First Parish Cohasset

“Given and Received”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
Stewardship Sunday
March 7, 2010

When to say please and when to say thank you? In my earlier conversation with our youngsters, it was clear that in our role playing, they were completely confused about this. Mr. Lion kept saying “Please” when you would think the proper response would be “Thank you,” and Mr. Elephant kept saying “Thank you” when the proper response would seem to be “Please.” We’re used to having our manners in neater boxes!

So it is with what is given and what is received. If I give you a hug, you receive it. If you receive a hug, you’re receiving a gift from me. But was the hug ever mine in the first place? And isn’t it also a gift to me that you’ve received it? And how can you just receive a hug if you’re not also giving one? This matter of giving and receiving gets deliciously confused.

We commonly speak of life as a gift. We also speak of a mother giving birth, even giving life. Which is it? Our mothers, the Spirit of Life, or God the Source of all Life? No wonder we who tend anyway toward out-of-the-box theology get so theologically confused. There are no easy answers. We even struggle with the questions.

As for money, we have an easier time talking about birth and death or sex than we do about our fiscal resources—what we make for a living and how much we give away. Not to worry. This is not, as some would say, “the sermon on the amount.” Rather, it’s an invitation to think about stewardship from a different angle. By the way, when I first typed “angle,” I spelled it a-n-g-e-l. Our unconscious is always one step ahead!

How to give? How to receive? My friend and colleague, Bob Thayer, tells the story of visiting England several years ago and attending Sunday worship with some of his British Unitarian friends—probably before we added “Universalist” to our identity. Bob and his friends sat near the front of the church. (You know how happy I am when you do that!) Now Bob found the service and the sermon completely gratifying, and he was feeling quite generous when it came ‘round to the offering. He reached for his wallet and in true tourist fashion found only a “wad of British pound notes,” all quite large. Breathing deeply, he pulled out a twenty-pounder. His friend glanced over at what he was about to do and raised his eyebrows. “’It’s a rather large donation,’” he whispered to Bob.

I can imagine Bob feeling somewhat annoyed as if to say, “This is my choice, not yours.” Well, his friend suggested that the usher would be in full shock. “He may fall down. He’s never seen a twenty-pound note in a collection except for famine relief in India.”

Bob warmed to the challenge. His friend kept at it, “’Be mindful that this usher will ask you after the service if you would like change.’”

So what happened? Bob dropped the twenty-pound note into the plate. The usher did indeed react initially with a frown, but the corners of his mouth quickly turned up into a broad smile. Then the knowledge washed over Bob that because they were sitting in front, everyone behind them would see that recklessly generous gift, presumably dropped into the plate by one of the American guests up front. Since the Second World War, Bob thought to himself, the British tend to view Yankees, who after all broke rank a few hundred years earlier, as “’over-sexed, over-paid, and over here.’”

At the end of the service, handshakes and hugs were exchanged all around, including Bob and the usher. As Bob stepped out into the autumn air, he glanced back to see the usher take his note out of the plate, then look up, meet Bob’s gaze and mouth the words, “’Thank you very much!’”

What pure joy it was for Bob to surprise the British usher and his friend. I wonder: who gave and who received?

“God loves a cheerful giver.” It was probably one of the first Bible verses I memorized as a Sunday schooler. I didn’t know then that it came from Paul’s Second Letter to the church at Corinth, the same church he had written to about love. Perhaps there was a connection.

When I give generously, it’s not that I feel so cool or righteous or magnanimous. Okay, sometimes I do. But even more so, I feel like I’m returning something that was never really mine in the first place. Ultimately, none of us owns anything. Yet when it comes to church, we commonly confuse ownership with stewardship. This is our church. This is my church. We say it without a second thought. Yet this church is 289 years old. When did it start becoming our church? When will it stop being our church? And this faith that we share… do we own it? Stewards are entrusted with the care of faith and community. None of us owns either. They’re gifts given and received. Stewardship is the precious act of affirming this through the gifts of money and time and love that we give and receive.

