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September 1, 2002 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 1, 2002

Returning: Home Sweet Home

When I was young I used to enjoy the stories that came from Paul Harvey’s radio broadcast called “The Rest of the Story,” I later discovered that when his stories where investigated, many turned out to be skewed or to be more tall tales than fact, still Paul Harvey’s stories often are captivating for his style, and many do reside in the realm of real events and this one, as related by Mark Adams, pastor in Rockland, MD, is a case in point:

 
On the tenth of April 1852, a man died in Algiers, where his body was buried and remained for thirty-one years until his own country, The United States of America, sent a war ship to bring him back to his native land. As the ship bearing his body drew near to New York harbor, bands of music went out to greet it; Cannons thundered out their welcome; and all the flags hung at half-mast to do honor to this man’s memory. Both rich and poor crowded the docks to welcome him back to the States and everyone stood in reverence as his remains were carried by.

Who was he and why did he receive so much honor? Well... .I can tell you that he had fought in no great battles. He had written no great books. He had never painted a great work of art. He had no famous inventions to his credit.
 

            Is your curiosity sufficiently piqued?  Now, if I were true to the Harvey format, I would give you a commercial right at this point. 


 
Okay....enough suspense....it’s time for THE REST OF THE STORY. This man was John Howard Payne and the accomplishment that brought him such posthumus [sic] praise was the simple fact that he had written a song ... a song [with which] everyone everywhere identified . . . Payne’s song was sung by the millionaire in his mansion, by the workers in the factory and farmers in the fields, and especially by soldiers [of the Civil War], knee-deep in muddy trenches far from home and family.

John Howard Payne was a man who believed that the place we call “home” is, to quote his song lyrics, “...the spot of earth supremely blest, a dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.” And, millions . . . even today agree with Payne that: “Be it ever so humble....there’s no place like home.”
 

From an authoritative biography of Payne, I learned that John Howard Payne was a child actor, who grew into a man fascinated by the theater.  He was the first American actor to be uniformly welcomed to the English stage.  He spent most of his life in England, writing for the theater. Payne wrote the song Home Sweet Home for the 1823 opera Clari, the Maiden of Milan. “‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam/ Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

And:

[Payne] eventually was appointed [the American] consul general in Tunis, a post he occupied twice in the period from 1843 until his death in that city on April 9, 1852.

The song itself lived on -- during the Civil War the armies of both sides, encamped on the battlefield, would sing it together at night. Jenny Lind sang it during her tour of America; Adelina Patti sang it for President Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

[Then] In 1883, financier William Wilson Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery, got Payne's body exhumed and brought to the United States. It arrived first in New York, for one procession, and then, in a massive ceremony attended by President Chester A. Arthur and Gen. William T. Sherman, [Payne’s remains were] interred in Washington's Oak Hill Cemetery.

And that had never been his home.

 

And, that is the end of the story. 

            Today I wanted us to consider what home means as a place we return to, and the place that is always dearest in our hearts.  Home as the place we want to return to from “wherever we may roam.”

I had two short trips not too far from my home this summer, and I felt, as I always feel when I come back home after even a few days, that it is so good to be home.  Home, to one’s familiar things in their familiar places, to one’s own bed (a highlight for me of returning home), to the people and places that are part of being at home.

Perhaps underlying our frequent desire to travel, to leave our homes and go wandering somewhere else--to the beach, to family near and far, to other countries—is the very comparison and contrast that being away gives us.  As I hear frequently from other people, most of us return to our homes with a deep feeling of gratitude for the settled, familiar, comfortable place that is our own.

Home as a place to which we want to return seems to me a very deep and abiding need of humankind.  Home as a biological event, the place we were brought into the world is often part of this.  If you ask most people: Where are you from?  They will respond in one or more ways: “Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up in Tennessee.”  Or some such combination.

            Not everyone takes the same view of home; for example, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher: “Home is where you come to when you haven’t anything better to do.”

T.S. Eliot wrote that: “Home is where one starts from.” There seems to be a need to identify with the place that saw our entry into the world.  Now this may be part biology, part familial history, but whatever the reason, we do have a deeply ingrained sense of being from some particular place.  The exception to this, well it is a kind of exception, are the people from military families, “Army brats” as they often term themselves, who will say: “I’m from all over, I was an Army brat.”  Yet, even then, they will usually tell you where they were either born, or spent most of their years, or where they identify as home now. 

One lighter view of home comes from Bill Bryson, travel author and humorist, echoing Tom Wolfe: “There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.”

Home, for me, is the place you want to return to, no matter what.

            Most of you have heard me talk about my childhood home in rural Idaho, at the time it was the countryside some five miles west of Idaho’s only major city, our capitol, with its great population of 80,000, Boise.  Back then, there were mostly orchards and farms surrounding the city, with very small hamlets dotted among them.  By the late 1970s that countryside had become suburbanized as the farmers and fruit-growers sold their land for much higher prices than they could ever hope to get through their labor and dedication.  My home, that house set back into a rectangle of lawn and house and farm buildings was razed to put in a new development of very nice homes.  I had not been back for the years that this was taking place, and luckily for me, a cousin cautioned me not to go back.  She had grown up across the road, her father also a fruit grower, and their orchards had fallen to the same development. 

            She said to me that I would never be able to see the “old home place” the same if I saw it as it is now.  I took her advice and have never gone out there, to that place of my child’s heart and eye of acres of apple and plum trees, the big old white Victorian era house, the favorite haunts among the ancient shrubs and roses.  They are still clear in my memory.

