief in the illusion of control gets them into trouble and keeps them coming back for more, unable to admit that they are not really the rulers of the roulette wheel and all. There is also some evidence that teenage girls who have more illusions of control about getting pregnant may fail to use birth control with regularity.” However: “There’s more evidence going in the opposite direction: people who have an intact illusion of control are more likely to be proactive in addressing real problems.” Rats swimming furiously, looking for an island which is but an image in their brains. Wild Bill Cody, seeing into the severe reality of his situation, seeing what’s needed, and filling the need. Becoming a mediator between the different ethnic groups in the camp.

Positivity is NOT a form of irresponsibility, and neither is it a Saturday Night Live Stuart Smalley pep talk in front of a full-length mirror: “I’m going to do a terrific show today! And I’m gonna help people! Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!” Yet if you’ve ever seen Stuart Smalley on TV, or been acquainted with a real-life version of Stuart Smalley, you know that their daily affirmations amount to no more than enforced cheer and a compulsive fending off of anxiety. To others they can appear to be upbeat, but underneath it all is the sense of potentially crashing at any moment. Utter vulnerability and unsafety. Do you know what I’m talking about? But the positivity I’m referring to is different from this. It’s not a reactive defense against feeling difficult feelings. You can be positive and optimistic and yet still feel sadness when you see suffering around you, you can still feel anger, you can still feel fear—yet you don’t get stuck in any of it. Feel the feelings, talk about them—but keep on swimming to the island. Keep on taking one step at a time, moving forward, eventually moving yourself and moving others into a better place. Wild Bill Cody faced down his despair and faced down his hate, his bitterness. Touched them, knew them. Yet he also trusted that this is not all there can be, that transformation is still possible, through forgiveness. Positivity is ultimately self-trust—trust that even our most beastly feelings won’t devour us up, that we have inner resources giving us strength to move forward.

The Wild Bill Cody story has a lot to teach us. Positivity as responsibility, positivity as self-trust, and also positivity as a commitment to healing. I love how writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this. She says, “I keep remembering a simple idea [a friend] told me once–that all the sorrow and all the trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-’n’-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, nor merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.” That’s what Elizabeth Gilbert says. It applies as much to Wild Bill Cody as it does to you and me. Positivity helps us get out of the way of our Unitarian Universalist principles living and moving in the world. That’s what it does. In the midst of malfunctions of all types, swimming for the island.

There’s so much more that might be said. Wild Bill Cody’s amazing capacity to see the Divine Spark in his Nazi guards, which in essence was a refusal to capture them right back in the snare of his negative expectations, thus reinforcing the negative. His sheer perseverance, leading straight to being a blessing to so many people who needed it. Just his physical condition—his physical health—after six years in a horrible prison camp. All these Olympic-sized achievements, all connected to positivity. And if, after hearing all this, you are wondering how it all might apply to you, all I can say is, I feel you. I hear it. For there is a traditional view of positivity and optimism that needs to be acknowledged, countered, debunked: the view that a capacity for positivity is something a person is simply born with. A matter of fixed temperament. Wild Bill Cody was able to do what he did because of good genes, or a good upbringing. Maybe the story speaks to some people, but not to everyone. As Susan Vaughn puts it, “Asking a pessimistic person to be more optimistic is like asking a leopard to change his spots.”

This is the traditional view. Yet it’s wrong. “I believe,” says Susan Vaughn, “that optimism is the result of an internal process of illusion building. I believe we should fundamentally redefine optimism as the result of a particular series of mental machinations, psychological somersaults. These internal gymnastics are not generally something that optimists are just born knowing how to do. Optimism is not, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson on hope, ‘a thing with feathers that perches in the breast.’ Instead it is an active internal process, more akin to learning to fly. It is a verb, not a noun. And pessimism, by contrast, is not the absence of some elusive winged creature that our biological birdcage either contains or lacks. That’s good news, because if optimism is the result of inner psychological processes, then we can all become better illusion-builders with practice. So if you can’t imagine that illusive island now, don’t worry. You can learn to.”

And that’s what we turn to, right now. Planting the seed of positivity. A daily practice to add to the other four practices I’ve introduced in this sermon series. Self-knowledge, clear thinking, willpower, emotional intelligence, and now positivity.

A caveat, before I go any further. For some people, this psychological and spiritual exercise may be extremely tough to do because your emotional weather system is snow snowy and icy that it’s impossible for your ideas or efforts to get any traction. The downward depressive spiral is in full swing. All fifty states inside you are under blizzard conditions. All your highways and roads are iced over, and there are massive car pile-ups everywhere. In this case, medication is clearly merited, together with therapy. Susan Vaughn speaks to this wisely in her book. Take a look.