I’ll never forget the time I went to Berkeley, California to meet with our Unitarian Universalist Association’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. I was nervous, anxious even, because this is our denomination’s “deciding council” for prospective candidates for our Unitarian Universalist ministry. I was prepared, well prepared, but the butterflies were having a party inside my tummy. It was a crisp December morning, and I had time to kill before the afternoon meeting. What to do? Off I went to the campus of UC Berkeley, an iconic space in my coming of age history. Once there, I asked a few folks where Sproul Plaza was, the historic site where I was sure I would hear the echoes of Maria Savio and Joan Baez launching the free speech movement all over again. My search was like a little red hen story. I asked person after person where I could find Sproul Plaza. Nobody seemed to have a clue. Then finally, I found someone who guided me there. I walked around, gazing at ghosts and straining for long-ago voices. Then I looked down. At my feet was a bronze hubcap-like medallion embedded into the sidewalk. Inscribed on its surface were these words:

     “This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”

A claim had been staked that this small circular space and the air above it should never be property, that it should never be owned by anyone. And I wondered to myself if perhaps the soil that is this earth and the air that we breathe and the water that we drink and sail and swim in is no more ours than the earth was before we were born or will be after we die. And I wonder this morning as we think about stewardship, if this church is no more ours than it was before we were born or will be after we die. Our connection is stewardship, stewardship for this religious community, stewardship for our mission. What we give is received, and the gifts that we receive are given in our very openness to receive them.

Consider once again the house finch of Lois Ann Carrier’s poem. He sings his heart out. “Sun and song pour down…” For his perch, he chose “the blue spruce I once called mine because I planted it.” The song continues long enough for the poet to learn every note. The epiphany rising from this poetic parable? Its concluding stanza:

     “…I grow rich and easy
     as less and less belongs to me.”

The gift that is stewardship is a gift given and received. The gift that is participation in this religious community—participation in all its forms—is a gift given and received. It has been said that it is better to give than to receive, but when we give, we also receive. May God bless our confusion.    Amen.

Sources:

Lois Ann Carrier, “The Gift,” in How We Are Called: A Meditation Anthology, Mary Benard and Kirstie Anderson, Editors, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2003, 10.

The Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Robert Thayer, “Large Bills,” in Offerings: Remarks on Passing the Plate, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2004.

“Love’s Edge”
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
Standing on the Side of Love Sunday
February 14, 2010
(delivered partially extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Standing on the side of love. Which side is that? And love…there are so many kinds of love to consider. There’s the love of a parent for her children. There’s the love of a child for his parents. There the love of friendship. There’s the love of aunts and uncles and cousins. There’s the love of church. There’s the love of community. There’s the love of self, and we can’t love anybody else if we don’t love ourselves. There’s the love of the familiar, the love of home and neighborhood, maybe the love of where we grew up.

Then it gets harder. There’s the love of somebody who really feels different, the love of somebody with different features, the love of somebody with a different skin color, the love of somebody whom we might have been carefully taught to be afraid of, the love of somebody with a different sexual orientation, the love of somebody who’s fighting a war “on the other side.” There’s the love of somebody who’s in prison because they’ve been convicted of a horrible crime. There’s the love of somebody who’s hurt us or someone we love. There’s the love of somebody with whom we’ve got “issues.” There’s the love of somebody who can drive us nuts in a few seconds’ conversation. Yep, now we’re getting into muddy territory.

Standing on the Side of Love is a public advocacy campaign, launched last June by our Unitarian Universalist Association. The purpose is to “harness love’s power to stop oppression.” What does this mean? It means standing “with all who believe that no person should be dehumanized through acts of exclusion, oppression, or violence.”

“Our religious imperative is to love above all else. ….Standing on the Side of Love confronts exclusion, oppression and violence head-on. Grounded in the belief that all people deserve love and respect, the campaign pursues social change through advocacy, public witness, and speaking out in solidarity with those whose public lives are demeaned.”

It gets muddy.

I’ll bet just about everybody here has said at some point: “I just love everybody. Why do I have to think about particulars?” It’s the specific stuff of loving that makes us squirm. Yet it’s the specific stuff of loving that is the most gratifying, when we stand beside, not over, our neighbors who are hurting, who are oppressed, who are devastated by powers natural and by powers quite human.

Haiti comes to mind—hundreds of thousands dead, over a third of the population desperate for clean water and medical care. Billions of dollars have poured in, along with a host of medical caregivers and engineers and sanitation experts and military personnel and trauma counselors. This congregation has already given well over a thousand dollars to our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee/Unitarian Universalist Association Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, enabling our Service Committee to partner with indigenous groups in Haiti reaching the most marginalized of survivors. The beauty of this mode of giving is that it happens in partnership, in solidarity with—not as charity, but as compassionate justice.

