Currents: January 2013

The Illuminators Hope you're enjoying our January/February theme, The Illuminators, a theme that gives us a chance to speak to one another about what we often consider to be the frailties or negatives of human existence - meekness, grief, illness, death, fear - and to see those parts of our personalities and our experiences in a more positive light. All of these things can light our way home to wholeness - as individuals, as a church community, as a faith - if we allow and participate in the process. Here are a few sermon excerpts, and the sources that made them possible.

Sunday, 1/20/2013 - MLK Jr. Sunday - Rosa Parks

Call to Worship - You may not think the world needs you, but it does. For you are unique, like no other that has ever been before or will come after. No one can speak with your voice, say your piece, smile your smile, or shine your light. No one can take your place for it is yours alone to fill. If you are not there to shine your light who knows how many travelers will lose their way as they try to pass by your empty place in the darkness.

Reading - The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation’s development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear. - by Aung San Suu Kyi

excerpt from the Morning Message -

"Before King there was Rosa Parks,” then apartheid leader and later South African President Nelson Mandela later explained. “She is who inspired us, who taught us to sit down for our rights, to be fearless when facing our oppressors.”

We have many of Rosa Parks’ notes and journals. She asked herself the question, who will take the first steps? She always believed it would be the churches. She loved church. She would quote novelist Richard Wright who said that going to church on Sunday was like "placing one’s ear on another’s chest and hearing the unquenchable murmur of the human heart." In her case, that the churches would lead the charge in ethnic integration in America. In our time, what? For what will be sit down and refuse to be moved? For what will we use our meekest nature – for what will be we be quiet, humble, thoughtful, and so sure in our hearts that we are right that we cannot be moved? For what will you, in your life, get meeker, and meeker, quieter and quieter, until you overcome? For what as a church shall we do the same? Where is the arrogance that inevitably accompanies a culture as strident as ours taking us? Why aren’t the whiz-bang special effects working, and when are we going to realize that they never will? I’m tired of all the loud voices, and the accusations, and the glittery subplots that keep us all distracted and distressed. Why can’t we feed our people? Why can’t we eradicate the violence of guns and the twin oppressions of poverty and mental illness? When will our children be safe in school? When will our teenagers know only dignity and thus be known for making kind and gentle choices? What’s the long and thoughtful relationship we’re willing to have, the deep education we’re willing to submit to in order to be part of lasting change? In order to actually be able to sit in the silence and be part of what’s true? We should be exhausted by all that is happening, by all that still hurts and rings false in our ears, but our exhaustion is part of the answer. Maybe in our exhaustion we will finally have the strength to sit still and make things right. Because, it is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights.It has not been enough. We have to resist fear. Best done from a centered being and an open heart.

Let us not eradicate from ourselves what is quiet, and humble and private and even shy and a little bit stiff and formal. Let us celebrate it. Let us look to Rosa. Let us be meek and of good heart, and we shall overcome.

The morning message was inspired by, and all quotes are from, Rosa Parks: A Life by Douglas Brinkley....If you were there and heard the rest of the sermon you'll want to read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Sunday, 1-27-2013, Grief

Reading - Beannacht ("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

John O'Donohue ~

excerpt from the Morning Message -

....Death causes grief, and so does illness, but so does divorce, moving, growing up in a dysfunctional family, becoming addicted, recovering from addiction, losing your job, retiring from your job, watching that last kid leave home, losing trust in a friend, losing your faith…In fact, according to John James and Russell Friedman, from whom I learned the most about loss and grief, grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior and so grief is pretty much a daily part of life, because life is changing all the time. Relationships change all the time.

According to James and Russell, we are taught, in our culture, how to successfully acquire, but not how to successfully lose stuff. Praise, toys, good grades, friends, when we are younger. Acceptance, faith, good job, home and hearth and lovelife as we age. All of these are things we are taught that we need in order to be whole and happy. There will be much talk and celebration when these things are acquired in a life, but when they are lost, and they will be, we’re not so good at talking about that. Our reactions to one another often reinforce the cultural ideology that we should not even acknowledge loss, let alone become adept at dealing with it. Loss is embarrassing, even shameful. We say things to one another like, “What’s done is done….You have to move on……Don’t burden others with your feelings…Don’t cry….Get a hold of yourself…He’s in a better place…Time heals all wounds....and my personal favorite as of late: There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

Most of us, by the time we reach adulthood, have internalized six unfortunate myths about grief: Don’t feel bad. Replace the loss. Grieve alone. Just give it time. Be strong for others. Keep busy. (James and Friedman)

Do these things and remain embarrassed about change, loss and the resulting grief. Do these things and we will trip around in our grief, carrying it like an old-fashioned coat that is too big for us. Carry a heavy heart around in your chest, one that feels more numb than anything, like the spirit, the breath, the life just can’t move through it anymore….Grief doesn’t have to be this way. Grief is a great illuminator. It can actually be that cloak of love that helps you mend and mind your life.