            I have learned since then the wisdom in being wary of returning to important places, for as Thomas Wolfe said, “You can never go home.” Meaning, that home of your childhood, or heart, for it will change, and if we go looking for that “old home place,” we are very likely to come  away saddened and discouraged. I have returned to the places where my children were born, because their birth gives these places great significance in my heart, and even these I left disappointed for all that had changed in the intervening years.  I have returned to a house where I put in hundreds of ours of work, to find it so far from my vision of it.  And, I heard from a former member here, that she was heartbroken to go back to a much loved house where she had gardened her heart out, only to find it overgrown and neglected.  If felt like an affront to her, and she, too, left heartsick.

            Now, some of this notion of home has to do with expectation, our vision of what a house should look like, but it is also connected with the sense of joy that we have when we return home to find things as they used to be. 

            For some years after my old home was gone, I would go to my grandparent’s place, the original homestead, where an uncle of mine still lived, and it had changed very little.  Partly because this was an old bachelor uncle—think of Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian bachelor farmers—who was challenged to change his overalls regularly, so the house the farm changed very little the years of his occupation.  It reminded me of the best parts of my childhood. 

            Someone once wrote that home is “where we learn what love it.”  Perhaps that is the key to the need to return home; it is the need to know where and what love is.

            Home, of course,  does not have to be any one particular place.  We have a sense of home as people we love, place of birth, a place of growing up, of the larger home that is our country of birth or choosing, of the place that we spiritually connect with, as a the lakeside we spent a summer go to and where we feel most connected with the larger spirit of life in the world.  Even the workplace can have connotations of home.  As I hear older Dupont Company employees talk about the post-war decades when Dupont was at its peak, and you spent your life with the company. 

The old adage tells us that: Home is where the heart is. We want to return to the place where our heart is, where the people are who have our hearts.

A dear woman I know, now in her mid-seventies, is struggling on two fronts with this understanding of home.  For over forty years, she and her husband shared this house and made it their home, most of her eight children were born after they bought this house, and she sees in every nook and cranny visions of her late husband who worked and remodeled and lived largely in this house. Yet, all these are reasons why she struggles from day to day, for he is everywhere, and to sell the house (which is now a burden for her to keep up) and leave would be like leaving the most important part of her behind.

Home, in large measure, is the place we create, and you and I create home for ourselves, and others, all of our lives.  Home is not just the house you live in, but the place where you feel safe and contented; the place you make safe for yourself and for others. 

Home is also been thought of as the place where we go at the end our worldly lives, the eternal home of infinite peace and joy.  My of the Christian hymns I grew up singing talked about heaven as home, and the call to accept Jesus, to be saved was usually preceded by the hymn, “Come Home,” the most potent verse: “softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling, Oh sinner, come home.”

Our congregation here, the UU Society of Mill Creek is also my home, a home for all our members; a place of welcome for friends and guests.  Home for those who seek the sanctuary of the spirit.  A safe haven of ethical living, spiritual challenge and learning, contentment, and also for safety for those who have no one else. 

During my summer time away from this congregation, I feel a tugging in my soul that is only relieved when I once more step into this place, to this pulpit, with you, with all who gather here together to seek out the answers to our deepest longings. I believe that as much as this place, the CACC, has been my spiritual home for years now, that our very own home that is to be constructed this year soon will become the old home place of many hearts. 

I am happy to return, to be back home from my travels of the summer, from my time away.  I wish that everyone had a place that could be such a wonderful, such a holy, home of the heart.

 

September 8, 2002 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 8, 2002

Communion is Retelling the Story

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister, our country’s greatest poet and philosopher, said of our obligation as decent people who are sincere in our desire to advance truth and justice: “ Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.”

            Part of the importance of our annual water communion is not about who went farther away from home, or to the most inaccessible place; it is, rather, about the path the water itself represents (or the stones or shells).

  That we bother to bring a small vial of water or a pebble here, from wherever we have been, is about the importance of communicating a small part of our individual stories to the gathered congregation. 

Most people these days think of communion as a Christian rite.  It certainly is that, though there are significant differences between how various Christian denominations view the ritual, that in Protestant churches is most often called, “The Lord’s Supper.”  The very name, “The Lord’s Supper,” communicates the meaning of the ritual sharing of bread and wine, or, since wine is often substituted by grape juice in many Protestant churches, they talk about the Lord’s Supper in terms of breaking the bread, which represents the body of Jesus’, and juice of grapes, which they call the “fruit of the vine,” representing the blood Jesus is said to have shed for the sins of humanity.

Whether it is called communion or the Lord’s Supper , the ritual is about retelling the story of Jesus who sat down to the Passover Seder meal, as all practicing Jews still do today, partaking with his disciples of the traditional elements of that Jewish Liturgical event.  For Judaism is a highly ritualized religion, and Christianity carried forward many of these rituals, changing them, and adding new rituals, to suit the new religion that formed in the time after the death of Jesus.

So the communion rite is older than Christianity, and indeed older than Judaism.

Just think about the word itself: communion, and its related words.  It has the ecclesiastical meaning, as just mentioned, and its ordinary meaning, which is: The act or an instance of sharing, as of thoughts or feelings.  To commune is a related word, which is: To be in a state of intimate, heightened sensitivity and receptivity, as with one's surroundings: e.g., hikers communing with nature. Even the common words commuter or commute: come from the same basic root having to do with substitution on exchange, going from one place to another is a form of this. All these words derive from early Indo-European language to Latin, and mean: mutual participation.