To see the devastation, even on the nightly news, is mind-bending. What is needed is not restoration to the way Haiti was, but a full-blown resurrection of spirit and infrastructure toward what this island nation aspires to, this nation that won its independence from the French as a former slave colony, this nation that inspired abolitionists in our own nation to resist and rebel. To stand with our Haitian neighbors is to stand on the side of love. As members of the same human family in a faith that calls us to affirm the interdependent web of all life, we are called not to do for but to be and do with. I’m delighted that we’ve committed to giving 25% of our morning offering from now through August to this fund, whose harvest permits us to stand with.

There’s a distinctive opportunity to stand with our Haitian neighbors nearby. UU Mass Action, our Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry in Massachusetts, invites us to help Haitian residents in Massachusetts complete their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) forms. It’s a status just made possible by federal action. If you’re interested, please let me know and I’ll give you the contact information.

How else are we standing on the side of love in this parish? On a bone-chilling Saturday a few weeks ago, a dozen of you stood at the entrance to Shaw’s and Stop & Shop, handing out grocery lists to shoppers. You invited them to purchase at least one item on the list of items needed by the Cohasset Food Pantry and Wellspring and then to drop their items into the shopping carts that you stood beside at the exits. Four hours later, you had gathered the equivalent of 150 boxes of food, which you then delivered to the food pantry in Cohasset and to Wellspring. With so many of our neighbors and perhaps some of us going through tough times, this is edible love. On that chilly Saturday, you literally stood on the side of love.

Then there are some of you who flew on the side of love. Last October you headed to Guatemala, to the village of Antigua. There you set to work building a house, teaching math and computer skills, leading pre-school classes, and being with Guatemalan neighbors you had met through sponsoring their children. Through Project Common Hope, many of you have reached families and an entire village by sending funds and more to the children of Antigua. You came back and were filled with what you had learned from our Guatemalan neighbors, with the love you received and your consciousness raised about the disparity of wealth between the residents of Antigua and most of us. You worked and learned on the side of love.

There’s another way that we’re seeking to stand on love’s side. It’s sometimes tough, and not everybody agrees on how to do it and how to show it. It’s through our Welcoming Congregation process. You voted last May to become intentionally welcoming of all among us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. Some of you attended the workshops hosted by our Welcoming Congregation Committee. Many of you voted affirmatively last May, but sustaining the momentum isn’t easy. There’s disagreement about how to realize what you officially decided.

Standing on the side of love isn’t easy. It means going to love’s edge, standing right on the edge of a circle in which some are included and some are shunted to the outer rim and beyond. The very edge of the circle is the best possible view for seeing who’s in and who’s out.

Every issue of compassionate justice has an uncomfortable edge. How we work toward human rights in Haiti; how we work for full rights for all who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; how we address the gristy issues of immigration reform; how we speak about two wars now being fought in our name; how we make our voice heard in the scarred debate over health care reform. Are these religious issues? If we take our principles and purposes seriously, every issue of human rights is a religious issue. Are these political issues? If we understand that politics is simply the system through which societies structure themselves. Are these issues of power and privilege? Yes, and power is not readily shared, nor privilege readily conceded.

To stand on the side of love at love’s very edge is to share power generously and to let go of privilege. It is not charity; it’s compassionate justice.

When I seek guidance for how to do this, I turn to my lifelong standby—the Old Testament prophets and the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Prophets, we know, were not the most popular personalities of their day. They spoke what they saw, not mincing words; and their words ring for us today. I draw the heart of my ethics, the heart of my religion, most especially from the prophets Micah and Jesus:

“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) asks the prophet Micah.

The Old and New Testaments alike set forth a guideline for loving behavior in what has become known as “The Great Commandment:”

In the Gospel According to Mark, we read that a scribe came up to Jesus and posed the question, “Which commandment is the first of all?”

“Jesus answered, ‘The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:38-31, with variations in Deuteronomy 6:4, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:34-40, and Luke 10:25-27)

If God is love, then we could readily substitute the word love for God in both of these passages.

What does LOVE require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with LOVE?

and

You shall love LOVE with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Love is behavior in the particulars. It is gristy more than grand. It calls us to love the folks we feel are unlovable, the folks who are often unpopular, even people who have hurt us or hurt those we care for. We might not like them, but we’re called to love them—that is to behave with compassionate justice, with mercy, and with humility—not self-righteously but in solidarity, as one human alongside another, around potholes of perception, through often unjust policies and practices of churches and communities and nations, even through the valley of the shadow of death and the shadow sides we each harbor in soul and psyche.

Love requires courage as well as compassion, patience as well as urgency, resilience as well as resolve. Love is not a doormat but an open heart, an open mind, and a soulful community ready to stretch right out onto the margins. Together let us stand on love’s edge. Together let us stand on the side of love.