But if your inner emotional weather is not so severe, then jump right in. The positivity practice begins like this: with a clear resolution to encourage yourself to notice more of the positive and praiseworthy in your daily experience. To do this for at least a month, if not more, everyday. Building up this specific attention muscle over time, and seeing for yourself that optimism is, in fact, a verb and not a genetic mandate. A choice that we can make, in our human freedom. Start each day consciously making this choice, and then, at the end of the day, as part of your Review of the Day, reflecting on how things went, what patterns did you see, and so on.

Between the beginning and end of the day, there are at least two positivity things you can do: simultaneously, or you can decide to alternate between them, focusing on just one at a time.

The first is inner-focused. It’s simply to pay attention to your thoughts about yourself or the world, and when you catch yourself falling into a downward spiral of pessimism, say “thank you for that perspective” and then shift things up. For example, you encounter a “problem-saturated” story: a story with a trance-like effect, a story that hypnotizes you and makes it easy to think that it is equivalent with the truth. Say “thank you for that perspective”—and then spoil the pity party. Shift gears: ask: “What would someone else say?” If it’s a congregation-related story, the questions might be: “What would the newest or longest member of the congregation say about this situation?” “What would a child say?” or, better yet, “What would someone who disagrees with me say?”

Another opportunity to shift gears is when we catch ourselves playing the “I wish I was [fill-in-the-blank] game.” “I wish I was…” or “I wish he (or she) was …” or “I wish we were …” Doing this is not positivity, and it’s going to make you feel horrible, and you don’t have to make this choice. You don’t!  So easy to do anyhow, though—the habit is firmly fixed in so many of us. So if you catch yourself doing this, shift gears. Move from “I wish I was…” to “I’m glad I’m not….” “I’m glad she’s not…” “I’m glad we’re not…” Apparently this is something even the Dalai Lama does, as he works vigilantly on his own positivity. Probably everyone here can honestly say, “I’m glad I’m not Wild Bill Cody”—glad I didn’t have to go through what he did. And the ironic thing is that not only does this not harden our hearts against people like Wild Bill Cody—research shows it does exactly the opposite. Our hearts open up. In affirming that we are, relatively speaking, better off, we are more likely to use our resources to help people in similar situations. Fascinating and true.

As for the second positivity action: it’s outer-focused. It involves choosing to be more aware of the efforts of others around you, appreciating them, feeling gratitude. Says writer Marcel Proust, “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, for they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Do this, and then then take things to the next level. Strive to find positive qualities in people or situations where appreciation and gratitude are not so easy. As a teacher, or a boss, or a co-worker, or a spouse or partner: feeding with your attention what is healthy and starving with a withdrawal of attention what is not. Looking for something good, no matter how challenging a person’s behavior might be. This in fact may allow you to help them work through their challenges. Not capturing them in the snare of your negative image, and thus only reinforcing the problem.

However we focus our effort—inside of ourselves, or outside—ultimately the practice is about building up the positivity muscle over time. Seeing for yourself the verb that optimism is. Choosing to learn how to sing a song entitled “Everything’s Possible” even though no one might have ever sung it to you. So much relies on this. The cessation of suffering. Getting out of our own way, as we strive to live out our seven Unitarian Universalist principles. This is an achievement that is nothing less than an Olympics of the spirit, and we set this for ourselves not every four years or two years but every day. Every day. Going to be lots of malfunctions along the way. Lots of them. But we carry on. The island is there. Keep on swimming.

Halfway into the march, one of our members and I talked about whether we could actually teach the song “Standing on the Side of Love” to our band of marchers on the move. First, a few learned the chorus, then a few more, then most of them, adding this to our small but lusty repertoire.

Along the way, we saw smiles and support, but we also saw contempt in response to our signs and our identity, and the messages we were conveying visually and musically.

Right outside the original Ebenezer Baptist Church building (now a national historical site), some men were shouting anti-gay and anti- Jewish rhetoric after seeing our banner and our people marching. We met their hateful shouts with a rousing sing of “Standing on the Side of Love.” We sang it not once, not twice, but three times, directly back at them, with lilting melody and emotional conviction.

In the words of our intern minister, Julie Lepp, at that moment, we lived out our values of faith in action and meeting hate with the power of love.

The Islamic Speakers Bureau made note of the visit of our Neighboring Faiths middle school religious education class to the Al-Farooq Mosque in their most recent newsletter.