In ancient Greece, Syria, Scandinavia—these are the cultures who do some kind of  communion about which I have read, but really all ancient civilizations had a ritual form of communion that was a retelling of the religious/mythic stories.  Communion was/is a substitution for an act that reminded the participants of the old stories of the culture. The sharing of meat, blood, grain, fruits, or water usually figured centrally.  By ritually exchanging or sharing these gifts of the gods, goddesses, or god, the people heard a litany of the story, and would take on the story into themselves—this was sometimes believed literally. 

In ancient Greece, eating the flesh of a bull killed in the rite of Dionysus, would connect the communicant with that god, who was represented as half bull, and one was believed to take on some of that strength and power. 

The exchange is often a very important part in itself,  that is the handing of the ritual blood, meat, or bread, to the one receiving.  As even today, priests and pastors or lay leaders in Christian services usually pass out the elements of the communion or Lord’s Supper.

One Bob Brown shared the story of his father's embarrassing mishap in church. He was a Lay Leader in the church, and when he finished helping with communion, his father sat down beside Bob's mother and did what he always did when he sat down beside her: he gave her a hug and a little peck on the cheek. Then he looked up and saw his wife in the row in front of him

This idea of handing out the communion elements though, is really a later adaptation of the original Passover supper that Jesus is said to have shared with the disciples.  Because, for about three-hundred years, the early Christians always had the Lord’s Supper as a separate event, and sat and shared food as at a meal, lifting up the bread and wine as did Jesus.  So we see how the changes are wrought over time, taking from older forms, making new forms of ritual.

Nowadays, there are many Unitarian Universalist congregations who enact various forms of communion.  The First Parish Church in Concord, MA, where I was before coming here, once a year they retrieve the Paul Revere silver communion set and have a fairly traditional communion service. This is not an uncommon event in the New England congregations, but across our movement communion exists, too: the flower communion, and water communion, are also now traditional.

Of course, all rites and rituals are about retelling a story, imparting history, exchanging a part of what we have been with a part of who we are now.

As we repeat this ceremony year-to-year, we are telling our story here at Mill Creek congregation, enacting part of the story, and re-telling older parts of our story.  This is how religion is made—in large part how history is made, too.

We Unitarians have a deep respect for the truth in Emerson’s statement, that we want to make it easier for those who come after us to know what many people (many of us) have had a hard time learning. We want to shine some light on our human experience and knowledge.

Communion is sharing.  Sharing our common experiences, and our individual or particular experiences.

            Canadian United Church minister, the Rev. Stephen Mabee writes:

In the earliest description of Holy Communion to be found anywhere (which we read from Paul's 1st letter to Corinth). There are four action verbs. Paul says "Take, bless, break, and eat." David Kolb of Western Reserve University, has discovered that people learn in 4 basic ways. Dr. Kolb's four ways of learning are from [1]experience, [2]from observation and reflection, [3]from logical analysis and thinking, and [4]from trying out.

            This explanation of the communion reminds me that in many religions, incense, or the smoke it produces, is also an important part of the ritual. Smoke, as a purifying element, to purify the participants is far more ancient still than communion.  And, use of incense is still popular today in Episcopal and Catholic churches.

            There is a story told by an Episcopalian woman, about a visitor who found in her prayer book some notations that obviously had been used by a novice server for Holy Communion as a reminder. At the appropriate places, the server had written "sit," "stand," and "go to the altar." For one stage of the ritual he had added, and underlined, "Incense the people."

            As we are always retelling the story of our various rituals, we are also always in the process of growth and change.

            In our Chalice lighting response, we say: We gather here as a people of faith with joys and sorrows, gifts and needs.  The water communion is our way of re-telling this story, for the water represents any or all of these things to each of us. 

            We gather here, not because we have to, not because we fear retributions if we do not, but because we are retelling our story, even as we are creating our story.

            The spirit/soul that lives in each of us, is a powerful force for communing, certainly with one another, but with that which is greater than ourselves-- with that Ultimate Reality we call God, we call love.  The story must needs retelling.  It is the call of the Spirit. May it always be thus.

So be it.

 

September 15, 2002 Sermon

 

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 15, 2002               

Judgment, Guilt, Forgiveness

If there was ever a sermon title likely to keep people away from Sunday services, the one for this Sunday is probably right up there near the top. I was talking with a minister friend about this a few months ago, wondering about the wisdom of my decision to put these “big three areas of pain and misery” all lumped into one sermon.  Her rather pointed response was that it probably was better to offer one big sermon that might cause pain, than three that would create misery.

            What originated this sermon were the high holy days in the Jewish religious calendar of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

            When I was growing up out west in Idaho, I have to admit to knowing next to nothing about Judaism, except the unpleasant teachings that often come out of fundamental Christianity.  So, I appreciate this story that I heard presented as a true story, and was more than a little surprised to find I was victim to the ever-present urban legend phenomenon when I found it in a book of Jewish humor:

 

            There was this girl, Miriam, who was away from home for the first time, attending a small college in the Midwest.  The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, was a couple of weeks away and Miriam wanted to send her grandmother an appropriate card, so she went to the local drug store, that constituted the largest stationery shop in town, and looked up and down in all the racks for a card, but had no luck.  Finally she went to the store clerk and asked: “Do you have any Rosh Hashanah cards?”