Amen

Sources:

Leviticus, Deuteronomy, The Gospel According to Mark, The Gospel According to Luke, and The Gospel According to John, The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Gospel Parallels: A Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, Edited by Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr., Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1957.

Standing on the Side of Love Congregational Toolkit, Standing on the Side of Love, 2009,

http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SSLToolkit2009.pdf.

Worship Packet for National Standing on the Side of Love Day, Standing on the Side of Love, 2009, http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/SSL-Worship-Packet1.pdf.

“Afterlife”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 7, 2010
(delivered extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Afterlife….we wonder about it, imagine it, paint it, mythologize it, and construct elaborate scenarios about it. We even preach about it. We might believe in it. As for knowledge, we’re clueless. We simply don’t know. Some of us might say, “Not so! I’ve had experiences that tell me there is something on the other side of what we know as life here and now.” Well, that may be the case; I’m in no position to doubt this.

The story we heard earlier this morning from Jim, Warren Hanson’s The Next Place, sounds awfully appealing on a windy winter Sunday—“peaceful and familiar as a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet untroubled mind.” My favorite phrase is the one that reminds us it’s a complete mystery:

     “I won’t know where I’m going, and I won’t know where I’ve been as I tumble through the always and look back toward the when.”

….echoes of Dr. Seuss, who had more than a few profound things to say about how we live our lives and how we imagine.

In the Christian tradition that so many of us grew up in, we perhaps committed to memory that verse from the Gospel According to John, what I call “the walnut verse” of Christian theology:

     “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Its appeal is intense. Our instinct for life is intense. Even when things get us down, even when we step into the biggest of potholes, even when our children hurt, wars break out, we’re diagnosed with an illness that may or may not be the way we die, our instinct for life is intense. The prospect of everlasting life holds immense appeal. No wonder it’s the focus of great works of art, music, mythology, poetry, and of course, religion.

What happens when we die? Is that it? Ker plunk into some black hole of the universe, into some nothingness? Do we who have lived suddenly become part of the void, whatever that might mean? Or is there something more? Is there life after death? Or should we be asking if there’s life after life? How we ask the question shapes the how of our imaginings.

Yes, we can go to the Bible or the Dhammapada or the I Ching. We can also turn to our own experiences of having lost someone dear and wondering where they are, if they are, how they are and whether we will ever connect with them in any way that will salve the grief of not having seen them since what we call death happened.

In early February of 1968, Russ Flesher, my first husband, was killed in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He was 27; I was 25. After calling my family and closest friends, I phoned Michael Allen. Michael was the priest at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church-in-the-Bowerie on New York City’s lower east side. It was where I had done my field work as a student at Union Theological Seminary, the seminary where I had met Russ and where we had married. I was living the following February in the East Village, a few short blocks from St. Mark’s. Michael responded immediately to my call. Within the hour he was sitting with me at my kitchen table.

“Michael, what do you think? Do we live and then one day just stop cold? Is death the end of it all? Will we ever see and hold the person we’ve loved so much?” Here was this Episcopal priest, filled with all the John 3:16’s you can imagine, looking me in the eye and saying, “I had a friend. We were so close. I couldn’t imagine life without him. Then he died. He was so young, and he died. I want to believe that he’s somewhere happy and healthy, but all I know for sure is that I haven’t seen him for a long time. I still miss him. I still love him.”

What do we know? What do we believe? What do we experience? What do we learn?

I’ll never stop learning from children. They’re little philosophers with no axes to grind, no belief bones to pick. Shana, my firstborn, was about six years old when her granddad, my father, died. Shana adored him. He would tease and tell stories and imitate animals and take her for rides on his golf cart. He was a great granddad. As I was preparing to fly to the Midwest for his memorial service, Shana brought me a book from her room. It was Eugene Field’s lullaby poem, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

     “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
     Sailed off in a wooden shoe–
     Sailed on a river of crystal light,
     Into a sea of dew…”

Shana loved it and so had my father. “Here, Mommy, take this for Granddaddy. It will make him feel good.”

My darling daughter was convinced that her darling granddad would need something comforting to read on his journey, in his new home, whatever. It was no less a gift than what the ancient Egyptians prepared for the pharaohs in the form of food and artifacts nestled into the Great Pyramids. Here was a lullaby intended to accompany my father on his trip to wherever.

Now there’s a second piece to this story. My little daughter and I continued our conversation about how we feel when somebody dies. “Will I die? Will you die? What will it be like?” she asked. “I don’t know, honey. I’ve never died. But think of it this way. We don’t know where we were before we were born.” With a gleam in her eye, Shana exclaimed, “Well I know. I know just where I was before I was born!” “You do?” I asked. “Yes, I was in Daddy’s penis!”

