The trees do not care what we are celebrating, be it Christmas, or Kwanzaa, or Yule. We care. We argue. We party. Of course the trees notice, in their slow, silent, cellular way the shift of the sunlight on their bodies. They notice the freezing of water, and respond to the thaw when it comes. The rhythm of each year is written, visibly recorded, in the rings of trees and the layers of soil. The do notice individually if we cut them down for firewood, or to clear space for our living. But ultimately they are uninvolved in what drives us to plan and work, to spend and travel, worry and anticipate.

This is perhaps one of the most universal insights of all human religion, that there is always something larger than ourselves in which we move and live.  Some people assert they have a special, and thus better, relationship with that larger reality. Some claim their nation is guided by God or that their good fortune is somehow earned or deserved.  Likewise some become convinced that the opposite is true, that the whole world has been turned against them, by Dharma or by God.  Likewise,  some people are certain that the Creator of the Universe expects them to piously honor the birth of Jesus on December 25.

Unitarian Universalists naturally hold humility about these things. We think it is good to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and just as good to enjoy a secular Christmas.  And, if you decide to celebrate on some other day, or to celebrate another holiday, or to not celebrate at all, that is good too.  If you give gifts to your friends and family on one particular morning, or on another, the trees do not mind.  All the trees ask (in their silent, cellular way) and all that we ask, in our verbal and thoughtful way, is that you act justly, love mercy and walk humbly within the web of all living things.

So, though the trees are beyond such sentiment, I hope that you have holidays which awaken you to the wholeness and goodness of life.

A couple of weeks ago, I was happy to have my one day off on Friday, because I had been fighting a flu for two weeks (which was not too bad but made me generally tired all day, and I ached by the middle of every afternoon.) While relaxing at home, I received a call.  After a slow two-year decline, one of our long-standing members had died: peacefully. The family was going to the Mortuary Saturday morning, and then we would talk about the memorial service.

Saturday morning the phone rang and it was from a person at the mortuary calling to tell me that a member of my church had died and the family would like me to do a memorial service. “Oh, I know Marvin well,” I replied, “I have already started talking to the family about a service. “Marvin?” he said back, “I’m calling about George.” A sadness rushed through my body. I thought: “George who went in for minor colon surgery last Tuesday? No,” I realized, “the George who I had visited a week earlier in the hospital, wracked with pain but not talking of death at all.”

Both families had already planned a service for the next Saturday, one in the morning one in the afternoon.  Sadly, the morning service could not be held in our building because our Rummage service would be going then and the foyer was filled with stuff.  Our church Dinner Discussion group was meeting in my home that night, the next morning I had a service on a topic that still required some serious work, including the integration of two video clips, and we had a congregational meeting on Sunday afternoon to discuss a serious financial crisis in the church.  This crisis had generated a number of extra meetings and conversations.

On top of all this I was doing all my regular work: research for a sermon about something I knew very little, calling on people who were in the hospital, talking someone out of depression, meeting with colleagues in my UU Cluster, meeting with colleagues from Christians in my city, meeting with various leaders, planning and preparing, and attending the seek to week events of the church.  I love my work, I love the church, but I was feeling a little overwhelmed by Wednesday;  and, I was still sick.

I realized, not for the first time, how much my sanity and health depend on flexibility built into to my weekly rounds.  Luckily, I had done enough research for the sermon that I could  stop research and go ahead with writing.  It takes a lot of time to go out to visit people, so I insisted that a couple of people come to me at church and I called to talk with some on the phone rather than face to face.  I had two writing projects I could put off to the next week, and there were some events that I could easily postpone or cancel.

Late in the week, after I had been at the church for six hours straight and was feeling  “like butter spread over too much bread,”  I called to tell my wife that I had another meeting on the environment, and then I would be home.  She protested that she had not seen much of me recently and reminded me that I was still sick.  “Do what you need to do,” she said.  After I hung up the phone I let myself be very quiet, took several deep breaths, and then went straight home since resting in her arms was what I most needed to do.

The weekend was beautiful, successful and inspiring.  Thanksgiving break did not come too soon.

A few weeks back I got a form letter from the Islamic Center of Muncie, IN.  It was to invite all religious people to tour their new facility and share in an open house.  They have chosen as their new worship space a building that is very visible on a major shopping artery only a few blocks from our UU church.