            The clerk gave her a puzzled stare and replied, “I’m sorry, we only carry Hallmark here.”

 

Tomorrow, Sept. 16th, is Yom Kippur this year, in the Jewish Year 5763. I say this year, for like many of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem holy days, it is part of lunar cycle, and moves from year to year. Yom Kippur is generally considered the most important holiday of the Jewish year. For ten days—the Days of Awe, as they are called--beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish faithful are called to examined their deeds in the eyes of God and humankind, and to made amends where possible. On the tenth day, Yom Kippur, literally, “the day of atonement,” the hope is that the penitent Jew will have his or her name inscribed in the book of Life.  This process entails all of these issues I am talking about today of judgment, guilt, and forgiveness.

            No doubt, it is clear to all of us that these big three issues of judgment, guilt and forgiveness are just as much a problem for those who are not reared in the Jewish religion. Maybe more, for our spiritual processes may be less bounded, or defined, as it were, for addressing what can be three principle areas of human weakness or strength. I believe that an important facet of our Unitarian faith is to examine our lives in the light of these grave matters of what is wrong, how do we handle it when we have wronged others, and what can we do to find peace of mind.

            We are not alone in this endeavor, for equally clear, is that while there are cultural variations on the theme, all societies, all religions, all people, have a sense of what is right and wrong, judging the wrong, our sense of guilt regarding wrong-doing, and an understanding of forgiveness. 

            Though one troubling aspect of all this that I wonder if you notice, as I have, is that all cultures seem bent on focusing on the wrong, and assuming the right; and I often wonder if that may be the real problem.  Think about the Ten Commandments: they are all about what “thou shalt not” do. Or the way we run our communities and nations, with all the rules and regulations that make up a country’s laws, again, the “don’t do lists”—why is that? Why don’t we have the Ten  Commandments that say positively: These are the laws of God: Thou shalt be respectful, period.  Thou shalt look for healthy wholesome ways to fill your time.  Thou shalt marry with care and wisdom and live happily and faithfully all your life.  Etc, etc, etc.  All the focus on threat is problematic. Every principle of good child rearing says to focus children on the positive.  We say: Treat your sister well, and you get treated well; rather than, you hit your sister one more time and you go to your room for forty days and forty nights.  Of course, I do know the answer, in part. It has to do with power, control, hate, anger, among other emotions that can over-ride the spirit of love in the human heart.

            Who judges us?  Who judges you? Your boss?  Your customers?  Your wife-husband-partner?  Your friends?  Your Family—meaning, mother, father, grandparents—the whole enchilada of family that counts? And, Why?  Is judging simply about our standards of success, expectation, and so forth? Why do we think these people are important?  Why do we give them this level of influence over us? What impact do they have on our lives?

            My experience is that often we each are our own harshest judges.  We find all the chinks in our character, all the weakest links in our person, all the disagreeable within us.  What we find can alternately make us defensive, rebellious, angry, hateful, or turned inward these emotions can become internalized passive aggression, or a feeling of being helpless, among other things.

            Guilt is the by-product of judgment..  If we are judged and found wanting, we are meant by the very structures of culture, religion, families, to feel bad, to feel an on-going sense of self-reproach about our wrongdoing. 

While the Jewish high holy days direct the wrong doer to self-reflection, the understanding is that on Yom Kippur, it is all settled and done as far as God is concerned, and as far as humanity should be concerned.  Well, God may keep to that understanding, but humanity seems to have a much bigger problem.

            What is gained by having a sense of guilt?  My feeling is that a little goes a long way.  It is heart-breaking to me to hear that somebody is still beating themselves up emotionally over long passed deeds that nothing can be done to change, fix, or probably make amends. 

            I want you to think about this, as well: How do you use guilt yourself?  There are few souls among us who have not resorted to the:  How could you have----? Or Why didn’t you---?  Perhaps is that we just feel that it is better to be the one pointing the finger of guilt than to be the one at which the finger is being pointed.

            A healthy amount of guilt makes us responsible, but a load of it we cannot remove makes us either joyless or useless.

Erma Bombeck, writing humor about home and family for thirty years, once wrote: I came from a family of pioneers. My mother invented guilt in 1936.  Many of us can relate to what she was saying.

            The great spiritual question then is: What do we have to gain from a serious “check-up” of our deeds in the way of Jews during these ten Days of Awe?  I believe this can be one of the healthiest things we can do, both for mind and body, but mostly for our spirits.

            Forgiveness is one of the trickiest subjects in the human lexicon. While every single one of us enjoys being forgiven when we goof up, make a mistake, take a wrong path; few of us are able to feel equal joy at offering the milk of human kindness in the form of giving a pardon, or giving up resentment for the wrong that has been done to us.  Forgiveness is too much like money, it seems to me, in that we can be just as greedy with our treasure trove of pardon as we can with our treasure trove of material possessions.

            These judgment-guilt-forgiveness issues all bring to mind for me the work of Daniel Goleman, which you have heard me mention many times, called The Emotional IQ.  In this book, he talks about the disconnect between the heart and mind, if you will; our souls and our heads.  Why is it that we can know so clearly that a thing is wrong, but do it anyway?  That happens because our emotions can run roughshod over our intelligence.  You and I have seen it happen a thousand times.