Well, there you have it, Shana’s philosophy of the “beforelife.”

Our children tend to be concrete, but no less so than how we construct our images of what might be an afterlife, of what might be heaven. How many times have you heard that you’ll become an angel? That you’ll have wings and lie on clouds and be at peace? It’s a beatific vision of what might be, a never-ending vacation but in a fluffy celestial resort. When my dear friend and mentor Forrest Church discussed the matter in his final book, Love and Death, he suggested that a heaven defined as “an eternity of harps, halos, and hymnals….might best be described as punishment for good behavior.”

So let’s bring our imaginations back to this realm that we can perhaps all agree we inhabit—the realm of life. We re here and now alive. What an extraordinary state. If any of us could go back to the moment before birth and imagine, just imagine what we might be getting into when the lights went on and we took our first breath and let out our first cry, it would be downright traumatizing. We do, after all, speak of the birth trauma. Ka-boom, we’re here! We graduate into the miracle of life most quickly during our first year—the stimuli of tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, sensing all draw us into the miracle of life. The fortunate among us grow up and grow old. All of us die. Can what follows be any more extraordinary than what we’re experiencing right now? Could it possibly be any more mind-blowing that what we experienced at birth? Could we even have imagined the “right now” before we were born?

I hold comfort as I long for all the dear ones I’ve lost in knowing not that they might be in some tangible, harmonious, peaceful heaven—although who knows—but in trusting that the love they gave and the love we gave them holds. I take comfort and reassurance in knowing that the love that you and I give to each other, the love that we send out into our larger world in acts of caring and compassionate justice continues from life to life and that it extends from life across the bridge of death into the mystery that awaits us all, unites us all. Where it begins, this love that holds, this love that lasts, is here, right here in this world, on this earth.

“Spiritual awakening,” writes the Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, “is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.” In journeying to a mountaintop, we leave everybody else far below; we escape. Such is not the way of bodhichitta, “awakened heart.” The way is down, earthward, down into the thick of where life is lived. “Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”

When we memorialize someone, what do we hold up—the afterlife that we imagine, that we believe, that we hope for? Perhaps, but above all, we hold up the exchanges of love—the stories of summer days on a beach, the chapters of growing up and growing with, the tales of tabletops laden with food shared and laughter rising. When we memorialize someone and when we miss someone and when we wonder what will become of us when we too shall die, the stronghold of our trust lies above all in the love we give, the love we have given, the love we have shared.

Is there life after death? I don’t know. My imagination can’t stretch that wide. Is there love after death? It is an act of love that brings us here in the first place. It is love that sustains us. It is love that accompanies us into what I can only imagine as ultimate family.

In the fullness of life that is, let us love one another. I love you each and all. Amen.

Sources:

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1997.

Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008.

Eugene W. Field, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, first published 1889.

The Gospel According to John, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Warren Hanson, The Next Place, Waldman House Press, 1997.

“Life and Death”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 31, 2010
(delivered extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Life and Death, a small topic, no…an intimate topic, yes…a topic that reaches into every human heart. From the youngest to the eldest, life and death hold all the “big questions.” How did I get here? What am I doing here? What do I want to do? What can I do? How can I be? What happened before I was here? Will I really die? How will it happen? Will I be missed? What do I want to leave behind? What do I hope for after death? Is there life after death? What will it be like?

“Religion….our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die,” so said my late friend and mentor and a minister to us all, Forrest Church. Forrest breathed his last the day after his 61st birthday this past September.

Yesterday in this very space we celebrated the life of a much-loved member of this community. Two years ago, there was no inkling that cancer was about to make a fatal call. It did. It came with a vengeance. We lost her.

Just a week ago we marked the first anniversary of the loss of another woman, a young woman dear to this congregation. For so long she had struggled and suffered. For so long her loving husband cared for her and did all he could. Her frail frame could no longer fight the illness that claimed her. It was time to let go. We lost her.

     “We laugh, we cry, we live, we die;
     We dance, we sing our song.”

So it is for each of us. It’s almost bearable when we do it together….when we laugh and cry and live and die and dance and sing as religious community holding faith and wonder that we are here at all.

Sunday after Sunday we share our joys and sorrows, the fiber of our being together. We speak, we listen, we hold silence, and today we’re lighting candles again….bringing our joys and sorrows into caring community. In sharing from your heart, you spoke of life and death.