The first paragraph of the note gave basic information but the second paragraph read as follows:

“This life is entrusted to us as a gift and we must live to serve the oppressed and the needy because it is our duty. We must learn to create kindness, compassion and love for each other to alleviate mutual distrust and enmity between people of different ethnicities, races and faiths. The Islamic Center of Muncie hopes that you will support us in this effort.”

Reading this I thought, “This could have been written as a mission statement of a UU church.”  I liked their opening in a stance of gratitude, their emphasis on service, on promoting kindness and love and alleviating enmity. I liked their invitation to cooperation and unity.   I know that not all Muslims, even in this center, are of the same mind, but their current leadership has set them on a progressive course.   Of course a UU statement would also include something about the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Furthermore I know that Muslims  in general are not thinking of gay or lesbian, bisexual or trans-gender people as among the oppressed.  But they can be our allies in many ways.

For instance there is the Maryland legislator, Saqib Ali, who has considered the oppression of glbt people and has taken a stance in support of gay marriage even though he fully understands and accepts that there can be no gay Muslims [or more accurately, if one is to  submit to Islam one must accept its strict prohibitions against homosexuality]  (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111770008).

As I learned in community organizing, there are no such things as permanent allies, there are no such thing as permanent enemies.  Each may take different paths but the struggle for peace and justice is universal.

At the Berry Street Lecutre Dr. Paul Rasor moved us another step on the road to a truly multi-cultural anti-racist anti-oppression religious movement. I found his speech, “Provincial Ironies,” and Rosemary Bray-McNatt’s respose, to be challenging, disturbing, exiting, hopeful and frightening all at once. He is just another in a long line that have asserted that we fall way, way, way short of what we say we are and what we want to do in the world.

I am sure the text will be up on the Berry Street site soon. http://www.uuma.org/BerryStreet/index.htm

In the meantime I will simply say that his focus on clear statistics grounds a powerful anaylis of the mostly cultural barriers that keeps us small and lacking in true diversity.

I almost wish I was not going on summer break so I could give a rousing sermon this Sunday, or well, maybe next Sunday. Then again August is just around the corner, and the path before us is long, very long, incredibly long. Still, the path bends toward justice.

Appearing back to back, two articles in the Summer 2009 UU World Magazine caught my attention[ http://www.uuworld.org/currentissue.shtml .] Both echoed (for me) the closing quote in the “Blog Roundup” from Joel Monka: “UU itself is still like monosodium glutamate in my life – a flavor enhancer for what I already had, rather than a stand-alone religion in its own right.” Wow,” when I read that I thought, “The purpose of  my life, as a UU Minister, is to improve the flavor of various religions.”  In “Natural Aptitude” Laura Pedersen tells us it is hard to distinguish UUs from Hippies and says, “… UUs believe that there is truth to be found in all religions, but no one relgion holds all truth.”On the next page, Ken Collier tells us that “Religion is about the healing of brokenness,” which is a powerful purpose but, though he speaks of the religions of Buddha and Christ, he says nothing about UUism being “a religion.”  He ends with the idea that religions are just different cultural methods of achieving the same goal of wholeness and healing.   Furthermore Pedersen notes that UUism is not so much a choice as a found quality, “Finding that one is UU is “… like discovering that one is gay or has a natural aptitude for clog dancing.”

The point for me is that even if a candidate for the UUA Presidency tells us “We are the religion for our time,” the fact is that most of us do not think we are a religion, but either a smorgasboard of religions, or something that enhances the flavor of religion cooked up somewhere else.  To be sure, there are many who think we are a particular religion, such as the religion of Existential Humanism, or the religion of  “God is love,” or the religion of “be reasonable and openmided,”  or the religion of  particular liberal causes.  But each of these are minorities who favor one cooking style over others and ultimately see the UU movement as a flavor enhancer for their own particular dish.  There are those who think of UUism as “an approach to religion” but certainly not a religion of its own. 

Maybe that is just fine, and we should accept our place as a “liberalizer of religions” or something like “fusion cooking,” an approach with endless variations.  However, when I meet Unitarians from the Kasi hills, or people in North America who’s lives have been utterly transformed by finding a UU congregation I think we can be something more.  I think our best churches are offering not just MSG but the substance of universal truth, prepared as religion that feeds the hungry soul.  I can’t say my church is “one of the best” but we do struggle to make each worship service not just a sampler of all the good spiritual food in the world, or a place to get something to suppliment your own spiritual cooking, but full meals that have real integrity and their own unique flavor.