            It reminds me of this story:

           

A rabbi and soap maker often went for a walk together.  One day, the soap maker said, “What good is religion?  Look at all the trouble and misery of the world! Still there, even after thousands of years of teaching about goodness and truth and peace.  Still there, after all the prayers and sermons and teachings.  If religion is good and true, why should this be?”

            The rabbi had nothing to say.  They continued walking until he noticed a child playing a game in a dirty vacant lot.

            Then the rabbi said, “Look at that child over there. You, Soap maker, say that soap makes people clean, but see the dirt on that youngster.  Of what good is soap?.  With all the soap in the world, over all these hundreds of years, the child is still filthy.  I wonder how effective soap is, after all!”

            The soap maker protested.  “But, Rabbi, soap cannot do any good unless it used!”

            “Exactly!” replied the Rabbi. “So, too, with religion.”

           

            Well, that is our goal here, as a people of faith, to learn how to use our religion so that good is the result.

            Back to the issue of judgment; we can cultivate, can become aware in ourselves, of the “constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are all normally caught up in, and [need to] learn to step back from it” (Jon Kabat-Zinn).  Depending how we were raised, we all have a system in place that affects how we react, how we label, what we ourselves have learned to judge as right, wrong, good or bad; or neutral sometimes.  As Kabat-Zinn states: “This habit of categorizing and judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all.”

            Anyone who has watched the Sopranos, a TV show about the mafia, learns about how our system can be seemingly illogical, but still work powerfully on us. It is incongruous to many of us that one could be devoted to the church, but regularly engage in criminal behavior.

            When we can learn to look at our actions with objectivity, which sometimes may require the help of a professional counselor, we can at the very least sort out our list of real and perceived infractions, and then find a way to deal with them in a healthy mental and spiritual fashion.  Finding out how to be truthful with ourselves is no small order, and, I believe, it is life’s greatest religious work.

            Guilt is all tied up with judgment, and has a healthy place in our social contract.  If we didn’t feel bad when we have treated someone in a way we certainly would not want to be treated ourselves, the system would fall apart. We should have some remorse for doing something wrong; for, it is from this remorse, this emotional education that we learn how to be better people.  The problems arise when we become so burdened by guilt that we can barely function.  A little guilt, ideally leads to contrition, contrition to forgiveness.

Sister Wendy, the English nun known for her art expertise as shown on PBS television network says this about guilt:

 

            I don’t think being human has any place for guilt. Contrition, yes.  Guilt no.  Contrition means you tell God you are sorry and you’re not going to do it again and you start off afresh.  All the damage you’ve done to yourself, put right.  Guilt means you go on and on belaboring and having emotions and beating you breast and being ego-fixated.  Guilt is a trap.  People love guilt because they feel if hey suffer enough guilt, they’ll make up for what they’ve done.  Whereas, in fact, they’re just sitting in a puddle and splashing.  Contrition, means you move forward. 

 

When our spiritual depth is compromised, though, and our whole reason for being is to carry around our guilt, then we will live without joy, without knowing the depth and breadth of life’s possibilities. My greatest sadness about the history of Christianity is the whole notion of Original Sin, and the guilt that has laid on generations of people.

 Perhaps the only place that this kind of guilt belongs is in the heart of one who has deliberately taken the life of another; which is part of my objection to the death penalty.  How can you be punished by society, know your guilt to its fullest extent if you are dead?              

            So judgment and guilt have a to be steered like a car going down the road, go too far one way or another and we wind up in a ditch.

            Forgiveness is the really big issue. Forgiveness is like exercise.  Everyone says it is good.  Everyone says they ought to be doing more.  And few of us do it as much as we need.  My own need to learn to be more forgiving is what brought me to meditation, to the need for meditation. I am also an advocate of exercise, and learned years ago that a walk every day is one of the best forms of meditation.

There is no doubt that forgiveness can be one of the hardest things in the world; to move beyond the hurt and pain that our family, friends, associates can inflict upon us.  The desire to hold on to our chunk of pain can be more potent that the benefits we gain when we can let it go.  The desire for revenge can be so powerful, as we see in every part of the world.  The scenario is as basic as flour gravy:  You/you people did this . . .I/We will get even . . .I/We are right . . .You are wrong  . . . My/Our cause is worth dying for . . . . Never-ending pain.

            To say: We have both been wrong . . . We are both in need of putting hurts behind us . . . can take generations of death through an awful cycle of revenge before they can ever stop. 

I sometimes marvel that following the end of World War II, Germany and Japan could move on, put that power and revenge thinking behind them, and move over fifty years to be global partners with the very countries with whom they chose to make war.  Historically, going into a war is rarely about one battle, and more about creating a vicious cycle of meting out pain and suffering for generations to come.  We are still dealing with the effects of WWII in Korea, six hundred years of war in the Balkans, a few thousand in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors.

            There is only one way to break the cycle of pain, hate, and revenge, whether it be in our own souls or in the soul of a nation: that is to learn forgiveness.

            Forgiving is not forgetting, and forgiving is not about allowing those who would harm us to continue in a pattern of abuse.  But in some way, be it with the help of others, or if we can manage on our own, we will only know peace and contentment if we can let go the Tasmanian devil of hurt and revenge.

            This has been a lesson in the lesson of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  To examine our hearts and minds, find that which we have done that we could learn from, and all that it means to grow, change, make amends, and forgive.  So be it.