[Weave in the shared offerings of joys and sorrows.]

You brought into our worship what holds life and death and what transcends life and death. Some of us call it God. Some of us call it Spirit of Life. Perhaps we can all agree that love, love above all holds life and death and transcends both. Love lives. Love is eternal.

I am among the luckiest people in the world. My mother loved me. She gave me the most important of gifts—birth, life, love, and a graceful death—her death, not mine, or maybe it’s mine too. This past Christmas was the first Christmas of my life without Mom. How to celebrate birth, even a birth that rocked us like the birth of a baby in a stable in a lonely corner of the Middle East 2000 or so years ago? How to celebrate birth when your very own Mary, your very own Mommy, isn’t here anymore? Well, I cried. Even though at times I felt I had no right to cry, because my Mother had lived a hundred years. That’s a long life, and it’s the blink of an eye.

We were ready for her to go. A wonderful birthday party just over a year ago brought our whole family together. We blew up balloons. We wore funny hats. We toasted her with champagne and chocolate. She was present and aware and told us some amazing stories about her life that we’d never heard before.

We parted with hugs and kisses. Mom had made it so far. She had summoned whatever adrenaline was necessary. Then, in a matter of weeks, dementia came to call—not an easy visitor. Decline was rapid and not without struggle. In October, we got a call from our niece that “Gram” was in the hospital and her vital signs weren’t good. A quick trip on the Acela to Philadelphia and then to Bryn Mawr Hospital, where my niece, Tenny, and I sat on either side of Mom as her breathing was labored and her consciousness dim. A hundred years old! She was ready.

“Walk with me, Jesus,” was the comfort that she wanted as she let go. She had told me so a few years earlier. The 23rd Psalm was her favorite. Most of it I remembered from childhood, as I held her hand and stroked her forehead…

     “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
     He makes me lie down in green pastures;
     He leads me beside still waters.
     He restores my soul……”

Then…..what comes next? “Wait,” said Tenny, digging out her Blackberry. “I’ll Google it.” So with my high-tech niece on the other side of my Mom, her Gram, together we spoke the 23rd Psalm, hoping she would feel a comforting Jesus walking with her through “the valley of the shadow.” Whatever she took in, whatever was comforting her, we were a unit, loving our Mother and Grandmother across a passage that we too will make. It’s inevitable.

When your mother is dying, you might not think about giving her news about what’s happening with the family, but there was good news to share. I don’t know if she received it, but I trust that she felt it in the bones of her soul. “Mom, you’re going to have a sixth great-grandchild in May. Sarah and Robb are pregnant.” I knew how much it would mean to our daughter, Sarah, that her Gram got this news before she died. I knew that if Mom were fully conscious it would mean so much to her. Life and death and life were full circle.

Her breaths became deeper and the intervals longer, but she was peaceful, so peaceful. Then….that very last breath, a sigh, a long deep sigh. Tenny and I looked at each other. The tears rolled. She was somewhere else, not here, definitely not here. We didn’t know where, just not here. We called my brother, Tenny’s Dad. Jeff and Donna were in the Middle East, and at the moment of Mom’s death, they were in the ancient city of Petra, in the Valley of the Tombs. I’ve been there. But now I was here. Perhaps we were in the same sacred space, a space inspiring awe and marked by the sure promise of life at its outset…the promise of death.

As I look at your faces this morning, I know that so many of you have lost mothers and fathers, some of you have lost husbands or wives, and some of you have lost children. You know grief. You also know the joy of the love you shared, the love you gave, the love you received. Would you trade for a second the love you knew to escape the grief of losing your loved one into a mystery more vast than any of us here have yet experienced?

We’re born. We live. We die. And then…we don’t know…it’s a mystery. It’s a mystery where we were if we were before we were born. All we can know for sure is that we’re alive now, and that’s a miracle. The odds that any of us are here are overwhelmingly against us being here. All the ancestors coupling across generations, all the possible couplings of sperm and egg, the odds are so against us being here, being who we are, being alive. But here we are, a miracle. My friend Forrest called it “the miracle sandwich,” a miracle sandwiched between two great mysteries. All we know for sure is the miracle.

Actually, we know one more thing. We know that we lose those we love, and one day they will lose us, but what doesn’t die is the love. Even when our names are forgotten, the love, like some crazy kind of DNA, lives on from generation to generation. Not just generations of humanity connected by bloodlines, but through friends and passing strangers on into the future as long as humankind survives itself. Love lasts. It’s eternal. Love given, love received, love shared. Life and death would be opposites were it not for love.