I went to see the latest Star Trek movie this past week. It was lots of fun, but I came away wondering again why fantasy with spaceships, but no science of any sort, is called “science-fiction?”

Of course the original Trek series often played loose and free with science.  For example they never took trouble to explain phasers that vaporized bodies down to their shoe soles, without effecting anything near them.  But the latest movie had strange “red matter” that was never explained in any way, starships being built on a planet’s surface (very illogical), huge shuttle bays on a small ship, inexplicable water works on a starship, magic mathematical equations, planets (Vulcan and Delta Vega) that are way too close to one another, (and what does “delta vega” mean?)  etc. etc.  There was, literally, no science ever used or mentioned except in some questions for Vulcan kids being tested in school.

The point is that we communicate our values in the stories we tell.  Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists have long valued integrity between science and religion.  We have long insisted that supernatural ideas be taken with a grain of agnosticism and that science is of great value.  Many of UUs have loved Star Trek shows because they blended science and religion in fun ways (“Who Morns for Adonis,” “The Apple,” to name two original series episodes off the top of my head).  Often there were strange “spiritual” elements that were explained in pseudo-scientific terms, like the energy existence of the Organians, but there was also real science, and the portion of that increased through the Next Generation and beyond.

Now a movie is made with no science at all.  And we wonder why Kansas schools and others are trying to present religious ideas like Creationism (AKA “intelligent design”) as if they were good science!

I have been studying Buddhist thought for more than thirty years, since I first got a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones in high school.  For more than ten years I have been learning about Buddhist practice, integrating meditation into my life and attending Buddhist ceremonies of various sorts.  Thus, as I was listening to All Things Considered yesterday to a report from Sichuan China, I was surprised to hear about someone who had lost his faith in Buddha.

Some NPR reporters had returned to Sichuan a year after the terrible earthquake.  One year ago a reporter had spent a day with a couple who were looking for their child in the rubble.  The body of the child was eventually found in the arms of his grandparents who had also been killed.  A year later the couple felt too fragile to talk to the reporter, but the man’s sister was willing to tell how her brother and sister-in-law were doing.

What struck me was how she described her brother’s religious thinking.  I paraphrase here: “He says he no longer believes in Buddha.  There is no point in burning incense, no point in praying.  He says, “My parents were good people, they lived a good life, my son was an innocent two year old.  There can be no Buddha or Heaven if such people die like this.” “

I thought this kind of tragicly flawed thinking, that if you pray good things will happen to you (and when bad things happen faith is lost), was only a product of Christianity, or monotheism and the idea that ‘God is in charge.’   I have been trained to think of the Buddha as a man who said, “Don’t put faith in me; test everything I say with experience; hold to the light within as the only light.”  I have been trained to think that Buddhism is about awakening the mind, not about calling upon the protection of supernatural powers.  (Though as I think about it I can remember several counter examples.)

The point is that many things are universal, including tragic and hurtful forms of magical thinking.  Superstition is not a creation of any one religion, or of any, but of the human mind, of our desires, craving, sin or tanah.  Thre will alwys be misplaced faith, trust in the wrong things.  Thus there will always be people who need the balm of a liberal faith, one that explains why we should live by love, ‘agape’ or ‘metta’, that helps us to face death and disaster with courage and an affirmation of life, that does not give us false hope, but an enduring and cosmic hope that transcends all time and tides.

I am back.  I have been away from my blog for quite a while.  I went on a little trip to Paris, Prague and Rome, and I decided not to blog while I was there, but instead to write more personal reflections and to take lots of pictures. But now I am back to writing here regularly.

Today I was listening to the wonderful “This American Life” and it reminded me of my plan to return to blogging.  One of the things I love about that show is that it thrives upon the same power that nurtures great preaching, the simple power of the human voice and the truth of stories well told.  Most of the pieces shared there are also written down, so blogging can share the same power.

Anyway, the piece I listened to today was by Dan Savage, the gay sex advice columnist.  He spoke about his relationship with the Catholic Church, especially as it has been changed, first by his coming out as a gay man and then more recently by his mother’s death.  It was a beautiful piece, evoking the power and vital importance of religion. At one point he talked about finding a “Welcome Back” card encouraging lapsed Catholics to return to the ritual and community.   Of course I wanted him instead to become a UU, or at least mention the possibility.  The closest he came was quoting his mother who said, whenever the pope or a archbishop spoke of the evils of birth control, “It is like they are trying to make us all become Lutherans.”