September 22, 2002 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 22, 2002 

The Constitution: Guidebook for Democracy

Last year as we sent our forces out to fight against the al Quaeda forces in Afghanistan, I saw this quote by Bill Vaughn, who wrote: “America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy—and won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”

            I suddenly felt the shocking awareness of how often that is true, based, at least, on the percentage of people who vote in even our major presidential elections, and the fact is that is not the most important election, for the president is one person, and we have a one-hundred senators, and several hundred representatives.  This year, called a mid-term election precisely because we see the presidential elections as more important, the percentage of voters will be even fewer.

            And, right here in the UU Society of Mill Creek, we have an annual vote for the important business of this congregation, and while we do get usually around something over half of the eligible voting members, there still are many who just do not see that the vote is all that important.

            Now, by this point, some of you sitting out there have wondered: What does all this voting and democracy and Constitution stuff have to do with religion, or spirituality?  And, it is well you should ask that.  My response is one you have heard many times from this pulpit, and that is that all of life is spiritual.  But to expand on the deep belief that I hold that all of life is spiritual, is to say that our greatest journey is life, and our greatest acts are those that come from putting ourselves into the great picture of humanity, and not from being purely self-serving.  This is the great wisdom taught by every noted mystic, every great spiritual leader: that we are a part of something far larger than ourselves, and that to be concerned with others is the path to the happiest, most fulfilling life; to consider what it really means to do for, with, and to others as you would hope they would do for you.

            In my young adult life, I was a teacher of grade school children, mostly first and second graders.  I continue to believe this one the most formative experiences in my life, to see the world through the eyes of these young ones, and to come to appreciate how important a child’s life truly is, to value how important loving parents really are for the kind of adults their children become.  I will speak more about that in my sermon next week.

            The overarching piece of wisdom I gleaned from those elementary school years is this:  Children learn best when they have freedom within well-defined boundaries.  The overarching piece of wisdom I carry with me now, having gone on to teach older children, college-age young people and adults, and now in my role as a minister or spiritual teacher is this: People learn best when they have freedom within well-defined boundaries.

            One of the reasons we have our seven Principles, always there on the back of your Order of Service, is that most of us like to know what and where those boundaries are for the religious life we value.

            Our founders, mothers and fathers alike, knew keenly that we could not just have a revolution where thousands of lives where lost to gain freedom for the rest of us—right there an AWE-ful spiritual act of love, but that we needed some guidance if we were to hold on to that tenuous freedom in the beginning, and hold on to it for the long haul during periods of ennui or fear.  Both equally dangerous emotional states for the preservation of freedom, which comes via the vehicle of democracy.

            Over the course of our 226 years since the United States was born as a free country, we have seen the wisdom of this decision repeated both to our joy and our chagrin as we either saw our country going one way or another.  Yet, the real jewel in this crown of democracy is that we never have gone too far one way or another.  We have generally kept to that Golden Mean so valued by Aristotle and the great philosophers over time.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said during a time a great testing in this land: “Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman.  There they have no superiors.  There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences.” [And he also said] “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”

            An equally telling statement came from William Simon who reminded that: “Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote.”

            Equality, and exercising one’s mind and freedom to chose, and omitting to do what might result in a greater good:  I think all these are highly spiritual understandings.

            One of the things that distinguishes a Good place from a Bad place, in the minds of most of our citizens, is the power to have or do these things: To have equality (we are still working on refining this on), but at least to be equal with our leaders when it comes to the democratic process.  To be able to think what we think, and say what we think, even if it is not popular with the larger group.  This especially we recognize as the highest gift of a free society.  And, the opportunity to make our views known, be it through the freedom to speak publicly or at the ballot box, is a freedom we ought to hold dear.  Then, to know that as we speak and act, we are doing so not just for ourselves, but the many who cannot because they are children, or in ill health that restricts them, or unable for any number of reasons. We act for those who would have us remember them.

            Most of our presidents have made statements about the spiritual and worldly power of the vote. Abraham Lincoln, who said, “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” 

Harry Truman said a lot of serious things about voting, but he also said a good many humorous things, such as in this story:

            During his whistle-stop campaign for the presidency in 1948, Truman is reputed to have asked a fellow in the crowd before him how he was intending to vote.

“Mr. Truman,” came the reply, “I wouldn’t vote for you if yours was the only name on the ballot.”

Truman turned to an aide and instructed, “Put that man down as doubtful.”

 

[And] It was a terrific election.  Ninety-five million Americans took time off from work to vote, and sixty-eight million of them did.

 

It was Lyndon B. Johnson who said: “Voting is the first duty of democracy.”

            Duty is a word of some ambivalence to many people; that is, until a trying or testing time arrives such as that we experienced on September 11, 2001.  Then we all understand with terrible clarity what duty really means.  It is the Golden Rule come to life.

            The Constitution is our guidebook for democracy, offering a great many freedoms within boundaries that we as the voting public can enlarge or shrink using the power of the vote to ratify amendments.  We must act with care and wisdom if we are to prevent our freedoms being slowly nibbled away while we are not paying attention.  The Constitution is a brilliant document, in that the founders understood this creeping tendency toward taking power from the people and putting it into the hands of leaders who would constantly watch and listen for human weaknesses that would permit them to grasp ever more power—which always translates to greed for position or wealth.  The founders, we must remember, lived under kings who either let them have their run to establish the colonies, to make them profitable, or began to withdraw their privileges, to tax them more and more, and it was by no means an easy path for that small group who initially said “this is wrong to have taxation without representation”, to go on with not even half the support of the population to challenge the right of the King of England to treat his people with such disdain, to finally revolt, go to war with still only about half the people in favor, to gain independence from the whole great British Kingdom.  It may be hard for many of us to believe from this vantage point, but there were many people who said, “We shouldn’t go against the King.  The King knows better than we do what needs to be done.”