So hold silence for a moment. Close your eyes. Open your hearts. Breathe it in. You’re alive. There’s still time. Breathe it in. Breathe in the love. And then, let it go, let it go into the heart of the person sitting next to you…into the hearts of the folks easy to love…into the hearts of the folks hard to love…into the universe. Let it go. Let the love flow as we all join the hands of our hearts in knowing that we will each and all one day draw our final breath and then let it go into the breath, the spirit, of all who have ever lived, beyond time and space, breath beyond breath, love beyond life and death.

I love you each and all, I do.   Amen.

Sources:

Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008.

Psalm 23, The Book of Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

“We Laugh, We Cry,” Words and music: Shelley Jackson Denham (1950 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 354.

Chalice Reflection
of
Martha Jackmauh

“A Different Way
We shall overcome some day!”
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 17, 2010 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

“I have a Dream” were the words that contained great insight that Dr. Martin Luther King frequently used to begin many of his speeches. His mind was enlightened because of his vast experiences and observations on many levels that brought him to speak out against human suffering. Many of the problems he addressed, of course, were those of racial and national conflicts.

He spoke of a Higher Consciousness whereby humans would be encouraged to face the reality that human suffering was caused by their lack of responsibility and awareness of their actions.

Reactive behavior and thoughtlessness are based on fear, pride, power, ego and greed…..all of which become an insatiable appetite and whereby people will do anything to anyone to maintain these horrific addictions.

Martin Luther King was an Evolutionary-Revolutionary…….one who was not afraid to speak his well-learned TRUTHS……and to pay the price.

We humans are part of nature and if you observe nature closely, you will see the same hostile behavior in order to protect their territories and species. This is reactive behavior for mere survival at the most fundamental levels.

Humans, of course, have these similar traits and when they ran out of resources, they would invade other territories and kill other humans. Then evolution proceeded from caves to the empire state building and wars have continued from stones to nuclear weapons. Because of these actions, the suffering goes on from generation to generation.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?
A DIFFERENT WAY!
WILL WE CHOSE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OR WAKE UP?

About twenty years ago I read the writings of an American Indian Chief, and he stated that the Afro-Americans would raise the consciousness of American Culture.

Thanks, in part, to Martin Luther King, we have an African-American Governor and President. “The times they are a changing.” After each of these elections, I had the privilege to take a bus to Cape Cod, walk around Hull and Boston and the African Americans I encountered would look deeply into my eyes….and I would look deeply back into their eyes and smile from my elated spirit……and…….likewise, their spirit shone back. A strong connection I did feel. I had never seen such peace and self-confidence radiate from them to such an extent before.

“WE SHALL OVERCOME SOME DAY”
“AND THE DAYS HAVE ARRIVED”

Fortunately, there are many groups of conscious people meeting together regarding the many levels of our human struggles and they are attempting to find ways to uplift all humans from the many places of deprivation and suffering, as well as the destruction of the planet.

Thank you to all the Evolutionary Revolutionaries……without weapons…..instead…..using their gifts of consciousness.

“A Different Way”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 17, 2010

Haiti is uppermost in the minds and hearts of us all—Haiti, the island nation to the south, its history so intimately linked with that of our own nation. This morning I invite us all to pray the prayer of Mother Theresa:

“May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

We usually don’t pray for a broken heart, but at this time when so many lives are broken, when an entire nation is rent asunder, how can our hearts not break? And if our hearts break, let’s hope that what fills that fault line is love, prayers of love, deeds of love, and the hard truths that only love will allow us to bear.

On this morning that we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just think. He couldn’t have done what he did if his heart hadn’t broken. He couldn’t have done what he did if the broken space of his heart hadn’t filled with love, including the hard truths that love called him to witness and preach.

Four days before King was murdered, he spoke at Washington, DC’s National Cathedral. His words span the decades:

“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Not so different from the words we sang just moments ago:

“Our world is one world: what touches one affects us all.”

In the 1960s, the tumultuous 60s, Dr. King decried racism, he led marches, he led sit-ins, he was arrested 30 times. In circles of power, he enjoyed all the popularity of an Old Testament prophet, a thorn in the side of the status quo. But his voice chafed even more so when he began speaking out against an unjust war, and when he linked racism and the unjust war of his day to economic disparity, and when he linked economic disparity to the scourge of poverty. Imagine how his words of that not so long ago Sunday landed in the laps of a probably not completely adoring congregation nestled into the pews of that great cathedral in our nation’s capital:

“We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world.”