The first gift grief gives us is the opportunity to be honest. All relationships – with those living and those now dead, with parents, friends, children, beloved pets, places of worship or work or home – all relationships are both positive and negative. If you are getting all of one and none of the other, you are not in relationship. (Come see me). And what we want in the good and the bad is to be able to be ourselves and to be heard. When we lose a relationship, for whatever reason, this need remains. We want to have natural, honest expression in our grief. We want to rage, we want to cry, we want to stay in bed and give up, we want to ask questions, lots of questions, we want to laugh, we want to scream, but most of all we want to tell each other what we wish had been different, better or more. And we want someone to hear us say it. This part should have been different, and I’m sorry. This needed to be better, and I forgive. This part was really wonderful, it made my world, and I wish there could have been more of it. I feel that loss. It hurts me.

When C.S. Lewis’ beloved wife Joy Davidman – whom he wrote of as “H.” - died he found himself drawn to and resisting the urge to make her perfect in his mind and his memories. Over and over again in his rage and his grief he returns to honesty as a balm for his pain. “H. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. An [imperfect] woman married to an [imperfect] man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. (Lewis, 42).” As he reveals what could have been different, better or more in his much-awaited and all too short time with Joy, he finds that this honesty serves him well, “Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become….And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account (ibid, 51).”

When we turn away from loss as embarrassing or shameful and turn to what could have been different, better or more in our relationship, the relationship ends but what we learned, what we loved and what really mattered we get to keep – those gifts meet us everywhere, palpable and insightful - and both the brokenness and the gifts make us whole human beings, truly aware, as Madelein L’Engle writes, “that that which has been created with love is not going to be abandoned. Love does not create and then annihilate (ibid, xv).”

This is the second of grief’s gifts to us: Love. Grief is the way we make sure our heart works. If you love you will grieve, and, thank all the gods, if you grieve you will love again. If you trust, if you relish, if you rejoice, if you long for, if you cherish, adore, triumph, succeed, build up and bind to you, you will also lose, and you will grieve, and then you’ll know that it was all true. You wanted to know, didn’t you, that you could feel all of that, that all of that actually happened to you? What an amazing life this is, and what an amazing person you are in it, that you could feel all of that, that you could participate in that much love, in that much fun, in that much hope and help and delight. When it changes and you fall from those heights, that’s when you know you reached them. Grief is actually what catches you, and sets you gently back on the ground. Then you have a choice – focus on the pain or fill up with the love. Here is grief’s third gift – did it happen to you, or did it happen with you, and what will happen now? Grief, the great illuminator, gives us repeated chances to be faced with playing the victim, to believe in our pain and sorrow that someone or something really has THAT much power over us, to MAKE us feel such and such a way, …..the repeated chance to choose instead to be vulnerable and thus to take responsibility, and remain active participants in our own destinies. To realize that change is inevitable – in ourselves, our partners, our communities, our church, our children, our home – and that all we have to do is acknowledge our regrets, ask forgiveness and give it, and move on to the next chance to love and to build. If we love, we grieve, if we grieve, we love again.

Do cry. When change comes, and you hurt, or you’re excited, do cry. In public, walking down the street, preferably and then we'll have a UU emotional intelligence revolution going on here...No, don't start there - start with a friend. At least cry and grieve with a friend. Let weakness overcome you, feel awful, allow yourself to be empty, don’t do anything to replace the loss, and just cry, cry, cry. Time will not heal your wounds, but this expression of your loss will. In ancient alchemy these tears of ours were part of the operation of solutio; they are the softening, the melting of all that is in us that has become hard and inflexible. They shed bitterness, and in doing so, they allow for wisdom. What could have been better, different, or more, my friend? Tell me from your heart. Because, in the same moment we were promised life and became that promise, we were promised loss, and grief became our guide. It is very old, and very wise, and wants nothing more then to guide us back to ourselves again and again. Let it light the way.

Three wonderful sources made this sermon possible, and I suggest all of them for further reading, reflection, and grief recovery, as well as for referencing all quoted and paraphrased material herein. Please remember that The C.S. Lewis work is theistic, so be ready for that. The Grief Recovery Handbook requires a partner. I suggest that, whether you know it right now or not, you have a friend or relative who would be happy to join you in this work, but if you do not, I would be happy to be your listener.

The Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James & Russell Friedman

A Grief Observed by C.S.Lewis

and to learn what I've used here about tears, and more, take a look at The Book of Symbols

Program Pages

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Monday, January 7, 2013

January & February: The Illuminators