            Never assume that just because your views are not in the majority, that you are not right in your thinking.  There are always leaders and there are always followers; we all can be followers when we believe the leaders are acting in our best interests, and we each can be called to be leaders, when we see that there is a need.  We are all leaders when we step into a voting booth (assuming it is working correctly!)

The Danbury, Massachusetts Baptist Association, concerned about religious liberty in the new nation wrote to President Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 7, 1801.

Sir, Among the many millions in America and Europe who rejoice in your Election to office; we embrace the first opportunity which we have enjoyed in our collective capacity, since your Inauguration, to express our great satisfaction, in your appointment to the chief Majestracy in the United States; And though our mode of expression may be less courtly and pompious than what many others clothe their addresses with, we beg you, Sir to believe, that none are more sincere. [sic]

Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty -- That Religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals -- That no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious Opinions - That the legitimate Power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor:

 

On January 1, 1802, in response to the letter from the Danbury Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

Gentlemen:

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which are so good to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should `make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

 

 

What stands between your soul and mine, and the reality of existence we call our lives is the guidebooks you and I choose to follow. I heard a bit of an interview this past week with a scholar of the First Amendment, who leads a First Amendment organization that has been doing polls since 9/11, to test the temperature, as it were, of freedom.  The polling results indicated that many people are willing to see some restrictions to their freedoms, and have a negative view to the large scope of the First Amendment, yet when asked what the First Amendment covers, very few knew anything except the Freedom of Speech.

            Yet, the first Amendment is about a good bit more that just freedom of speech, that is just the first one mentioned, and the one we would probably all miss the most.  So to remind us all of the content of the First Amendment:  Article I: Freedom of speech, religion, press, petition and assembly.

            We have a lot more to lose than just the right for the KKK to stand on corners and make speeches, or for people to disagree publicly with our government during a time of crisis, these seem to be the kind of issues that  a good many people feel we should give up, but if we give those up, how long will it be until we are asked to give up writing, petitioning, assembling, and practicing our free faith?

            That is why I hope, that this week, which I only learned a few months ago, is designated national Constitution Week, that we find time to talk about, here in this place of religious freedom and practice, all that which we hold dear. 

 

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. [my underlining]

 

So be it.

 

September 29, 2002 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean                                       

September 29, 2002

Children: Life’s Longing for Itself

 

  I have some questions for you this morning, but I want you to respond spontaneously, without trying to “think” too much about them.

 My first question: When were you born?  My second question:  Where were you born?  And my third question:  Why were you born?

The first and second questions are pretty much about factual data.  When? What day, time of day, month, year—all that we understand in our scope of time—when did you come into this world as a breathing, adapting infant who was destined to become an adult? Where is equally factual: What place on this globe we call Earth did you arrive?

But this third question, of Why were you born, is one we may or may not be able to answer with any accuracy.  I suspect the first answer we thought of says a good deal about how we approach the spiritual life. 

When I was first confronted with this question, my response reflected my years of education and teaching, no doubt my innate predilection as well, for I went for the factual data:  I was born because of human biology.  My parents married, “knew each other” in the biblical sense, and within the first year produced their first off spring, which was me.   

Now our response to any question in life, especially any question about our particular lives, is often like an onion.  We have the first, or outer layer of response, but as we continue to think about any given question, we find many layers beneath that are worth exploring.  This is how depth in our spirituality happens, with the progressive questioning and lifting of the layers of ourselves for ourselves.

Part of what led me to consider this sermon topic was the birth of my granddaughters fifteen months ago.  More accurately, it was the conception of my granddaughters twenty-five months ago, two years and one month ago, to be precise.  It dawned on me that never before in human history, have grandparents had such knowledge of their grandchildren’s conception, or indeed of most parents having the precise knowledge of their own children’s conception.  Before the wonders of modern contraception people did not so much know when children would be conceived, as they just assumed they would.

The pattern in human existence is that we recreate ourselves, all life on earth is distinguished in this ability, indeed this drive to reproduce.  And, as was big news this past week, it may or may not require male and female for this to happen.  The big news story this past week , perhaps you heard, makes us wary of our assumptions about reproduction.  From the Associated Press:

DETROIT, Michigan (AP) -- Experts at a city aquarium are baffled by the unexpected births of three baby sharks to a mother who hasn't been near a male shark in at least six years.  The female whitespotted bamboo shark gave birth at Detroit's Belle Isle Aquarium. The births, often called virgin births, are among the few known at accredited U.S. zoos or aquariums. 

 

            To this date, as far as anyone knows, human beings as we know them have yet to reproduce without the help of both male and female, but it is very clear that we reproduce in great numbers, hence a world population exceeding six billion.

            Back to my own experiences as mother and grandmother, what most amazed me was the transformation in my own daughter from a rising junior executive who had no desire to have children, as she had stated repeatedly, into a young woman just a couple of years past her thirtieth birthday who suddenly decided, or so it seemed, that she had to have children.  I was amazed by this transformation.  So, the result, after a great deal more thought and effort than most children have ever been brought into the world, was two little girls, Morgan and Haley, my granddaughters.