But more than that he spoke about the power of the sacrament of last rights to sanctify a difficult and very painful moment, and he spoke of the beauty of an old church and ceremony with their sense of well worn sacredness, and he spoke of the comfort of certain beliefs, all of which are rare or impossible to find in UU congregations.  I was glad that the piece ended with him still searching, longing for and yet not finding fully the Beloved Community.  Perhaps someone will invite him to the right UU church that helps him bridge his longing to the reality of a community that affirms him as a gay man, and affirms a more inclusive, universal, and small ‘c’ catholic spirituality and faith.

So I was wandering around in my WordPress dashboard when I noticed that someone had linked to my page from somewhere in Mexico.  So I checked out the link and found the Libre Congregacion Unitaria de Mexico.  If that was not cool enough they had translated one of my sermons, “No Immaculate Conception” into Spanish.  How cool is that?  I know some Spanish, enough to get into trouble, as the saying goes, but I could never have done that sort of translation.  Now I can preach one of my sermons totally in Espanol (sorry, but I don’t know how to blog with Spanish accents yet.)

The Mexican Unitarians had even added illustrations.  Wow. I had never thought to add visual elements to my web works.  The translator had added hyperlinks into my text, such as a link to an English language biography of James Luther Adams.   They included links to my Muncie UU website, the photo (now old) from that site, as well as links to my WordPress blog.  I did not know any of this had been done, but as long as they give credit where credit is do I think the whole thing is very, very cool.

As they say at the top of the site: El amor es la doctrina de esta iglesia, La búsqueda de la verdad su sacramento, Y el servicio es su oración.

This is the third in a series on theological depth.  (see: http://http//uulte.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-more-what-is-deeper.html)

My favorite story about UU lay theological education comes from the parents of a child in the church I now serve.  She was about ten and playing on the playground at school when another child came up to her and said with accusation in her voice, “Do you believe in God?”  The UU child responded “Which one?”

A conservative theological education is usually about learning the difference between the right way and the wrong way, sometimes the many wrong ways.  On the other hand a liberal theological education is about understanding something of the many paths.  It has been wonderful to hear the President of the United States say, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.”  The UU Child had learned this basic lesson of religious diversity that the more conservative child had not learned; there are many ideas about God, and we can be a nation, one people, despite this diversity.  UUs should be the leaders in our nation and world on this matter, but instead we have been sidelined by a tendency to avoid God language all together.

I have long asserted that the key question before UUs is not “is there a God” but “what can we know of God?”  As ‘Unitarians’ we naturally assert a fundamental unity to absolute reality.  But how to summon that unity that is both inclusive and has integrity?  If the UU child were asked “Do you believe in the Christian God?” Would our child be able to distinguish between the God of Hell and Damnation and the God of Universal salvation?  Would he or she be able to ask if the other is interested in the God of rules and discipline, or the God of the free Spirit that is bread and joy to the world?  Would the UU child be able to explain that the one ultimate God is beyond anyone’s ability to know and thus there are many faces we give to the divine?  Would he or she be able to say that the ultimate truth is seen as clearly by those who see only grace in the natural forces of the universe as by those who know God as Krishna, or the resurrected Jesus?

There is one man in my congregation who has drifted over to the Anglican church and then back to our UU congregation.  The center-point of his religious journey was in a very dynamic and liberal Catholic church.  There he developed a very personal relationship with God.  He also found loving inclusion of him as one of many gay and lesbian people.  When he came to Indiana he found the same feeling and spirit only in the UU Church.  But after several enthusiastic months with us he left, troubled at having to explain (or avoid talking about) God, his desire to praise God, and to thank God for loving him as a gay man.    At our last meeting he told me, in essence that he feels God’s presence in our church, even if we don’t talk about him enough, and so somehow he will have to make do with less God talk.  I told him I would try to include his needs in my worship leading as best I could, despite my personal grounding in scientific naturalism and a non-theist Buddhism.

Theologically I find that the Hindu religious tradtion has a longer history of celebrating and exploring unity within diversity.  We too should develop such a theology in English rather than Sanscrit.  But we must also develop a way of helping people distinguish between the weaknesses and dangers of the many paths… even if there is “one mountain” it is still possible to fall off… which leads me to my next post.