No band-aids for Dr. King. Only abolition would do—abolition of racism, abolition of war, abolition of poverty. All are variations of violence. King sought a different way. His vision was peace and mutuality. His means were nonviolent resistance—not nonviolent passivity, but nonviolent resistance. His models were Jesus and Gandhi.

We can’t presume to know how Dr. King would have responded to what is happening in Haiti, but we can learn from his teachings and his life. Haiti is a cataclysm of nature; it is a catastrophe of economic disparity.

How is it that Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere but the second oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere? On December 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on the island and promptly called it La Isla Española (“the Spanish Island”). We commonly hear the term Hispaniola to refer to the entire island—what is now the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti. Wave upon wave of colonial oppression followed, layered with wave upon wave of indigenous resistance. The French turned it into a slave colony; the slaves revolted, and on January 1, 1804, independence was declared, with Haiti as the name resurrected for this new republic, an indigenous name meaning “Land of Mountains.”

Unlike our own nation, slavery in Haiti was abolished as independence was proclaimed. Events in Haiti inspired abolitionists in this country while chafing the white privilege that has fueled our shameful history of slavery and racism. These realities, coupled with Haiti’s rich natural resources, positioned Haiti for long-term abuse by U.S. leadership, with only a few exceptions.

There are grounds humanitarian and historic for our nation to respond with generosity of spirit and resources to the crisis that is Haiti. This “Land of Mountains” that is home to 9 million neighbors is suffering fracture upon fracture. Economic disparity among nations is nowhere more acute than between Haiti and the United States. How this came about calls for all of us to do some heavy homework. In the meantime, we hear the cries of a people buried in rubble and crumpled in an infrastructure that gasps for breath.

We can act. From the core of our faith, we can act—and many of you already have—with an outpouring of generosity and justice. Within a day of the first horrific tremors, our Unitarian Universalist Association joined forces with our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, seasoned by decades of human rights work, including disaster responses to the events of 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake in Pakistan. As a justice organization, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee partners with grassroots organizations in the venue of the disaster. The intent is to reach the most marginalized and to complement the massive aid programs launched by larger emergency response organizations. I invite you to read the insert that you’ll find in your order of service to learn more about the UUSC approach.

Thanks to the leadership of our Outreach Committee and the full support of our Parish Committee president and your minister, our non-pledge offering this morning and next Sunday will be dedicated wholly to the UUSC/UUA Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund. Beginning in February and stretching through August, our 25% non-pledge plate offering will go to this fund.

In the spirit of Dr. King, our Unitarian Universalist Association and our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee offer a different way to give. There are many ways, and I honor each of them. There are many channels through which to do what we can to relieve the suffering, and I commend each of them. I am grateful that our president has committed at least $100 million to the Haitian relief effort. I am grateful that he has granted temporary protected status for 18 months to the estimated 100,000 Haitians who are in this country illegally and to the 30,000 Haitians who were facing deportation back to Haiti. I am heartened that so many in this nation and other nations of the world are reaching out with funds and expertise as the horrors of Haiti continue to unfold.

But I hearken back to the lessons of Dr. King. Crushing poverty, like the crush of the earth itself, is systemic and calls for a response of partnership over the long haul. It calls for generosity, yes. It calls also for us to learn about this island nation whose history and fate are so linked with our own. It calls for us to become informed advocates on behalf of practices and policies that will not just restore what was—and God knows in Haiti that was awful enough—but that will embody solidarity with the Haitian people.

Can we “let our hearts break so completely that the whole world falls in?” Can we fill those fractures with love that is just and lasting? As we ponder our gifts, I invite us to hear the words of my friend and colleague, Rev. Robbie Walsh.

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life, already
spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take
your losses, do whatever must be done
next.

When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.

Amen.

Sources:

Vanessa Buschschluter, BBC News, Washington, “Troubled history: Haiti and US,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460185.stm, January 16, 2010.

David James Duncan, “Let the Whole World Fall In,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2005.

“History of Haiti,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti.

Naomi Klein, “Aristide in Exile,” The Nation, August 1, 2005.

“Our World Is One World,” Words and music: Cecily Taylor (1930 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 134.

Julia Preston, “Haitians Illegally in U.S. Given Protected Status,” Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, “Conditions remain critical in Haiti,” The New York Times, January 15, 2010.

http://www.uusc.org/content/conditions_remain_critical_haiti, January 15, 2010.

Robert R. Walsh, “Fault Line,” from Noisy Stones: A Meditation Manual, Skinner House Books, 1992.