            No doubt many of you have witnessed some aspect of this great desire to have children.  Often, we see the sad cases where people cannot have children, and what drain and struggle it is for them, emotionally and economically, to come to terms with this situation; then to go on to make further decisions about trying various methods of conception that only fifty years ago would seem like science fiction.  And, in many cases, to make the decision to adopt, and adoption, too, has changed radically in the last century. We are now better placed to become parents than ever before in human history.  This is wonderful news for many people who long to be parents.

            Ironically, we are also better placed in history than ever before to chose not to be parents.  And, that is also wonderful news for many people. To give a bit of balance, there are a good many people who have said that they would not have had children, or not so many, if they had had either the knowledge or access to better methods of birth control.

 I have several friends and acquaintances who have chosen not to have children, and I do note they seem to have maintained a better sense of humor than many of their counterparts with children.  One friend says: I’ve absolutely nothing against kids.  I just follow the advice on every bottle in my medicine cabinet: “Keep Away from Children.”

 

It does not escape our attention that there are few families these days of the size common to my grandparents’ generation.  Both of my parents were from large families, but they had only three children, and most of my aunts and uncles had no more than four children, and I had two.  Most of you who are over fifty remember much larger families than we see today.

            So we live in paradoxical times, when just about as much research, development, and resources go into addressing both helping increase fertility and, at the same time, helping to decrease it. 

            From my perspective, the passion around these issues is by far greater on the side of reproduction.  But that can bring up some frustrating questions.  Why do people reproduce who are themselves struggling? Now, in many parts of the world, the answers are more complicated. Children are the parents old age protection, for example.  But what about right here in Delaware?

 I have become well-acquainted with a family in Wilmington, a man and woman who have between them five children, both come from very poor backgrounds, both have had minimal educations, both work at jobs that are minimum wage, they have no health or property insurance, except for their cars, they rent their home, and both have minimal skills for changing their status.  So, why would these two people have so many children when they are obviously in a bad position to adequately feed, clothe, and educate them?  Perhaps we might have said years ago that these children were the result of lack of knowledge or access to family planning information, but that answer does not seem to fit here.  This couple are both under forty, and they chose to have their children; further more, they love these children very much, and work exceedingly hard to provide for them.  It is indeed a paradox.

            So, if those who are well off and those who are poor are equally driven to reproduce, to create families, there is something more happening here than purely biological responses can adequately address.

            Few would question that biology plays an important role in our desire to have children. Among the basic human drives are the desire for food, shelter, and reproduction—all related to survival.  Yet the biological answer never suffices to say what bedrock emotional longing keeps people, rich and poor, longing to bring more children into the world.  I think Kahlil Gibran says it the most poetically when he describes our need for and our love for children as “Life’s longing for itself.”

            “Life’s longing for itself.”  Life wants more life.  We who live want to see living go on.  We cannot envisage a world where human life is absent, except in catastrophic terms.

            Just consider that all the drive toward preserving the environment, species protection, insuring clean air and water, all these are rooted in our desire to deep the earth habitable for the future. For our world’s children, grandchildren, and on and on.

            I had a friend in Texas who once said that she hoped her only child did not have children so she could quit worrying about the future.  I was a bit taken aback by this attitude, for it seemed entirely selfish, or at the very least shortsighted.  What about all the children of our world?  Can we care less that they might suffer for our neglect?  Well, that is another sermon, but what struck me in her attitude is that she wanted children herself, but would not expect that her child would want them, too.  I do not know if her daughter did have children, but I would hazard a guess that she has or will.

            As the poet James Baldwin wrote: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

 It was about this time that I was reading the works of Dr. Mary S. Calderone, the great anti-nuclear weapons advocate said: “Our children are not going to be just ‘our children’-- they are going to be other people’s husbands and wives and the parents of our grandchildren.”

            Here is another aspect of our great human need to replicate ourselves that is quizzical.  We always think the younger generation is worse than ours or those of the past.

            This quote sums it up:

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.  They no longer rise when elders enter the room.  They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize over their teachers.

 

The author is Socrates who lived from 470-399 B.C.E.  You know the saying: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

            What is not paradoxical is our desire in our own families and our family here in this congregation to recognize the worth and dignity of children as well as adults.  Since our founding as a nation, Unitarians as a whole have believed in the importance of caring well for children. And, since our founding as a congregation, we here have worked to provide our young ones a safe place to grow, to learn, and to ask the questions that they need to hear answered.  Without fear of retribution, without concern for our honesty, and without shame. 

We may differ as to the reasons we personally have or do not have children, but we all agree that for the children that we gather into this community, we should and will care for them well.  We make an example of the way we believe all children deserve to be treated, and to encourage them that we value them by the way we include them in our services and in all our programs we create especially for them. An important modeling for the larger life.

            Life does long for itself, and I believe most of us hope that the life we have will help the life the exists outside ourselves, especially for children’s lives.  We long for life to improve in significant ways, not so much in material ways, but that generation to generation we learn a tiny bit more about the real worth in life and of life: our ability to love and care for one another, and to protect our homes.

            Kahlil Gibran also tells us that we are the bows from which our children fly as arrows, away into their own lives.  Above all, our spiritual focus, our goal as Unitarian parents and as a community of faith for our children is this: We, as the bows, want them, the arrows, to be strong, mentally, physically, and spiritually for that flight which will be their lives. We can do no less, and we can do no better.

So be it.

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